Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  “I thank God for Fox News,” she said. “No, I thank God for any— any—opposing view.”

  Then it wasn’t just the opposing view. It was the right view, the one other networks were afraid to express because it was true. Her mother had died of cancer. Her schizophrenic brother, also. Now she had seven siblings left. Six of them had been trying to talk her into joining AA. I’d long felt queasy around Faith. Her mind was a frantic pendulum, mine a dull, insistent, and heavy bell clapper always gonging on time. She was doing the heavy work, thinking, rethinking.

  “But you know what? All this feel-good junk, and I’m serious? This psychotherapeutic mumbo-jumbo, and excuse me for using a cliché, this marchin-line rhetoric, no better than some structuralist, poststructuralist, or semiotic lit-crit claptrap, this weak-kneed, genuflecting-toward-well-meaning, politically correct point of view? It’s bullhonkey. I’m sorry but I can’t merely fall into pace. I have spent my life yearning towards the truth. I’m an intellectual, and as a professed intellectual, someone who examines the evidence—you know what? Fuck that. I’m a Catholic.”

  Her rough, smoke-cured voice dissolved into a girly foam of rising giggles—the teen who used to throw slumber parties when her upper-middle-aged mother was too tired to host them.

  “Well, but Fox News,” I said, trying to place Fox on her socialist-activist continuum, still at the stage when I wasn’t perceiving her shift, her swing. “Faith, Fox is the fomenting enemy!”

  “I know, I know. So who’s going to want me?” she said, her pace not letting up. “I want a baby! I want to get married, and yet I’m so over the hill. Do you know how lucky you are?”

  “I do, dear.” I could hear the bemused condescension in my voice. “No, I do. I really do.” But I didn’t, quite.

  I’d never had to do any of the heavy lifting, I’d never been an activist. I was a housewife.

  Now she was sober, dividing her salad and main course for a leftovers lunch the next day. She found graceful ways to be blunt. Before, she was a radical-thinking liberal, hoping to make the world a better place. Now she was a conservative hoping to keep the world sane and in its proper place.

  I wasn’t expecting her to make it personal and suddenly about Perry and me. You didn’t try to predict Faith. I hadn’t predicted her going into AA, and here she was, all sunshine, lovely.

  “I just think you guys would both benefit from AA,” she’d said. “You’d both blossom.”

  “Perry hasn’t had a drink or smoke since 1982, he writes a book a year, gets his work done.”

  “Yeah,” she said musingly, “but what it gives back, the program. The system makes you take stock. It makes you catalog and list and in the midst of taking stock you taxonomize your motives and motivations. Are those the same thing?—hard to say! But, it’s the kind of question the twelve steps compel you to ask yourself. The hardest part of course is trying not to reach for physical and I’ll say sensual coping mechanisms. With Perry, it’s food, I guess—right? You examine yourself while sitting with your feelings. See, I already feel better since starting to talk to you.”

  I seemed to be hearing that she believed her enthusiasm could be that infectious.

  “Great.” My voice trilled into a chime of exultant exhaustion: “No, but that’s great!”

  “And for you it’s sex, right?”

  “I never have sex,” I said. “I have an open relationship but never any sex.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about. If you could just sit with your feelings and join AA. My sponsor’s about got me convinced to attend Al-Anon meetings, too. You know, from my mom.”

  Just then I’d wanted to freak and abandon her ass in the diner without paying the check.

  “Faith, we have good days and bad days,” I said. “That’s the long and short of it, okay?”

  “Wow, I never thought I’d know you to get so defensive. I mean, when we first met …”

  “I’m really tired. I just want to say go home, darling, and that I’m the same person …”

  I paid the check and outside the front door of the diner she smiled and we hugged.

  “All right, sir. I have you in my heart, I pray for you, even if you think it does no good.”

  “That doesn’t bother me at all,” I said with conciliatory cheer. “It’s my Southern idiom.”

