by Paul Monette
"He can take care of himself," Aldo said, folding the blouses on top of the dresser.
"Of course he can," Madeleine said, as if that were self-evident. "But he's not as jaded as you are."
"I'm not jaded. I still like simple pleasures. Salted nuts and cocoa. Clean sheets—"
"You have a bad case of reality, Aldo, and he doesn't."
"Don't let David put a spell on you, Madeleine," I said, walking over to the bay window. The late afternoon sun was hot and shining in, and I could feel sweat between my shoulder blades. "Remember the Desert Inn. He's been around, and he's gotten what he's wanted since he was a boy."
"If I didn't know you better," she said, sitting down on the bed and adjusting her turban, "I'd swear you were jealous of his youth."
"I'm not. I just don't want us to labor under the illusion that David is innocent."
"I didn't say he was innocent. I said he wasn't jaded."
"Like me," Aldo said, laying the blouses in a drawer.
No I'm not, I thought. Not jealous and not like Aldo either. In fact, I thought I was doing beautifully, keeping cool and free of jealousy during the onslaught of Aldo. I wanted to talk to Madeleine about the scene with Mr. Farley. We had had a brief laugh over it when I brought the first of the suitcases up. She did a cruelly apt imitation of him reading his Latinate legal prose. But I wanted every pause and every shade of irony, and she wanted to unpack. Phidias had been so pleased with things that he didn't even wait for Farley to leave. He went home to the dairy, David told me, to supervise the afternoon milking as usual. David, too, seemed to think it was all behind us and, having won his round with the lawyer, didn't think twice about Madeleine's. Only I needed to know. The lone musketeer. But the mood had altered utterly with Aldo's arrival, and so I went along, trying not to pout and get left behind. I stood in the bay and looked down onto the dunes, and I saw David in his shorts, trotting along the planks toward the beach.
"Don't be cross, Rick," she said, and I turned back, not realizing we were still in conversation. "We agree in principle. He hasn't been hurt so badly yet, and we both want to protect him so that he won't. It's dumb of both of us, but there you are."
"In a way he is pretty innocent," I said.
"You keep saying that. It's not a word I attach much favor to. You know what he asked me yesterday?"
He had reached the beach. He slipped off his shorts and ran naked to the south, toward the cove where I spent my afternoons. My chest tightened. I turned away from him and watched Madeleine dry her hair with the towel. I noticed that she was still wearing the cameo earrings.
"What?"
"Who, if I had my choice of anyone, would I have liked to know. 'You mean since Adam and Eve?' I asked. No. He meant the twentieth century."
"David has no past," I said. "He doesn't understand that there have been other centuries."
"Carole Lombard," Aldo said. "That's who I should have known. We were both Virgos."
"Who did you say, Madeleine?"
"Well, that's it, I couldn't think of anyone," she said. She stopped toweling her hair, and she shook her head and let the hair fall. It was blond again. "I mean, I've met everybody as it is, and I don't go out of my way to meet them a second time. I said it would have been nice to meet Freud because I knew Jung a little bit. I would have liked to compare the effect on the two of them. But really, it's not the same as knowing them." She shrugged like a movie star. "I don't know anyone at all."
It was the glamorous, offhand answer David must have been looking for, full of small confessions. And I think it is probably true that Madeleine didn't care about the names on her dance card. But I suspected what the question reminded her of.
"I know who you didn't say," I said.
"Charles A. Lindbergh?"
"Right."
Madeleine once admitted to me that she survived her fame by putting on the Madeleine mask in public, particularly when she crossed paths with someone famous. She had told me long ago that the only star she met before she took on the press herself was Lindbergh, in Paris when she was twenty-three. She had not been so impressed as the French at large about his flight, since she had little patience with technology in any incarnation. He was all tarted up in a leather flyer's jacket and a white scarf. It was at a party on a boat in the Seine. She had spent half a year's wages to take the train to Paris and buy a dress. "It was a fabulous dress," she said. "Black crepe, with white silk gardenias sewn on at the shoulder, and then a shower of white petals down the front." And Lindbergh had looked right through her. He asked her a dumb question and then turned to talk to yet another reporter. It was the single occasion where Madeleine had stood with her nose pressed against the glass of the sweetshop. God knows what resolutions she made that evening.
