Salt Water

by Charles Simmons

  She sat up straight and held out her hand to kiss, like a courtly lady.

  I gave her the leaf. “Why did you want this?”

  “So you would return to me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I return to you?”

  “You might have forgotten me on your travels.”

  I looked at what she was reading. The Waning of the Middle Ages.

  I ached to tell her about Father. It would have been a binding secret between us. But if Mrs. Mertz found out that Father had girlfriends it might encourage her.

  As Zina twirled the leaf between her fingers she told me about lunch. “They were very femmy-chummy. They talked about the problems of being married to attractive men. They talked about running two households—we had a country place, too, when Father lived with us—and the problem of bringing up gifted, only children.”

  “Did Mother say I was gifted?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Did she say what my gift was?”

  “I’m your gift, Misha. I want you to kiss this leaf.” She held it against her mouth. I closed my eyes and leaned forward. She removed the leaf, and I kissed her lips.

  8

  The Beach Party

  MOTHER PROPOSED A joint beach party with the Mertzes.

  She took it upon herself to invite Melissa for me and suggested the Mertzes invite whomever they wanted. I suspected Mother hoped they would invite men friends who would put me out of business with Zina and Father out of business with Mrs. Mertz, if there was any business. Melissa would be a problem. With her around I wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to Zina. But then an idea occurred to me. I’d invite Ari Galaktos, a friend from school who was stuck in town for the summer. Ari was a poet and had actually published a poem. Melissa might go for him. Also, Ari was taller than Melissa.

  The party was scheduled for Saturday night, three days off. In one afternoon Sonya, Blackheart, and I collected enough firewood for two beach parties. The ocean tides, sweeping by the Point, deposit all sorts of things on the beach. You wake up one morning and there are thousands of clam and oyster shells along the shoreline. Tires turn up, bottles, dead fish, dog carcasses, once a horse, cork and plastic floats, seaweed, tackle, jellyfish, and lots of wood— boards, planks, ties, beams, logs, crates, oars. Because wood floats and is carried at full tide to the high-water line it tends to stay on the beach, while jetsam can litter the shore one day and be gone the next.

  We carried wood from as far as half a mile away and piled it on the beach in front of the house. Sonya supervised empty-mouthed, while Blackheart was practically lifting his own weight and carrying it stiff-necked like a soldier. Sonya would give him a bark when he dropped it devotedly in front of her. He mistook this and started leaping around her. She nipped him on the nose, and he scurried back to the house, I would say with his tail between his legs, but it was too short.

  When we were done Zina came out with her camera and in the late afternoon sun posed me holding a series of bleached branches at my side. I was the hunter, this was my kill. I stood with my free hand shading my eyes; I stood smiling and looking proudly at the limb; I stood glancing apprehensively over my shoulder. The tips of one of the branches actually looked like antlers. Then she brought out a tripod and took a picture of me holding her by the hair, her arms dangling and her eyes closed. Later when I showed that one to Father he said, “You two should have exchanged roles.”

  Mr. Strangfeld delivered Ari Saturday morning. Ari, who was sixteen, had a long, dark face, heavy eyebrows, and a reserved manner. “He’ll be a diplomat,” Mother once said. “Or a butler,” Father added.

  An hour later Mr. Cuddihy dropped Melissa off on the bayside. Ari and I were there to meet her and carry her things across the Point. When I took her to her room she said, “I have something for you.”

  “No presents, Melissa.”

  “It’s not a present, but it is for you.” She handed me a folded piece of paper. “Read it by yourself.”

  I left her to change and took the paper to my room.

  THOUGHT S FOR A B EACH PARTY

  We’re all alone—at least the others are

  asleep. We touch and smile. No words, just thoughts,

  of which a chance one sparkles, and we laugh.

