“There had been gales before as there would be gales to come.” These grandiloquent lines appear in my stack of pages. “Everyone knew, when the men and boys set out, that they might not be back, but never was there anything quite so ferocious and unheralded: no fair warning from the sea, only a squall like a maniac’s tantrum, hurling waves so furious that just one young man was left to tell the tale, as though the storm were proud of its force and wanted the tale told. He lived into his eighties and was known thereafter as the single survivor.”
I heard all this from Ev at night, after his father had cupped his hands at dinner to explain the movements of the tides. We lay in the narrow bed in Ev’s old room, with the very moon that pulled the tides beaming in on us, lighting up the field of cabbage roses on the quilt.
“I still don’t quite get it about the tides,” I said.
“You get high tides at certain times of the month,” he said, yawning, “just after the moon is full or new, and lower tides other times.”
“Yes, but what about this bucket business?”
He pretended he was asleep, because he hated to be caught not knowing something precisely. Five minutes later he rolled over and said, “What do you think, seeing them in their own setting?” A direct question!
“I like them even better. But they seem just as sad as they were in the city. Maybe they’re not keen on me. Do you think they’re nostalgic for Margot?”
“No, they’re always like that. It has nothing to do with Margot. They never especially liked her, as a matter of fact. They felt she was watching their every move, because she was a psychiatrist. But she wasn’t interested in the least. She never liked the beach, either, so she didn’t come here much. She didn’t like sand in the bed.”
“I love the beach. I’ll come whenever you want. I don’t even mind sand in the bed.”
“I used to explain to them that she was a doctor—that was something I thought they could trust—but it didn’t do any good.”
“But why the sadness, then?”
“That’s the gale. The history.”
He told me about the eight members of his father’s family lost at sea in 1841. It struck me as an exceedingly long time to mourn.
“I’ll take you to the cemetery tomorrow and show you the stone,” he said.
“All right.” I didn’t know what else to say. I began touching him—he seemed so remote.
“I don’t think anybody’s ever made love in this bed,” he said.
“Didn’t you and Margot, when you visited?”
“She never wanted to, here. Maybe it was the sand. She was right, you know. There are always a few grains in the sheets.”
“Well, we can be the first.”
He was ready but reluctant. “We’ll have to do it quietly. They’re right on the other side of the wall.”
“What do you suppose they think we’re doing? We’re grown-ups.”
“They’re my parents.”
I had a bad feeling then, a kind of presentiment. Maybe I shouldn’t marry him, what with the gale and the sadness and this quiet love. My exuberant Q.—how different he was. If we had had to be quiet he would have made a game out of it. Let’s make love like Trappist monks, I could hear him whisper. If I didn’t want to play a monk he’d let me be a Carmelite nun. Or, Let’s pretend we’re deaf—we’ll do it in sign language. Or, First one who makes a sound is the loser. And then, as I often did at that time of my life, I silenced Q. I shoved him into a hidden chamber of my heart where his voice was muffled.
The next day we went first to the local museum, housed in what used to be a hotel on a high dune overlooking the sea, close by the lonesome lighthouse with the small cottage and yard alongside, where children’s bikes and toys stood disconsolate in the salty air like figures in a Hopper painting. In the museum Ev showed me a letter under glass from Daniel Webster, Secretary of State at the time of the gale. Webster was replying to the town selectmen’s request for help for the widows and orphans “left in want of the most common necessaries of life; food, clothing, and fuel.”
Such a destruction of brave men far exceeds all the painful forebodings which I formed, when, at my home on the Coast, I witnessed the approaching fury of the gale. .. . I feel that I should ill requite the kindness, I have ever experienced from my fellow citizens of your part of the country, if I should let pass without notice, such a letter as yours.
Allow me then, to request your acceptance of the enclosed; which, though small, may relieve some one of the unfortunate, and I hope will at least serve as a proof of my sympathy and regard.
“They wrote so much better then,” I said. “Imagine how a Secretary of State would write today.”
