“Laura, do you, um, think it’s very, like, fickle to go out with someone when you’re involved with someone else?”
“It depends on the circumstances.”
“Well...” She takes a deep breath and we go on in silence. When Jeff was in the motorcycle accident a year ago, she said she’d die of grief if he died. He’s all mended now, teaching summer classes on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. She hasn’t seen him in two months, but after midnight, curled up in the wing chair, she murmurs into the phone.
“I met someone at the restaurant. We got to talking and he said he’d come back but I didn’t think much of it—lots of them say that. But then he did. So I’ve seen him a few times since.”
Aha, a trial run for my stint as Juliet of Verona. She’d certainly be sympathetic. “That’s not so terrible. If he’s a nice person, I mean. Who is he? What does he do?”
“That’s not the point, what he does. You sound as bad as my mother. The point is Jeff. We’re supposed to be going out.”
“I understand. But it’s still important to know something about this one. After all, he just appeared out of nowhere, more or less.”
“All right, he’s a grad student at Michigan. And a surfer. He’s sharing a house with three other guys. They couldn’t find anything on the ocean side so they drive over every day for the waves.”
“Like us.”
“Not exactly. I mean, they’re serious about the tides and all. Anyhow, what do you think? About Jeff, I mean. Why are you grinning?”
“Not at you.” I tell her about the retiring Juliet and her many correspondents seeking help with problemi di cuore.
“Her parents were forcing her to marry the first guy, weren’t they? My mother would kill herself if I ever married Jeff. Not that I was particularly planning to, I never—”
“Look, Jilly, this could pass, just a summer romance, and then Jeff won’t have to know a thing about it. If it develops into something more, well, you’ll tell him then. You’re not locked into anything. . . . Even if you were . . .” Juliet wouldn’t say anything of the sort. I’d be disqualified at once.
“God, you older people can be so . . . immoral.”
“We do have to be flexible. So much has happened to us.”
She laughs uneasily. “Why, did you ever feel you could like two people at once?”
“Sure.”
“You mean when you were my age?”
“And older.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, I’ve always been a very practical sort of person.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I did what would work. Sometimes the best thing is to do nothing. Just let things . . . take their course.”
“I don’t think I get it.” When I don’t clarify, she asks shyly, “Were you really in love with anyone before Dad?”
“Yes.” We’ve come quite far and the ship does seem a trifle closer. The sun is declining, the water halfway to our knees and rising. We might have to swim part of the way. How would I get back? Another Rescue Squad statistic?
“So what happened?”
“It didn’t work out.”
“And then you met Dad?”
I nod.
“So is it, like, if you start to love a new one you stop loving the old one?”
“Not always. Certain people you don’t stop loving. You might not want them, but you love them.”
She’s horror-struck. “You mean you kept loving him while you were married to someone else? To Dad? I never thought of you as. . . . Are you saying you put on some kind of act the whole time you were with him? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Of course not. I didn’t put on any kind of act.” It wasn’t necessary. “No, what you saw was exactly the way it was between us. Look, Jilly, this is about as far as I think we’ll get today. I’m tired. Let’s turn around.”
“Okay. But tell me. About the other one.”
“There’s not much more to tell. Some love you just . . . put away somewhere, in a quiet place.”
We walk in silence, the sun on our backs now. If I’d said any of this before her problema di cuore, she would have been more vehement. Now I can feel her sifting through it, seeking a new pattern. Q. didn’t like my shooing him out of the house when he came faithfully to care for me after Ev died. Not at all. I can’t help it, I said, she might very well turn up. Couldn’t you tell her I’m a friend, Laura? I’ll act like a friend. No. He packed sullenly. If he didn’t return, so be it. I couldn’t risk Jilly. After he left for Peter’s place I went around clearing up coffee cups, wine glasses, every trace. I shelved the tapes, removed stray hairs from the tub, changed the sheets. I scoured the apartment like a duenna alert to signs, far more carefully than I would have done for Ev. It wasn’t guilt. Protecting what was mine. And he did return, late Sunday night. That was when we danced to the Jamaican music, then collapsed on the living room sofa and soon he was making love to me, seizing the moment of animation. I didn’t even cry at the end: it was a new sofa where I had never lain with Ev. It bore no memories.