  There’ll come a day, I fear, when you are out of reach and memory is all of you

  I have; and then another day when that

  is gone. That morning I’ll awake and rise

  and eat an ordinary breakfast, dress

  and go to leave—to find that I forgot

  a certain necessary something, just

  my comb, my keys, a paper, or a book—

  a light makes darkness clearly black: a part

  of me is lost. And then I’ll wonder what

  you were and where you were and try to reason

  out an emptiness and hunt for nonexistent

  strings to pull you back in view.

  What then? These words I’ve understood and truths

  I’ve known because of you, these lonely fires

  that add a little light and comfort on

  the mind’s black stretching beach of night,

  the shifting tide forgetfulness will rise

  and snuff them out, when it has carried you,

  who lit them off to sea. What fumbling hand

  and wet will kindle up the blazes then?

  Walking downstairs with Melissa to lunch, I told her I liked the poem, which was true, but that wasn’t my main feeling. Mainly I was uncomfortable that she was writing poems for me at all.

  After lunch I motioned Ari to come to my room and asked him what he thought of Melissa. Ari was always polite. I might as well have asked him what he thought of lunch. I showed him the poem. He read it carefully.

  “It’s good,” he said. “Take the first line, ‘We’re all alone—at least the others are.’ It works two ways. The others are asleep, but they’re alone too. And the line ‘the mind’s black stretching beach of night.’ It’s one foot short, so you have to say it slowly, you have to stretch it out.” He saw other things I hadn’t seen. Then he asked me if I was going with Melissa.

  “She’s all yours,” I said.

  The plan was to have drinks on the bayside porch at seven and move to the ocean beach at eight. Zina and Mrs. Mertz brought one guest, a man about fifty named Max Pondoro. He was the only one dressed up—white slacks, brown and white shoes, paisley shirt, and navy blazer. Mrs. Mertz herself had caught the spirit of the thing—she came barefoot, in jeans and a man’s frayed shirt. Zina was proper in bell-bottom slacks and a pale blue blouse.

  Max Pondoro kissed Mother’s hand and said how kind she was to have invited him. He kissed Melissa’s hand and said what a pretty young lady she was. He bowed slightly as he shook Father’s hand, which brought out Father’s big smile. Only Ari was up to Mr. Pondoro—he bowed back.

  I left the porch at seven-thirty to start the fire. Zina came with me. “My mother is a genius,” she said. “Did you see Max’s way with your mother?”

  “No.” I had, of course.

  “Well, watch at the party. Mother told him to play up to her.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  “To make her feel attractive. You have to admit, Max was made for the job.”

  “My mother feels perfectly attractive. She is perfectly attractive. She doesn’t need some dummy kissing her hand.”

  “Misha! My mother is trying to be nice. She felt your mother was upset and needed a little perking up. That’s all.”

  “She was upset, and it’s over.”

  “Misha, you’re mad at us. We love you, and we love your mother. Come here!” She pulled me to her, put her arms around me, and hugged me. Then she held me away and said, “All right?”

  “All right,” I said. I knew she was doing to me what Max Pondoro was doing to Mother. But it was all right. Zina’s body was soft and hard, and I could smell the scent of her soap.

  When we got the fire started
I pulled out a tarred board that was smoking. Otherwise the fire was fine, big enough to be fun, but not so hot you couldn’t cook over it. Besides franks, hamburgers, and marshmallows, there was wine and beer. Mrs. Mertz brought a thermos of martinis, and Father a bottle of scotch. The air was cool and dry, and there were no bugs. We sang rounds, “Frère Jacques,” “Dona Nobis Pacem.” Everyone slipped food to the dogs, and Blackheart spit up. Father, Zina, and I were on one blanket; Ari and Melissa on another; Mrs. Mertz, squatting, poked the fire with a stick and sipped a martini. And, sure enough, there was Max Pondoro chatting Mother up. She was laughing. Well, why not?

  By firelight Zina took on a new kind of beauty. Her dark, tanned face had red in it, and her brown eyes were shiny black. She told a ghost story about a witch who was deserted by her lover for another woman. The witch turned herself into a pig and mingled with the man’s other pigs. She was the most succulent pig of all, and when Christmas came the man chose her for Christmas dinner. But just before the slaughter she ate the leaves of a deadly henbane bush growing at the edge of the wood, and when the couple ate her flesh they died a fearful death.

