North Haven

by Sarah Moriarty

  She yanks at the screen door, pulling down more than out to pry it loose from the frame, and calls into the house. The cool, dark wood absorbs her words. Shoes off, the wood soothes her, seems to suck the heat from her soles. She calls up the back stairs, then through the dining room and up the main stairs. No answer.

  On the front porch she can hear music coming from the sloop out on its mooring. It comes small and bright across the water and up the rocks. She can almost make out the tune. No one is on deck, but she can see the open hatch of the cabin. The porch eases underfoot, rough compared to the smoothness of the planks inside. She carries her shoes in one hand, hooked on the ends of her fingers. She picks her way carefully down the path to avoid the pricking evergreens that send feelers along the ground, out into the empty sunshine and warm rocks. Down the ramp.

  She stands on the float, and all the heat has rushed from her. Maybe because of the stronger breeze that makes it a few degrees cooler there, or maybe because of the hollow music that comes from her husband’s boat and seems to pollute the empty sky. Or maybe it is the ominousness of high tide that has just turned. The water feels raw, like it could catch her in its current and send her away, slide her away. A kidnapping current, the shore shrinking away faster and faster. Then it is she and the dark rocks and the black sea, or just the sea, cold and willowy at its base.

  The submerged ropes mooring the float beg her to follow them as they slant down through hazy sunshine. Through murk, their silken hair, soft cobwebs of brown algae, wave in a seduction, a lying reassurance that under the water is safe and warm. The wide, drifting fronds of seaweed, like six feet of freshly processed film, brown, transparent, slick, curled at the edges, reach out to pull her in. She ignores the siren call of kelp and lets out her own call. But there is no reply, the music too loud at its source.

  Little Devil sits at the end of its line off the stern of the sloop. So she must take the big dinghy, beached upside down on the float. She pulls on her shoes, wanting traction, resistance, wanting in some small way to pull herself together. She rights the dinghy, holds it at the bow, and rocks it over. The hull knocks more than necessary against the decking of the float. She wants him to hear, have him come to the deck, express that he has been napping, soothed by the waves, that he will row to her. “Stay there, I’ll come to you,” she wants to hear him say. She doesn’t want to catch, or see, anything. Still she pushes the dinghy to the edge of the float and slides it into the water. Holding the bow with both hands, the stern goes in first, dipping so close to the surface a bit of sea slips in.

  She draws the boat parallel to the float with the bowline. She steps in the center with one foot and pushes off. She sits down fast to get out the oars before the breeze sends her back into the dock. She plugs in the oarlocks and draws the oars together across her lap. Once the oars are in the locks, she leans forward, dip, slice, pull. Smooth swirls and a glide out to the sailboat.

  It takes eight strong pulls for her on a windless day on a weak tide. But today she goes slowly, watches the circinate fronds of each ripple. She even tilts the oars in, tucking the paddles inside the rail, allowing herself to drift, to feel the wind push the boat where it wants to go. The surface of the water feels elastic; it makes room for her but won’t allow her to pass. She tests it with the tips of her fingers, then her whole hand. The cold of it makes her bones ache. Flexing her hand and then making a fist brings back the blood. She picks up the oars again, immerses them in the water. They cut the surface, back, down, through, up. To be an oar, to have life and use, to be joined with the water and with a hand. To be both. It seems so hard to be both. To be mother and wife. To be tool and toy, to be bountiful and beautiful, to be expansive and inclusive. To cover the world and then to taste only a fraction of it. She is sweating again. She wets her hand and rubs water on the back of her neck. Reaching the sloop, she ties the dinghy down and pulls herself up—hand, knee, foot, foot.

  From where she stands now in the cockpit, she can see four bare legs in the berth below, sliding like oars together and apart. And then they stop. They must see her legs, her torn Keds, wet from the row in an unbailed boat, her slim cotton trousers, black with a purple bleach stain near the cuff. She will have to confront them in her gardening outfit. The legs spring apart, four become two.

  A man, not her husband, bursts up through the open cabin door. His is a face she doesn’t know, a square chin she’s never seen. But she recognizes youth when she sees it, stripped naked on the deck of a boat she swabbed, reflected in all the bright work she’s polished. He doesn’t look at her, just moves past her in long-legged leaps, all tan skin and blond ringlets, ringlets everywhere. Everywhere. He pauses to hold a line, steps over the rail, and then dives off.

