The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  My turn to smile now. No matter what faces me in the rest of the world, I am revived by my sojourns on the Vineyard. And I am determined to make this one peaceful. Last week I had a fight with Mariah, our worst yet. Spurred on by Meadows, I made the long drive to Darien and took my sister to lunch. I tried to suggest, as gently as I could, that maybe she could tone down her constant invention of new conspiracies. I told her about the possible judgeship, told her that her conduct was hurting Kimmer’s chances, but did not tell her my source. She shot back that the whole thing—offering my wife a shot at the bench, threatening to take it back if Mariah kept speaking out—was itself a conspiracy, a way of shutting us up. I told her that seemed a little farfetched, we had words, and, suddenly, it was the terrible days after the Woodward book all over again. Only worse this time, because the Judge is not around to draw us back together by the force of his will.

  And so I ache instead. Unable to concentrate in the classroom, I have asked for a few weeks’ leave from the law school, and Dean Lynda has happily granted it, both because she dislikes me and because she knows it will put me in her debt. Stuart Land has agreed to cover my torts class until I get back, and has already called three times, distressed by the disorganization of my lesson plan and my office, and offering to repair both. I have politely declined, not wanting anybody probing the shadowy nooks of my life.

  Earlier this month, I attended Freeman Bishop’s funeral, my second funeral at Trinity and St. Michael within two weeks. Some visiting priest, a member of the paler nation, performed the service, and few mourners attended. I noticed a face or two that I remembered from the Judge’s service, and I strained unsuccessfully to call names into my tortured mind. Mariah skipped the service. Sergeant Ames was there, however, perhaps expecting more bad guys to show up. I chatted with her briefly before she slipped out a side door, and I learned only that Conan was still negotiating his plea bargain, which I already knew from the Washington Post’s Web site.

  Then, last week, came our usual tense Thanksgiving with Kimmer’s parents, still waiting impatiently for me to tame their incorrigible daughter; evidently they do not realize that Kimmer is not quite tamable. Vera and the Colonel glared down the table at me as Kimmer and her childless sister Lindy gossiped and Bentley made a mess. If my wife does not become a judge, I suspect that my in-laws will somehow heap the blame on me.

  But mostly I have been looking forward, with growing eagerness, to today’s journey.

  The ferry at last!

  Now, turning my face into the sea breeze as the ship breasts the surging waves, rushing me toward the island I love, I am able to smile at Kimmer’s eccentricity—and even at Kimmer herself, who is huddled near the snack bar, carrying on a conversation of vital importance on her cell phone. Perhaps the colloquy concerns her work, perhaps it concerns her candidacy, perhaps it concerns something more intimate. For once I refuse to care. Ever since I shared the news of trepidation in the Hadley household, Kimmer has turned loving and warm, as though to compensate for other behavior, a stark metamorphosis that I have seen before, and which, unlike Gregor Samsa’s, can reverse itself in an instant; but I am determined to enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

  So, finally, here we are on the ferry, the day I have been awaiting. Kimmer has stolen forty-eight hours from the demands of litigating for her clients’ advancement (and lobbying for her own) to cross with me the threshold of the house that now is ours, and for that small act of theft, I am grateful. She might have forced me to go with only Bentley, or even alone. The fact that she did not I take as a signal of continuing armistice. Nearing the glory of the Vineyard, I find myself believing, against every objective indicator, in the possibility of happiness. Even with my wife. Which is why, I suppose, fidelity in a sad marriage can fairly be described as an act of faith: faith in life’s endless possibilities, which is another way, I am sure Rob Saltpeter would insist, of describing God’s bounty. And so I smile as I stand at the rail, my finger tucked into my son’s belt as he leans into the spray and calls to the gulls and laughs and laughs, and, as I glance around the deck at my fellow passengers, each, I am sure, as joyful as I as we rush on toward our island, my heart bursts with love: love for my child, love for my wife, love for the very idea of family, love for—

  And suddenly she is there.