"Who did he say?" Aldo asked.
"David? David is so irresistible," she said. "He said me. Now is that jaded?"
"Well, it's a very complicated bit of seduction," I said, as precisely as I could.
"I think it's darling," Aldo said, and he walked back into the deepest closet and for the moment disappeared.
"Wasn't today marvelous?" she asked me. "Weren't we all marvelous?"
"Yes. But I thought things were going to stand still for a while." I opened my hand in the direction of the shipwreck that littered the room.
"Don't worry, Rick. We're going to settle down now to our summer vacation and get fat and lazy. Aldo is going to last about a week here. He likes you."
"I like him."
"I guess you do. But you don't know what to make of me. The point is—I was thinking this in my bath—you've seen too many Madeleine Cosquer concerts and not enough of me in these last years. I lounge around your apartment for three days eating my vitamins and unwinding from my singing. Now we have a little time, and that's good." She stood up and walked toward the bathroom, the chiffon sweeping in a wave behind her. She called over her shoulder. "On the other hand, don't expect things to stand still. I have to get dressed. They used to say in Hollywood, 'If you don't get dressed after a bath, you'll start to drink.'"
"Who used to say that?"
She paused at the door. It didn't seem like a question that would stop her. I hadn't expected an answer. She worried her hair with her hand, impatient to look at it in a mirror. It looked fine, and she looked from where I stood roasting in the sun very cool and untrampled.
"Some sad little drunken starlet, probably. There's something I have to tell you."
There's something I have to tell you. I think that's what she said. It didn't sound at all like a cliché when she said it, and it had the effect of pulling me to attention, as if I had been drifting away from the critical matter without realizing it. I don't know whether we say some lines because they are movie lines that fit our scenes or whether the lines got written into pictures because people talked that way to begin with. When I was on the boat cruising in the Mediterranean, a ratty executive dismissed a heaven-blue bay we anchored in by saying, "It's the same color as my swimming pool." Because I was the boat's sunstruck beauty, I got away with snarling back at him: "Your swimming pool is the same color as it. Isn't that what you mean?" The heightened reality of There's something I have to tell you told me that we were going to zero in and get to the bottom of things. You hear a remark like that and know you have dreamed it before and have been waiting for someone to speak it.
"What?" I said, coming out of the sun and taking hold of one of the bedposts.
"After you all left, Farley brought up the children again. He said I ought to let them know what I've done. He thought they might even understand and support me." And then she got very logical. She sounded as if I had objected, but I wasn't even sure yet what we were talking about. "It's all signed now. They can't make me change it back. And they're rich already, and besides, they care about wild land."
What are you trying to convince me of? I wondered. I heard Aldo come back out of the clothes, and he must have paused at the closet door to listen. I couldn't see
him. He was on the other side of the bed and behind me.
"How are you going to tell them?" I asked.
"Well, Farley is going to arrange it. He's their lawyer too, and he'll gather them together in a couple of weeks."
"Will he tell them?"
"No."
"They're coming here."
"Yes."
Run, I thought. Get out of here. I wobbled a little as I clung to the bedpost, but my anger was icy clear. I wanted to fling the suitcase off the bed. Then I changed my mind and wanted furiously to pack us up and undo all our evidence. And then I saw that I wasn't going to do anything but talk. Aldo let out a gasp behind me, but it seemed less frightened than thrilled. It filled me with grief just to talk. Before I could tell them what they were doing, they had gone on and done the next thing. They never thought why they did what they did until afterward. Well, I would talk it down their throats then. I had to start talking even louder.