  He swims for the dock in strong strokes. The man—boy, really—swims for the Japanese car up the road. She watches him; he glides like a boat through the water, no splash. Then he hauls himself out up onto the float, not bothering with the swimming ladder—hand, hand, foot, foot. He drips up the ramp. He looks even younger from this perspective too. She turns back to the boat. With his arms stretched wide on the back of the bench, her husband sits in the cockpit facing the house, watching too. She sits down beside him, and they watch the young man disappear into their house to leave wet footprints across their dining room floor. They sit there together like they are watching a sunset.

  “He’s a good swimmer,” she says, her hands folded in her lap. Had it been a woman, she could’ve slapped him; there are a whole set of standard responses for that situation. But she doesn’t know what to do with this. Anger will come later, she thinks, echo out over the water, out of the screen doors and single-paned windows. It will turn and rage, a winter storm. The kind that moves beaches and pulls down seawalls. But not yet.

  “He’s on the national team,” her husband replies.

  He brings his arms over his chest, so that even in the most innocent way he doesn’t have one around her. He leans forward, elbows on knees. The music has stopped, and they hear the channel marker ringing, tipping slow on the wake of a motorboat. She puts her feet up on the opposite bench and stares now at the bleach stain on her pant leg: How do you fix that?

  “The house looks nice from here,” she says, though she isn’t looking at it. The house and the kids should go to her, she thinks; both survived because of her. Food is bought and cooked because of her. Bellies filled, forms filled, checks written.

  She has kept them all alive, but not herself, she is barely breathing. Her artwork is nothing but a block of unmolded clay drying out in their basement. She is arid, cracked, parched. They are sucking every last bit of moisture she has left. She thought she was drowning, but she sees now it is worse, slower, a long and brutal desiccation.

  The anger builds in her, but the understanding that she isn’t what he wants is stronger and brings up the tears she is sick of showing him. She is remembering how to do this, what should come next. But none of it is what she wants, only what she says, because she needs a script now, instructions, a booklet explaining how to assemble a family without a husband. The kids are at the quarry and will be back soon. She wants this settled before then. She can’t stand when the kids leave their clothes in their duffel bags all summer. She can’t stand waiting when a friend is late for lunch. She can’t stand watching a sick animal die and has, as a farm girl, simply shot the thing dead. A mercy killing, but more for herself than the groundhog in a trap or the lamb who is slow to walk. The idea of recovery seems too dim, too slight a chance, too crushing a potential disappointment. So she will do what needs to be done.

  “Stay for dinner tonight. We’ll talk to the kids afterward, then in the morning you should go.” This seems simple. Clean. Efficient.

  “You don’t want to talk about this.” It is a statement, resigned, something he says to the water, to the house, not to her.

  “I don’t know what this means,” he begins, but can’t continue. The young man has been on the boat before. Many times. The oth
er women are an effort to keep the young man away, to prove to them both that this is not the way of things. He has never brought him in the house. They are simply moored together on the edge of his life, where he wants them to stay.

  He looks at her, and she at the house. He wishes he could put an arm around her. He wishes he could take it all back and have her be the one in the cabin. His love for her is as crushing as her disdain for him. He saw her once swim naked off the dock, when she thought she was alone. She was fire then. Since their littlest was born she has reverted to some frozen time before they settled into each other. They sleep without touching, a thin sheet spread over them like an altar cloth. He follows her gaze to the house. It looks like a hymnal left out in the rain, he thinks, flaked and swollen.

  It is almost five, and she wants to start making dinner. She stands to leave. He watches her pull her dinghy alongside the boat and step in. She looks up at him, her face just over the edge of the deck, her chin suddenly knotted like a walnut and the tears coming. She pushes off. He calls after her, but she rows hard away from the sloop. He pulls in the Little Devil, untucking the oars and sliding them into the locks, pushes off, and he rows after her. The wind has died; the water is glassy in the evening calm. She stops rowing and turns around. He stops and lets his dinghy drift toward her. Two boats drift in the water, one after the other, like mated birds, together but separate.

