by J. J. Murray
knowing what could go wrong and preventing it,
being your own master, mastering the elements:
one wave, one swell, one billow at a time
until the end of the day when sunsets and calm waters
smiled as you left your world in a dinghy back to land,
back to memories, back to thoughts and regrets,
to feelings not used on the sea
(too busy acting, reacting, analyzing lines of right and wrong)
with faith that though no visible paths or lanes guided you,
Yes! An act of FAITH that told you the wind would blow,
the ocean floor would stay below,
and the waves would roll you on, roll you on
“Home,” I say, tears in my eyes. “The Captain always came home.”
I rest there sweating on that joyless beach, eyes cast down, half expecting the Argo to cross in front of me on the sunless tide, until I’m numbed by the cold—and the memories. I draw a few glances from people on Green Walk as I mumble Longfellow:
Build me straight, O worthy Master!
Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel
That shall laugh at all disaster;
And with wave and whirlwind wrestle.
Maybe they think I’m Jonah just spit out of the belly of the whale come to Nineveh to shout, “Repent!” But I’m no one to shout or even whisper “Repent” to anyone but my own reflection.
But when I enter Henry’s apartment, I see a dark Nubian goddess in a lime green pantsuit relaxing on Henry’s couch, Henry fluttering around his kitchen.
“Where have you been, Pete?” Henry asks.
The Nubian goddess’s eyes travel to my sand-encrusted feet. “He has obviously been to the beach, Henry,” the goddess says in an enchanting voice.
I flex my toes, brown sand spilling onto Henry’s carpet. “Yes. I’ve been down to the sea.”
Henry moves to the goddess and hands her a white mug of coffee. “Pete, this is my dear friend Cece Wrenn. Maybe you’ve heard of her?”
“Hello,” I say, recognizing the name. Cece Wrenn, Bermudan jazz singer and pianist with the smooth, lilting, haunting voice, is chiseled, coiffed to perfection, and as dark as the coffee she drinks. “I’m Peter Underhill.”
“You mean Desiree Holland, of course,” she says in a lovely, precise Caribbean voice, a musical voice with a calypso beat.
“Henry’s told you.” I paw at the carpet with my feet.
“Yes.” Cece smiles. “You are not at all who I had in mind when I read your books. You were so much…darker.”
“I, uh, I’ve been out of the sun for a while,” I say.
Cece laughs and turns to Henry. “I like him, Henry.”
Henry frowns at the brown spot beneath my feet. “Why don’t you clean yourself up, Pete?”
“Sure.”
As I shower, I wonder about the couple in the other room. Henry is or seems to be gay. Cece seems heterosexual to the core. I had heard that white gay males and black women get along famously, but she’ll be spending the weekend in a one-bedroom apartment with me on the couch? And she says she likes me?
This is a subplot I did not foresee.
Freshly laundered and somewhat less ragged looking in clean jeans and a light blue oxford shirt, I go to the kitchen and pull open the refrigerator, grabbing a can of Coke.
After I pull the tab and take a sip, Henry says, “There’s plenty of beer in there, Pete.”
“I’m fine.”
“I thought we were celebrating Desiree’s return.”
I see them sitting on opposite ends of the couch. “We are, Henry. I just need to wake up first.” I sit in a chair opposite them, and no one speaks until I can contain my curiosity no longer. “So you two are an item.”
Henry looks at Cece. “Do you wish to tell it or should I?”
“I will tell it,” Cece says with a little sigh. “Henry, as you may know, is gay.”
I don’t blink. “Yes.”
“And as you may have noticed, I am definitely not gay.” She flutters her eyelashes and smooths her hands down her pant legs. “Yet for some reason, Henry and I have hit it off.”
“We’re soul mates,” Henry says.
Cece shrugs. “It is amazing, but it is true. We have more in common than any two people I know or have ever known, including my parents, who had a wonderful marriage.”
“Can I tell him the next part, love?” Henry asks.
