The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  “I’m staying here,” he finally said. “In Mexico.”

  “Oh?” Alice balked. “With her?”

  “She needs help.”

  “Right.” And she couldn’t help but laugh. She heard her own laugh and it sounded older than she ever imagined she’d be. “Who is going to help her?” “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t?” Gus shot back. “Tell me, who is going to help that kid?”

  His voice cracked, and she put her hand on his scratchy beard, his thick soft hair, as she finally understood. He was making a choice. He looked at her for less than a second, as if he was afraid, as if the very last thing he wanted to do was what he’d just proposed, and for an instant her anger dissolved. She wanted to tell him that it was okay, that no matter what he did she’d always look to him and always look after him; she wanted to embrace him until both of their ribs crushed. But everything told her not to. Everything told her she couldn’t.

  And Alice found she was preparing for a crowd, putting on a brave face as she began to walk away. He called after her and her shoulders went up as she tried not to run. Her name sounded embarrassing, irrelevant, and as August yelled she raised her hand, waving backward with the most casual and meaningless of good-bye gestures. But no matter what she did, no matter how she postured, she wasn’t yet looking ahead. She couldn’t see past what he was seeing—her own turned back and her own foolish wave—trying on the world with his eyes.

  20

  The morning after Alice walked away from Gus, the waves swelled to fifteen feet. They crashed down on Fire Beach, shaking all and damaging some of the houses built on the dunes. The open window above Stephen’s bed would have shattered over both him and Alice, had they not already been awake at four in the morning, and for quite separate reasons, each being the type of person who was quick to recognize danger.

  They hurried outside to board up the windows. The night was blustery, with an overcast prune-colored sky, and as she watched Stephen disappear around the front of the odd building he liked to call home, her breathing grew faintly labored. Sand blew around her ankles in a prickly mist, and she tried to find a suggestion of even the gauntest moon. Palms lashed overhead, though not quite violently enough that she might fail to see their grace. The ocean was deafening, of course, but she ignored her surroundings in order to focus on keeping the window shut. If she was in immediate danger she wouldn’t have been too surprised, but there was also nowhere else she would rather have been. This was not entirely different from how she’d felt twelve hours previously, when she’d opened the door in the late afternoon and Stephen had been in the midst of a nap. He was under mosquito netting, sleeping on his side, and she had walked right in.

  Now it was the middle of the night and he was out of sight, and Alice couldn’t see much of anything. She had no clear understanding of windstorms—about any storms on this coast, for that matter—and what did or did not count as a reasonable fear. Stephen had handed her a flashlight before they’d rushed outside, and she remembered to turn it on now, but the yellow beam clarified nothing but spinning sand.

  She could keenly feel Stephen’s absence and he was anything but ghostly. He was all too substantial, a fairly hulking mass, and without him beside her there was developing— in addition to the increasingly rasping wind—an unexpected and frankly disappointing hollowness. And here came the vague feeling of dread that meant nothing other than having something to lose. Alice entertained walking away right then, escaping such inevitable damage.

  But his hand was on her back. “You okay?” He was coughing and gesturing her toward the door.

  “Feels like rain,” she said.

  “One thing at a time.” He smiled, shaking out sand from his hair. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go inside.”

  They kept the lights off, as the electricity was already waning.

  He poured tall glasses of water, encouraging her to drink, as he gulped down glass after glass. She sat on the kitchen table, her sandy feet resting on his thighs.

  Alice hasn’t left the turtle factory since the winds began, and now she’s finally emerged to forage for this evening. It’s the first calm afternoon and she’s biked into town with the bicycle she took from Skinny Karen in exchange for most of her clothes and the silver coil bracelet. Alice wants to cook. Alice wants to cook for Stephen tonight, as she is leaving tomorrow. She’s going home. With the bicycle basket full of provisions, she’s at the bottom of a steep dirt road, and as she looks up toward the mountains, she’s faced with a sight she’s certain must have been created by the glare, or at the very least by her profound lack of sleep, a deficiency delicious and three days old.

