We fade out into a Technicolor sunset, strolling hand in hand down my favorite beach, the one whose high dunes wall it off from the rest of the world. The surf trips about our ankles as we breathe in the salty spirit of the air. We’re wearing shirts and hats to forestall skin cancer—we take the warnings seriously now. We don’t smoke anymore, or eat red meat, or do any of the bad things. Utterly absorbed in each other, we emit a rare, invulnerable intimacy that makes the oiled young people lying on their blankets murmur, Look at that nice couple walking by—they seem so serene, like people who’ve grown old together. How do they do it? Do you think we’ll last like that? (She’s not really old at all, a few discerning ones note. She a lot younger, isn’t she?) Q. still looks with interest if a sleek, long-legged bikini passes, but I don’t mind, it’s only force of habit. I look too, for that matter—a purely visual pleasure. . . .
Back at the rented cottage, he goes over his lines for Lear, slated for the fall. I cue him. I’m Kent, Oswald, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, the Fool. He goes to bed early, can’t take the late hours anymore. I know by his heavy, even breathing that he’s in a deep sleep. Nevertheless, when the phone rings I snatch it up quickly and whisper, “I told you not to call me here. I can’t talk. Yes, I’ll be back in two weeks. Yes, yes, of course I remember. Yes, me too. You know I do. . . .”
I WOKE WITH A SHUDDER in the dark and reached for Ev beside me. Only a split second. That hadn’t happened in a long time. It was because I felt like my old pre-murder self, my mind lithe and agile. It, the thing, seemed to have left me with that shudder, the way you shudder off a nightmare. My eyes adjusted quickly to the dark and I made out the shapes of things—desk, chair, window edged by light from the street lamp. The inner fog had lifted, as it had for those few hours up on the Cape, when I could see out and saw clearly that I would never write the book about the seaside town.
The night was very still. No car alarms or sirens, no sounds of traffic or a car door slamming somewhere, not even a faraway voice in the street or a baby’s cry or anxious footsteps hurrying home. Not a rustle or a rattle, not a creak in the old uneven floorboards. So hushed it was as if the cosmic forces had finally ceased their friction, as the library book predicted, and the tides were still. The earth would be moving in slow motion, the days and nights unthinkably long. Ev’s town would long since have sunk into the ocean, leaving a scattering of islands. The only stirring was my breath, thin, long, quiet and slow. Almost out of place in the silence, like the flutist’s little gasp between notes, but sustaining, necessary, the spirit behind sound.
Suddenly out of the silence broken only by breath, scenes and dialogues from the new book came to me, swift and hard as a tide sweeping in. I rushed after the words, clinging to key phrases—bits of flotsam—repeating them like a litany so as not to forget. The more I memorized and catalogued, the more kept coming. And it was like coming, like sex, that feeling of pitching through space borne by something untranslatable; the infinitesimal hesitation—a kind of terror, a kind of bliss—and for salvation you give in and take the hurtling, even become the hurtling. Soon I wasn’t chasing the tide of words but was the tide itself, mercilessly carving the shore and giving it a new shape. When it receded, I knew I would have nets full of fish.
I leaped up, turned on the light, and grabbed a pen. Lines skimmed unevenly across the page, threads seeking their tapestry.
THE CRISP, clear feeling was gone the next morning, leaving me the familiar sack of sand. I couldn’t even remember getting back into bed. But when I looked over at the desk, the pages were stacked there; thank God it hadn’t been a dream.
Last night, writing feverishly, I’d had the opposite notion: that the inert summer months might have been a bad dream. One of those harrowing stories that pulls you in, then backs you into a corner with no way out, until at the last minute the author reveals it was only a dream. A dream within a dream, giving the eerie feeling that every layer might be a dream, the author herself a figment of imagination—but whose, and where?
And though you’re relieved for the dreaming heroine, you’re resentful, too. You’ve been tricked, your feelings somehow exploited. As if it were revealed that all of the above, say, were the stratagem of a woman lying on a couch in a room overlooking a river, fighting boredom by transforming it into stories of a life she never led, while in the dim reality are the husband going to the office and the children to school, lunches to be packed, jeans to be hemmed, and the class play tonight—she’s got to rouse herself, the kids are counting on it.
Well, no, I wouldn’t dare. Anyway, it’s been no dream for me. Here I am, in the usual morning struggle to free my body from the bed—the kind of lover who hates to let you go, who plays at keeping you pinned down. This thing will not leave with any simple shudder. But more such shudders will bring longer respites of clarity, at closer intervals, reversing figure and ground as the fog burns off to a smaller and smaller patch on the landscape.
Meanwhile, I’m waiting, as Ev’s ancestors waited, once they learned not to deplete the forests but to pump the sea into vats, where in time it would leave them the precious salt.
Meanwhile, everything I’ve reported is real, down to the last headache. Moreover, Joyce is off to Africa next week to spend two months with the Tsumati, gathering data on rituals connected with agriculture. She’s leaving the cat with Roger but is concerned about Lizzie, alone and depressed since she broke up with the man who didn’t want more children. Mona’s latest client is a hot new women’s rock group noted for its outrageous outfits, so as we sit in the neighborhood cafés, none as satisfying as the Athena, she tells me about their jaunts through the thrift shops. Otherwise she continues faintly benumbed in her happy marriage, or so it seems—who am I to judge? Luckily Grace found an excellent woman dentist, so the root-canal work is proceeding apace; the downside is that this dentist has no interest whatsoever in the performance art project. Instead, Grace is toying with the idea of a miniature model of the Museum of Modem Art, floor by floor, complete with wee guards, gift shop and cafeteria, and scaled-down replicas of all the paintings. Obviously this will take a great deal of time. I’m having fantasies about getting Carol the Witch and the Tai Chi teacher together. They have only a nodding acquaintance at this point, but I suspect more could develop. Carol could do wonders for the teacher’s English. Unless he and the interpreter . . . ? No, I never got that impression. It was all words and spirit between them. Anyway; just a passing fancy. Oh, and I’ve had a card from Tony. He’s coming East for Thanksgiving at his mother’s and could easily take the shuttle to New York. How would I feel about a visit from him and Sophie? Her mother, Hortense, incidentally, is all right. Struggling with the chemo, but the prognosis is good.
