The Maytrees: A Novel

by Annie Dillard

  Before Lou knew her, Deary wed a New York painter who came to Provincetown every summer. Lou’s mother used to find him surly. He divorced her for a Boston orthopedic surgeon, and both seemed to cheer up. Then she married a sweet-talking Azorean fisherman, a dragger. Everyone knew the dragger’s family froze him out because Deary was not Catholic. He obviously missed his gregarious kin, just across town, so Deary sadly released him. One summer Lou returned from college to find Deary married to an old Rocky Mountain abstractionist who wore a gaucho’s rawhide hat. She saw his few clothes and many primed canvases in the cold-storage shed. There he told Lou he found Provincetown provincial. Later Deary, weeping, told Lou that he moved to a Greenwich Village studio and returned only once, bareheaded, to load his canvases on the bus. And once she married a Red Sock, a reliever who never came back from spring training.

  Standing on the road by the beach Lou studied the painting class. Alarmed, Lou saw the students en plein air ripple green and blue and cadmium yellow and red around Deary’s form in glare. She herself hoped to paint, soberly, when she got old. The more she saw of the Provincetown school, the more she favored grisailles.

  AFTER THEY MARRIED SHE learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they touched. She learned from those cells his awareness and his courtesy. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.

  She shipwrecked on the sheets. She surfaced like a dynamited bass. She opened her eyes and discovered where on their bed she had fetched up. She lay spread as a film and as fragile. Linked lights wavered on the wall. The linked lights looked like chain mail. They moved blindly over the wall’s thumbtacked Klee print of Sinbad. The tide rising on sand outside bore these linked lights as if on a platter. She loved Maytree, his restlessness, his asceticism, his, especially, abdomen. Where is privacy, if not in the mind? It is your temples I kiss, where they dip. They should bulge, from all your mind holds. Their hollows are entries; they allow me near your brain. Forever and aye, my jubilee.

  Maytree, flexed beside her, was already asleep. He usually fell asleep as if dropped from a scarp. From above he would look as if his parachute failed. Intimacy could not be unique to her and Maytree, this brief blending, this blind sea they entered together diving. His neck smelled as suntan does, his own oil heated, and his hair smelled the same but darker. He was still fresh from an outdoor shower. Awareness was a braided river. It slid down time in drops or torrents. Now she knew he woke. The room seemed to get smarter. His legs moved and their tonus was tight. Her legs were sawdust; they were a line old rope shreds on sand. All her life the thought of his body made her blush.

  —We should get up, Maytree said, and moor the dory. Tide’s coming in.

  Now he stood and brushed sand from his side of the sheet. They always had sand in the bed. It was a wonder she was not slimmer.

  -Mayo’s duck sandwiches, cheddar, beer

  -hard-boiled eggs in waxed-paper twists (3)

  -two red-speckled notebooks, fountain pen, 2 lbs 10d. nails

  -The Circus Animals’ Desertion; Fathers and Sons; Sons and Lovers; Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World

  MAYTREE LEFT TOWN ON impulse and headed toward his shack. The planet rolled into its shadow. On the high dune, sky ran down to his ankles. Everything he saw was lower than his socks. Across a long horizon, parabolic dunes cut sky as rogue waves do. The silence of permanence lay on the scene. He found a Cambrian calm as if the world had not yet come; he found a posthumous hush as if humans had gone. He crossed the low swale and climbed a trail his feet felt. He ate a sandwich. Now he knew, but did not believe, she loved him. Her depth he knew when he kissed her. His brain lobes seemed to part like clouds over sun.

  He massed three glass lamps on the shack’s table beside the speckled notebooks. The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock. The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees/—Those dying generations—at their song.

  Every book he read was a turn he took. He ran aground. He started new notebooks without having made the least sense of any old notebook. He pitched into the world for plunder, probed it with torches, filled his arms and brain with its pieces botched—to what end? Every fact was a rune. Whole unfilled systems littered the kitchen and beach of the house he shared with Lou. He wanted to spend himself broke in the brain, to master something and start again. Since everything fit with everything else, how could anyone begin to think or understand?