  Later she’d met him, the one whom I’d haplessly and cavalierly promised her she would. I had pictured a Fox News–watching Christian, ideally a Catholic to light candles alongside, but nothing would ever be so simple with Faith. Truth was, I could never stop adoring my Faith.

  “You were right, I met a guy,” Faith said at lunch. “The only sticky part is he’s Hindu. I had trouble telling my dad at first, but he just wants me to be happy, sane. He’s happy for me!”

  “Awesome! And maybe that’s why they call them the Greatest Generation.”

  “I know you hate the Catholic Church,” she said. “And that you’re anti-Vatican.”

  “All true. But what’s that got to do with your dad, technically? He sounds rather wise.”

  “It’s taken me this long but I’ve come around to understanding my father’s the wisest and most sane person I know. We were arguing about affirmative action, and he said, ‘Faith, would I ever tell you to go on welfare when I never in a million years would have—when I could have?’”

  “He used ‘never in a million years’?” I said.

  I was in Maine the year before when Faith had called to tell me, “We’re engaged, and I’m pregnant!” Nothing Faith ever said could surprise me. “I’m so happy! I’m so in love!”

  “What did I tell you?”

  “I know, right? Will you come to my wedding? It’s in Philadelphia, and it’s Hindu.”

  When she told me the date, I was glad to have something planned so that I could bow out.

  “I can’t believe what’s happening,” she’d concluded. “A bountiful basket of blessings!”

  There was nothing a gay man could wish for his straight women friends more than some marital bliss. I thought of Faith constantly in Maine, because here was where I’d gotten some of her life’s highlights, and anyway there was nothing to do in Maine but listen to the sounds of our thoughts—which was why Perry and I came to Maine. We weren’t lashed by the media distractions. We could be peaceful again and work on our friendship, more important than any felicity in bed.

  Now I was sitting with my feelings all alone up here, as she’d put it in her program lingo.

  I was at the kitchen sink looking out across the inlet after that walk. The night had come on so quickly. He was watching the Olympics in the next room, all the beautifully fit divers, and said, “I don’t know, darling, but I’ve been feeling punk. Tummy aches. Maybe I just shouldn’t eat. These meds give me horrible, scalding diarrhea. I’m on the potty all day long practically.”

  “Do you want me to run off the Neck in the car and grab you some soup?”

  “Now, this boy is from North Carolina. I think he’s great but he’s like in fifth place.”

  I waited and then called into the next room, “Perry, did you hear my question?”

  “I don’t know what I want. You know what I want? I want to be sixty again. I remember talking to Hiram Grayson, you remember that guy, poet? A few years ago, I was complaining to him. Maybe he’s ten-twelve years older than me. He said, ‘I wish I was your age all over. I was your age, I felt great, young. Now everything’s going wrong.’ Now I know what he means.”

  With scissors I was snipping kale, trimming it from the tough, chewy stalks to roast, and I did remember Hiram Grayson and his translations of Cavafy. I didn’t know if what I was doing I should stop doing or what. The reflective kitchen light made it difficult to look through the plate glass across the inlet, but I leaned in, squinting to peer. I didn’t know if my kitchen preparations were about to be wasted, but then a sense of patience came over me. Nutrition was my system of recovery, my religion, but I was starting not to believe even in
it. I called, “I remember him.”

  “Oh, anyway.”

  “No, go on.”

  “I dreamed about him saying it again this morning, before I got up—and it felt suicidal.”

  My reaction was to think of Faith, the well-named, ill-named, second-guessing Faith—it contradicted her name—her second-guessing. Her need to spiritualize and taxonomize and make everything into a neat metaphysical bundle, whatever. I put down my scissors and the greens and flicked my hands of their juice and leafy bits. I went in to hug him, half-insensibly.

  “Now darling,” I began. To lose him was unthinkable, but I thought about it. “Darling.”

  “I go to bed and think I won’t wake up.”

  “Not waking up and doing something intentionally are two different things.”

  He laughed, reanimated, and said, “Oh, I know. I was just talking. I can’t kill myself!”

  I said, “We all think that at times. I’m sorry you have to. Dinner’ll be on in fifteen.”

