There are either rocks or ocean below, waiting to meet up with me, which is an ugly thing either way. So while I’m spinning it hits me—in that sudden abbreviated way that things hit when you wouldn’t think there’d be time for any of that—what an ironic moment this is to realize that I want to live.
Rocks. It’s rocks.
And a kind of shocked blackness that takes me away.
Sometime after I land—how long I don’t know—I open my eyes and see the stars and the cliff up above me, blurred and muddied by the fact that I’ve knocked out my contacts.
Then my field of vision all goes black again.
And I think I’m blind. I think I’ve undone all Mitch did for me, torn my retinas or somehow knocked away all that good work and I’ll never see again. I’m still trying to breathe. I think I broke some ribs and I know for damn sure I broke my leg and I still need to breathe. But it’s all black with no air and then I go dizzy a moment and open my eyes and see muddy stars again.
And I realize I was passing out, not going blind, and I manage to pull in some air, but my ribs are cracked or broken and it hurts like hell.
But I’m alive, and I can see.
Moon Pie is on the cliff up above me. I can’t see him, but I can hear him barking. Good boy, I think. Bark. Call attention. But it’s one or two or three in the morning and I know there’s nobody’s attention to call.
So I lie on the rocks and breathe.
I have blood in my mouth. I touch the spot on my head. The spot I hit when I collided with the cliff edge. My hand comes away bloody. There’s a lot of blood. I’m surprised how much. Then there’s another place on the back of my head that I hit coming down on the rocks. My leg hurts so bad and I try to lift my head to look at it but something goes wrong.
Then I open my eyes, I don’t know how much later, and I’m just seeing where I am again, and I remember wanting to look down at my leg, but I’m not sure what happened with that.
Moon Pie is still barking and I’m taking little shallow breaths because it hurts. I look up and Pearl is sitting on the rocks looking down at me.
I’m pretty sure, even now while it’s happening, that she’s not. Only she is. I mean, I really smacked my head. Pearl doesn’t go places in her body, not anymore, but I smacked my head so hard and that’s how I see her.
“Pearl,” I say. “I missed you so much.”
“Leonard,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, because you know I love you and all. But that was really, really stupid.”
She’s just the age she was when I saw her last, about eighteen, and her hair is freshly combed, like a black waterfall. The wind is up on the ocean tonight and it blows hard across us, but her hair doesn’t move. It doesn’t blow. That’s how I know she’s not there, really. Except to the extent that she is.
“Why?” I say. “Why is it stupid?”
“Because you have a life,” she says. “If you didn’t, you’d deal with that. But you do. So don’t waste it.”
“I just wanted to be close to you,” I say.
And then it hits me, in my delirium, that I’m repeating a conversation I had with Mitch when he tried to be blind for a day to feel closer to me. But I’m repeating it with the roles reversed.
“Voluntary death is never going to catch on,” I say out loud. “It’s just not something you’d choose for yourself.”
I say that. So I’m saying both sides now. I’m saying the Pearl things, too. And then I open my eyes and Pearl is gone.
Or was never there.
I take little shallow breaths and lift my head to look down at my leg and it’s crooked. I think I still hurt but it’s getting harder to tell. I lay my head down again and close my eyes and I know things about myself I never knew before.
I know that I’m just a human guy, like everybody. I’m not some ethereal spirit who can magically transcend this life thing and go where I belong. I belong right here with all the other humans, and the only reason I ever thought otherwise is because Pearl is dead and I wanted her back.
The tide is coming in now.
A wave of it washes up onto the rocks and it’s shockingly cold, like being thrown into ice water. It hurts my ribs and my leg and I yell out loud, and Moon Pie barks more desperately.
I have to find a way to crawl up the rocks and get out of this. Because it’s cold.
But then a few waves later I realize it’s worse than that. It’s going to pick me up and dash me against the rocks and jostle my broken bones.
Just as I think that, it does.
It only moves me about one rock over and sets me down. There’s some pain, but now the coldness of the water is making me numb.
I don’t realize the real potential of the situation until the biggest one yet washes over me, slaps me up against the face of the cliff, and then pulls me out to sea. I grab at rocks, but their faces are slippery and the pull is so strong. I try to swim, to fight against it, but my ribs are broken and I’ve hit my head so hard and the ocean is stronger.
I reach for what might be the last rock, but my hands slide away and I’m sucked out toward the sea.
And I think, that’s it. I just found out how badly I want to live and now I’ve lost the battle.
My eyes break the surface, and I open them and see Pearl again. Sitting on the rocks at the water’s edge. She doesn’t look worried or upset. I’m about to raise my hand to wave good-bye when something stops me.
My harness.
The twisted, crashed glider has wedged itself firmly between two rocks. And I’m strapped to it, attached by this harness. The harness wins. The ocean loses. It pulls and pulls and recedes, and I wait for the glider to come loose, but it never does. It holds me. Then another big wave washes me up onto the rocks, jarring my broken bones. I try to grab for the glider, but I miss. And I have to do it all over again.
Again the glider holds.