  He took off his shirt. Love itself raised other honest questions, more than several. Was romantic love a modern invention? How long could it last as requited, as unrequited? Does familiarity blur lovers’ clear sight of essences and make surfaces look significant? Since love intensifies in parted lovers, presumably because the lovers forget and reimagine each other, is love then wholly false? How false? Thirty percent false? Sixty percent? Five?

  Later he stood on the foredune’s lip and looked at the stars over the ocean. A wider life breathed in him, and things’ rims stirred and reared back. Only the lover sees what is real, he thought. Only the lover sees the beloved truly, inwardly. Far from being blind, love alone can see. Watching the sky now, and forever after, doubled his world. He felt he saw through Lou’s eyes as an Aztec priest, having flayed an enemy, donned the skin. Or somewhat less so.

  A WEEK AFTER THEIR wedding, Reevadare stopped by their house—Maytree had moved into Lou’s. Raising a coffee cup as if to toast, she said,

  You went in as twoski

  And came out as oneski.

  Now aren’t you sorry,

  You son-of-a-gunski?

  He knew Lou was not at all sorry. The quatrain was new to Maytree. It posed a question he was circling then: Do women in love feel as men do? Do men love as women love? His virgin bride shared her pipe-frame bed all smiles and laughter. When they were intimate to the last degree on that bed, did Lou’s experience join his, did his experience match hers, during this moment and that moment?

  In the course of his reading he could survey, informally, what ground other students of the matter had won. He seized their green kitchen table as a desk.

  Later while Lou bathed, Maytree copied from a volume of Keats’s ever-young letters a possibly unrelated but similarly unanswerable question: Who enjoyed lovemaking more—the man or the woman? He popped it into that spotted notebook in dimeter and trimeter:

  Who shall say

  between Man and Woman

  which is the most [more] delighted?

  The woman, everyone knew Tiresias said, but Tiresias was made up. On what grounds had the Greek man let full-fictional and full-switched Tiresias answer, The woman? Did lovemaking then and now run to male, or to female, noise-making? Speaking of wild surmise?

  For lovemaking nearly killed Lou. Was she all right? Abashed, he held her steady until she opened her eyes. Was he a brute? What ailed her?—Whoo, she answered once, and another time, Yike. He stopped worrying. Hours afterward he used to see her, firm and young as she was, gripping the rail to check her descent downstairs.

  He proposed Keats’s question to Lou one morning as they shared the last of the tooth powder. —Say, Lou—here’s a question. Keats put it, “Who shall say between Man and Woman which is the more delighted?” What do you think?

  —The woman. Rather prompt of silent Lou. Much later that night in their shack bed she added just as he was rolling asleep, If the man is John Keats.

  TWO MONTHS AFTER THEIR wedding, Lou helped Deary shift to her shed. Year-round Deary kept rough headquarters in an abandoned cold-storage shed on Cold S
torage Wharf. Provincetown’s painters depicted this long shed so often they called it “motif number one.” Deary looked now to be wearing several dozen layers of bright-print cloth. Her hoop earrings were the size of parrot perches.

  Usually Deary lived there all winter, often sheltering a loose person or two who needed a roof. To Lou, the shed smelled of gasoline, engine oil, and shellfish. For utilities, Deary used a woodstove, and a pier hose till it froze. Everyone helped her by buying the oyster-shell sculptures she glued for tourists, purple eyes out. One winter Deary lived in Cairos’ summer cottage. If almost anyone had a baby winter or summer, Deary moved there to watch the older kids, to shop, cook, and shift laundry. One October she moved into Cornelius Blue’s dune shack to tend him when he broke his pelvis at low tide flying from a horse that bucked. Bauhausy in fits, Deary carted to wherever she was staying a pedestal chair sculpted as a hand. Lou liked it. She sat on the plastic palm and leaned on the black fingers. In summer when Deary slept on the dunes or on Cairos’ porch, the chair stayed in the shed. So, often, did Crazy Joe, a harmless bum.