“Yes, you’d probably get something prefab from a computer, if at all. On the other hand, there’d be disaster relief programs. I suppose substance is worth more than style.”
“In this sort of case, I suppose. It was your father’s family, wasn’t it? So why is your mother sad?”
“Her family lost people, too. Almost everyone did.”
“And so is everyone sad? A century and a half later?”
“Oh, it’s not at all a sad town. It’s a very solid, energetic town. Just certain types who like to keep the story alive. They feel it like a fate, you know, a constant reminder. And when they marry each other, well...”
He took me to the church cemetery to see the memorial to the fifty-seven men and boys lost in the gale. The carved inscription blurred with moss read, “Man goeth to his long home and the mourners goeth about the streets.”
I squeezed Ev’s hand. He wasn’t going anywhere in a ship and even if he were, now the lighthouse and the Coast Guard and radar would guard him. He was safe, and with me. I had the audacity to think his congenital sadness would burn off like the fog of the early mornings. I was barely free of Q. myself, I wasn’t even sure why I was marrying this stranger, a Portuguese in Yankee disguise, as different from me as anyone could get, but I trembled with the romance of making him happy. And maybe I did, for a little while. A few minutes, here and there.
Late that night, after his parents had gone to sleep, I wandered into the small spare bedroom neatly fitted out as a guest room, with a salmon-colored chenille bedspread and flowered curtains, a scarred old dresser holding a vase of artificial daisies, and a lamp whose base was a clipper ship. From the neatness of the room and the stillness of its air, it seemed rarely used. On one shelf of a sparsely filled bookcase—mysteries, a half-dozen Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a few thin, outdated phone books—was a row of the annual Town Reports over the last few decades. I leafed through them, entranced at the story they told. Dirt roads were paved; civil servants got small raises; teachers complained of the crowded elementary school; Halloween dances were held at the high school and swimming lessons for children were offered at high tide at the bay. Tracts of beach were ceded to the meticulous care of the National Seashore.
I squeezed Ev’s hand. He wasn’t going anywhere in a ship and even if he were, now the lighthouse and the Coast Guard and radar would guard him. He was safe, and with me.
“Look,” I said to Ev back in bed, “for years the same three men were the Selectmen, the Assessors, and the Board of Public Welfare, except they’re listed in a different order each time.”
He peered over my shoulder. “Sure, I know them. I went to school with their kids.”
The Police Department consisted of the chief and two patrolmen. Other town officers included the Tree Warden, the Shellfish Constable, the Surveyor of Lumber, and the Moth Agent. Ev was not amused. “That’s what we’ve got here, trees and ocean and bay. They’ve got to be taken care of.”
“Of course. I’m not laughing at that. It just seems so nice and simple. That a town’s major problem could be moths.”
I read to him from the most recent report of the Moth Agent, bemoaning the infestation of gypsy moths over the past four years. “Many conferences were held and surveys made. .. . An aerial spraying project was th
en planned.... It is too early to say how effective the spraying will control the gypsies, although results look fair to good. We will certainly know in the spring when the caterpillars emerge from their eggs.”
He smiled unwillingly “You think it’s quaint,” he said. “It’s not. It’s people’s daily concerns.”
“That’s what I like. How come your father has all these reports? Does everyone get a copy?”
“Probably because he’s been Harbormaster on and off for a long time.”
“I thought he had the gas station.”
“He does. Harbormaster isn’t a full-time job.”
“What does he have to do?”
“He collects fees from the boats moored down at the harbor, he goes out now and then to check that there’s no speeding in the bay, or that boats aren’t getting too close to swimming areas in the summer. I used to help him when I was a kid. After a storm there’d always be a few wrecks or boats that got loose from their moorings, so we’d go out with the Rescue Squad to get them back.”
“Did you know everyone in town?”
“More or less. If I didn’t know them personally I knew who their families were.”
