My favorite ocean beach has huge dunes walling it off from the town, from the continent. At the approach, at the top of the dune, the expanses of sea and sand below are a discovery no matter how many times you’ve stood there. You climb down as if descending into an endless room, or onto a stage with the sandy hill as backdrop. On the beach, the rest of the world vanishes except for the swimmers and an occasional slow-gliding ship far out. Each time I climb down, I’m not sure how I’ll manage the climb back up, but I don’t care. Not a bad fate, to be stranded here on the welcome blankness of Long Nook. For aside from a few unobtrusive signs warning of loose sand on the dunes, there are only the God-given essentials: no snack bar, showers, changing rooms, toilets or drinking fountains, and now no lifeguard chairs either, since the selectmen have apparently cut lifeguards from the budget, leaving the tourists to fend for themselves.
A million years ago this unadorned stretch of beach, walled off by high dunes, was the edge of a mountain range, until a glacier slid down from the north and nudged the mountains about to form a curved spit of land. Later on, sand deposited by the currents and tides flattened the land and refined it into the familiar arc on the maps. But this bit of magnificence is only for today. Thousands of years from now, long after the lighthouse has fallen into the sea, this beach, worn down by the tides, may be the ocean floor. Instead of the arc-shaped spit of the Cape, there will be a string of islands.
It looks as if nothing is happening, a narrative without a plot, yet this patient shaping and transforming work of water—carving the shore, never satisfied—is the earth’s real drama.
I WAS DETERMINED to get out to the ship. “I bet we can make it this time. I’ve been working up to it,” I told Jilly. She was taking the night shift, so we set off on the mud flats after lunch.
“We’ll have a nice walk, but I doubt if we’ll get there. It’s farther than it looks. Why do we have to get there, anyway?”
“I don’t know. I like to have a goal. And I have a yen to see it up close. It’s mysterious.”
“They say it was sunk in World War II. Maybe it was headed for Europe. Or the Germans were offshore. Imagine, German subs in Cape Cod Bay.”
It’s always felt daring walking so far out, not dangerous-daring—the tide comes in slowly and the waters are calm and shallow—but adventurous-daring, walking on land usually covered over, secret land not meant to be seen or trod on. I kept my eyes on the ship, black, open and bare. Jilly unexpectedly proved to be an expert on the tides. She knew about the sloshing basin and the pull of both sun and moon.
“The sloshing around goes on all the time, plus you have the gravitational pull, plus the wind, which can whoosh the water forward or keep it back, depending. You’ve got all these factors and the slope of the land, too, working at the same time. When the pull of gravity and the sloshing are in the same direction, that’s when you get tidal waves or huge high tides like in the Bay of Fundy, or else the opposite, very low tides, like in Nantucket. Have you ever been to Nantucket?”
“No. How do you know all this?”
“I took a course in oceanography last semester. We went to the Marine Observatory in Woods Hole, at the other end of the Cape. The Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia,” she said soberly, like a child who’s studied up for the exam, “has the world’s highest tides. They can go up to fifty feet—the water just zooms in. Everyone knows it’s coming so they keep away. The bucket is sloshing upwards just as the sun and moon are pulling. I’d love to see that someday. They have this neat way of fishing, because of the tides. They set up poles way out on the flats when the tide is out and string up nets between them. When the tide comes in it’s so deep it covers up the nets and poles, and when it pulls back, the nets are full of fish. And, like, they haven’t really done anything, just waited out the tide.”
“Like loaves and fishes.”
“I guess. How’re you doing? Still okay?”
“A little tired. Does it look any closer?”
“Not really. I think the current’s shifting, too. See, it’s up to our ankles. You have to figure, Laura, once we get out there we have to come all the way back.”
“Okay, let’s turn around. It makes me feel like an old lady, though.”
“Oh, cut that out. You’re looking better already, not so sleepy. And you can swim. You didn’t think you’d be able to.”
“Anyone can swim in this water. It’s all salt.”