Don’t move, I said. Oh, it feels so good. I wish I could keep it in me forever.
Q. smiled. They all say that, he said.
Really? Well, if it’s so universal there ought to be some way. Maybe it could be detachable. I mean, you could have it back, I know that terrifies men—but just so I could walk around with it for a few hours. That would feel nice.
I’d help you if I could, said Q. But it’s a lot to ask.
I dozed off briefly. He was still holding me when I woke, big and heavy and patient. How many is all? I asked.
What, all? What do you mean?
You know, altogether.
My whole life?
Mmm-hmm.
He was quiet for a long time, with the distracted, sober air of a woman making a grocery list for a large dinner—don’t forget the olives to start, and the cooking sherry, better check the butter and ginger ale and toilet paper, too. .. . I can’t say, he said finally.
Why, is it too many?
No, I just can’t remember. What’s the point?
You could fill rooms with them, I bet.
Oh, I doubt it. I wonder if they’re all still alive, mused Q.
I heard of a man who did that once, I said. Filled a room. Mona’s first husband. She had left him and gone off to live in London with the baby. Two years later, after he kept urging her, she came back and he gave a big party to welcome her. He invited all their old friends, she told me. New people, too. A very nice party. A year later, when she left him again, he told her he had invited all the women he’d slept with while she was away. Five. Why do you think he did that? I mean, besides having his little joke on her. Is it some kind of thrill for men to see them all at once? To be surrounded?
E chi lo sa? Q. shrugged. That’s pretty mean. Mona, eh? I never knew that.
She only told me after I’d known her for years. Mona’s very tight-lipped.
Kiss me, said Q. I want to see if you’re tight-lipped.
“Where is he now?” Jilly says at last.
“Oh, quite far.”
“Is he married?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
We walk slower all the time. “So have you ever thought. . . now, you know?”
“I’m not thinking about any of that now. I feel too sick.”
“You know, Laura, sickness can be used as an excuse for not taking the next step in your life.”
I give her a withering glance.
“Okay, okay. So who was he? What did he do?” She mimics my tone perfectly.
“He was an actor.”
“Was he anything like Dad?”
“Nothing like. He ...” As we splash back through ankle-deep water, I rein in the urge to tell her about the many ways Q. was not like Ev, how he made me excited and exalted, to talk about him as if I were her age, in that bubbling, tipsy way girls do. But I can’t use her for that. Not yet. Not ever. “He
was a very different sort of person.”
“Well, now you’ve got Tim,” she says with bland scorn. The revival of an ancient flame, lovers rejoined after tragedy, might appeal to her as a story. Tim, an example of my practicality, does not.
“Tim is something else altogether.”
“That’s for sure. You know, Laura, maybe you should think about moving. Change your life. Go someplace where it’s not so stressful. San Francisco, even Santa Fe. You can write anywhere. Except for the downtown scene New York is the pits.”
“Oh, but I love it, Jilly. I have the river. ...”
I have it all there, I didn’t say aloud. My past, your father. That Bronx street—Spanish movie house, supermarket, botanica, OTB parlor .. . I even feel my lost energy is there somewhere, if only I could locate it. Not to mention the beds around town where I slept with Q., the places we ate and walked. There’s that Mexican restaurant, and the motel we checked into for an hour, and the place near the Marina where we parked and groped in each other’s clothes and came in two minutes and had a fit of laughter. There’s my old apartment in the Village where he used to come see me, where I threw him out one day and he went, closing the door so silently. . . . The day-long walk I took after he left, up the whole length of the island, wearing out a pair of sandals.
“No, I couldn’t leave the river. My friends. My Tai Chi class. My parking spaces.”
“You’re so weird, Laura.” She pokes me gently in the arm. I hope that means it’s all right between us.