  My mother would have put me to bed and kissed me, then sat up worrying.

  Later that night, a window on the second story of the next house down along the neck, on the other side of the rocky crescent beach, flashed on and off. It would stop for a minute and do it again. The teenagers from my earlier walk: the house was in the direction they’d been headed, tromping through the woods off-trail. Youthful game, one of them trying to get on the nerves of the other and daring him to get pissed off. I remembered the thrill of “haunted houses” as a kid.

  There was no plan for who we were. Night was long for us. We’d go to bed separately. I read, which had become my coping strategy. I could live with him as long as we slept separately.

  I could see him from the adirondack. His room at the other end of the main house jutted into a field—the front yard, if you were arriving on a boat—of ferns grown high and pine and poplar saplings, and whatever was going on in there was directly in my sight line. He liked to keep the handmade wooden shades rolled up with the chains fastened to hold them in place, the full light of the morning and afternoon coming in to wake him or keep him from napping for too long. He had the overhead recessed lights burning and was reading in bed or sitting at the little desk, where I could see his head through the paned window as he bent into his laptop’s screen-glow. Napping too long, when in the past it refreshed him, now depressed and frustrated him. He was losing his life, the remainder of it, he feared, in dribs and drabs. A lot of his Paris friends (who were older, admittedly) had died. People were asking him if once he’d finished the novel he was writing he thought he’d ever write another. I watched him ease up from the desk, pushing on the edge of it with his fists in launching thrusts, one-two, to go to the bathroom, ducking slump-shouldered out of sight, then reenter his snug, pine-paneled sleeping quarters getting ready for bed. He reached up with his right hand to grab the frame of the big picture window you could see the dazzling or somber inlet through, and carefully stepped up onto the platform the bed rested on that was eight inches high. The house had been built by a pair of Buddhist craftsmen in the sixties who’d come to the area with hippies and other alternative types who’d colonized themselves around a famous guru who for all anybody knew had since escaped samsara and the material world, along with its abundant lobsters, and pushed on to nirvana. Everything was tongue-in-groove, or pegged flush. There was glass everywhere and in the solarium at the center of the house the newest owners had scattered the beanbag chairs we didn’t use and on the pine walls hung Formica shelving that bore seashells and frames of local nature photography. It got too hot in there on the sunnier days to be used as anything but a greenhouse transition zone from his room of slumber and huddled work to the dining room with its oilclothed table and the kitchen. His bathroom had a barrel-shaped tub of tightly fitted cedar planks, no glue or liner. Just out the back door was a shower that cascaded onto always freshly turned bark chips. He bathed outdoors mostly, smelling trees and the ocean. That part of the house was self-contained. For hours, I imagined, he could feel alone in nature.

  It had a European washer that cycled forever but was quietly efficient and cleaned clothes better than ours at home—and since it fell in his domain, he was in charge of the laundry up here. I was glad, not to relinquish my usual New York workload, but to see him more happily active. I had to walk him and this could be a trial. If it rained, which it did a great deal this year in spates, he might whine and give up, say he wanted to turn back. But he’d put on three pounds in the last week. He’d been away from his previous month of hard physical therapy and was slowing down and getting creakier. The driveway out to the shoreline road was winding and gravel-packed and gave him steady footing. He looked at me, huffing helplessly. I waited pitilessly. He huffed on.

  It wasn’t in his nature to be sad or depressed or self-pitying for long. He’d been raised in Christian Science, but I wonder if at the end anyone in his family had done anything more than go through that religion as a phase long enough to absorb its basic self-determining optimism. He’d worked hard in physical therapy, sweating from his exertions for the first time on purpose. He’d obeyed his therapists and pushed himself. The harder he worked, the less he complained. When he was done he might be tired but he followed the tenets without sagging defeatedly into laziness.

  I’d watched him go from “lame and halt” to hobbling mechanically then to more fluidity. But he had good days and bad days. When people asked about him, I said, “Good and bad days.”

