Shipwreck

by Louis Begley

  There is a bottle of whiskey in the bottom drawer of my desk that I keep there for emergencies—usually a bad headache brought on by getting stuck in my work. After a stiff drink, I began to think about the situation more calmly. It seemed very unlikely that she would show up on the Vineyard. She didn’t even know where it was! The last time I had mentioned my house there she seemed to think that it was off the coast of Maine. But even if she found it on the map and made a serious effort to get there next week, the logistics would defeat her. Commercial flights to the island from New York, Washington, and Boston over the Labor Day weekend would have been fully booked since early May, even those going only as far as Hyannis. I couldn’t imagine her chartering a small plane, even if she found one available, or flying to Boston and renting a car she could drive to the ferry in New Bedford. Anyway, the ferry too would be fully booked, so she wouldn’t be able to get her car on it. As fully booked as all the hotels, inns, and bed-and-breakfasts on the island. The real threat was the news that she had a job she liked waiting for her in New York. But that prospect also attenuated the more immediate threat. If she was going to live in the city, perhaps merely a few blocks away from us, where was the need to make heroic efforts to get to an inaccessible island during the worst moment for travel in the whole year, especially if she had no place to stay once she managed to get there?

  It was late by the time North and I took leave of each other. Neither said that we would meet the next day. Had the question whether I would see North the next day occurred to me—I was so tired that I am sure it didn’t—I would have dismissed it. I knew that, if God gave me life, I would be inside L’Entre Deux Mondes waiting for my strange friend.

  As it turned out, he was waiting for me when I arrived, looking again as though he had spent a sleepless night. But this time he was carefully shaved, and his clothes were fresh. I thought he looked oddly festive. Perhaps that was the effect on me of the nicely faded red shirt and the knit tie of a darker red.

  All happy weekends are alike, North announced as soon as we sat down at what had become our usual table, and in consequence there isn’t much that’s interesting to be said about any one of them. Therefore, he continued, if I inform you as I now do that my long-awaited Labor Day weekend with Lydia on Martha’s Vineyard was exceptionally happy, you won’t be surprised to find that my account of it is brief. Perhaps even banal.

  Here is how it went. Lydia did manage to take part of Thursday off. The traffic to La Guardia was light; there were no accidents on the bridge and no delays on takeoff or on landing. To arrive on the island during the most beautiful afternoon of the year with Lydia, in our state of shared happiness, was a blessing that filled me with exhilaration and gratitude. Out of superstitious fear of inviting an immediate reversal of fortune, I tried to avoid making my beatitude obvious. One by one, my charms worked. Robbie, the caretaker, who had worked for my uncle and stayed with me, met us at the airport with my station wagon. We dropped him off in West Tisbury and drove on home. There we found that he had opened all the doors and windows, so that we could smell in the house every herb and every flower in the old overgrown garden. I kept hugging Lydia while she unpacked and kissed her on the neck, because she is so ticklish there. She put up little resistance. We went on with our childish pursuits during the four days that followed. The night we arrived we had steak, which we had brought from the city. During the rest of our stay, dinner was either lobster steamed in the big lobster pot on the stove or broiled, freshly caught bluefish. For lunch, we ate scrambled eggs or pasta with pesto that I made with basil from the patch outside the kitchen. These are things I cook quite expertly. Lydia had left word at the hospital that it would be impossible to reach her. Just in case some resident or intern decided to try anyway, I disconnected the telephones throughout the house and the answering machine with them. We saw absolutely nobody—not a single one of my fuddy-duddy friends. Toward the end of the afternoon, we swam from West Beach, which is a long stretch of dune and sand, open only to the families of members of the association that owns it. As my uncle’s heir, I am a member. It’s only a few miles’ drive from the house. You have on your right two ponds, first Menemsha and then Squibnocket. The ocean is always on your left. Then you come to a place at Nashaquitsa where only a narrow finger of land separates the pond from the ocean. You drive over it with extreme care. Once you have made your way across, you are at the parking lot of the Squibnocket public beach, which is itself quite fine. At the end of the lot begins a road like a track in the sand, the entrance to which is barred by a gate. If you are a member of the Squibnocket Association, you have the key to the padlock. You unlock it, drive through the gate and just beyond, lock up, and continue down the little road until you reach sanctum sanctorum. By that I mean a beach of the purest soft white sand with nothing behind you but dunes and dune grass, nothing before you except the ocean and Ireland beyond it, and nothing on either side of you as far as the eye can see but more beach. Families with young children come earlier in the day for the extraordinary beauty of the setting and for the swimming, which is perfect for kids and for strong swimmers who want to cover a long distance, because in normal circumstances the surf is very manageable without any threat of an undertow or treacherous currents. People bring lunch, and groups mingle with the sort of constrained politeness and gaiety that have always set me on edge. To be frank, I can’t bear it. But in the late afternoon, West Beach is absolutely deserted. My fellow association members are all on their own or their neighbor’s screened porch, decked out in faded L.L. Bean togs and cackling over Dubonnet and gin. And what did we do during the day? Lydia read my manuscript. To keep out of her way, I ran errands and pruned the garden, which is the part of gardening I like best.