  Right here, on the deck, long and nicely muscled, in jeans and a bomber jacket, not twenty paces away—the woman from the rollerdrome. It is not remotely possible, it is far too great a coincidence, I must be mistaken, my sullen libido is playing tricks on me . . . yet I know it is she. The roller woman. The woman who, a long month ago, flirted with me until she spied my wedding ring. The woman who haunted my dreams for the next couple of weeks. She is toward the prow, standing a little apart from the crowd, her face turned into the wind, so I see only a piece of her dark brown profile, but the smooth, broadly set jaw and the mass of impossible curls cannot belong to anyone else. A flamboyant purple overnight bag is slung over one shoulder and she is clutching a book: something genuine, hardcover, thick, the title in some other language, which my distant eye identifies tentatively as French. An edition of Molière, perhaps. Student or teacher? I wonder, suspecting that the answer is neither, for the text feels like a stage prop. I am thrilled to see her. I am appalled. I continue to stand at the rail, gazing in astonishment at this improbable apparition, far too shy to—

  “I would kill to have her body,” says Kimmer. So distracted have I been that I am not sure how long my wife has been next to me, but the wicked bemusement in her voice hurts as much as ever. On the other hand, I am guilty as charged. “She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”

  “Who?” I venture, careful not to turn around too suddenly, lest my wife conclude that I am actually staring where she thinks. I still have tight hold of Bentley’s belt, and he is still hanging over the rail, hypnotized by the wake. The roller woman might be carved from stone.

  “That giant nzinga over there,” answers my learned Kimmer, who likes to pepper her conversation with the occasional Afrocentric non sequitur. She points with one hand, holds my arm with the other. The cellular phone is nowhere to be seen. “The one you can’t seem to take your eyes off of.” Kimmer laughs as I twist slowly back in her direction, then barks softly like a dog. “Down, boy,” she says, not kindly. No peace treaty after all.

  “Kimmer, I—”

  “Hey, she’s looking this way. Misha, she’s looking. She’s looking at you. Turn around and wave.” She grabs my shoulders and tries physically to make me do it, but I resist.

  “Kimmer, come on.”

  “Hurry up, honey, you’ll miss your chance.” Teasing, but also making her ancient point, that I should have affairs to balance hers; that I should fall in love with somebody else and leave, sparing her the necessity of hurting me any longer; that my constancy in the face of her dalliances marks not Christian virtue but secular wimpiness. We have argued this out so many times that she need raise only a hint of the long-standing quarrel to bring all the torment rushing back to my heart.

  “Cut it out,” I hiss, allowing an edge to come into my tone.

  “Misha, go on!” my wife laughs, ignoring whatever I am feeling. “Go say hello, fast!” Then she stops pushing. Her hands fall from my shoulders. “Too late,” she murmurs in mock sadness. “She’s gone.”

  I cannot help myself. I do turn back now. The roller woman is gone. In her place are two plump white girls, stuffing Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups into their mouths and dropping the wrappers into the sea. The gulls hover nearby, either protesting the pollution or hoping for a bite. The roller woman has vanished as silently as she materialized; had Kimmer not confirmed the evidence of my eyes, I might decide the roller woman was never there at all.

  “I just thought she was somebody I knew,” I say, knowing how lame it must sound.

  “Or somebody you’d like to know,” my wife suggests. It occurs to me, against all evidence of our recent years together, that Kimmer is jealous.

&nb
sp; “I’m a one-woman man,” I remind her, trying to keep it light.

  “Yeah, but which one?”

  I turn in her direction again. She likes to goad me into these arguments, and, although I try to keep my temper, she often succeeds. As she succeeds now: “Kimmer, I’ve told you before that really I don’t appreciate jokes about . . . about my fidelity.”

  “Aw, honey, I’m only kidding.” A playful kiss on my nose. “Although, you know, it’s okay with me if you decide you want somebody else . . . .”

  “I don’t want somebody else . . . .”

  “That’s not how it looked to me a few minutes ago.”

  “Kimmer, I love you. Only you.”

