Salt Water

by Charles Simmons

  6

  A Warning

  NEXT MORNING THE sky was pale blue and cloudless, the ocean green and clear near shore and blue-black far out. A snappy breeze blew in from the bay over the Point and into the sea, keeping the water smooth and the breaking waves small and tight. It was a nifty day for sailing.

  There were four houses on the Point if you count our house and the guesthouse as one. The house nearest the mainland was a snug little shack belonging to Mr. Strangfeld, who had been living there alone since before World War II. The older he got the more we wondered how he managed in the winter. He had electricity but no phone. If he had gotten into trouble, there wouldn’t have been much he could do about it. Every spring when we opened the house we half expected to hear that he had died, his flesh stripped by rats.

  He made his living from the Pointers. He drove his beach buggy past the house every morning about eight. If we wanted a ride to the mainland we planted a green flag in the sand and he picked us up. It was the only way to get off the Point by land. He did it rain or shine as long as anyone was left. He performed two other services. We all had wells, but the water was brackish. Mr. Strangfeld delivered ten-gallon bottles of drinking water from the mainland. When we wanted one we left the empty in front of the house and he changed it for a full one. Also, he kept an eye on the houses during the winter to see they hadn’t been burgled, blown down, or washed away. I don’t know how much we Pointers paid him, but it was enough for his taxes, electricity, and food. We could have had our own beach buggies, but we felt to deny Mr. Strangfeld any part of his income would have endangered his survival.

  Bone Point stretches six miles north-south along the mainland, with the end of the Point to the north, the ocean on the east, and the bay on the west. By Grandfather Michael’s day Bone Point was an island, but it must have been a peninsula once, when it was named. During World War II the Army Engineers built a causeway from the southern end to the mainland. The town, with a population then of seventy thousand, was about three miles to the north. What Mr. Strangfeld did was drive us to the base of the Point, over the causeway to the mainland, where you could take the coastal rail line one stop into the center of town. We kept our car at the station and usually drove into town alongside the railroad.

  Father went in that morning, so I gathered up my courage and invited Zina to sail. She was so beautiful in her candy-striped bathing suit that it made me self-conscious to look at her. I put her in charge of the mainsail, and she learned quickly. In no time she was ducking and shifting like a veteran. I told her she would make a good sailor, which got us talking about what we wanted to be.

  She wanted to be a good photographer, “not famous, just good.” She explained that she hadn’t yet plotted her course, mainly because of what she called the chrome shift, the change from black-and-white to color. She said that color photography had been technically perfected too soon. “Black-and-white had years to go. Now it’s hard to resist color. Plenty of serious photographers do only black-andwhite, but there’s something affected about it, like making black-and-white movies. Color may never be any good, it may be too real. Good photographs aren’t real, they’re pictures of what you think about what’s real.” She said the truth had come to her one evening in a New York restaurant. “There were black-and-whites on the wall. Everything else was in color. I was in color, the man opposite me, the chairs, the floor. The pictures were the only exception, the only refuge. Art is a refuge from reality.”

  She asked me if I had a talent. I said I thought I had a talent for happiness. “Like Father,” I added.

  She said I seemed more serious than Father.

  “Father is very serious. It doesn’t show, because he’s witty and he’s nice to people.”

  “You’re nice to people, Misha, when you want to be.”

  I knew what she was getting at, which I didn’t want to talk about, so I said, “But do you think I have a talent for happiness?”

  “I think you have a talent for goodness.”

  “What good is that?”

  “It’s good for the people around you.”

  “Is it good for you?” I said.

  “Maybe. But when I said you were nice to people when you wanted to be—”

  “You meant Melissa.”

  “That girl loves you.”

  “I don’t love her.”

  “If I were a man,” Zina said, “I’d make love to every woman who loved me.”

  “Suppose you were a movie actor and thousands of women loved you.”

  “I’d make love to every one of them once. It would be my sacred obligation.”

  “What about when they wanted to do it again?” I said.

  “I’d explain about my sacred obligation to the others and send them away.”

  “Suppose they insisted?”

  “I’d tell them they were lucky to get me once.”

  “What would you do if I said I loved you?”

  “Well, Misha, I’m not a man. A woman must love a man before she makes love with him. That’s her sacred obligation.”

  “Well, I love you.”

  “Maybe you do, and maybe you don’t. I’ll give you a test. Can I let go of this sail?”

  I turned the Angela into the wind, and Zina sat down beside me. “All right,” she said, “I will kiss you on the eyes, but you must keep them open.”

  “Kiss me on the actual eyes?”

  “Yes, and if you can’t keep them open you don’t love me.”

  “I can do it.”

  “You can’t keep them open with your fingers.”

  “I know. Go ahead!”

  She touched one eye with the tip of her tongue. She let me close my eyes in between. Then she touched the other eye. Tears ran down my face.

  “You’re really crying,” she said

  “I really love you,” I said.

  She dove into the water. I could handle that mainsail and the tiller perfectly well myself, but to take over so suddenly flustered me. She came right to the surface. We were far out, and she was surprised by the feel of deep water. It has a swell and pull that let you know you’re in its power. The sails caught the wind and the Angela moved away. Struggling to get the boat under control, I saw on Zina’s face not fear so much as intense curiosity. I wanted to get to her before she became afraid.