“Still. My next day off, we’ll rent bikes and ride down to the harbor. It’s partly a matter of will, you know. You have to push yourself.”
Don’t I know it. I was performing every minute. Back on dry land I stretched out on our waiting blanket. The beach was hot, the wind sultry; the sun turned the mud flats into a vast coffee-colored mirror. When I woke the sun was lower, pale and creamy in a graying sky with a breeze that promised rain. The beach was almost empty. Off in the distance, I saw Jilly bending down to pick up rocks. She would examine them, toss some away and stuff others in the paunchy pocket of her sweatshirt. She returned and sat brooding on the blanket, head bent, letting sand sift through her fingers.
“Is something the matter, Jilly?”
“Oh, I thought you were sleeping. It’s nothing, just . . . I’ve been thinking a lot lately . . . about people dying and whether anyone even notices they’re gone, after a while. I mean, after a while you start to live again and go on as if it never was?”
“But that’s not how we feel. You know. We think about him all the time.”
“It’s not even so much him. I do think about him a lot. It’s more . . . have you ever felt ... it sometimes seems nobody cares if anyone else lives or dies? As if no one’s connected?”
“What do you mean? We’re connected.”
“Not us. There was something in San Francisco.” She flopped over alongside me on her stomach so our faces were close. “You’re going to think this is ditzy, but .. . do you remember I mentioned Barry and I took his father’s car one day and drove into the wine country?”
“Did something happen with the car? Were you hurt? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“No, no, nothing like that. We just had some wine, and after that Barry decided to stay at a friend’s house up there and I drove back myself. But this strange thing happened when I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“Well, what?”
“Nothing really. Just a thought I had.”
“Come on, what thought?”
“Well, I’m driving along with all this fantastic scenery and suddenly at the tollbooth I get stopped. I didn’t know why. It was weird—I felt guilty, like I was in a stolen car or carrying drugs or something. I even thought for a minute Barry might have set me up. He’s a pothead, who knows what else he might have in the car? I mean, I was pretty freaked for a minute. The attendant disappeared and I even thought of making a dash, but it’s a good thing I didn’t. Meanwhile, traffic was piling up behind me, all the Marin County types coming to town for the evening, you know? And being late for stuff? Honking away as if it was my fault. But what could I do? They saw me trying to hand the woman the money but they still honked. Then I saw cars at other tollbooths stopped, too, so I figured, well, okay, it’s not me. Whatever it is, it’s going to take awhile. I turned off the radio and the a.c. and the motor and rolled down the window and just sat there. Finally the attendant came back and I asked her what it was, and she said someone was trying to jump off the bridge and there were police cars and ambulances on their way to try to stop him or catch him or whatever. It’s a great bridge for suicides. I think it has a world record. Well, after about fifteen minutes—all this time I couldn’t see a thing, at least if I’d been able to see it might’ve been interesting—I thought to myself, I wish he would just jump and get it over with, or else not jump. Either way, so I could get going. I was tired of sitting there, you know? I mean, if people are considering jumping off a bridge they could at least have their minds made up before they cause all that disruption? But the next minute I r
ealized, what a terrible thing to think. I mean, it’s a person up there. Maybe somebody’s father. How could I think such a thing? So I was sort of upset that I thought that. How could I forget what it feels like to have someone die?”
“It doesn’t mean you forgot, Jilly. It’s what anyone would think in that situation. You can’t control those thoughts. Probably the other drivers were thinking the same thing.”
“That doesn’t make it any better. What I should have been thinking was how to save him. Why didn’t anyone jump out of their car and rush over to help?”
“People tend to get paralyzed at those moments.”
“I didn’t feel paralyzed. The thing is, I didn’t feel anything. Do you think it’s modem life and alienation and all that shit, Laura?”
“I think it has to do with distance. If you had known him or if you were standing three feet away, you would have acted differently. There’s no point agonizing over a thought. How can you censor thoughts? Well, you can, I guess, but would you really want to? It’s not as if they affect what happens. What did happen, anyhow?”