  Last year on this pier by a creosoted piling Lou met Deary’s mother, pearls and pearled hat, suit, and heels, on a rare visit: Ruby Hightoe. Glaring and calm in her tailored suit, she steered her red alligator-skin high heels around a pile of cord net that seaweed and beer bottles fouled. Deary’s mother reminded Lou of Mrs. Buff Orpington, whose husband invented the chicken and portions of whose car stretched across four panels of Blondie.

  Deary had floored her long shed and painted it yellow. Where Lou’s eye wanted a window, Deary tacked the Modigliani print—the long-drawn-out red-cheeked woman’s head and neck—that they all had. The opposite wall showed Picasso’s usual blue clowns on a beach. A brass porthole was a window. Three bushel baskets hung from nails and served as dresser, closet, and pantry. Her bed was a cot mattress on a door on iron milk crates; Crazy Joe’s was a mattress across the room. Some of her wool skirts stretched between wall nails like tapestries to block wind. Her bookshelf was a stepladder. Lou liked to peer down the gap between planks and wall where she saw fish swim. Now Deary handed Lou an old corn dodger to drop in. The fish were on the corn dodger before it hit.

  Lou walked back from the pier, hoping Maytree was home. Vietnamese legend calls the earth the realm of desire. When Maytree laughed he loosed his legs. His collarbones and Achilles tendons were thin. He whistled, wore loose pants, and rattled on.

  MOVING HOUSES WAS MAYTREE’S paid work. Since he returned from out West and the war, Maytree hauled whole houses for hire, on afternoons only. He got paid for hijinks. He worked some afternoons with his old college friend Sooner Roy. They started as carpenters, turning porches into rooms, adding apartments, and raising roofs. Then for friends they moved the Protos’ house on a Monument Hill traverse. They detached the pump, braced corners and doorways with two-by-sixes, jacked the mildewed house, and with advisers pushed it onto a haywagon hitched to a mule team. The mules were having none of it. Maytree forbade whacking the mules with planks.

  Old Flo Proto, inside, chopped onions and carrots. People could hear her knife hit, or was it a hatchet. Maytree guarded the mules while Sooner rounded up two tractors and Flo Proto cranked up her woodstove. The tractors, themselves whacked, worked. Splay-legged in her wobbling kitchen, Flo Proto cooked on the woodstove a slumgul-lion to feed the crew. The chimney smoked, and its smoke marked their route. Schoolchildren broke out to trail the house.

  The more houses they moved, the more house-moving jobs offered. People dragged anchor to a patch of trees, or a hollow cheap to heat, or a patch of waterfront exposed but eminently rent-outable. The process stimulated Maytree, and Lou, too—and children, and retired sailors, and off-duty coast guards, and neighbors—by its many routes to disaster.

  That summer Lou watched Maytree and Sooner move a house or two a month. Most larky, they floated houses alongshore—if half the hawsers in town and Sooner’s truck, two veteran jeeps, two tractors, and the milkman’s piebald cob could ease a house down to the bay without a wreck. Lou followed the trek. When they gained the beach they propped railroad ties as ramp to logs on the beach. They pushed the house to slide on the logs. Bystanders propped low walls. Lou stood at water’s edge as one of their house tows rolled into the drink. It would have turned turtle but the bottom snagged the stovepipe. It got epic quickly. Where was Winslow Homer when you needed him? After that day, they breasted to the top-heavy raft four gasoliners to power the contraption and act as Mae Wests.

  Maytree was no more finicky than house owners or the town about who might own lots’ titles. During the war, property bills, if any, lapsed. Yankees paid back taxes and taxes on empty lots. After the war they owned them all.

  Sooner Roy wore a slouch hat, its brim a sawdust gutter. He followed the Red Sox in frenzies terrible to behold. He was trying to borrow land on which to build, under a canvas canopy, a forty-foot sloop or yawl to sail to Maine. He grew up in Missouri. Maytree was tall, and Sooner was strong as Babe Ruth.