  Returning to a given spot in a sailboat is not easy. You don’t move in a circle, as you would in a power boat. You execute a figure eight. As roundabout as that sounds, it’s the proven way to get back to someone overboard. Father taught it to me. I had done it once, and did it again now. Zina at first thought I was sailing away from her. I kept shouting, “It’s okay. I’m coming back.”

  She needed help getting aboard. We didn’t talk much going in. She had been afraid.

  After we moored I asked her if she would have lunch with Mother and me.

  “You better see if your mother would like that.”

  “My mother was peeved with your mother, not with you.”

  Mother said sure, and I fetched Zina from the guesthouse.

  I loved listening to the two of them. They brought out the lady in each other. They talked as if I weren’t there.

  Zina wanted to know what Father did (he was an insurance broker with his own business), where we lived in the winter (in an apartment in town), whether Mother or Father had been married before (no), whether Mother had more women friends than men friends (women), whether Mother had a job or profession (no).

  Zina said she knew she would be a success as a photographer.

  Mother asked how she knew.

  “Because I want it so much.”

  “Do you think things work that way?” Mother said.

  “In my case,” Zina said and smiled, and Mother laughed.

  Zina said she had been born in New York City, which she liked because it was “half European.” She went to college for only one year because she had thought she wanted to be a philosopher, but it turned out that she was more inter
ested in things than ideas. She liked Bone Point because she didn’t have to wear shoes. Her parents had been living apart for six years but were still married. Mr. Mertz was in import/export and traveled a lot. Zina didn’t plan to marry for a while, if ever, and if she had children she would wait till she was thirty at least. She had more men friends than women friends, which she intended to change, “because there’s more to learn from women; men only teach you about themselves.” She knew she was attractive to men, but that was because she was independent. “Men like independent women. They’re easy to get rid of when the time comes.”

  “I doubt you learned that from experience,” Mother said.

  Zina giggled. “Really my mother said that, I didn’t.”

  I was very pleased that Mother liked her. I wanted everyone I loved to be close. Mother, Father, Zina, Blackheart. And maybe there was room for Mrs. Mertz.

  As she was leaving, Zina said, “I think you have a peach of a kid.”

  “So does your mother,” Mother said.

  “I would like to say … I want you to know … Mother is really harmless. Would you come and have lunch with us?”

  “I’d love to.”

  I admired how quickly Mother said it.

  Zina kissed Mother’s cheek, touched the tip of my nose with her finger, and left.

  We cleared the table silently. I was sure Mother would have something to say, but she didn’t. So finally I said, “Zina’s okay, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, she is,” Mother said, turning away.

  “Do you think she’ll be a success?”

  “If she doesn’t lose her way.”

  “How could she do that?”

  “Get married and have kids and give up a career. Any number of ways.”

  “She said she’ll be a success because she wants it so much.”

  Mother turned around angrily. “She’s wrong. She may be a success, or she may not, but it won’t be because she wants it. Life is not like that. Don’t you understand that?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Michael, Zina may look like a girl to you, but she is a grown woman. She will break your heart if you don’t get this idea out of your head. You do not get in life what you want because you want it, you get what life gives you.”

  She went out to the porch, slamming the door behind her.

  7

  A Trip to Town

  I WENT TO town the day Mother had lunch with Mrs. Mertz and Zina. Mr. Strangfeld drove me to the station. He was perfectly American as far as I could tell, but he knew I had been born in Germany, and he liked to use German phrases with me, guten Morgen, guten Tag, wie gehts. When he picked me up that morning I said, “It sure is a fantastic Morgen this Morgen.” “Ach, ja,” he said, “sehr schön,” which he translated for me: “Oh, yes, very beautiful.” And it was beautiful—cool and crisp and clear.

  The town, Father said, was just the right size, small enough to know what’s going on, but not so small it didn’t have mysteries. Rich people moved in at the beginning of the century. One of them built the college, and another built the art museum. People liked it because it didn’t have mills or factories.

  My pal Hillyer, the one whose parents were divorced, was coming from his country place to meet me. He wanted to go on a movie binge—one in the morning, two in the afternoon. I wanted to go to the museum. Zina had been talking about the impressionists (“they painted light, not things”), and I wanted to fill my head with what was in her head, although I didn’t try to explain this to Hillyer. We compromised. We did the museum in the morning, then after lunch we saw the flick the museum was showing and another one in a regular movie house.

  My main reason for going to town was to have dinner with Father. Mother had suggested it, and I always enjoyed it. Hillyer’s reason was to spend the night with his girlfriend. He had described in his letter how he had come into town and tried it a couple of weeks before, but when they opened the door of his house some lights were on. Had his father come home from South America? Hillyer left the girlfriend at the corner and went back to investigate. The house had been broken into. He tried to persuade her to come back with him (“We can call the police later”), but she was too shook up and he walked her home. It had taken a lot of effort to get her to try again. He promised to go through the place first to make sure the coast was clear.