“So you know the Cemetery Commissioner and the Pound Keeper and Fence Viewer and the Inspector of Animals and the Wire Inspector—”
“You’re teasing me,” he said, knocking the Town Report out of my hand and vaulting over me.
“You’re so easy to tease, it’s irresistible. Hey, aren’t we making too much noise? What about your parents?”
“They must be sleeping by now. You city provincials are all alike. No respect.”
He was wrong. I was awed by the town, and it wasn’t anything to do with quaintness. This glorious strip between bay and ocean was, in size and silhouette, uncannily like my own water-lapped island—long and narrow and tapering at the tip. Except much of its twenty-three square miles was sandy beach, and its affairs could be managed by a few dozen people (nearly all of them male back then, aside from the Library Trustees and the schoolteachers).
It was manageable: that was what drew me. At Town Meetings, citizens pondered not just the problem of gypsy moths, but how best to clean up the town dump and fight Dutch elm disease. They set speeding limits for motorboats, they tarred the roads and tended the beaches. They voted that yes, the new police cruiser should have a two-way radio but no, power steering was an unneeded luxury. They set rules for the dimensions of road signs, so as not to mar the town’s beauty, and voted down any alterations in the dunes or the marshes. Time and again the selectmen rebuffed the notion of broader highways and development at the harbor, and bristled at the threat of a major airport at the nearby Air Force base.
Meanwhile, my hometown was growing less and less manageable. The whole country felt unmanageable. We had lately come, tattered and intemperate, from the jungle war Ev fought in and barely spoke two words about. Our history was looking like a series of gallant, doomed efforts to make order out of a stretch of land too large to govern, home to groups at cross-purposes. Much more locally, I was coming out of two years with Q., also unmanageable—that is, together we made an unmanageable situation. Ev and his town, I thought when I married him, were the opposite.
FIFTEEN MONTHS AFTER I MARRIED EV, Q. left Susan. He was madly in love. Or just plain mad, Mona reported over the phone. I tried to find out about Q.’s love—what she looked like, where she came from, how old she was, and had she any brains. But dear, terse Mona said only that the woman had been playing Sally Bowles in a summer stock production of Cabaret. I suppose she thought it would pain me to know more and she was right. Though it would have pained me less to hear it from Mona than from Q., which in the fullness of time I did. Why do you tell me these things? I’d say. What makes you think I want to know? Yet even as he gave me details—not so much sexual as intimate—making me the keeper of his life and his narrative, even as I cringed inside, every word like a surgeon’s fingers on deep raw innards, I relished each convolution of the emotional drama. Here’s something for your data bank, he said. He knew.
Q. left his wife. Q. was madly in love. Had there been a lull in the ongoing domestic crises? Carla drug-free, Renata over the abortion trauma, the drowned brother given belated artificial respiration, the entire family as cheery and stable as at the close of a half-hour sitcom, meaning that my timing was wrong, I hadn’t had enough patience? Or should I feel a certain pride that he fell in love on the rebound, banished by me, and knew enough not to make the same mistake twice? No, such forethought didn’t sound like Q. Whatever the case, he left Susan and I was married to Ev. I had to do something for revenge, something short of killing Q., which I considered but abandoned.
“You know what?” I asked Ev one night after we made love and were sitting side by side, I with a magazine, he with mounds of newspapers in English and Spanish, for he was leaving for El Salvador in a few days. He looked monkish even though naked, paled after the flush of love, his rimless hexagonal glasses glinting in the night light, his beard in disarray. He put down the paper and turned with the half-smile.
“No, what?”
This was a routine of ours. I did it to make him ask a question.
“I’m pregnant.”
He laughed and slid a finger up into the center of me, making me shiver and smile. “Isn’t it a little early to tell?”
“Not from this time. I’m serious. From weeks ago.”
“You really are?”
“I really am.” His silence. This time I pushed. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Well, good. I’m surprised. But, good. If that’s what you want.”
“I guess I want you to be happy about it.”