  My wife shakes her head and smiles sadly. “Well, then, you’re crazy or stupid . . .”

  “That’s entirely uncalled for,” I say in the most wretched Garland tone.

  “ . . . or maybe just some kind of masochist who gets his kicks from having a woman treat him like . . .”

  This nonsense might go on forever, except that Bentley rescues us. Having spent a good twenty minutes simply watching the water go past, he has at last worked out what is happening. Grabbing both his mother’s hand and my own, he swings around until his back is to the rail. When he is sure he has our full attention, he smiles up at us and proclaims with great glee, “I’m on boat.”

  The fight goes out of both of us, and we are, for an instant, united in pure and strong parental love for our son.

  Then the moment passes, and we are competitors once more. And Kimmer, as usual, beats me to the punch. “Yes, you are on a boat, honeybunch, yes, you are,” she murmurs, gathering a proud, wriggling Bentley to her breast. “Yes, you are, baby, you’re on a boat, that’s very good; now let’s go inside and get warm. Mommy will get you a Coke.”

  “Hot chockut, Mommy, hot chockut!”

  “Hot chocolate! Great idea, baby, great idea!”

  Without a further word to her husband, my wife, the prospective judge, carries our son into the cabin. I watch her go, reading questionable messages in the sway of her hips and the set of her back. As so often happens at these moments of marital frustration, something primitive and ugly twists and furrows within me. A terrible red heat rises inside my head, a kind of indigestion of the brain; as always, a brisk but patient stroll helps me to wrestle my demons down. I make two complete circuits of the deck and one of the indoor seating down below before I feel sufficiently calm to join my family in the canteen; in all that walking, I see no sign of the roller woman. And this bothers me, not simply because I miss her already, but also because I am convinced that her presence on board is no accident. She is here for the same reason she was at the rollerdrome, because she was sent—and not by God either.

  (II)

  OCEAN PARK is a broad but irregular expanse of grass fronting on Seaview Avenue, the busy street one crosses to reach the rickety wooden stairways leading down to the slowly eroding beach known, unofficially, as the Inkwell, in whose gentle waters, for generations, the darker nation has frolicked. The house where I spent the summers of my youth is on the opposite side, where the neat Victorians are small and cramped together and too expensive. At one end of the park, to the right as one faces the water from our front porch, a line of fine old houses, all of them much larger than ours and topped with brightly colored turrets and fancy weather vanes, dominates the horizon. At the other end, to the left, just beyond the line of sight from our porch, stands the Steamship Authority dock, where some of the ferries unload in summer; during the off-months, all the ferries tie up a few miles up the coast in Vineyard Haven. A bit closer in are a lovely weather-beaten Episcopal church, its doors open in summer to the sea and so to every Sunday storm, and the city police station, which looks out on a tiny plaza featuring an aging bronze statue bearing a plaque that commemorates, for some arcane reason of Yankee logic, Confederate war dead. The statue guards the top of Lake Avenue, the narrow, crowded street leading down to the Flying Horses carousel, which is all that matters to Bentley.

  Like many homes in Oak Bluffs, my family’s summer place has a name, emblazoned on a faded wooden sign hanging from one of the posts along the front porch. Ours, unfortunately, is called VINERD HOWSE, a phrase selected by my sister Abby when she was small, quite by accident—she wrote it on a picture of the house she drew in the kitchen with crayons from the Crayola 64 box one rainy Oak Bluffs afternoon—and it was my unemotive father who surprised us a week later with the plaque. After Abby died, the family never had the heart to change the name. When we climb out of the white BMW on this bright fall day, however, the first thing my darling Kimmer says is that the time has come to get rid of it. As she pulls a sleeping Bentley from his car seat, I ask her which she means: the plaque or the name. “Either,” my wife tells me, still showing me her back. “Or both.”

