by North, Will
“You saw this?” Colin asked as Edwinna rocketed through the twenty-five mile per hour beachside stretch of highway just below Burton.
“No, I just like to take impulsive pre-dawn drives when visibility is zero. Although with my old eyes it hardly matters...”
“Would you like me to drive?”
“Don’t be impertinent.”
She took the curve up into Burton wide and fast, pounded the brake pedal like she was trying to stamp out a fire, and managed to bring the automobile to a shuddering halt at the blinking red light between the Harbor Inn and the Burton Mercantile general store.
“Where to, doc?”
“You’re the psychic; you tell me.”
“And you’re a New Yorker. Does wise-ass just come in the water there with the fluoride, or are you special?”
“Jeez, Miss Edwinna, cut me some slack. I don’t know where. The health clinic is out; the families would go ballistic. And we can’t take her home like this.
“No shit, Sherlock. Not with those wrists.”
Colin looked at her. “You saw that, too?”
“No, I just make this stuff up.”
The old lady stared at him and drummed her bony fingers on the steering wheel, waiting.
“No. My place is out.”
“Though that’s where she belongs...”
“What?”
“Don’t ‘what’ me, young man. You know damn well ‘what.’ You love her. Have for years. Not that it did a damned bit of good, because she’s never understood the first thing about you. I don’t know which of you is dimmer, you for still loving her when it’s hopeless, or her for never seeing it. Lame, the both of you are.”
“I gave that up long ago, Edwinna.”
“Bullshit.”
“Not to mention she’s married…”
“To a three-legged table.”
“Excuse me?”
“Unstable.”
“Tyler?”
“She got another husband I don’t know about?”
“I’ve known him more than twenty years; he’s okay.”
“Okay men don’t abuse their wives, Doc.”
A car horn honked behind them; the first of the south end ferry traffic had arrived. Edwinna lowered her window and gave the impatient driver behind her the finger. No one honked on this island.
Colin leaned his head on the dusty dashboard. “All right, my place.”
“About time, is what I say.”
“Miss Edwinna, with respect, what you say isn’t always right.”
“The hell it isn’t.” She gunned the big V-8 again and roared away from the light, which continued blinking as if it had simply been marking time while they argued. A mile farther north, just past the Judd Creek Bridge, she swung the Caddy right onto Quartermaster Drive. Just after the narrow neck of fill called “the portage” that connected the main island to its little sister, Maury Island, she yanked the car left and up the hill to the bluff overlooking Tramp Harbor.
“How do you know where I live?”
The old woman just stared at him.
“You’re scary, Miss Edwinna.”
“You know it. Keeps people on their toes.”
four
COLIN WOULD REMEMBER that first weekend in London with Pete and Tyler as if it had been bound in an album of sepia-toned snapshots. That was partly to do with a trick of the October light. The weather was clear and the combination of the low autumn sun and the ever-present moisture rising from the Thames made every feature in the cityscape look like it had been overlain with gold leaf. There was an unnatural softness, as if he were viewing the city through gauze. Yellowing plane tree leaves rattled and whispered as the three of them shuffled through streets busy with walkers out to savor the last clement days before the winter’s wet and dark set in. The gleaming enamel-painted facades of Victorian terraced town houses, normally the color of clotted cream, glowed apricot in the slanting light. The faint tang of coal smoke escaping from Chelsea chimney pots drifted like an acrid but somehow comforting perfume. Forget the clichés of spring, Colin mused as the three of them strolled through St. James’s Park that Sunday afternoon after showing Pete Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament; fall is the most romantic time of year, with couples drawing closer as the days grow darker.
And yet on this particular Sunday, the romantically-attached couple with whom he walked puzzled him. As he watched Tyler and Pete together he could not help but think they were oddly matched. Tyler vibrated with antic energy, regaling Pete with curiously lurid histories of the neighborhoods through which they passed: famous murders and the great Scotland Yard detectives who investigated them; Churchill’s prodigious drinking as he struggled to outfox the Nazis from the underground Cabinet War Rooms not far from Number 10 Downing Street; the history of prostitution in tony Mayfair’s Shepherd Market; Cold War spy intrigue in Whitehall; notorious royal flirtations in Hyde Park.
Colin wondered when Tyler had managed to gather these historical tidbits and guessed some offbeat guided tour. Some men postured and preened before their women, Colin knew, but this was Tyler performing street theater at walking speed, with Pete as the sole audience. Colin felt like he was watching from the wings.
Pete’s own behavior was no less mystifying. While she appeared to attend to Tyler’s every word, nodding and exclaiming with each colorful new revelation, laughing as her boyfriend acted out his stories, she also shot Colin sideways looks which seemed to telegraph: This is not me; this is just what I have to put up with.
Smitten as he was, Colin couldn’t understand why she did it; habit, perhaps, a lifelong familiarity with such behavior, an acceptance of this frenetic theatricality as the norm, the baseline from which to measure the rest of her experience with men. If that was the case, Colin thought, he must fall well below the level of Pete’s expectations. He was no showman, no Tyler.