  “I want to stay,” he says quietly. Oars in, he is at the mercy of the wind, but there is none.

  “You’re fucking men. You don’t get to stay.” This is much louder and, on the smooth water, flies clearly to the porch, where Tom stands, having beaten his sisters home by a good ten minutes. He watches his parents, two fools in boats, in what seems to be a slow-motion dinghy race, ending apparently in the demise of his family. Tom stands behind a pillar where he can see without being observed, and listens.

  “One man,” his father calls over the water.

  “Of course, the All-American.” Her husband loves her even more as she shambles about in the dinghy, kneeling at the stern, gesticulating, causing the boat to slap and slosh in the water. Lucky her oars have rubber stops; they hang unattended in the water, limp hands floating in a tub.

  “The National,” he says, correcting her. “Sit still. You’ll end up headfirst in the drink. We’ve had one scare this summer; we don’t need another.”

  “Jesus, Bob, I’m not a ten-year-old; I can swim.”

  Libby’s accident had changed things for them briefly. Brought husband and wife together in a way they hadn’t been since she was born. Their fear and their relief had injected the first week of that summer with romance. A profound appreciation ran through them both. Libby had survived, and they had too. The night after her accident they stayed up together on their small screened-in porch off their bedroom, drinking lemonade and discussing their impending middle age. Her feet rested in his lap, and he held on to her big toe as he talked. She laughed as he explained the correlation between his growing bald spot and his increasing belly. They talked about their first apartment. The neighbor who drove a bus and woke them up every morning at 3:45, so that most mornings at 3:50 they ended up making love. He told her he wanted to chew on her toes.

  They came together on the blanketed floor of that porch as the stern lights blinked and the halyards clinked. But that was more than a month ago, and now they drift as they have for the last ten years. They drift, but he is always behind, always chasing her. Here at least she faces him; he’s not sure when the last time she turned her face to him was. There was the night on the porch. She let him pull her to him. But she never draws him close, never comes to him of her own accord. She demands and she delegates, she gives him lists not looks. He waits for her to come to bed, and then she accuses him of sleeping on top of the covers, of not even joining her in their bed. But he would rather float above their bed, a cloud at the edge of her perpetual storm, than to be banished to the empty, clear sky. He would rather burn in the hearth of her rage than drown in the emptiness of life without her.

  “We aren’t telling the kids anything,” he says. “I’ll go, but we are not making any final decisions now. I’ll go sailing. I’ll leave for a few weeks, if that is what you want. But I will not end our marriage in one afternoon.”

  “I don’t think it’s just been this afternoon, Bob. I’m sure the All-American has been here before.”

  Tom feels sick, like when, during a recent driving lesson, he ran over the neighbor’s cat. Why do cats sleep under cars? Don’t they know? He stops watching them, and he sits down in a chair, but their words go on, floating in on the wind like so much pollen choking the gutters and covering the rocks with a yellow film. Disgust. Betrayal. Truth. Love. Why. I don’t know. Germinate. Like briars around an ancient castle, trapping some in, keeping the rest out.

  That is what their words are doing, growing weeds in his mind, blotting out his perfect day at the quarry where he ditched his sisters and made out with Gina Jo. She will come over tonight, and he will take her shirt off. He will see things he has never seen before. And he will rid his mind of all their words; he will spray them down and dig them up. He will put Gina Jo’s face over every one of those weeds; he will feel her breasts pressed against him, not their spiny, furred leaves. He will lick her; he will put his tongue in her ear. He will gobble her up like a sundae, like a cigarette, like a nice strong drink.

  Their father called the young man late last night, and now the two men stand beside his little Japanese car, just past the pump house and the bend in the road. The All-American is not easily convinced that it is over. Their father can only see the peaks of the roof, the chimneys. They stand there at five in the morning, the All-American in shorts and sandals, as usual. He always dresses for Florida even though they live in some misted Celtic hinterland, as if Hadrian’s Wall stretched right out under the Atlantic, crossed the Northwest Passage, rolled boulders down glaciers until they petered out, just forgotten farm walls, cow paths snaking the coasts of New England. They stand in the ruts of the drive, ferns weeping at the edge of the road. The All-American has come to convince him that it is just beginning, to laugh at the ridiculousness of being discovered, like guilty teenagers bare-assed behind the bleachers. His curls jounce as he shakes his head.