  My father once proposed changing the name to The Three Fools, one of his many obscure chess puns, but my mother put her foot down; my father, in all the years I remember, never acted against her wishes. Addison insists that it was Claire Garland who made the decision that it was time to end the confirmation battle, when the Judge was prepared to fight to the bitter end. Mariah whispers that it was Claire who argued that he should resign from the bench after the humiliation of the hearings, so that he could speak out publicly and clear his name. And all of us know that it was after Claire’s death that my father’s speeches became as wild and nasty as most people surely remember. Small surprise, then, that even after my mother died, my father honored her memory—and Abby’s too—by retaining the sobriquet Vinerd Howse. But now that Vinerd Howse is mine, or, rather, ours, my wife has other ideas.

  I stand for a long moment in the narrow front yard, the key dangling from limp fingers, remembering the glorious Martha’s Vineyard summers of my childhood, when friends and family swirled constantly in and out of the double front doors with their tiny panes of glass, some rose, some azure, some clear, held fast in frames of involute leading; remembering the many sad and lonely visits to this house through those endless months when my mother sat dying, often alone, in the front bedroom on the first floor; and remembering, too, how easy it became to avoid coming back here once the Judge began his tumble toward megalomania. As Kimmer fusses with Bentley and I stare at the summer home of my youth, I find that I have difficulty recalling precisely why I was so filled with joy when I learned that the Judge left me this cramped and unhappy shell. With my parents both dead, the house should by rights be dead as well, quiet and neutral; instead, it seems almost a live thing, fiendishly sentient, brooding malevolently on the family’s misfortunes as it awaits the new owners. Quite suddenly I am paralyzed with some emotion far more primal than terror, a clear and utterly persuasive knowledge, shivering through me from some unnatural source, that everything is about to go wretchedly wrong: I fear that my legs will not move me to the porch, or my hands will not work the key, or the key will break off in the lock. In that terrible moment, I want to reject this scary inheritance and all its ghosts, to grab my family and hurry back to the mainland.

  As usual, it is worldly Kimmer who restores me to my senses.

  “Can you hurry up and open the door?” she demands sweetly. “Sorry, but I have to piss in the worst way.”

  “No need to be vulgar.”

  “There is if nothing else will get you moving.”

  She is correct, after a fashion, and I am being foolish. I smile at her and she almost smiles back before she catches herself. I heft the heavy suitcase in my left hand and bounce the key in my right. Then I stride boldly up the steps, heedless of the demons who caper in the shadows of memory. Drawing a breath, I dismiss them like a veteran exorcist and rattle the key into the lock. Only as the lock begins to turn do I notice that one of the tiny panes of colored glass is missing—not broken, just not there, so that through the space defined by the narrow gray leading I can see into the darkness of the house. I frown, pushing the door wide open, and, standing frozen on the threshold of the house I have
loved for thirty years, I realize that the goblins have not all retreated. I try to swallow but cannot seem to gather any moisture in my throat. My limbs refuse to move me forward. Through a slowly descending curtain of the deepest angry red, I see my handsome wife brushing past me with a whispered, “Sorry, but I gotta go,” and I feel her transferring Bentley’s hand to mine.

  Kimmer is three steps into the house before she, too, stops and stands perfectly still.

  “Oh, no,” she whispers. “Oh Misha oh no.”

  The house is a disaster. Furniture is upended, books are strewn over the floor, cabinet doors broken, rugs sliced to ribbons. My father’s papers are everywhere, the breeze from the open front door ruffling their edges. I peek into the kitchen. A few of the dishes are smashed on the floor, but the mess is not as bad, and most of the plates are simply stacked on the counter. While Kimmer waits in the front room with Bentley, I force myself to go upstairs. I discover that the four bedrooms are barely disturbed. As though there was no need to bother, I am thinking as I stand in the window of the master suite, telephone in hand, talking to the police dispatcher. As I explain what has happened, I look down at the BMW, parked illegally along the split-rail fence that guards the south side of Ocean Avenue, doors still open, baggage not yet unloaded. Something isn’t right. They did not wreck the second floor. The thought keeps swirling through my mind. They left the second floor alone. As though ransacking the first floor was enough. As though—as though—