Again I open my eyes and see Pearl sitting watching me. And I realize that the tide is just beginning to come in. It’s hours until morning. The battles I fought against these two waves will be a small part of a very long war. I realize if I want my life I’m going to have to put up a hell of a fight.
A wave crashes me against the rocks again. I grab an aluminum strut on the glider, wrap my arm around it, and hold on like I’ve never held on to anything before.
Pearl is still sitting—or not sitting as the case may be—just off my left elbow.
She says, “Do you think I wanted to die?”
“No,” I say. “I think you wanted to stay with me.”
“Damn right,” she says. “I had no choice. You have a choice.”
“I don’t want to die either.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“I don’t want to die now.”
“Good,” she says. “’Bout time.”
The waves are coming up higher now, and I’m so sure that each one is going to lift and unstick the glider and wash the wreck—and me—out to sea.
But I’m still holding on.
“You’re my son,” she says. “So you’re strong.”
I’m numb from the cold, and my whole body feels achy. I don’t really want to talk, but it’s Pearl, and she might not be around to talk to later. And besides, if I don’t talk, I’ll give up.
“Did you fight?” I ask.
Pearl says, “No.”
“So why do I have to?”
“Because your dignity is not at stake,” she says. “To keep your own life you give away anything in the world except your own dignity. That’s the only thing you’ve got that’s worth dying for. Now shut up and hold on,” she says.
When I open my eyes again, she’s gone.
I’m alone out here. I can’t even hear Moon Pie barking.
I worry that I’m going to pass out and I’m worried about my sanity. Because of the way time stretches out. So I decide to sing. Or, I don’t know, maybe I don’t decide exactly. Maybe I just start. Funny thing is, I’m singing that song Pearl used to
sing with me at bedtime. I wish Pearl was here to sing with me, but I can’t honestly say I think she is.
Then after a while I just can’t sing anymore.
I notice that I’m less in my body than I used to be. I can see me down there on the rocks, holding that glider. Not far down. But still. I worry what it means when I get outside of myself like that.
Then a few minutes or an hour later—I’m not able to figure time anymore—a big wave comes in and floats the glider and I can feel it lift up and I can hear the little scrape as it unsticks itself from between the rocks. Then the wave rushes out again and takes us. I’m back inside myself now. I’m hoping that’s a good sign.
“I really tried,” I say to Pearl in my head, but I know she’s not there anymore. Worse yet, I know she never was. I mean, not like that. I still believe I saw her in a candle flame and a sparrow but I don’t believe she sat on the rocks and talked to me.
I feel like I’m tumbling under the surface of the water, bubbling along, and I can only hold my breath just so much longer. Then my face breaks the surface, and I’m out beyond the waves. And the war seems to be over. I’ve probably lost, but at least the war is over. It’s strangely calm. Instead of the battering there’s just a rocking swell.
I feel like I could pass out now and rest.
I can’t decide if the glider will make me more likely to wash out to sea or to wash up onto the beach. But I figure I should decide soon, because I’m going to pass out. I have to take my best shot.
I unbuckle my harness. I’ve decided I’m going to try to swim to shore.
I don’t feel cold now. I feel strangely warm and without pain. Very calm.
I take one good, brisk stroke, and I find the pain again. It capsizes me. Comes up through the numbness and I struggle and almost sink, and then I hold very still and wait for it to subside again.
I call out to Pearl one more time in my head.
I look at the moon and it all goes black and stays that way.
MITCH, age 37: what grown-ups do
I arrive home from Jake and Mona’s house thinking I shouldn’t be here. I should be out looking for him. But I wouldn’t know where to start.
We don’t even know for a fact that he’s out flying the glider. It’s that obvious, awful fear, but we don’t really know.
Let’s say he took it out to fly it. He would take it pretty far away, I would think. How many hills are there in a fifty-mile radius of here? Part of me wants to visit each one personally. But probably I’ll be of more practical use to everyone if I just stay by the phone.
I try to fit my key into the front door, but the door pushes open. Which is strange. I’m really pretty goddamn sure I locked it. I always lock it.
It opens with a slight creak and I step inside.
It occurs to me briefly—with a little jolt in my stomach to go along—that someone could be in my house. But I brush the idea away again.
It’s barely light. It’s still so early in the morning that it’s only about half-light.
I close the door behind me and look around. Sure enough, there’s somebody here, sitting in the corner. It jolts me for a split second. But then I decide it looks like Harry. I decide it’s probably only Harry.
“Harry?” I say. “Is that you?”
“Goddamn right it’s me,” he says.
The voice doesn’t sound right. I mean, it is Harry. No doubt about that. But there’s something in his voice that was never there before.
And there’s something on the coffee table in front of him that was never there before. Something that doesn’t belong to me. That coffee table was, miraculously, clean. I took everything off it so I could spread out some work night before last. Then I gathered up all the work and took it into the office.
I set Pearl’s old envelope on the coffee table, next to whatever this is that Harry brought. I can see a big manila envelope, and it looks like a group of photos, eight-by-tens half spread out. Maybe black and white. But, photos of what—that I can’t see.