  “Is the moral,” Father said, “not to eat pig or not to lie down with witches?”

  “I think,” Mother said, “it’s watch out for any woman who makes a pig of herself.”

  “I think the moral of the story,” Melissa said, “is that love is worth dying for.”

  “It’s your story,” Father said to Zina. “What’s the moral?”

  “Melissa has the right answer.”

  The fire turned to embers. Father suggested we walk along the beach. Mother had fallen asleep. Max Pondoro and Mrs. Mertz said they would stay and guard her. The water was black except for the phosphorescent lights in the hollows of the waves. Backlit clouds passed in front of the moon. Melissa, walking behind us with Ari, recited Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

  The sea is calm to-night.

  The tide is full, the moon lies fair

  Upon the straits…

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…

  The poem was beautiful, but it was wrong about the world. The world at the moment was Zina and Father and I walking on this perfect beach on this perfect night. Mother content. Mrs. Mertz probably staring into the embers. Melissa and Ari discovering each other.

  Father felt it. “How dear we are to one another!” he said.

  Zina felt it too. “Without one another we might as well die. Isn’t that what the poem means, Melissa?”

  “Yes.”

  When we got back to the fire only Mr. Pondoro was there. Mrs. Mertz had gone to bed. It seems that when Mother woke she wanted to know where everyone was. Mr. Pondoro tried to tell her, but she didn’t believe him. She said she was going to the guesthouse to look for herself, and that was the last he saw of her.

  That pretty much ended the party. But the night wasn’t over. I woke, at what time I don’t know. The moon was gone, the room was dark. Blackheart had his paws on my chest and was whining. Someone else was in bed beside me. At first it seemed to be Mother, who for some reason thought I was still a baby. Then it was Zina, who now understood how much I loved her. But it was Melissa. “Is it all right to be here?” she whispered. She put her arm around me, and we kissed. The trouble was, when I had awakened I was having a sex dream. I could no more have turned away from Melissa than I could have stopped the dream. She smelled so sweet. We didn’t do anything besides kiss, but it happened to me. I held her, and we kissed some more. Then I fell asleep. When I woke in the morning she was gone.

  After lunch Father and I sailed Melissa, Ari, and Mr. Pondoro across the bay to town. On the dock Melissa squeezed my hand and whispered, “Write me your thoughts.” Ari embraced me and whispered, “Thanks.” What did he think he was thanking me for?

  When we got back to the Point I wanted to go right away to the guesthouse, but I held off till later in the afternoon.

  Zina was alone on the deck.

  “Misha, I want to tell you something about yourself. You are actually older right now than you will be in a few years. You’ll be younger then and enjoy yourself more. For instance, why did you let Ari scoop Melissa up like that?”

  “He didn’t scoop her up.”

  “Misha, I was there. I saw it. And you didn’t raise a finger.”

  “Melissa came into my room last night. She came into my bed.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Misha,” she said with a sly smile, “I hope you were a gentleman.”

  “I was not a gentleman.”

  “You don’t understand me. I hope you didn’t send her away. That would have been very ungentlemanly indeed.”

  She was so pleased with herself. I could have struck her. I called to Blackheart and stalked off toward the house. He ran beside me, barking and jumping.

  9

  On Love

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON Mr. Strangfeld dropped Hillyer off. Hillyer was big, with kind of a small head. He was over six feet and weighed a hundred and ninety, most of it muscle, which was a mystery because he didn’t move around much. Mother loved to watch him eat. That night she roasted two chickens, and he ate one by himself. Also, Father liked to play straight man to Hillyer. I think it was with this in mind that he asked him if the boys at school worried about venereal disease.

  “We pretty much stick to virgins, sir.”

  Father asked what happened after they ceased to be virgins.

  “We move on, sir.”

  “Is there an inexhaustible supply?”

