The Maze at Windermere

by Gregory Blake Smith

  I began by saying I had not yet come to a Decision, for I did not want him to labor under an Anxiety during the whole of our Interview. I ask’d him again what Father had said to him, expressing to him that it was not like Father to put off a Decision. He repeated (I thought with some Pique at what he must have consider’d my Disbelief of him) that Father had set a figure for Ashes and had listen’d to his Suit with respectful Deliberation, and had said he would think on it, but that this close Voyage to the Islands would prevent him Answering until his Return. I thank’d him and answer’d that that was what I had understood him to say the other day. This was but Dancing on my part for I wanted to Veil my reasons for coming. We had more of the like. He return’d each of my questions with Consideration and Patience. Finally I ask’d had he discuss’d the Matter with Ashes? Was he in the habit of seeing her? He ask’d then, in return, what did I mean, which fluster’d me somewhat as I thought the Question clear. I ask’d yet more plainly, did Ashes wish to be his Wife? He said then that he believ’d Ashes return’d his Affections, that they saw one another on First Day, and elsewhere when they could. I thought there might yet be some Evasion in that, so I ask’d did she favor this Plan of his, that he should sell himself that her Freedom might be bought.

  It was then that the first Cloud cross’d his Countenance. No, she did not, he said plainly. Ah, I said, then she does not wish to marry. He look’d at me then as if he marvel’d at what I could mean. It was not that she did not wish to marry, he explain’d, but that she did not wish the State of Servitude on him. He had been a Slave once and having had those Fetters once untied, she would not have him resume them. And then as I was silent, he said he believ’d it was a Testament to her Love toward him that she would not have him back in Bondage.

  I continued with questions: oh, I know not what, about where he imagin’d he would live, how could his Apprentices have an indentur’d Master, and the like. But I was just Acting. For I felt a Confusion and a Shame running through me and I thought my Face redden’d even as I sat there. I stumbl’d through to the end of the Interview, telling him I had been in a Mix the other day, so surpriz’d was I by his coming, and thanking him for this further Talk which would allow me to think on the Matter more clearly. I must have look’d a Fool, for when I left, tho’ I threw on my Cloak yet I neglected to put on my pattens, something I realiz’d the Instant I was back out in the muddy thoroughfare, but I could not turn back, and set off through the streets, my thoughts sinking downward.

  For it seem’d to me that I had exercis’d a kind of Meanness toward Charles Spearmint, or at best a shameful lack of Charity. For who was it, I ask’d myself, who conceiv’d such a doubling Scheme as his getting a Wife by buying one who did not wish it? Whose scheming mind was that? Aye, it was Prudy Selwyn’s mind! Evil be to him who thinks evil, as Father has so often said. For was not my Judgment reveal’d then as a deceitful Balance as we hear some cheating Merchants use? And he an African and I a New Englander for the further Shame of it!

  I did not return home then, but rather walk’d down to the Wharves in the gloaming that I might sink further into the Dark. I look’d out at the bobbing masts, and the gray and cold Ocean beyond, and I wonder’d whether I was a Friend at all, for so scarce was God’s Light in me. I had always felt it a shameful Secret that I did not experience, or so rarely experienc’d, the Goodness and Clarity I did hear about in Meeting. Yet I accounted it my Youth, and that in time God would grant me an Influx of Light that would reside in me and not go out in the next Instant as it seem’d always to do. But now in this dark Humour I batter’d myself with Questions. Why was God so stinting of His Light to me when He gave it so readily to others? Why did He not help me see the Good? Why, when it was left to itself, had my Mind entertain’d such base Suspicions? What could it be but that God did not watch over me, that He did not Love me, that He did not see me worthy of His Love and of His Light? Oh, I spent an Hour in the most abas’d State!

  Now, writing in my room, I am somewhat recover’d. Yet there is this with which I must reckon: Ashes is belov’d of Charles Spearmint, and Charles Spearmint is belov’d of Ashes, and Each nobly looks to save the Other.

  2011

  At the Casino over the next few days Sandy kept his head down. He had done the right thing, had told Aisha about Alice and could now—couldn’t he?—move on. He called some of his buddies in Florida, texted Todd Martin, checked in with Saddlebrook, where he’d coached the previous winter. He saw Aisha once and she acted as if nothing had happened. (Maybe nothing had happened.) They went out for clam rolls and a beer, and he defaulted to sleeping with her, but it wasn’t the same. He couldn’t help but let a certain distance—an irony almost—come into his touch, into his way of being with her. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything.

  And then he got a call from his rental agent with the news he’d been dreading all summer. The condo owners wanted their place back. They weren’t getting divorced after all and since he was renting week to week—that’s why the condo was so affordable in the first place, the agent reminded him—she was afraid he would have to leave on short notice. She offered to help him find another rental if he could afford a little more.

  A little more turned out to be a lot more. It was summer, it was Newport, no one else was getting a divorce. The only other option was to forgo looking at the summer rentals and search instead for what the agent called “townies.” But she was afraid she didn’t handle those. He could check the classifieds, maybe Craigslist.