And Jilly? I was just wondering myself, when the phone rang.
“Laura? I hope this isn’t too early. I meant to call before but my schedule is wild. I’m taking five courses, plus we’re in the middle of our famine piece. Remember I told you? We take turns sitting in the gallery window eating bits of rice on and off all day. It really works well during rush hour when lots of people pass by. And we don’t cheat, either, I mean, like go out for pizza afterward or anything. We just have the rice.”
“But you must get pretty hungry, don’t you?”
“Laura,” she groaned, “getting hungry is the whole idea! But don’t worry, my turn only comes two days a week and I eat enough on the other days. If we get more people involved we’ll only have to do it once a week, and maybe—”
When she paused for breath, I asked, “What ever happened with Jeff and that other guy, the surfer? I can’t remember his name.”
“Zack.” She grunted. “He never made it to Boston but he did write, once. He’s one of those people who shouldn’t write. He does better in person. He’s not such a hot speller, either. I don’t know how he got into Michigan. I haven’t thought about him lately. And Jeff, well... ” Another grunt. “After all that, it turned out he got involved with someone on the reser
vation. And I’m sure he didn’t agonize over it the way I did! The funny thing is, Laura, when he told me, I wasn’t even that upset. I mean, I acted upset and I suppose I was for a little while, but it was more like I was supposed to be? Because we’d been together almost three years, you know? But after a week or two I realized I didn’t even mind so much. I was even, like, relieved? Does that sound weird?”
“Not at all. I’m a little relieved, too, frankly.”
“So was my mother. Listen, one reason I’m calling . . . you’ll never guess what happened.”
Oh, not another one. A hang-glider? Bungee-jumper? “What?”
“I won the raffle. Not the first prize, the copper rooster. The second prize.”
“What raffle?”
“The lighthouse. Don’t you remember? It’s falling into the sea? We bought tickets so they could move it back from the edge.”
“Oh, yes. Well, congratulations. You’re the first person I ever heard of who won a raffle. So what’s your prize?”
“A painting of the lighthouse by a local artist. I can’t remember his name. I wrote it down somewhere. It’s nice, but I’m going to give it to you because I don’t have any room. My walls are crammed as it is.”
“You might want to save it for later, when you’ve got an apartment”
“No, it’s not my thing. But you’ll like it, I know. I want you to have it.”
“Thanks.”
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic. How are you feeling?”
“Good. Better. Yes, sort of better.”
I told her about Carol the Witch and her various spells and potions. I thought that would please Jilly and it did. She sounded proud of me, as if I’d passed into a new phase of maturity and accomplishment, probably very much the way I sounded when she was seven and learned to ride her bike without the training wheels. Ev and I had each run behind her with a steadying hand on the seat, but Jilly was having none of that. “Give it to me,” she said, tugging at the bike. “Just leave me alone and I’ll figure out how to do it. And don’t watch.” She dragged it off to a far corner of the playground. We did as she ordered, only peeking now and then to make sure she wasn’t kidnapped. A half hour later she was back. “Now you can look!” She got on the bike and rode so far down the Drive that Ev took his bike to go after her—she was almost out of sight. “How did you do it?” I asked when they returned. She only smiled slyly and flounced off.
“Laura, the other reason I called is, I was thinking of coming up for a weekend soon. Maybe next weekend, if you’re free. How’s that? I can bring the painting.”
Yes, yes.
I had barely hung up when the phone rang again.
Laura, my love. (Oh, no.
Oh, yes.
And now what?)
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Wolfe Lowenthal, a different sort of Tai Chi master from the one portrayed in the novel, but equally fine. Some of the principles and practices of Tai Chi were drawn from his book, There Are No Secrets (North Atlantic Books, 1991). I also drew on Tai Chi, by Cheng Manch’ing and Robert W. Smith (Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1967).
My grateful appreciation goes to Rachel Koenig for much of the information about Chinese medicine, though naturally any errors or misinterpretations are my own.
I used Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao te Ching (Harper & Row, 1988). The story on p. 27 about “no complaints whatsoever” comes from a footnote in Mitchell’s translation (pp. 100-101), which he adapted from Zenkei Shibayama Roshi’s A Flower Does Not Talk.
Information about the tides comes from Joyce Pope, The Seashore (Franklin Watts, 1985), and George W. Groh, Land, Sea and Sky (Collier, 1966).
Quotations about the seaside town are from the Annual Reports of the Officers of the Town of Truro, 1965-1990.
Many of the examples of performance art are taken from Marcia Tucker’s book, Choices: Making an Art of Everyday Life (The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1986).
Quotes from the Samurai’s creed are from Alan W. Watts, The Spirit of Zen (Grove Press, 1958), p. 120. The poem quoted on p. 218 is taken from Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen (Vintage, 1989), p. 126.
“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” referred to on p. 288, is the title of a poem by Richard Wilbur, from Things of This World (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1956).
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Pages 6, 162, 170, 245: Photos by Harry Schwartz
Page 80: Photo by Ani Mander
Page 154: Chart by Zecky P’tank
Page 262: Chart courtesy Japan Publications, from Acupuncture Medicine: Its Historical and Clinical Background, by Yoshiaki Omura (1982)
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The Fatigue Artist Page 33