  But when Alice’s eyes adjust to the angle and the sun, she sees that her vision is just fine. Her brother is on a motorcycle. He’s gunning the engine and he has a little boy not five years old seated in front of him, a chestnut-brown boy with shiny black hair; a boy small enough that, as he leans back, his head barely reaches Gus’s chest. Alice nearly screams out to stop him, to prevent Gus from endangering this child, when she realizes that the motorcycle isn’t running, and that without a key in the ignition the cycle is only a toy, a big, muscular, metal toy with which these two can play. Gus surrounds the child, leaning down and talking in his ear, pointing out buttons to push and switches to flick. He is laughing along with this thrilled kid; he even puts his bearded chin on top of the boy’s small head. He looks relaxed and loose, and Alice realizes she hasn’t seen this August in a very long time and that this is the version of her brother that she has always and only chosen to see. Chasing down this version has meant neglecting herself, but it has also meant neglecting who he was all this time—who her brother was in the process of becoming: someone she didn’t know as well as she thought she did, someone who based decisions on letters and stories, on a misguided responsibility.

  But it is good to know that, after all, this August still exists. It’s good to know he’s still in the world, even if she can’t be included inside of it.

  She hasn’t been too careful, she thought, remembering how Gus had searched in vain for the right description of his sister. But while she’s been extravagant with Gus—inflating his better qualities without realizing it half of the time—she has been sparing with herself, dwindling her details, paring herself down. She’d made the mistake of acting on the notion that after Charlotte had gone she could not afford, not at any cost, to lose him. But there was no way to control so profound a loss; she tells herself she knows this now. She knows she can’t hold on to him whether she stays or if she goes.

  Alice knows that the minute she calls out to him, he’ll be different, he’ll be changed. When she calls his name, when she explains how all she wants is a proper good-bye, this very Gus—the one guiding the child’s hand to the rearview mirror, the one pointing, laughing—he’ll be gone. It will happen immediately, and Alice is sure that the child will start crying, howling; it is he who will have felt the change perhaps most acutely.

  She rides toward the beach as fast as she can. Fixed in amber—in a place that is permanently late afternoon—are her brother August and a boy. They’re in the desert; they’re on a motorcycle. With the sun on their faces and the wind at their backs, they are going nowhere.

  Part Three

  21

  Inside, 2001

  The doorman posted outside the Upper East Side apartment building was idly spraying the sidewalk with a hose while sweating in his too-heavy suit. As Alice passed by him, she gave what she hoped was a sympathetic look and recited the apartment number she had scrawled the night before on a scrap piece of paper. The doorman came inside with her and called upstairs, dialing while asking for her name. “Alice?” he repeated back to her, and then, “Yeah, Alice is here?” He hung up the phone, and Alice had an irrational feeling that she’d be turned away, after having taken the train into Penn Station and traipsing uptown on a brutally hot day, worked up for nothing at all. Just as she was debating on whether to spend the day in the frosty reliable
Met or get a cheap pedicure and head back, the doorman said, “Go on up.”

  “Oh,” she said, “oh, thanks.”

  “You all right?”

  “Perfect,” she said.

  “It’s a scorcher today; you’d better be careful.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she said, nearly stepping on a little bichon on an extended rhinestone-studded leash, while making her way to the elevator. When she’d entered the building there had been sweat gathering at the base of her neck and dripping down her chest, but the lobby was filled with whirring fans, and by the time she was in the elevator she would have been quite cool had she not grown dizzy and flushed with another very internal heat wave spurred on by the nature of this appointment, its incongruous surroundings and formality.