The show folded, as all performances do eventually, that evening at their “local,” the Cross Keys pub, where they went for a light dinner. Moira Kennedy, one of Tyler’s earliest conquests and a woman whose wavy, flaming red hair matched perfectly her fiery disposition, was working behind the bar. Colin watched Tyler lead Pete off to a quiet corner while he stepped up to the bar to order their usual.
“Two pints of Director’s please, Moira, and a half of shandy,” Colin called.
“Oo’s the shandy slut, is what I wanna know?” she snapped.
“Now, now, luv; that’s just a childhood friend of Tyler’s from the States.”
“Seem pretty chummy to me.”
“Well, they would be, wouldn’t they, Moira; they grew up together.”
They both watched as Pete, still jet-lagged, nuzzled into Tyler’s shoulder. Tyler had positioned himself so he didn’t have to face the bar.
“So how together have they grown, is what I’m wonderin’,” Moira hissed as she pulled the pints.
“It’s not like that, Moira; they’re friends from childhood,” Colin lied. He was getting used to covering for Tyler.
“Uh-huh. You three here for dinner, too?”
“We are.”
“In that case I’d recommend the haddock in cream sauce for those two,” she said, cocking her coppery head in the couple’s direction.
“Really? Why’s that?”
“Bloody horrible it is tonight, that’s why.”
Colin laughed and paid for the drinks. By the time he reached their table, though, it was clear Tyler had descended from his daytime high as abruptly as the setting autumn sun. The gloom was palpable.
Tyler grabbed his pint and downed half of it in one go. “Took long enough,” he said finally. “They have to brew the stuff first?”
“You’re welcome,” Colin replied as he passed Pete her shandy.
Colin had seen the pattern before. There were days when Tyler seemed on a seesaw of the spirit, the life of the party one minute and killjoy the next. Something or someone would trigger a blackness that enveloped him like the sooty Lon
don fogs of yesteryear. He’d grow short-tempered and argumentative, or simply broody. The mood could last a few hours or a few days, there was no telling. And it was impenetrable. He looked at Pete across the small oak table they shared. She shrugged.
“Shall I get the bar menu?” Colin asked.
“As if we didn’t already know everything what’s on it.”
“Pete doesn’t, you know.”
Tyler took another long slug and banged his jar on the table. “We’re not staying anyway. I’m not hungry and Pete’s half-asleep. See you later.”
He rose abruptly and headed for the door.
To Colin’s astonishment, Pete rose and followed, as if on a leash.
He picked up his pint and Pete’s drink and went back to the bar.
“We don’t take returns,” Moira said when she saw the untouched shandy.
Colin looked at the glass and shook his head.
“What is it that women like you see in Tyler?”
“You mean besides the handsome and rich part?”
Colin nodded.
“Mystery,” she said.
“Huh?”
“It’s like this. You, for example, are a good and honest bloke, and not bad on the eye, either, if you don’t mind me sayin’. What you see is, I’m guessing, what you get.”
“Damned with faint praise…”
She waved his comment away. “But your mate there? Something hidden, something unpredictable and mysterious, know what I mean?”
Colin shook his head.
She stared over his head toward the door. “Makes a girl want to get in there and sort it out…”
***
DURING HER VISIT, Pete, who was an art history major at New York’s Sarah Lawrence College, haunted London’s galleries and museums while Tyler was up at Oxford. Nominally, at least, her reason for being in Britain was to pursue independent study of the painters who had influenced the French Impressionists. No doubt because of Tyler’s presence in England, she’d chosen Joseph William Mallord Turner. She spent hours studying the Turner collection at the Tate. On the museum’s late night Fridays, after Colin finished at the vet school in Camden Town, Pete met him at the Pimlico tube station and dragged him to the gallery where she enthused about Turner until Colin pled starvation.
The Morpeth Arms, a handsome Victorian-era pub just upriver on the Thames, was their atmospheric post-Tate dinner stop. While Colin tucked into a steaming plate of shepherd’s pie and mushy peas, Pete bubbled,
“I can’t get over the pure physicality, the violence even, of Turner’s later work. I mean, look, this is a guy who for years did neo-classical or allegorical paintings with the precision of an architect. Where did all that swirling passion suddenly come from?”
Colin looked up. “Um, your salad’s getting cold.”
“What?”
“Joke.”
“I’m serious. Where did he find it?”
She asked this as if Turner’s prodigious skills had gone missing at some point or been hidden by his cat.
“Suddenly, out of nowhere, he finds this freedom of expression. First he paints these static—stilted, really—classical scenes and the next thing you know he’s painting these wildly emotional canvases—fires, storms, shipwrecks. What happened to him? What unlocked that vision?”
“I heard his eyes went bad. Things got blurry.”
She shot him a fumy look. “You heard nothing of the sort. You just like to wind me up.”
Colin made a gesture with his laden fork as if capturing her in a picture frame. “You’re beautiful when you’re wound up.”
“Oh, stop. Plus, I know you actually appreciate great painting, even if you do pretend to be the poor, illiterate kid from the wrong side of the tracks in New York.”