  So he spent Wednesday, his day off, looking. But all the apartments, even the small furnished ones, wanted a year’s lease. He followed up on a Roommate Wanted ad he’d found in a candy shop, tore off one of the tags with a phone number, but the apartment turned out to be some stoners’ place—mattresses on the floor, Bob Marley on the stereo—and he’d never felt his quads so out of place. He ended up in a rooming house—a big old renovated run-down Victorian thing with asbestos shingling—being shown a high-ceilinged room with violet walls and the reek of cigarette smoke and a shared bathroom down the hall. It was a hundred fifty a week.

  Back on the Indian, pissed off—was he really going to live in such a dump?—he took off through town, out past the Burial Ground, out to the naval base and then circling around to the string of beaches on the east side of the island. From the start he had told himself not to be fooled and yet it had happened anyway. He had let the condo with its chichi sculpture and thick draperies and its view of fifty million dollars worth of sailboats in the harbor lull him into thinking he was part of this world, as if there were an equation sign between some millionaire’s yacht and Sandy Alison on his antique racing-red motorcycle. The sun, the women in their slingbacks, the expensive cars parked all over town (U-WISH one of the license plates had read): maybe the bozo had been right about him after all.

  Back in town he got the light at Memorial and was coming up on the Casino when he realized the figure he’d just seen at the side of the road—back there, across the street from the Athenaeum—the woman sitting at the trolley stop, had been Alice. He gunned the Indian as if to say screw you and your house, and then felt stupid, let up, turned down Berkeley and onto Freebody Street, where he pulled over to the side of the road.

  Was that how she was getting around, he wondered, riding the little trolley buses that ran up and down Bellevue for the tourists?

  Geez, he had to see her sometime, didn’t he?

  When he came around again she pretended not to notice him, even when he stopped in front of her—big as life—and let the Indian idle at the curb. “Hey,” he said, but she didn’t answer, kept her head turned from him, gazing off like there was something of interest in the other direction. He took heart: she was ignoring him in an actressy way, a funny-Alice sort of way. He maneuvered the Indian up the curb, shut the engine off, and put it up on its kickstand.

  When he crossed to her, helmet in hand, she leaned over and spread her things out
on the bench. “Sorry,” she said, “no room.”

  He stood over her, and there were his quads again.

  “I got kicked out of my condo,” he said. He had to say something.

  “Morals charge?” she asked, turning her face to him. She was dressed in a denim skirt and a cowgirl shirt with flowered embroidery, and her hair was in braided pigtails like she was the sweetheart of the rodeo. She didn’t look depressed at least. He bent over, picked her things up—her laptop and her photocopies and stuff; couldn’t the girl afford a briefcase?—and stacked them beside her so he could sit down.

  “The divorcing couple isn’t divorcing anymore.”

  “Good for them, bad for you,” she said.

  He pulled back at that, waited a minute, waited for her to say she was sorry or something. But she didn’t.

  “I went up to the library to look for you once,” he tried. She had her lips pursed, wouldn’t look at him. “But I chickened out.” Still she didn’t look at him. “I was worried about you.”

  “Because of these?” she said, and she pulled back her cowgirl sleeves and thrust her upturned wrists at him with their pale scars exposed. And she fixed him with a look that was so angry he thought, good god, what had he done? And then she seemed to recoil at her own behavior, pulled the cuffs of her sleeves back down, and dropped her hands in her lap. She turned her head away from him. This time there was nothing actressy about it. He had the good sense not to say anything.

  “I’m not in love with you, you know,” she said after a time. “I just wanted someone to hold me. I was drunk. And you were there.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “It could’ve been anybody. These things come over me.”

  “Okay,” he repeated.

  “Oh, shut up,” she said. She picked up her papers and her laptop and squared them on her lap, sat there all tight to herself as if to minimize points of contact with the world. She had her head turned from him in such a way that he could only see the side of her face, her cheekbone, and a blinking eyelid. He couldn’t tell if she was crying, but he didn’t think so. After a couple of minutes the little trolley came, its sides plastered with images of the Breakers and the Chinese teahouse, and the tourists inside looking over their heads at the Old Stone Mill behind them. The driver gave Sandy a quizzical look until Sandy waved him on.

  “Can I give you a ride home?” he asked when another minute had passed.

  “I’m waiting for the trolley.”

  Which was maybe supposed to be funny. So he stayed where he was, quiet, waiting, looking past her at the traffic, the light turning and the cars starting up, turning again and the cars stopping. A couple of blocks away the green pennant advertising the International Tennis Hall of Fame flapped over the entryway to the Casino. The air was warm.

  “You lied to me,” he heard after a good five minutes had passed. He returned his gaze to her, let his mind roam over that night: what was she talking about?

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes. You did.”

  He frowned to himself, looked at where her hair parted at the back of her head, the two cowgirl braids that fell down the fronts of her shoulders onto her chest.

  “About Margo,” she said.

  Ah, he thought. And then temporized with, “And you know this how?”

  She didn’t bite. “I know.”