  “At least she knows now,” the All-American says. “At least you can stop pretending.”

  “What was I pretending?” their father asks.

  He knows his lies have extended to everyone, to this young man, only eight years older than his son. What lies has he fed this boy to keep him coming back aboard his boat? What lies has he told to keep him away? Have I been pretending to love this boy? Have I been pretending to love my wife? Have I been pretending that I am a sailor and the sea is the keeper of all my secrets, of all my truest desires, and that no person can satisfy me like the high sun and a strong wind?

  He wonders why the young man isn’t cold, his arms bare, the mist heavy in the skirts of the trees. Peeking through the foliage, the yellowed seaweed in the cove is a creeping jaundice. The seals have left; they sleep low by the spindle.

  “You think you don’t love me?” the All-American asks.

  “I know I do. But I can’t stay.”

  The cove is sick, the house is sick, mold a cancer in its walls. She cares more for the mold than for him. She skirts around him, turns from him as she would from a draft, pulls her sweater tighter. She forgets to leave a light on for him, so he stumbles up the stairs in the dark. She complains of the cold, and he adds a log to the fire, then she complains of the sparks. But she makes coffee in the morning even though she only drinks tea. Her nails are short and rimmed with black dirt. She makes things grow. She coaxes faces, bodies from clay, fields and flowers from paint and canvas. She makes things beautiful. She smells like sugar. He wants to bask in her, devour her, crawl inside her skin and sleep. He would drink her, eat her, inject her. But she leaves him shuddering, sick, sitting on the edge of the tub in the middle of the night wond
ering when she last called him by name. He is losing sleep, losing weight. She is heroin, and the young man, methadone. Monitored and controlled, the All-American doesn’t make anyone sick, but calms nerves, settles stomachs. My love for him is not a cancer or a cure, he thinks; it is a delay, a putting off the inevitable withdrawal.

  He encircles the young man’s wrist with his thumb and forefinger. Usually the young man is all angles, his wrist a square of tendons and sinews that widen and weave up his arms, moving into the wide planes of his back. Their father loved to think how easily this young thing could overpower him. But here in the mist the All-American is so slim, a wiry rabbit, and he, the father, the husband, a lumbering bear. Or maybe he is just a man after all, a man who has taken this little rabbit into his hands to feel its fluttering heart, its whispered breath, and now the bones are too small, too brittle in his hands. He can’t be gentle enough with any of them. Not with his wife, or with this boy. His love, his desire, is sprung and toothed and quick to snap. He has destroyed and devoured it all. There is nothing left for him on land. Maybe he is sick, loving too much, too many. Loving both of them, so none of them. Maybe he is the jaundice infecting the cove, the wet breath breeding mold in this house. He needs to be encased in fiberglass and sent singing down the Styx.

  “Why don’t you let me come with you?” says the All-American. “This can be just another cruise. Please, Bob.”

  He says this coming close, standing just inches from their father, from her husband. He can feel the heat come through the boy’s thin T-shirt. With the All-American he can be just a man. He sinks into the space between them, lets his arms go around the young man’s shoulders, lets his hands go to the back of his neck, the back of his head, his face. And for a moment they are at each other against the car. He wants to consume him, devour the All-American and keep him forever. He clutches at the young man’s face, and they are frantic, their mouths and hands. They are desperate. And his sweater is up and off, and the young man’s shorts are down, and then her husband is on his knees, worshiping the All-American. He is god of the water, and I am just a man on the sea. And every satisfaction is a prayer, the young man’s hand in his hair, a blessing, together, a gratitude. He has spent four years putting forth offerings, trying to keep this boy that he should lose. They have always had a tendency to pull and rip at each other, like lions, like children. It is one of the All-American’s best qualities, he thinks. But all that play is gone, now. They finish and come apart, pulling their clothes back on. Their father stands up, lichen stuck to his sleeve. The young man tugs at a tuft of hair that curls above the neck of her husband’s sweater.