  On Monday, I took my boat out for a run toward Naushon. She had been in the boatyard for her annual visit, and since I wasn’t using her, they had delivered her to the Vineyard Haven berth only the week before. I had never seen her in better shape, and it made me feel guilty when I thought of how little time I spend on her, but that’s a whole other matter and another example of my childishness. As I have told you, Lydia is not a keen sailor, so when she said that she would stay at home and finish my manuscript, I was not surprised. In fact, I was glad to have her finish, although I must say that when I was out on Vineyard Sound running before the wind, I regretted that she wasn’t there because I thought this was the best I could offer her, better than all my literary pretensions. I got home in good time for drinks, and over drinks and dinner we finally talked about Loss.Then it was early Tuesday morning, time for me to take Lydia to the airport. To be on the safe side, and catch the first flight to New York, we left the house before seven. A heavy fog had come in before dawn and was billowing over the road, which is not unusual, but though I had to drive very slowly there was little risk of being late. The pilot wouldn’t take off until the fog had lifted. Shortly after we arrived it did lift, majestically, like a curtain rising on yet another gorgeous day. I kissed Lydia goodbye and waited in the hall while the passengers boarded. There seemed to be no end to my childishness. I found it so difficult to let Lydia go that I left the building and went to the edge of the tarmac and waited there some more, waving as the plane rose toward the sun, banked sharply to the left, and disappeared. Only then did I go back to the car, trying to cheer myself with the thought that the rest of the stay promised to be pleasant. Lydia had agreed to return on Saturday, and if possible remain through the end of the following week, in which case we would leave for the city together. That gave me time with my boat—I might sail over to Nantucket and have dinner with an old friend and his rather new third wife. I would accept the offer of a shower, but certainly I would sleep on the boat, and then take them out for a spin and lunch onboard before heading back to Vineyard Haven. I would also have enough time to finish my revisions before Lydia and I left the island. The background music for these cheerful thoughts was our dinner conversation the night before. She had told me with great conviction
that she really liked Loss,to the point of believing that it might be my best book, more moving than The Anthilland stronger. The wayward wife had impressed her especially, because she was drawn with a sympathy and an understanding that she thought were new in my work. Since it was Lydia’s standard complaint that I treated my female characters unfairly, this was the comment that counted. I did not abrogate the principle that a wife is not an objective judge of her husband’s work. But Lydia was telling me that I had overcome a defect that she had always criticized before. That bestowed on her praise, I thought, greater authority. Anyway, I might as well confess it: I wanted terribly much to believe what she said. Her liking Lossand saying it so convincingly had reinforced my trust in her and my consciousness of our union; it had put me in a state of exaltation. There is no other word for how I felt. Thus, said North, I couldn’t understand what had happened when I got into my car and realized, with total clarity, that all the contentment I have just described to you had suddenly vanished, and that its place had been taken by a terrible grinding nervousness and anxiety. My panic seemed utterly irrational. You need to get home at once, I said to myself, drink a cup of strong hot tea, and get to work. That was good advice except that, as I realized very soon, my jitters were the result of a remarkably timely premonition. Something inside me was keeping watch.