  He quickly considered, and then just as quickly discarded, denying it. “It wasn’t a lie,” he said. “I mean it wasn’t directed at you. I couldn’t very well tell you the truth, could I?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You can sleep with whoever you want.”

  He thought of telling her that—as it turned out—he couldn’t sleep with whoever he wanted: there was his job, his getting kicked out of his condo, his owing his old traveling coach eight thousand dollars, but he didn’t. Instead he asked if it had been Margo who had told her. She shook her head no.

  “Surely not Tom.”

  She didn’t laugh, crossed her legs at her ankles. “No, it was Aisha.”

  He supposed he kept his face composed, but he felt like he had been slapped.

  “Aisha?” was all he could say.

  “I think she was trying to help by making you out to be a creep. Not worthy of my affections.”

  “Aisha told you about me and Margo?”

  She nodded, self-conscious enough not to pick up on his tone of voice. She was looking down at the stack of stuff on her lap. “That horrible night,” she said. “I was upset and when I got back to the house I woke her up and told her everything.” And she laughed an awful laugh and put her hand to her mouth. “Like a teenager!”

  He tried to keep his voice even. “You told her about that night? In the cemetery?”

  “Not to worry,” she said. “It reflects well on you.”

  He stared at her. Aisha knew. The other night when he had so carefully broached the subject of Alice and the cemetery, she had already known. Why hadn’t she stopped him? The pretending, the pensive look, the not letting on, the charade of it all.

  “Does you credit,” Alice was saying. “Very gentlemanly of you. Not taking advantage of the feebleminded and all.”

  “Not guilty of—” what had she called it?—“abus de faiblesse?” he said a little sharply. “Is that it?”

  She looked at him as though he had cut her, then recovered: “Exactly so.” Then colder: “Well put.”

  He would leave, he thought. Forget moving out of the condo into that rooming house. He would just up and leave. The Casino could manage without him. There was a whole Eastern Seaboard of friends who would be glad to see him, who’d put him up for a couple of days—people he still knew at Duke, friends at resorts on the Outer Banks. Saddlebrook would be glad to have him back. Okay, he wasn’t James Blake or even Robby Ginepri, but he was a former top fifty player. They didn’t grow on trees.

  He shifted his helmet from one hand to the other, shifted it back. He looked down at her lap, at her hand with its strained ligaments, that taut, tense, yellow, waxy look it had. Another five minutes went by.

  “I’m sorry,” he found himself saying finally. He could see, a block away, another trolley coming. “It just started. Last year. When it didn’t matter.”

  “It always matters,” she said, standing up, papers and laptop clutched to her chest.

  What had he said to himself that night with Aisha?—he was the only one among them who wasn’t counterfeit in his heart. And he had felt the truth of it, he really had, and yet it was he who was sleeping with two women at the same time. And keeping it secret from everyone.

  “I don’t think you understand my situation,” he said, standing himself. “I don’t have a place to live. In another two months I won’t have a job. And I owe people money.” And you and your ten-million-dollar mansion! he wanted to shout at her.

  “Nobody understands anyone’s situation,” she said and started across the sidewalk to where the trolley had pulled up. When the door opened, she made it up onto the step in her halting way and then turned back to him. “I’m sorry I wrecked things between us,” she said. And then she tucked her face in, began to turn so he almost didn’t hear her say: “But I have the right to feel things too.”

  And she made her way down the aisle. The driver waited until she was seated and then pulled away.

  Back at the condo he opened the bottle of bourbon the condo owners had left behind and which he’d been denying himself all summer. And he used his copy of Daisy Miller to make one last fire in the fireplace. He tore the pages out one by one.

  Two days later he called a taxi, gave the cabbie a twenty to help him pile everything he owned into the cab, and sitting in the passenger seat with a brave front saying “Let’s roll!” moved into the asbestos nightmare. When Margo came by, she couldn’t stop laughing. “Oh, dear!” she kept saying, sitting on th
e edge of his bed in her tank top and miniskirt, patting her lips as if she were going to burp. Making love, he gathered, was out of the question so they ended up walking over to the White Horse Tavern and having roasted clams and gin-soaked lemonade in the bar, Sandy wondering out loud where on earth they could go if her place was out and now his place . . . letting the ellipses hang pointedly in the dark, woody ambience of the tavern. Maybe they should quit while they were ahead, he ventured.

  “Who’s ahead?” Margo asked.

  “Your ad,” Sandy smilingly replied, hoping he sounded subtle or suggestive, though he didn’t know what exactly he was being subtle or suggestive about.

  “You want to quit?” Margo pressed.

  This was uh-oh territory, he knew. Even if Margo wanted to quit, she wouldn’t want him to want to. She preferred the score to be forty-love, her favor.

  “I was just taking the opportunity to give you an out if you wanted one,” he said, and then in his best Southern Gentleman voice: “It must be difficult for you.” And when that didn’t work, feeling some heat come into the tips of his ears: “Of course I don’t want to quit.”

  At which she fixed him with a look, then popped the last clam in her mouth and got out her credit card.