Cece nods. “Just do not get carried away.”
“I won’t,” Henry says. “The next part, the next step in our relationship, is to start a family.”
This time I blink. Hard. “A family?”
Henry’s face beams. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
Gay white male and Nubian Caribbean goddess have milk chocolate child on Long Island. What could be more wonderful? I wish this Coke had some whiskey in it.
The phone rings, and Henry snaps it up. “Yes? I’ll be right over.” He hangs up. “Le Lethe has our order ready.”
“Are they not delivering tonight?” Cece asks.
“No. I hope you don’t mind eating in tonight, Pete.”
“Not at all.” Just eating will be enough for me. “What are we having?”
“Scallops!” Henry winks at Cece. “I won’t be too long, love.”
“Take your time,” Cece says.
Once Henry leaves, Cece stands and arches her back, her profile and body reminding me of an ancient Egyptian sculpture, like a sleek black panther. William Blake had it wrong. He should have written, “Panther! Panther! burning bright in the forests of the night.” This woman definitely has “fearful symmetry.”
She notices me looking and smiles. “You look like you need a drink, Peter.”
I wiggle the Coke. “I’m okay.”
She sighs. “I will bet that you are wondering why I am doing this.”
I shake my head. “I think I understand.”
She sits on the edge of the couch and cradles her coffee mug. “I am not sure that you do. Or perhaps you do.” She pauses to stare. “Ask your question.”
“What question?”
“The obvious question.”
I smile. “Okay, why Henry?”
She winks at me. “I have read your mind. Why Henry? Why not Henry? He is a wonderful man, bright, articulate, handsome, secure, and I love him.” She shakes her head. “And he is gay. I know it makes no sense.”
She looks up as if to give me time to reply, but I have no reply to give. This situation has never been in any of my plot outlines.
“But what does make sense is starting a family. I am not getting any younger, and Henry and I want a child so badly. We have been trying for several months now, and maybe this weekend we will be successful.”
With me on the couch in the other room. I find myself staring at her hands, her piano-playing hands, and wish I had learned to play an instrument other than the radio. I hear bubbles from the Coke popping in the can.
“Please say something, Peter.”
“Something,” I say, and she smiles.
“You are funny.”
“I try.”
“Peter, I have been searching for the right father for my child—or children, who knows? And so what if Henry is gay? He should be a father, too, do you not agree?”
“Sure.”
“Although right now it does not matter to me that Henry is gay, it might matter to me and our child later. But until then, I do not care. And that is the beauty of it, do you not see? I can have his love, his child, his support, and I fully know this man. We are completely open with each other. If he wants to see another man, he can.” She looks into her coffee cup. “And if I want to see another man, I can.” She looks up. “And since you will be here this weekend…”
I stop breathing. “Um, Cece, what are you suggesting?”
“Henry is a deep, deep sleeper, Peter, and I promise—”
I exhale. “Hold up, Cece, I don’t think—”
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“He will never know, Peter,” she interrupts. “Perhaps you can do what he cannot, what he has not been able to do.”
But I’m the Fisher King. “Now wait—”
“I admire your writing, your insight into the female psyche, and your love scenes—whoo! You really know how to make my nose sweat.”
I shake my head. “Cece, that’s—”
“I want to have children, Peter, and Henry just is not up to the task, you know?” She sets her mug on the coffee table. “And I think he set up this entire weekend so that you and I can…”
“Can what?”
“Can make Henry and me a baby. Do you not see? He loves me that much.”
I don’t know if I’d call it love. I don’t even think there’s a word that describes it. Maybe the word “twisted.”
“Cece, please don’t take this the wrong way. You are an incredibly beautiful woman, and under very different circumstances, I might be persuaded to be your…donor.” I cringe as soon as I say the word “donor.” That was cold. “But right now—”
“Henry tells me that you are recently divorced, that you have been separated from your wife for some time now, that you prefer black women to—”
I stand. “That I have no children? Did he tell you that? Did he tell you that I was married to a Catholic woman for many years and didn’t even come close to fathering a child?” Yet another item in the long list of my life that I do not understand.