“The wrong side of the tracks was the Hudson River which, at the time, was inhospitable even to fish.”
She paused in her rant, took a sip of her shandy—a mix of beer and lemon soda Colin told her repeatedly was a disgusting thing to do to good ale—and put the half-pint glass down. “This routine you’ve got—the lightning-quick, witty, self-deprecating remark—it’s so clever, and also so distancing. It’s like you’re dodging something. Maybe you’re dodging you.”
“Was that meant to stimulate conversation or kill it?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Colin…”
“Okay, okay. It’s a fair comment; I’ll grant you that much. But here’s another. Your fascination with how Turner found his passion…isn’t that just you wondering how you can find your own?”
“You’re answering a question with another question. And besides,” she added with a lascivious wink, “I found my passion.”
“Which is?”
“Tyler!” She shrugged as if helpless, a victim of the heart.
Colin put down his fork. “You’ve known him all your life, right?”
“Right.”
“From earliest memory, it’s been Tyler and Pete, Pete and Tyler?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So is he something you’ve found, or just something you’ve accepted as an inheritance? An inevitability? What is he to you?”
There was the slightest blink in the passage of time, as if some official at the Royal Observatory just downriver had made a momentary adjustment to the atomic clock that kept track of Greenwich Mean Time, and then she tossed her head and smiled.
“I think someone’s jealous,” she said, her laughter thin as frost crystals.
“Who’s dodging now?”
“I am, because I need the Ladies.’ Where is it, d’you think?”
Colin nodded his head in the direction behind her. She hopped off her low stool, slung her purse over her shoulder, and bounced away, that one hip lifting a little higher than the other, as if she were dancing to private music.
The subject was never raised again. Tyler came and went, like stages of the moon. By mid-month, Pete had christened Colin her “long lost brother.” It was not the relationship Colin dreamed of, but he kept his longing to himself and said nothing of Tyler’s infidelities. This was how Colin was made. More importantly, it was who he wanted to be. And who Colin wanted to be was a matter to which he attended with some care, although it had a complex pedigree. It rested on a base of the street rules in his old Manhattan neighborhood: stay watchful and never betray a friend. It was layered with the Arthurian legends he’d read as a boy, where the message was: honor the woman you revere, regardless of who she is pledged to, and be her defender. He knew these values were archaic. He didn’t care. There was nobility about them, something that resonated deep within him. It was love bonded to respect, desire wedded to an ideal and, of course, fundamentally unattainable.
Besides, he had no choice.
And by November, Pete was gone.
***
“CAN I JUST ask you a question?” Colin said.
He and Tyler were sitting at a corner table at the Cross Keys, having just celebrated Thanksgiving with steak and kidney pie and a bottle of “claret,” as Tyler insisted in calling the Bordeaux they’d ordered. Flame-haired Moira was off and Tyler was in one of his expansive moods.
“I believe you meant ‘May I,’ and you just did,” Tyler replied, grinning. He was well into his second after dinner double whisky, a pricey 25-year old single malt from the island of Islay, in the Scottish Hebrides.
“Are you in love with Pete?”
“Oh, ho! Jealousy rears its ugly green head!”
“Stop being an idiot.”
“Being an idiot is one of my many charms.”
“Help me out here. What would the other ones be?”
“Ooh, testy tonight are we?”
“It’s a simple question.”
“One thing I’ve learned about my roomie is that nothing’s ever simple with you. You see layers in any incident, multiple meanings in every otherwise declarative statement. You’re an analyst; must be your medical training: the diagnostician.”
“Would that be in the
manner of a compliment?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think so…”
“Good, because that would be so out of character.”
“Impossible. I have far too many characters to ever be out of one.”
“Well, how about you see if any one of them can answer the question at hand.”
“Why do you wish to know, if not out of rampant jealousy?”
“You’re answering a question with a question.”
“I’ve always found that an effective mechanism by which to keep the interrogator off balance.”
“Didn’t work this time, pal. I’m not unbalanced.”
“Well, that’s one of us, then.”
“Answer the question or I’m sticking you with the entire tab for dinner.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay stick me with it.”
“You’re right. You are an idiot.”
“Ah, but only sometimes; one never can tell.”
“Actually, one can. You’re an idiot for pretending to love Pete and shagging every other woman who comes across your path at the same time.”
“Am I getting only every other? That’s only a fifty percent success rate. Damn! I’m slipping. Get me another whisky, will you?”
“Not a chance.”
“How about if I answer your question?”
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
“Big of you. Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I love her.”
By which you mean…what?”
Tyler heaved a theatrical sigh and stared off into the dim light of the saloon bar. The soft light from rose-shaded sconces and table lamps made warm pools on the patterned, predominantly red, mock-Sarouk carpeting.
“By which I mean I can’t imagine not being with her, not having her be a part of me. I suppose these days one would say we’re ‘soul mates.’ ”
“‘Soul mates,’ or just old mates?”
Tyler shot him a look. “We’re not just friends, you know.”
“Yes, yes; you’re lovers, too. Big deal. You have lots of other lovers. Where’s the distinction? Where’s the fidelity?”