“I am. I mean I will be. I’m so preoccupied about this trip, I guess I . . .”
“Didn’t this ever occur to you?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe not. I didn’t know you wanted it.”
I could have screamed at him for all the traits I had once admired and thought would be so easy to live with after Q. But screaming wouldn’t change anything. I wanted him to be Q. and he never would be, and there was nothing to be done about it. If only I could have sobbed in his arms that Q. didn’t love me, he loved someone else, how could that be?
How could he leave Susan for someone playing Sally Bowles when he wouldn’t leave her for me?
“Laura, I am glad. It’ll be fine. I don’t mind at all.”
“That makes me feel great, that you don’t mind. I guess that’s how you decided to marry me, too.”
“That was different.”
“Was it? In what way? Maybe it’s time we figured that out.”
He waved that away. “Look, you want me to tell you what I feel, you always say. This is important to you and I respect that. I just don’t see my life as a drama the way you do. Dramatic decisions at every turn. It’ll be fine.” He reached over and touched my leg. The finger had long been removed.
“Never mind. Let’s not talk about it anymore.”
He picked up the paper, and three days later left for El Salvador.
It was bleak winter, the river frozen. I stared out the window at a ship that had been stalled for days in the ice. When I picked up the ringing phone and heard Q.’s voice I lost my grip. The receiver fell in my lap.
Sorry, I dropped you, I mean I dropped it, I told him.
He laughed and said, I’ve worked on my voice but I never knew it was so powerful.
I laughed, too, and so before I could remember to be enraged we were laughing.
I’m in town, Laura. I thought I’d see how you were.
In town from where? I’m not even sure where you live.
Minneapolis.
With that whatshername, the one you met in Cabaret and left Susan for, who played the Liza Minnelli part, Sally Bowles? Her?
Oh, God, no, that’s been over for months. It was a disaster. You have no idea, Laura. She wanted to reconstruct me. She herself came from a family of alcoholics and was constantly�
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You don’t have to tell me.
No. Well, how are you?
Pregnant.
Pregnant! Laura, love, how wonderful! Somehow I never imagined you pregnant. I knew you had that great success with the novel. I read it. It was marvelous. I knew it would be, just from the bits I read way back.
You never told me you read it.
I’m telling you now.
You were right not to before. I probably would have spit in your face. I don’t know why I’m not doing that now. But it’s good to hear your voice, actually. (Now that I’m safe, I thought.)
It was a wonderful book, he said. I want to talk to you about it. We have lots to talk about. But pregnant! Well, I don’t know why I’m so surprised. That’s what happens when people get married. And you did that. You went and got married, he accused.
Yes, I said. I don’t know why that should surprise you either. I’m the same as other women. The majority of women get married and pregnant at some point.
Oh, you’re not the same, my love. You’re very special. There’s no one like you. Age cannot wither you, nor custom—
For Chrissakes, Q., I’m not even thirty.
Sorry, just a manner of speaking. I’ve lost track of time. I was so wretched with that Sally Bowles. Plus I was having periodontal work done all during it. I don’t know which was worse. Best of luck, Laura. I’m happy for you. How about meeting me for a cup of tea?
I went.
You don’t look pregnant. That was the first thing he said. Then he put his arms around me. We didn’t know what kind of kiss to do so we devised, spontaneously, the unique kiss that we perfected later on for those ambiguous phases between us, something between a friends’ kiss and a lovers’ kiss, a kiss with slightly parted lips, a kiss bearing the richness and memory of loverdom but not the assurance, a tentative kiss, full of geniality and a touch more, but something short of passion, a questioning kiss, moist but chaste, brief but longer than a friends’ kiss of greeting. .. . I wasn’t swept away, only a trifle unsettled by it. Then I looked him over: coarse graying hair, tired eyes, old-fashioned tweed overcoat—he might have been playing a bemused professor in a 1940s movie. I’m safe, I thought.
The Fatigue Artist Page 18