“Was your wife taking birth control pills?”
“She was Catholic.”
She sits back and smiles. “They do not sell birth control to Catholics in this country?”
“I’m sure they do, but that’s not the point. It was against Edie’s religion, against everything she believed in, against everything she was raised to believe.”
“To use birth control or to get pregnant?”
Cece has a point, but she doesn’t know Edie. “Edie said she wanted to have children, and she never used birth control. Never.”
Cece shakes her head. “And you were around her twenty-four hours a day to make sure that she did not take these pills.”
“No, of course I wasn’t around her all day, but she told me she wanted to have children.”
Cece raises her arms above her head, her delicious breasts tightening her blouse to bursting. “Then you do not know women that well at all, Peter. We women tell men what men want to hear. It is our way of singing the beast out of you. And when you hear what you want to hear, you turn off your ears.” She lets a shoe drop to the floor and unbuttons the top button of her blouse. “Henry will not be coming back for quite a long while, Peter.”
“He won’t?”
“See, you are already turning off your ears.” She twists another button with her fingers. “Henry has a date.” The button comes free and I see she’s not wearing a bra. “And we have a date, too, do we not?”
Oh shitshitshit. “Cece, I—I’m leaving.”
She twists another button. “You are saying you are leaving, but you are still standing in one spot. And how will you get off the island? The next ferry will not arrive until morning. And it is such a long, cold swim.”
I turn my back on her and begin collecting my notes and securing my laptop. “Tell Henry I’ve gone to Huntington.”
“You are not leaving me.”
“Tell Henry that I will be staying on my father’s boat.”
“Will you not at least sleep on the idea for one night?”
I could…but I won’t. “Tell Henry that I will call him at his office.”
I rush to Henry’s room, stuff my clothes in my carry-on, and take as many deep breaths as I can without hyperventilating. In my whiskey-soaked days, I would be with this woman all night in every possible position until I dropped from exhaustion or someone called the police because of the noise.
Not tonight.
Tonight I have to get home.
When I pass by her, Cece is not nearly as alluring as before, her sultry voice nothing but cheap sound effects, her body nothing more than a mannequin, nonetheless a drop-dead gorgeous mannequin.
“So you are gay, too?” she asks.
I stop at the door and turn. “Gay? Cece, I’m not even happy.” I eye her from head to toe, and she draws her legs up to her chest. “I wish you and Henry every happiness, and for what it’s worth, you are the second-most beautiful woman I have ever known.”
“Second-most?” Her shoulders sag. “Ah, that explains it. You are in love with someone else.”
She’s right. I’m still in love with Ebony Mills. “Yes.”
“Henry did not tell me that you are in love.”
“Because I didn’t tell Henry I was in love.”
“It would not have mattered. What does Henry know of how a man truly feels for the woman he loves?” She stands and buttons her blouse. “If I had known that your mind was on another woman, I would not have embarrassed myself.”
“You have nothing to be embarrassed about, Cece.”
“And you do not know how it feels for a woman to throw herself at a man who does not catch her.” She slides on her shoe, a tear slipping from an eye.
“Like I said, under any other circumstances, I would be glad to—”
She waves her hands. “No, do not say it. Do not say you would be my donor. It is an ugly word.”
I set my laptop and carry-on at the door. “I wasn’t going to say that, Cece. I wasn’t going to say that at all.”
She wipes the tear away. “What were you going to say?”
I approach her, taking her hands. “I was going to say that I would be glad—no, honored—to have made love to you.”
Another tear falls. “Thank you.”
I squeeze her hands and kiss her forehead. “And it would not have been as a donor. It would have been as your lover.” I kiss her cheek. “And who knows, maybe we’ll see each other again, but far, far away from Henry.”
More tears. “I would like to give you my number, Peter Underhill.”