“They finally let us go through after about half an hour. I suppose they got him down. Or her. There were no signs of anything except all the police cars—I don’t know why they need so many for just one person. It might’ve looked the same if he’d jumped. In fact that idea has been used as a performance piece. Not the guy who jumped out of the window for the pictures. Another artist announced he’d really kill himself at the end of a year.”
“Oh, was he planning to jump off a bridge?”
“No, he was going to shoot himself. That whole year he lived the way you would if your days were numbered. He got his affairs in order, he traveled to exotic places, he didn’t bother getting his teeth fixed. He advertised the time and day he would do it and a big crowd came to watch.”
“Don’t tell me you actually witnessed this!”
“No, it was years ago. I was just a kid. I read about it. He came with his loaded gun. But in the end he didn’t go through with it.”
“I don’t get it. You mean it was all a hoax?”
“Nobody knows for sure. Maybe he really meant it but at the last minute he just couldn’t. I guess as a performance you’d have to call it a failure. But now I think, after you’ve been close to someone really doing it, like on the bridge, to do it as a display seems sort of . . .”
Yes, the line between life and art is not so fine after all. Arthur, in the hospital dying of AIDS, is not putting on a performance.
“Did the audience get their money back?” I asked.
She giggled. “I don’t know. It might’ve been free, in a park or something. Can you imagine doing that, though?”
“No.” I didn’t tell her I’d thought of killing myself if I wasn’t better in a year. Not in public, though. And not for art. “In a way it wasn’t a failure,” I said. “For the audience, that is. They paid for the thrill of anticipation, imagining someone act out their fantasies. They had that for a whole year.”
“Well, you see, then thoughts do affect things, Laura. I really believe that. His thought made an audience feel and think, maybe changed their lives. And it could be this person on the bridge was surrounded by a lot of negative thoughts, negative energy, in his life. That can make you depressed or even sick.”
If I agreed, I might shortly find myself discussing auras and crystals and asking the neighbors their zodiacal signs.
“My mother didn’t like me to think bad thoughts,” I mused, “but that was because they weren’t nice. She never said they had any power.”
“She might have been onto something. They have the power you give them. That could be more than we know.”
“I hope not. I think bad thoughts all the time.” I didn’t mention handsome Dr. B., perchance a victim of my thoughts traveling on the vibrations of the universe. But I did tell her what I’d wished for the drivers on Broadway, especially the car with the blaring radio. “It was harmless resentment. Why should they be driving merrily along, inflicting their horrible music on everyone, while I can’t dash across the way I used to? I didn’t feel the slightest guilt. And they didn’t die. I would have heard the sirens.”
“I wish you wouldn’t think that way, Laura, because Barry and I had the radio on very loud on that trip.”
“In that case, I’ll express my anger some other way. But you know, it is extremely inconsiderate.”
“I suppose, but don’t you think punishment by death is a little harsh? Like, you might be overreacting?”
“Naturally. That’s what makes it fun.”
On the way home the little white car’s motor stalled, a recent ploy. The temperamental thing was protesting its exile. It missed the city and its old habits, moving from one side of the street to the other each day, seeing Luke and the neighbors. Never mind that back home it risked having its bumper or other parts knocked off. You can’t explain nostalgia.
Late at night, in the spare bedroom, the old Town Reports felt familiar as I sat leafing through. After my first trip up here with Ev, I’d spirited home a few to read now and then in bed with him beside me. And so after his death, my vision of the town—rare in beauty, rich in water—was a patchwork of civic data mixed with scraps of memory that were mostly his, not mine. An outsider’s vision, quickened by the ebb and flow of the tides and the disruptions of the gales, and defying the inadmissible fact of the body lying on an unlovely Bronx street, outlined in chalk marks that washed away in the first rain. That was not supposed to have been Ev’s story. Nor mine.