  TWO YEARS LATER THEY were dancing in the kitchen to “Lady Be Good.” Maytree turned down the radio and ran his notion by Lou. It is an unnameable boon love hauls down, that people rightly prize as the best of life, and for which it fusses over weddings. Not only will a cave-dwelling pair cull food and kill so kids thrive, but their feeling for each other, not to mention for the kids, brings something beyond food people need. Each felt it between them when they danced. It was real as anything the mind could know. Her eyes’ crystal, her split-faced smile, agreed. He rolled the volume knob. Oh sweet and lovely.

  After their first year or so, Lou’s beauty no longer surprised him. He never stopped looking, because her face was his eyes’ home. No, what so endeared her now and forever was her easy and helpless laughter. He felt like the world’s great wit. She worked, walked, stood, or sat like a mannequin, shoulders down and neck erect, and his least mot slayed her. Her body pleated. Her rusty-axle laugh sustained itself voicelessly and without air. At table, if she was still chewing when the laugh came rolling on her backward like a loose cart, she put a napkin on her head. Otherwise she dropped on the table. If it slayed her yet more, she knocked the table with her head in even beats. Or her long torso folded and her orbits fell on vertical fists on her knees. Unstrung with hilarity, she lost her footing and rolled down a dune. More than once—anywhere—she dropped backward and straight-legged like a kid in diapers.

  He fell in love with Lou again and again. Walking, he held her hand. She seemed, then and now, to roll or float over the world evenly, acting and giving and taking, never accelerating, never slowing, wearing a slip of red or blue scarf. Her mental energy and endurance matched his. She neither competed nor rebelled. Her freedom strengthened him, as did her immeasurable reserve. Often she seemed the elder. She opened their house to everyone. Actively, she accepted what came to her, like a well-sailed sloop with sea room. Her face was an organ of silence. That he did not possess her childhood drove him wild. Who was this impostor she sang with in college—how dare he?

  Their intimacy flooded. Love like a tide either advances or retreats, Maytree opined into a recent notebook. Their awarenesses rode waves paired like outriggers. Maytree thought Plato wrong: physical senses and wordless realms neither diverge or oppose; they meet as nearest neighbors in the darkness of personality and embrace.

  They named the baby Peter and called him Petie. From his first interview with this implausible son, then purple, Maytree curbed his vision of teaching it to read and love literature, to row, fish, hit and pitch, miter corners, frame walls, sail, and rebuild motors. His sole intended fatherly prohibition—that his son never draw his living from the sea—was superfluous. He seemed incapable even of drawing breath. He was not so much delicate as hopeless, predating vulcanization.

  A pity because his plainly not-viable person, unfit for the grating air, enchanted Lou, of whose taste for primate fetuses or naked hatchlings he had no previous clue. Lou saw something in the organism that bypass
ed him, but apparently hit other females, including tourists, as if the quality inhered in females as a class rather than in babies as a class. Even managing his wormy limbs was an ordeal beyond Petie. If Lou handed the creature to him, Maytree had to remember to hold its head up, or his own Lou would scold him.

  Once on a renovation job he deliberately described Petie as “time-consuming” to Sol Raposo, a mason. Daily Maytree watched Sol’s three kids make a reunion party at the site by bringing him the lunch he ate playing with all three. Sol looked up incredulously through his bison curls and shrugged. He said, Have more.

  One day they settled with Petie under a bamboo-and-canvas beach umbrella. A red scarf held Lou’s hair. The tide was out; the flats were mud. The sun was low; soon their friends would show up with drinks and bottles. Friends would help drag Petie back by the heels and try to get sand from his mouth’s ungraspable drool.

  When he first moved in after their wedding, Maytree got to work enlarging the beachside crawl space. Now they had a wedge-shaped basement furnished with a galley and head. He finished it off by installing many-paned French doors right on the beach. When storms came, he removed both doors so the seas could pour in without breaking glass. In ordinary weather, friends entered the front door, went downstairs, and opened the French doors to the beach.