  “If you know where to look.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Among younger girls, sir. You can always find one among younger girls.”

  “There must be a limit even there.”

  “As we go down the age scale some of us lose interest, so demand never exceeds supply, if you see what I mean, sir.”

  Although the next morning was clear, a strong wind from the ocean lifted sand along the beach. Instead of swimming we took the Angela out on the bay. When the wind comes off the ocean, chopping it up, it blows into the bay and keeps the water tight. Four of us were just the right weight for the Angela—she really dug in. Hillyer was a good sailor, and we all took turns at the tiller, even Mother.

  After lunch Hillyer, Blackheart, and I went for a walk to the end of the Point. The only thing we passed was the wreck of the Rita M, which ran aground in the great storm of l938. The hull had lain exposed on the beach until World War II, when the Army Engineers, to stop erosion, constructed a two-thousand-foot stone jetty from the tip of the Point into the sea. As a result the tides collected sand in the pocket. The bay beach built up, and the wreck was mostly buried. All you could see now was the bleached fo’c’s’le sticking up sideways.

  We sat down beside it, Blackheart sniffed it and peed on it, and Hillyer broke out some pot. Pot is special on a bare beach in bright sunlight. There’s not much to fasten your eyes on. Waves and clouds become important. Hillyer and I chose favorite clouds and argued their merits as they passed overhead.

  Hillyer’s girl, it turned out, was named Rita. He said that at first he thought I was kidding with the story of the Rita M, but then he realized I didn’t know his girl’s name. He thought the coincidence was fantastic, especially after a few more puffs. He said that Rita’s nipples were like the dials of a safe. The current combination was two turns to the left on the right one and three turns to the right on the left one. “But the combination keeps changing. You have to experiment.”

  I asked him if he was in love with Rita.

  He said he didn’t believe in love, and if you don’t believe in it you can’t be in it. “It’s like mortal sin. If you don’t believe in it, you
can’t commit it.” Hillyer was a Catholic.

  I pointed out that that logic didn’t work for, say, diseases. “I’ll give you a test,” I went on. “If you had to choose between saving your mother from a sinking ship and saving Rita, which would you save?”

  “My mother’s a pain in the ass.”

  “Your father then.”

  “Pain in the ass.”

  “Is there anyone you’d save instead of Rita?”

  “Hannah.”

  “Who’s Hannah?”

  “Ben Fogarty’s sister.” Ben was in our class.

  “Why would you save her?”

  “Did you ever see her? You’d save her if you saw her.”

  “Are you in love with Hannah?”

  “I don’t believe in love.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t believe in love? Do you think when people say they’re in love they don’t feel the things they think they feel?”

  “Wha?”

  “You’re just being dumb.”

  “So what is love?”

  “It’s more than wanting to screw someone. It’s wanting to be with them, listen to them, think about them. You treasure everything about them, a shoe, a handkerchief.”

  “Snot.”

  “What’s not?”

  “Snot, snot,” he said and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Oh, come on!”

  “So what’s love good for?”

  “People in love are exalted.”

  He took a puff.

  I took a puff and decided to tell him about Zina. As soon as he heard the name he chanted, “Zin-a! Hann-ah! Rit-a!” and we broke up. We staggered into the water to cool off. Hillyer fell down, and we broke up again.

  A trip to the end of the Point included a walk on the Rocks. The Rocks were the jetty the Army Engineers built with blocks of trap rock dynamited from cliffs on the mainland. The blocks were as much as seven feet across. You could see drill marks where charges had been set to sever them. The Engineers got the blocks in place on a smallgauge railroad they constructed on a trestle beside the jetty site. You could still see railroad pilings sticking out of the water. After a rough tide or heavy rain the algae on the Rocks swelled with water and made them slippery. You were always hearing how a fisherman from the mainland had lost his footing and drowned. The only way to walk the Rocks, wet or dry, was the way we were walking, barefoot. Strong prehensile toes helped. This day the Rocks were hot and dry. The algae lay flat and sticky and actually gave us an extra purchase.