  North was silent for a moment and then said, Forgive me, I must now interrupt my story to tell you something that concerns the present. I saw that you noticed immediately yesterday, when I arrived here, my considerable disarray. My disarray and distress—yes, that would be an even more accurate description—were so visible because I had hardly slept during the night and had mishandled my insomnia. I knew I would have trouble falling asleep, so before going to bed I took the pill that usually knocks me out at once. This time it didn’t work at all, and in despair I followed up by drinking a good deal of whiskey. But even that, coming on top of what we had drunk together, didn’t quite do it. It gave me perhaps an hour of unconsciousness in the morning. Mixing liquor with barbiturates is not the recipe for looking respectable. That’s why, quite shamelessly, I came before you with stubble on my face, stains on my clothes, and so forth. I apologize for it. It’s unpleasant to look at a man in that state.

  I began to mumble something about there being no need for apologies, but North stopped me.

  Thank you, he said. It was quite apparent that I shocked you, and if you have forgiven me I am grateful. The reason for my sleeplessness must be obvious. I am deeply upset by the revived memory of the events I have been describing for you. To say that it unstrings me wouldn’t be overly dramatic. Constantly, as I speak to you, I am at the same time asking myself why I did the things I am telling you about, why I didn’t foresee more clearly their consequences, why I allowed myself to be so weak. There is never a good answer, and it seems that there is to be no rest. And then, the night before last, I began to worry obsessively about a different problem that is important to me, although it will almost surely strike you as trivial. I have hinted at it before. You see, I am a writer, not a talker, and yet here I am, talking and talking. The question I have had to put to myself is whether it isn’t a colossal mistake to tell you my story, when I should be faithful to my craft and set it down on paper. That is how I could give it a proper conclusion, so that you and every other reader would know, when you reached the last line on the last page of my book, exactly how the story ended. Now you may never know. Who is to say that the story is finished if I am still alive? If you are curious about the ending, you may have to arrange somehow to be there to bear witness when I draw my last breath. An even more important failure is that while I may never in real life resolve the conflicts that have torn apart the real John North, I think I could resolve them in a novel. You ask how? By inventing: erasing what’s inconvenient and bringing in whatever is useful and getting rid of what is improbable. Against the rules of logic. There is no other way. But real life is improbable and refuses to be governed by logic. That is why I have been right to insist always, whenever the question has come up—as I did to that wretched, stupid girl—that I didn’t want to write memoirs. That is the resolution I should have perhaps stuck to instead of allowing myself to play Jean-Jacques to you here in L’Entre Deux Mondes. At least Rousseau had the good sense to write it all out: that gave him the chance to reconsider and rectify his indiscretions. That’s already a lot more prudent—and more artistic—than spilling it all to you over bottle after bottle of booze on the threadbare hope that you will understand and won’t betray. By the way, it isn’t as though I spent much time worrying whether you would betray me. The risk of my betraying you, by not telling my story as it should be told, is far graver.

  My surprise was so great that I blurted out a question. Is there something to prevent you, I asked North, from making a novel out of your story later?

  I don’t know, he replied. For some time now I have thought that we never get closer to the truth than in a novel. Gide thought so too. It may be that, as I speak, my story acquires a shape that will resist change, that there are things I have said to you that I will not be able to take back. Perhaps someday I will make the attempt. If I do try and succeed, and you bring yourself to read what I have written, you will find out whether I was right. For the time being, I am inclined to go on with my tale, such as I remember it, and such as I can tell it now. Will you stay with me, even after my warning?

  I nodded vigorously.