The both of them were waiting for me to speak next. I let them wait.
What made me angry at myself was that I thought we could handle it. In my mind I was racing from door to door, from window to skylight, and I found them all secure. I knew, because I had been so drunk with it, that we had made it through the afternoon without a hitch. I also knew that Phidias wasn't well enough informed about the Carroll children, and I had been anxious about a visit or a phone call out of the blue. I didn't believe that anyone was ever that estranged. So it was a problem that was bound to come up, and Madeleine had merely precipitated the moment. We could handle it. But still she had no right to do it.
"I suppose Aldo and I will get a pair on the aisle," I said. "But excuse me if I don't wait in the rain at the stage door. I've seen too many Madeleine Cosquer concerts as it is."
I had thought I was going to yell. I wonder what I do with my anger when I become a bitch. I can wound like a sharpshooter with that vodka tone in my voice, and then I'm still angry when I finish. I talk to find out what I want to say, but I don't always get a chance to say it once I find out. Because I've talked too much.
"What do you think I'm looking for?" she asked me, and I could hear her daring me to say it out straight.
"You want your name in lights, isn't that it? You want lots of cruddy newspaper copy, and you want to be fabulous."
"She is fabulous, honey," Aldo said, the vodka on the rocks.
"I figured that's what you thought," she said. It was unlike her to be so quiet. We were supposed to be fighting. She touched her hair again, and she looked tired. I was sorry I was getting rough, and angry all over again for being sorry. "Some days I do want that. It's a terrible thing, but you can never be fabulous enough." She smiled, so it was hard to say how she meant it. "You'll think I'm crazy, but I'm bothered about the children. I'd feel better knowing what's going on between them and their mother. Phidias is pigheaded about it."
"Nothing is going on between them," I said. "She's dead."
She made a little gesture of impatience, as if I were being factitious.
"A will is one thing, Madeleine. You can't change the relationships with the children."
"I don't know," she said uncertainly. "That's what I want to talk to you about on our vacation. The rest is crap, I agree with you. You know I agree with you. That's why I don't have any friends in LA."
"You have me," Aldo said.
"Aldo darling, I don't mean you. I mean movie stars. You two are going to have to let me go now and put myself back together," she said, as if the air were all clear. "I'll be fabulous again in about an hour and a half."
She slipped through the bathroom door in the same way as she would have parted a curtain. I looked at Aldo, but he was already busy again with the suitcase on the bed.
"She doesn't really believe they'd put her in jail," I said.
"They wouldn't," he said, lifting a nightgown out.
ONE THING YOU HAVE TO SAY about David, he's not ornery about his privacy. I walked along the planks, trying to think nothing at all about the implications of what Madeleine had just admitted. What I had to do was find David. He would be brooding about some specific thing, or he would be contemplating the currents and the drift of the water he sat at the edge of. But he would be glad to share it, such as it was. He wouldn't intrude on what I was thinking or trying not to think about. There was that to be said about there being no rules. I could go to him now and sit and draw in the sand next to him, and he would not have to know why I was doing it again after all these years. In my ten days here, I had not once thought: "I have to find David." But I had to now.
I slow-motioned down the last dune, my bare feet going in over my ankles, and reached the flat of the beach. Right away I saw David's frayed and faded shorts on the sand. I stopped to take off my shirt and dropped it in the same place, thinking it was as good a place as any. I'm not pretending that I didn't remember David had no clothes on, but until then it didn't mean anything to me. Seen from the upstairs window, he had gone along here like a figure in a film. An erotic film, if you like. I don't mean to say that I wasn't turned on at the sight of him. Still, suspended as I was upstairs between Madeleine and Aldo, I couldn't include an erection, so it hadn't even begun. It was just an involuntary ripple counter to the movement of the stream. But now that I was here and making a still life out of our things, I felt my desire at an even greater distance. The course of the past did not trigger me. It boxed me in.