I turn around to the lamp and switch it on to get some light on this situation, which is beginning to have a distinctly wrong feel to it.
When I turn back, all I see is Harry’s fist. It fills up my entire line of vision, flying directly at my face, and catches me squarely on the bridge of my nose.
The pain explodes like light and color behind my eyes, and then I’m sitting on the floor on my tailbone.
Man. Who would have guessed Harry could throw a punch like that one?
“You little prick,” he says. “I gave you everything.”
The pain in my nose is this amazing, radiating thing, like a cross between a sharp injury and the worst headache imaginable. The mother of all headaches. The original headache.
My hands are cupped under my nose. I want to bring my hands up to it, it’s instinctive, but I can’t bring myself to touch it. So they just freeze there under my face and it dawns on me gradually that they’re filling up with blood.
I feel a wave of dizziness come around. When it passes, I crawl over to the couch and manage to hoist up onto it, and I lie on my back with my head draped back over the armrest. I’m hoping this will make the bleeding stop. I know I’ve gotten blood on everything. The floor, the Persian carpet, my jeans, the couch. It just seems like a thing to worry about some other time.
Meanwhile I’m not sure where Harry is, or what he’s about to do next, or what to say to him. It seems I have to say something.
I want to say, Man, Harry, that’s one mean son-of-a-bitch right cross you’ve got there. But it might sound flip-pant, and I think right now I’d better not be.
I say, “How’d you find out?”
But I say it quietly, and no one answers. I lie still and listen, wondering if he might have left. But then I hear him rustling around in the kitchen.
A minute later he comes back in with a plastic ziplock sandwich bag full of ice cubes. He sets this down on my face and I scream. Literally. Scream.
“I realize it stings,” he says. “But it’ll keep the swelling down.”
“Stings hardly says it, Harry,” I say when I can talk again. “Christ. I think you broke my fucking nose.”
“Good,” he says.
Then he sits down in the corner again. Picks up a drink which I realize he must have had by his side all along. The bottle is sitting next to the glass and it’s mine. It’s my Scotch from my cupboard, and since I rarely drink Scotch, it started out the night nearly full. But it’s not nearly full now. And it dawns on me for the first time, in a clear mental picture, that Harry has been sitting here in my living room for some time, drinking my Scotch and waiting for me to get home so he could break my nose.
I decide not to even ask how he got in.
After a minute he reaches over and grabs up the photos from the coffee table—the ones I haven’t seen yet—and throws them onto my legs.
I feel a wave of sickness as I pick them up, and I can’t tell if its origin is in physical or emotional pain.
There are three of them. They’re grainy black and white, poor quality, and after looking at them for a few seconds I realize they were shot through my skylight. How, I don’t know. Maybe from the tree or the telephone pole or the light pole up on the hill. I don’t know what lengths someone might go to if a wealthy and influential man was willing to pay him to get photos.
What’s really sad are the photos themselves. Because in them I’m not making love to her. I’m just sitting naked on the end of the bed watching her get dressed.
The only one I can clearly make out shows a kind of slump to my shoulders. She’s putting on her bra and glancing over her shoulder at me like she just then remembered I was even back there.
It’s like Harry paid some guy all this money to get photos of some hot affair, and what he really captured was this intense loneliness. This semierotic separation.
“You had her followed?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I had her followed. To prove it wasn’t you.”
Harry’s voice has lost that tightness now. It sounds deeper than before. It sounds like he might be about to cry. “You think I’m stupid? I’m not stupid. I knew there was someone. I chose to let it run its course. Granted I didn’t think it would take this long. I figured two years. Maybe four, tops. Marty kept trying to tell me it was you. I did this to prove how wrong he was. I said, Mitch is like a son to us. Of course he’s close with her. He’s like family.”
In the following pause I can feel my nose throb. The ice is making it ache, so I lift it off, but that’s much worse. It hurts much worse without it. So I set it back down with a little involuntary whimper.
“Why’d you do it to me?” he asks. “Were you jealous of my success? Is that it? Is it because I have more money than you do?”
I sigh. And wish we didn’t have to do this.
I wonder where Barb is, and if she even knows that he knows. If she’s off somewhere blissfully unaware that this is even happening.
“Money means more to you than it does to me, Harry.”
“Well, you tell me, then. What did I ever do to you to make you want to do this to me?”
“I know this is kind of hard for you to fathom,” I say. “But everything isn’t always about you. I didn’t do this to you.”
“Bullshit,” he says and takes another deep glug of my Scotch. I can hear him swallow. “Bullshit. Every time you fucked her you were sticking it to me. Be a man and admit it.”
“I am a man,” I say. “And I don’t happen to see it that way. It was between her and me. We tried not to even let it get started. We tried not to even be alone together, only then it crossed that line and we couldn’t uncross it again. I didn’t know how to stop.”
“You didn’t want to stop.”
“I couldn’t stop.”
“Bullshit. You can do anything you want. You didn’t stop because you didn’t want to.”
Love in the Present Tense Page 16