I remembered now the way dramatic events were enshrined in lists, complete with dates and cost—dry statistical fodder to be kindled by imagination: fires, rescues, stray dogs returned by the Dog Officer, the earnest efforts of the Handwriting Committee, whose goals were “To teach the concomitants of neatness, clarity, and attention to detail” and “To achieve and surpass national norms in speed and quality.” I could vouch for the program’s success. Ev’s handwriting was neat and legible, yet not without character: tall, slender, austere.
In 1971, a time of marches and protests throughout the land, a fifteen-man Auxiliary Police Force was recruited and trained in riot and mob control. Obviously the prudent selectmen felt it best to be prepared, especially given what a report the following year would call the town’s “reputation of permissiveness.”
It is regarded as a natural haven for the new generation, the members of the third culture. It also attracts a number of nudists, and the nudists, not surprisingly, attract a certain number of voyeurs. When all these factors are combined, it is little wonder that the community attracts an extraordinarily large influx of summer visitors! Nor is it surprising that the influx includes so many nonconforming persons who sometimes trespass on private property, sleep outside, park illegally, or break into parked automobiles or unoccupied cottages.
Nudists, voyeurs, nonconforming persons might come and go, but no native son or daughter slipped through the cracks: the arcs of their lives were traced and tallied from birth to marriage to death, with the deaths recorded in the biblical way—seventy-eight years, four months, three days. An anomaly among the ordinary deaths was a man of forty-seven—asphyxiation by strangulation, self-inflicted. That jarred my idyllic vision of the town and I felt a shudder of foreboding. Yet why not allow one such item, for verisimilitude? Certainly the town would have its private tragedies, but not, thanks to the lighthouse and the Rescue Squad and the Coast Guard, great communal tragedies like the October gale of 1841 in which fifty-seven men and boys were drowned on a day that began fair and mild. No, violence and tragedy would never be the theme of the town or any book about it.
The strict statistics embraced vast possibility, like the dimensions and texture of a canvas or the formal requirements of a symphony. A novelist would imagine the town’s porous life within the hard shell of data, making up what the statistics didn’t tell—how the wife of the Superintendent of Schools falls in love with the Civil Defense Officer, or the
child listed as born to Vincent and Cheryl Delgado is really the love child of the Clam Constable, a bachelor who lives with his aging mother, a woman careless with matches—two small fires recorded in one year. Is that the Burial Agent’s daughter who’s so often stopped for driving under the influence, or the Town Accountant’s son apprehended for breaking and entering? Was the boy who dropped out of school in eighth grade the one who hanged himself thirty-three years later?
You could chart a man’s life by his appearance in the statistics, moving from his parents’ marriage to his birth, his duly noted passage from elementary school to high school. He marries a classmate and serves on the Board of Health or maybe the Recreation Committee, supervising the swimming lessons at high tide. In a careless moment he’s arrested for speeding or, if the cop is an old friend or distant cousin, given a verbal warning. After one beer too many while his wife is out at a Library Committee meeting, he causes a minor grease fire, fixing hamburgers for the kids. Their dates of birth have been appearing every few years and soon their names are listed among the high school graduates. Finally, at ninety-one, he dies quietly of coronary thrombosis. This might have been Ev. Yes, I could give him that. He’d teach school or edit the local paper or work in his father’s gas station. His children might today be living off the tourists, working in the restaurants or motels, in the Province-town shops or at the golf course.
Or I could even see him as a fisherman, sere, solitary, in heavy dark clothes, poised at the rail of the boat, eyes fixed on the horizon. There wasn’t much fishing here now, though. The shift and churn of the tides, modeling the shoreline like a sculptor never satisfied with his work, decades ago filled the harbor with sand: ships could no longer pass. Those who still fished did so in Provincetown to the north, where Jilly served what they caught. The rest had gone the way of the whalers. It was here and not in famed New Bedford that whaling began, learned from the Indians. I couldn’t picture Ev harpooning whales from shore, a common method over a century ago. Even for him, that would have been too direct a mode of slaughter.
The Fatigue Artist Page 20