  In the short elevator ride, Alice looked up at the mirrored ceiling, which offered no more than what seemed appropriate— an exaggerated version of herself. She should have been wondering what to say and what not to say, but she was too busy acquiring a phobia of elevators, and when this one stopped with an alarming dip, she nearly pried the doors apart. Alice looked in both directions down the fluorescent corridors, nearly running through the blur of powder-blue walls and black Art Deco moldings. The door opened before she could even knock. “Cady” Alice said, out of breath. And without a word Cady put her arms around her. Her neck was a quick refuge from the impersonal apartment, the stultifying city heat. There were no traces of the expected blackberry soap, but instead fresh-cut grass. Alice pictured a glass bottle of scented lotion next to a porcelain sink—a bottle falling from Cady’s cool hands, crashing to the floor. Cady held her at a distance for a second or two. She was, Alice had forgotten, so much stronger than she looked.

  When they let go they were shy with each other; they were all about their surroundings. “Swank company pad,” Alice said, looking around the duplex apartment, done in hues of gray. The air conditioner hummed lightly. “They must love you at work. You must be doing really well.”

  “Better,” she said. “I’m doing better.” Her voice revealed a little fury and a lot of pride, and Alice guessed that it had been sheer ambition that had gotten her through these past few months. Cady was in New York for business.

  “Good,” Alice said, “that’s good. You look good—beautiful,” Alice said, and it was true and not true at the same time. Even though Cady’s hair was cut in chic layers and her complexion was as lovely as ever, Alice had never seen her this thin; she supposed Cady looked more elegant, but she also looked hollow, her even features verging on stern—like a woman literally just off the Mayflower—except this Pilgrim was also wearing well-applied makeup, good leather shoes. She didn’t know if Cady ever wore stockings or tights in California, but Alice could imagine her pulling them on—one leg after the other— trying to keep balanced. What she looked, Alice realized, was older. It had been only seven months.

  “You too,” she said. “Are you … working?”

  Alice nodded. “At the bookstore—basically my old summer job—which I suppose should be embarrassing, but I honestly just really like it. I’m running the place now; you wouldn’t recognize it. I even started a reading series.”

  “Fantastic,” Cady said with unfiltered pity.

  “It’s not forever or anything; it’s just that I decided to fix up the house before I sell it,” she said, in what she hoped was a practical tone.

  “I would have thought you’d be long gone by now. I was sure you wanted out.”

  “Well,” Alice said, suddenly parched, “I’ll be able to get… I thought there’d be more money this way, if I do most of the work myself. Right?”

  “That’s a pretty big job.”

  “Yeah,” Alice said, “it is. So I’m living there,” she said, beginning to cough a little. “I’m living back at home. Do you think I could have some water?”

  “Oh,” Cady said, her cheeks deepening a shade. “I’m sorry.” She went into the kitchen, and Alice watched her pour a glass of water, taking surprising comfort from how familiar it was to see her move around a kitchen. Alice remembered hiding her awe when Cady would search their cabinets for ingredients— Madeira, capers, mint jelly—items Alice didn’t even realize that they had in their pantry or, for that matter, even existed. When Alice finally asked her one day who taught her to cook, Cady admitted that she’d grown up idolizing her aunt’s servants, and that up until not so long ago she’d spoken with a slight Irish accent and wanted nothing more on Sunday mornings than to attend Catholic Mass, which of course horrified her aunt to no end.

  While Alice drank a full glass of water, she flinched briefly from a score of persistent little splinters (casualties of a recently stripped windowsill) as she gripped the cold glass too hard. She wandered to the window looking out on Third Avenue, where a woman pushing a stroller stopped to talk to someone she knew. A yellow parasol shaded the child from the sun, the smog, from unwelcome attention. Alice couldn’t stop the thought of how Erika was probably enormous and sure to be screaming in childbirth not too long from now.

  “Look,” she said to Cady, “look at that parasol.” And she pointed out the window at mother and child.

  “Let’s go to lunch,” Cady said in a virtual outburst. “Let’s go have a real lunch like ladies,” she said. “I can expense it.”