  The paintings were great, except there weren’t enough of them. I bought some Monet waterscape postcards as a memento. The museum movie was an old French flick Devil in the Flesh, about a boy who was having an affair with the new wife of a soldier away fighting in World War I. It was as if the movie had been chosen for me. The second one was Lolita. Hillyer pointed out that both couples had an age gap. I secretly thought this was a good omen for me, even though the movies ended unhappily.

  I wished Hillyer luck with his girl and went on to Bobo’s Steakhouse, a roomy, oaken place. Along the bar there were dice in leather cups the customers threw to see who would pay for drinks. The captain recognized me and said that Father had called. If I arrived first I was to be seated, a bottle of red wine was to be put on the table, and if, when no one was looking, I were to help myself, what could the law do about it? I was on my second glass when Father showed up.

  I saw him as soon as he came in. So did everyone else. He was in black tie. The captain took him by the hand and elbow; the bartender leaned over to greet him; Bobo himself appeared. If you didn’t know Father was a businessman you would have thought he was a celebrity. It wasn’t only that he was good looking, people woke up when he was around. He didn’t do anything special, his presence just made people feel good. Both Bobo and the captain escorted Father to the table. The fuss people made over Father was another reason I liked Bobo’s.

  Father explained that after dinner he was going on to the opening of a nightclub. The owners were clients. Otherwise he would have asked me along (“I think your mother wants you to keep an eye on me”). Father got the same treatment leaving as arriving. He had the car outside and drove me to the apartment. He told me not to wait up for him, which I had no intention of doing anyhow.

  Our place was an eight-room duplex. You could see the water from almost every room. We had been there four years. The first time I saw it no one told me it was a duplex. I walked around the first floor. There seemed to be something wrong. I saw a kitchen, two big rooms, a smaller room, and a bathroom. Where were the bedrooms? Upstairs was where—three rooms and a storeroom, the only room you couldn’t see the water from.

  I loved the beach house, but the apartment was more comfortable. For one thing, there was endless hot water. My bathroom had a seven-foot bathtub and a bidet, which my friends got a kick out of, and a marble sink as big as a desk.

  I thought of phoning Hillyer as a joke and asking him how he was making out—it was just the kind of thing he would have done—but instead I got into bed with the copy of Emily Dickinson Melissa had also given me. I saw a poem I had never noticed, and before I went to sleep I decided to give the book to Zina and write the page of the poem as an inscription.

  Wild Nights —Wild Nights!

  Were I with thee

  Wild Nights should be

  Our luxury!

  Futile—the Winds—

  To a Heart in port—

  Done with a Compass —

  Done with a Chart!

  Rowing in Eden —

  Ah, the Sea!

  Might I but moor—Tonight —

  In Thee!

  I woke at 2 A.M., I suppose because I had gone to bed early, and I got up to see if Father was home. His bedroom was empty, but a small light came from the first floor. I went downstairs on tiptoe. The guestroom door was closed. The light in the hall was the light from under the door. I could hear someone inside. I must have been half asleep, because for an instant I thought it was Hillyer and his girl, who for some reason couldn’t stay at his apartment. Then of course I realized it was Father. I went upstairs and got back into bed. I didn’t want to know
any more about it. Was it Mrs. Mertz? Had she come into town? Had he made a date to meet her at the nightclub?

  A few years earlier, when the facts of life were circulating around my classroom, I asked Father if what I heard was true. More or less, he said, and added that when two people make love they make something out of nothing. It was an act of pure creation. He didn’t say anything about marriage.

  I woke late the next morning and stayed in bed as long as I could. I wanted to make sure Father was gone. Silently I opened my door and listened before going into the hallway.

  The apartment sounded empty. In my parents’ room the bedclothes were turned back and one of the pillows was punched. Downstairs in the guestroom the pullout couch was closed. But I could smell cigarettes. The ashtray was empty but dirty, so I cleaned it. Father didn’t smoke. I was covering up. On the table was a note: “Michael, if you want to ride out with me late this afternoon, call the office. On the other hand, Strangfeld is meeting the one o’clock train if you want to go out earlier. You didn’t miss much last night. P.” He always signed himself “P.” I once told him I would have preferred “Father.” He said, “P stands, not for Peter, but Pater—no, Pop.”

  Mr. Strangfeld picked me up at one. Zina had asked me to bring her a leaf from town—there were almost no trees on the Point. I got a big maple leaf at the station. On the way to the house I asked Mr. Strangfeld if he had driven anyone else in the day before. “Nein, keiner,” he said.

  “Danke,” I said. “Bitte,” he said. So Mrs. Mertz and Zina had both been at the Point last night.

  Mother was cheery. I told her about everything but the busy guestroom. She enjoyed the description of Father’s elegant entrance at Bobo’s and pretended to disapprove of Hillyer’s assignation but really was amused. I asked how the lunch had gone with Mrs. Mertz.

  “Good,” was all she’d say. “I’m sure you’ll hear about it from Zina,” she added.

  I changed into my bathing suit and took the maple leaf to the guesthouse. Mrs. Mertz was sunbathing in front, and Zina was reading on the deck, in back.