Of course I recalled the horseman and the beachboy on Sea Island. They played out their scene in close-ups whenever my memory went their way. But the sea itself did not always set the scene going in my head, nor even a naked boy, though there weren't so many of those after David left. To this day, I don't think I've seen a horse since I rode into David's inlet. Or a deer. What usually brought me back to Sea Island was any slowing down of time. I am waiting in line at the Stop and Shop, two days' puny food in my grocery cart, and around me people stand by their prize marketing, food heaped high. They appear to expect life to be boring, and so they don't seem very bored. It is only another line at the Stop and Shop to them. To me, time puts on the brakes, and the flashbacks begin. You can cut out of your life the sea and the sensuous boys and the horses, so as to keep you from going back. But if time itself was once erotic, time itself will make you remember.
So it happens too when I am a little drunk or when I wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep. And yet the memory of sex with David is not sad, though I know that these slow times I am talking about are blank and freighted with rainy weather. It never hurts me to remember my wrestling and dazzling with David in bed. I wanted him and had him again and again, and the certainty that it could keep happening was itself enough to make me moan for him, come up to him when he was reading on my blue sofa and put my mouth in his hair and handle him all over. What scalded me about Sea Island and gave it the effect of stilling me and not arousing me was that it broke time down into David and no-David. I used to feel all through my fifteen years of one-nighters like a pickpocket. I am getting away with it, I would think as I walked home to my own bed at two or three A.M. after a good fuck. When David left, all that time before him became the time without him. And the time after him was the same except I knew it even as it passed, and I could no longer give myself up to the wild hour that began in a bar and ended in bed. I couldn't get away with it.
I thought of Sea Island as I followed the shots of David's footsteps in the sand where he had been running. But it made me want to cry, not fuck. I knew I could no longer see the house behind me if I turned around. The dunes tapered away here, and the rugged, gray-grassed, rocky fields came all the way down to the beach, ending at a break above the sand. In some places, the two kinds of landscape met neatly, and I could sit down in the sand and lean back and lay my head on the slope of the field. Sometimes the field ended in a crumbling cliff, with a six- or eight-foot drop to the sand, and I had the habit of resting in the shade when the sun was still high and hot above the pine forest at four or fi
ve in the afternoon.
But Mrs. Carroll's beach was most arresting for its two natural windbreaks. From a point deep in the woods, two stone ridges came fanning out into the open fields and down to the sea, stopping only at the high-water line. The earth had heaved in a quake or been sent up by glacial ice. At the shore the two ridges were perhaps a hundred yards apart, and they were ten feet high, with boulders littered at the foot of each. They were too far apart to turn the beach between them into a cove, but they cut that beach off from the rest of the shoreline. The architect of the Carroll estate, moved to improve nature wherever he could, hadn't passed them by. On top of the nearer ridge, he spun a gingerbread summerhouse, though it was so far away from the main house and so hard to get to that it was more of an ornament than a resting place. He built the boathouse against the inner curve of the farther ridge. The old dock, what was left of it, jutted out from there into the open water.
No one had ever bothered me on the boathouse beach, and no one except me ever went so far. It was a ten-minute walk from the house. When David went swimming, he sprinted the shortest distance between two points and dove in just below the house where he had swum that first day, when I tried to flee him. We could see the summerhouse from the tower room and, beyond it, the end of the dock in the water. But the beach lay hidden behind the promontory and could not be seen, even from the top of the house. I couldn't help feeling that the architect sited it that way, to keep the best way to the water secret, like the center of a maze. I had pointed it out to David from the tower last night or the night before, hoping I think that he would tell me in turn where he spent his afternoons. He didn't. But at least he had come to my beach today. I realized, as I walked toward the shadow of the plum and gray rocks, the lichen-covered granite crowned by the white wooden railings and cornices of the circular summerhouse, that I wanted to hear him thank me for it. He was going to love it here, and I believed it was a gift I could give with no strings attached. Except a thank-you.