We stumble to dry land across a stretch of sharp rocks, and at the water’s edge cross paths with a young woman in a bikini, who stops and smiles.
“You look very familiar,” she says to Jilly. “Haven’t I seen you around somewhere?”
“I work at Chez Louise. Maybe you ate there.”
“Oh, that must be it. Just the other night. Sure, I remember you now. The mussels were great. How do they do them? It tasted like cumin or chilies or something like that.”
WHILE THEY CHATTED ABOUT FOOD with the epicurean seriousness of the twenty-somethings, I had a sensation of mist rising and air clearing. Not outside—the sky was already blue and the air quite clear—but in my head. It was as if someone had wiped off a window pane and all at once I saw what was outside. My brain cells felt fresh and crisp, their damp fog burned off, even my fear almost evaporated. I took a few deep breaths to test the feeling. The synapses clicked nimbly along, registering and filing perceptions as they used to do. I could see as plainly as if they were declivities in the landscape of my future, certain things I would never do. I would never understand Ev the way I wanted to, from the inside, or understand us together. My curiosity, my need to dwell on the town and reinvent it, was more for me than for Ev, and it was too late. Too late to give him something I’d never given, and that he wouldn’t have accepted if I had. No amount of staring at the landscape from which he sprang would bring me closer.
I would never write the book about the seaside town, and as those words landed in my inner ear with a soft thud, a lightness came over me. Beautiful as it was, there was nothing I needed to say about the town. It, too, had its arsons and rapes and would have its murders, and there was nothing to say about that either—nothing except the obvious. I might write out of love, for I did love the feel and smell of it, the shape and sky and terrain. And the data. Each new fact, each glimpse of the town in a new wash of light or shade of weather, was rimmed by my projected love. I doted on the town the way mothers dote on children or artists on their work, as if I had invented it. I wish I had invented it. But with love, often, not a lot needs to be said. You can only write to perfect and fulfill things, and the town in my vision was perfect already.
Another thing I would never do was walk out to the ship. It was just too far. It receded as I approached. Whatever treasure it held was out of reach.
“You should definitely try the Key lime pie,” Jilly was telling the woman. “I think it’s our best dessert. It’s what we all eat in the kitchen.”
“I almost had it the other night. I was torn between that and the Mississippi mud cake. That was good, too, but it’s always so heavy. Well, it was nice talking to you.”
“Come again. The specials keep changing.” Oh, my Jilly. She would go far.
The beach was dotted with colorful umbrellas. Clumps of people lounged on blankets, some reading fat summer novels. Children ran here and there with water sloshing out of their buckets, and a few sunbathers still sat in chairs out on the flats, the water lapping about their feet.
“Why don’t we go over to the ocean and have a real swim?” I said. “Then later we can come back here for the sunset.”
Jilly laughed. “This is crazy. Do you think other people go back and forth like we do?”
“Who cares? We don’t have too many more days to do it. Come on, so we get back in time.”
It’s a ritual: people take their places on the beach like spectators watching a performance, on some evenings showy and dramatic, on some understated, and on foggy days the show is canceled altogether or takes place behind a curtain that stubbornly refuses to rise. Today’s sunset is the flamboyant kind, as if a daredevil magician behind the scenes were whirling giant colored scarves about the sky, seeing how close they could get to the wheel of fire without being burned. With the others, we stare in awe. Once the orange wheel drops into the water, the ship, rainbow-tinted, reverts to its usual blackness. Then comes the best part, the scarves subsiding, pulled slowly back up the magician’s sleeve, the afterglow and curtain calls. A special-effects sunset. Just last night I read that the sunset truly is a special effect, an atmospheric effect made possible by the layer of air cocooning the vulnerable planet. “The blue of the sky, the white fluffs of clouds, and the rosy glow of sunset,” the library book says (with a hint of the spoiler’s satisfaction, like telling little kids there’s no tooth fairy), “are all atmospheric effects, produced by the bending and scattering of light rays as they pass through the filter of air.” Well, so what? Isn’t everything an atmospheric effect, even love? “If there were no atmosphere, daylight and darkness would appear suddenly, almost as though an unshaded lamp were being switched off in a room.” Yes, we all know what that’s like, no need to rub it in.