  When he returned from the bathroom after brushing his teeth or whatever, I watched him pause by the bed, hobble up a step, then, looking down, like a marionette with some of its strings cut, teeter and fall sideways onto it, collapsing, half folding but landing safely before tugging the covers cozily up over him. After dinner earlier he’d said, “Come say good night before you go to bed.” “I don’t want my violent snoring to wake you up,” I said, and he replied, “I don’t care.”

  If I got up first the next morning, I would make the coffee and start the tedious half-hour process of boiling our steel-cut oats. From the fridge I got out the quart-size cardboard basket of blueberries and from the freezer the golden flaxseed meal I would sprinkle over the finished oats and berries and bananas with low-fat Greek yogurt—all while imagining his arteries unclogging.

  Still, every once in a while we would drive into town and order the greasy delicious lunch I’d allow him—you couldn’t be too strict or you’d have revolt on your hands—and after my fried oysters and his pork chop with sweet potato fries we eased up the hill in the rental car and parked in the library parking lot. The library was prosperous and self-vaunting, many of the cardholders well-known New York authors honoring the organization with readings and benefit appearances. In turn, it celebrated itself on its bulletin boards, which advertised exclusive signings and cocktail gatherings, where you could actually meet seasonal literary celebs and “pick their brains,” as one stapled-up flyer crowed. The town generally loved itself in the pages of its weekly publications. It winkingly announced its farmers’ markets featuring the organic produce grown here, fruits and vegetables that would make you young again, replant you in mother nature, and remind you how special you were because you were well heeled enough to rub elbows with the entire delightfully casual, liberal, lovable, genius crew. Combination pancake breakfast and book sale with auctions of signed (by their authors!) first editions. Throw a blueberry pie in their face and five dollars’d go to cystic fibrosis, the rheumatoid arthritis center, or literacy among young people with ADHD. Clambake, lobster dinner, hacky-sack tournament—“DOWNEASTERS, come and get involved.”

  “Downeast” meant we were downwind and east of Boston if you were a leisure sailor—if you were a Kennedy or the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little (who’d summered here).

  I doubted that kale figured heavily into the diets of the old WASPy guard like E. B. White. But kale was now prominent—just as important an issue as the Iraq War. And at one farmers’ ma
rket the other week I’d stopped at a stand and asked what was the difference between the dark variety of kale and the brighter, juicier-looking one. Kale was boring kale, I’d once believed. But no.

  The man who’d grown it looked healthy and pink. His gray beard glistened in the Maine sunlight. This was just before the gray overcast medium-pressure days. He wasn’t being tolerant when he tittered, he was just so high on his own health. And the older couple next to me listened expectantly when he cheerfully replied, “This darker kale, she’s your choice. Like if you want to make a kale smoothie, that’s the guy you want.” He winked at the couple. “Here’s your fella.”

  The man of the couple, bald but gleaming all over, said, “Well, I was just going to say.”

  “She’s a beauty,” said the woman—and we laughed, happily ignorant of kale’s gender.

  “It’s so full of phytonutrients,” the grower broadly announced, “the choice is obvious.”

  I believed in the healing power of kale and greens and farm-fresh produce, God’s bounty as expressed in organic agriculture. He presented only six items on his table, everything lovely. I bought rainbow chard, too, and he gave me a free bumper sticker reading, “Get Your Kale On!”

  That night I’d roasted the kale and chard, but everything else had come from the grocery store, which was no ordinary supermarket. Upscale supermarkets had stopped designating health food aisles as such. The one I went to, when I wasn’t at Walmart, called their health food section “Wellness Lifestyle.” I wanted to do everything I could to keep Perry out of the hospital.

  I was in the seafood section getting a pound of salmon meditating on omega oils and their ability to help clear arteries when I saw a couple of guys coming from dairy, one pushing the cart but both pivoting their heads trying to remember what they needed. I couldn’t recall their names, only their occupations. One was a Brooklyn private school headmaster, the other an architect. It was an effort to decide whether or not I should say hello, but they were headed in my direction.