  “If you’re sure,” Alice said. She went to put her glass in the sink.

  “Leave it,” Cady said, almost critically. “Just leave it. Let’s get out of here.”

  They ate in the kind of restaurant that Charlotte would have disdainfully described as Fake French—the label reserved for any establishment that served steak frites and did not allow smoking. But the place suited Alice just fine, as it wasn’t smoky, it was very dark and air-conditioned, and she could order a glass of wine. Cady’s thinking must have traveled along similar lines, for before they even saw menus, she’d asked the waiter for a bottle of Sancerre. There were wine labels laminated to the walls that served as wallpaper, and an alarmingly old couple were the only other patrons; they ate dessert and drank coffee in faint wheezy silence. Alice could imagine the chef and the cooks sweating in the kitchen, wondering who the hell would want food like this on a sweltering day like today.

  “I think I’m too hot to eat,” Cady said. But when the menus came she seemed to forget her discomfort, and when Alice ordered a salad, insisted it wasn’t enough. They ended up with a beet-and-goat-cheese salad, an endive-Roquefort salad, mussels and french fries and duck pate, two cold soups.

  “We have too much food,” Alice said.

  “Come on,” Cady said, smiling sharply—her smile containing a small shard of glass. Help me, was what she was actually saying. Be loud and keep talking. Pretend that you and I have in fact had lunch alone before.

  “You’re right; this is no time to hold back,” Alice said, not knowing what exactly she’d meant by that.

  Cady described a project she was working on in an Oakland loft space, something about poured wax and the way it looked like water, the functionality of metal as opposed to wood. She could have been speaking Spanish as far as Alice was con- cerned, for though she recognized most words and could basically glean Cady’s meaning from facial expressions, that was the basic extent of her understanding. “Did you think you’d ever see me again?” Cady finally said, after a long, prosaic review of this current client’s demands.

  “Did I? I didn’t know. I mean, how could I know?”

  “You could have called.”

  Alice nodded.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No,” Alice said, “I tried. You were unlisted.”

  “And you couldn’t have asked your brother?”

  Alice pierced the plump meat of a mussel and pried it out of its shell. “We haven’t spoken.”

  “You mean you had the conversation—that conversation you told me about—and you left and that’s that?”

  “Well, I hope that isn’t that. I hope he comes around sometime.”

 
“Yes, well, I have to find him,” Cady snapped back. “I have to do something about getting his signature.” She briefly touched her napkin to her lips as if she were ashamed. “I can’t believe he stayed there with her.”

  “I can,” Alice said.

  Alice wondered what Cady would make of the fact that in the past five months (after learning his last name: McAlistair) she had spent nearly every weekend with Stephen—meeting his friends, his crew, his dog—in upstate New York, and she had not let him once come to see her. She wondered what Cady would say if Alice told her that each time she saw Stephen, the last thing he always asked was, When can I come see where you live? She’d made countless excuses of why it was better for her to come to him. They had started to argue. What I’m really after, he’d yelled, is taking over your house. You’re

  right—he laughed, a truly caustic laugh—goddamn it, you’ve figured me out.

  Alice said, “I know for a fact that Gus still loves you, and—”

  “No,” Cady said, taking a determined sip of wine, “just stop. I don’t want to talk about him. Okay?”

  “Okay” Alice said, “I didn’t know.”

  “I can’t,” she said tightly.

  “Fine,” Alice said, “that’s fine.”

  “I’m seeing someone,” Cady said, brightening. It was impossible to tell if she was lying, and Alice hoped—to her surprise—that she was. It was impossible to believe that she was really and truly finished with Gus. “And I might want to marry him one day. Or if it isn’t this person, I would like to have the right to marry someone, which I can’t do, obviously, if I’m still legally August’s wife. I mean, it’s good to see you and everything, but I am trying to take care of some practical matters, which have been holding me back. It’s all so ridiculous that we got married. How did you not laugh in our faces when we told you?”