I pull out a pen and open my hand. “I promise not to wash it off.”
She laughs and writes several numbers on my hand, labeling one “cell,” another “home,” and yet another “office.”
“Is this number-one beauty a sure thing?”
“I don’t know, but I hope so.”
She pulls me to her and sighs. “Call me anyway, okay?”
“I will.”
She looks up at me with such beautiful eyes, eyes full of crystal tears like Ebony’s that day twenty years ago…“Do you promise to call me, Peter?”
“Yes.” My mind flashes to that distant parting. Yes, Ebony.
She kisses my cheek. “Another time, another place.”
“Yes.”
Another time, another place, another parting, eyes full of tears.
I retrieve my carry-on and laptop, their weight also familiar to me. The girl with sad eyes at the door, me with suitcases in hand, her waving, me nodding…
Full circle.
And once again I’m walking toward oblivion with no way to get off, an outcast in a twilight country.
I stand at the Cherry Grove pier under a single lamp for no reason at all, staring across Great South Bay at the lights of Sayville and the rest of the south shore miles away. From one island to another, without a ship or a star to steer her by, the next ferry arriving in sixteen hours, faint with hunger and nothing to eat, and a date tomorrow night with Destiny. I need to find a greasy spoon somewhere soon, a place proud to serve saturated fat and cholesterol with bottomless glasses of sweet iced tea to clog my arteries and ruin my kidneys. Are there any truly American diners left? Where’s a Bob’s Big Boy when you need one?
I could go back to Henry’s apartment. Sure. There’s a woman there who wants my sperm in the worst way, and I could even imagine that she’s Ebony. No, that’s sick. It was sick when I imagined that Edie was Ebony, all lights off, of course. I could go back to comfort Cece, maybe even spend the night…and
have to listen to her and Henry go at it—if he has any energy left—less than thirty feet away. No, that’s even sicker.
And sitting out here in the increasing cold could make me the sickest I’ve been in a long time. I should go back and let Nature take her course…but that would be cheating, wouldn’t it? Wait. How can you cheat on a woman you haven’t seen for twenty years? I’m going back. Yes, that’s what I’ll—
I hear the sound of an approaching boat. A twenty-foot runabout with twin Mercury 80s speeds out of the dark and chops through its own wake to the dock, several semi-sober women leaning over one side in an attempt to catch the edge of the dock.
I leave my carry-on and laptop behind me, reaching out to a woman with long raven hair. “Grab my hand. I’ll pull you in.”
And that’s precisely what I do—I pull her into the water. I don’t mean to. I have no idea what, if anything, is going through her mind, but when I pull, she steps out of the boat and into Great South Bay. She flounders around for a few seconds between the dock and the boat before standing in the shallow water and throwing her head back, her hair whipping water wildly into the air.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“This is great!” she yells. “And the water is so warm! C’mon everybody, let’s get wet!”
And that’s what they do. Everyone, including the driver, dives off the boat fully clothed into three feet of water while the boat continues to drift toward shore, one particularly large woman doing a graceless cannonball that sprays water on me. I go to the water’s edge and drag the boat up on shore while the squeals and shouts continue.
The raven-haired woman comes out of the bay first. “Thanks for pulling the boat up.”
Her appearance is definitely Irish, her accent Boston. “You’re welcome, and sorry about pulling you into the water.”
She giggles and wrings out her red flannel shirt, water pouring onto her hiking boots. “Don’t worry about it.”
“You want me to tie your boat up to the dock?”
She shrugs. “It’s not my boat.” She smiles. “In fact, we don’t know whose boat it is.”
“You stole it?”
“Sort of.” She wrings out her hair, a gob of seaweed plopping on the sand, a strand of marsh grass stuck to her pale, freckled cheek. She is not the stuff of James Joyce’s epiphanies. “I mean, one minute we’re just sort of standing there looking at it, and the next minute we’re just sort of driving away.”