SOON IT’S OUR LAST DAY. Typically, Jilly is working until the very end, and will go out afterward for a farewell fling with the graduate-student surfer. I spend the day at the ocean watching the tide carve the shore, its rhythm precise but seemingly capricious, sweeping in from the stretch of sea once called the graveyard of ships. I’ll never possess the town, as I had hoped, by a story that would change Ev’s life and mine—at least in a world translated into words. But I’ll possess the tides. I’ll feel their reach and retreat on my private terrain, covering then exposing, back and forth, world without end. World without Q.
Though maybe not world without end. At least not according to the books about the tides. They say that millions of years ago the earth spun much faster on its axis, rotating every four hours. It’s tidal friction, slowing things down, that has given us our more leisurely twenty-four-hour day. As the friction continues, the earth will drift into lethargy, rotating once a month, once a year. What long days to anticipate. And nights. Until, I read with some trepidation, “billions of years from now, the pull and haul of cosmic forces will be in balance, and the tides will be still.”
I PACK AT NIGHT so we can get an early start, and put the Town Reports back on the shelves in proper chronological order. I won’t be needing them anymore. But once I go to bed, my last night in Ev’s parents’ house among the sweetly ugly trinkets, I open the library books out of habit. Most of what I read I already know, the much-advertised historical high points: the Pilgrims’ first drink from the inspiriting springs, the Indians, the whaling and shipbuilding, the ships lost at sea, the October gale. And then I discover one item I never knew or else forgot: the nineteenth-century harvesting and processing of salt.
Salt was an urgent need back
then, not just for ordinary use, but to preserve the catches of fish that were the town’s livelihood. People would arduously pump seawater—with all its healing powers—into huge kettles and then boil it off until a residue of salt was left, a process which not only took enormous time and effort, but destroyed the surrounding forests. Great heaps of wood were hewn to build the fires that heated the kettles that boiled off the water and left the salt. Finally in 1876, a Captain John Sears from a neighboring town hit on the idea of using the sun’s heat to evaporate the water. Solar energy, we’d call it. From then on, a windmill pumped the sea into vats which stood in the sun until the water was gone, leaving the precious salt. One of those simple ideas that sounds obvious as soon as someone has thought it up. Deep in his ingenious New England soul, Captain Sears must have grasped the Eastern principle of wu-wei, or non-action, that is, waiting until the right and natural action arises spontaneously, of its own accord. The end result—useful, healing salt—is the same, but one way requires hard labor and ruining the forests, while the other requires nothing but sitting in the sun.
11
Jilly was out of sorts on the ride back to Boston. Farewell to the generous diners at Chez Louise, to me, the good stepmother, and above all, to the surfer. They’d agreed to keep in touch, and he might even try to see her on his way back, but she suspects that phrase “try to,” and I suspect she’s right. Keeping in touch would be iffy, with him at Michigan and Jilly at Penn. At least her cozy arrangement with Jeff had been shaken up.
After I dropped her off, the car ran friskily toward home, eager to return to its street life. Grateful, I murmured to it with affection. Animals and plants, the ancient Taoists believed, could respond to the vibrations of love and could even develop individual souls if they were loved sufficiently, the Tai Chi teacher once told us slyly. Why not cars?
Just outside of Providence I switched on the radio, which obliged with James Galway playing a Schubert flute sonata. During a pause between two notes, almost long enough for a rest area to zoom by, slipped a hasty intake of breath, James Galway’s breath, like a surreptitious gasp; without the music I might have heard it as a gasp of fright. A gasp revealing that behind the illusion of effortlessness is effort of the human breath, the breath the Tai Chi teacher calls spirit and which inside the body is transformed into energy, then into audible sound shaped in the patterns that make music.
The Fatigue Artist Page 22