  Thank you, said North. You are probably right. Here is what happened. I drove home faster than is my habit, because I was sure that Lydia would call from La Guardia when she landed— unless there were lines to get to the pay phones, in which case she would call from the hospital—and I didn’t want to miss her. In reality, there was absolutely no chance of that even if I dawdled. The pretty drive from the airport to my house in Chilmark couldn’t take more than twenty-five minutes, and Lydia wouldn’t be getting off the plane for another half hour to three-quarters of an hour. But this made no difference whatsoever, because my nervousness and anxiety had spread, like a summer storm cloud, to cover everything. I restrained myself from running to the house from the driveway. Instead, I walked ponderously, stopping to uproot grass and weeds peeking from between flagstone steps, made tea, had a first cup in the kitchen, and sat down behind my desk with another. My papers were laid out neatly—I had done that the evening before—and I started to work immediately. Some time had passed, I don’t know how much, when, as expected, the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver and said, Hi, you’ve been gone for a little more than two hours, and already I miss you. Was it a smooth trip? I heard a woman giggle happily at the other end of the line and at once I knew. It was Léa calling, not Lydia. She said, Then you haven’t been expecting me? I am very disappointed, and giggled some more.

  She had found Vogue’s offer so good that she accepted the job on the spot. There was a sublet on the Upper East Side waiting for her. We would at last be neighbors. Best of all, when she told her editor that she wanted more than anything else to be on Martha’s Vineyard for the Labor Day weekend, the editor had her secretary make some calls and it worked like a charm. She had a funny room with a big bathroom at a rather odd little hotel in Vineyard Haven, right across from the harbor. She’d been there since Saturday morning. The hotel didn’t matter, she said, Martha’s Vineyard didn’t matter, she had come to see me. But when she called on Saturday morning upon arrival there was no answer and since then she had been calling nonstop. Where had I been? I said I had been out on my boat. Then my voice cracked, because I had exhausted my self-control, and I told her in a strange artificial tone that I can still hear today that she was mad, completely lunatic, if she thought she could get away with pursuing me to Martha’s Vineyard, against my wishes, when I had expressly told her that Lydia might be here with me. She could stay on the island or go away, I said, there was nothing I could do about it, but she had no right to call me at home, I wouldn’t have it. What I meant by that last stateme
nt I didn’t know and I didn’t care, because I had lost my head entirely, but somehow I felt it had some effect. She must have sensed besides that I was going to hang up because she said, Don’t, don’t hang up, let’s talk for a moment, there are things I have to tell you. I said all right, but she had better make it quick, and she said, All right, listen to me, I was teasing you because you are such an idiot. I know you don’t want me in New York and I have accepted that, and I am not taking the job, although it is every bit as good as I described, and I am not moving into the studio on Seventy-eighth Street, although it is full of sun and looks out on a garden and I liked it immediately, because I love you too much to cause you worry or hurt you. But stop being a bastard. I’ve come here to see you because I can’t stop thinking about you, so let’s see each other and tomorrow I’ll go away and the next time you will see me will be wherever you want. In Paris or Moscow, it doesn’t matter, I’ll go to the ends of the earth to be with you. I could hear her begin to sob. I have never been able to bear a woman’s tears. I guess it began with my mother, who used to cry at great length from frustration whenever Ellen or I disobeyed, which was a relatively frequent occurrence. Tears would make me want to hide—disappear—it didn’t matter where, under the table, behind the sofa, in the coat closet. Or, when I got older, made me flee altogether.

  Stop, I told her, stop at once, and then we will talk, said North. In a moment she did, indeed, relent. Whereupon, North continued, I told her she was wrong to treat as a joke something she knew was essential to me—keeping what she and I did away from my life with Lydia. And I told her again that she was wrong to have come to the island. However, since she was there, and since Lydia had gone back to New York, I told her we would break the rule I had made and see each other here. I have to confess to you that I was buckling under the force of sudden desire for Léa. There was a particular image— of her nipples, very small and upright even before she had been caressed, and the way that her breathing would accelerate and she would turn red in the face as soon as I squeezed them—that was before my eyes the entire time that we talked. And with it, the knowledge of her immediate and complete availability and submission to every wish, to every need. At the same time, I didn’t want to spend the entire day with her. Boredom would outweigh the satisfaction of the senses. I cannot imagine greater ignominy. Therefore, I thought for a minute and said that yes, we could indeed be together until she left the next day but we had to do it right. There was no place on the island I could show myself with her without feeding immediate scandal. Not in a restaurant, not at the inn where she was staying because the owners knew me, not at the boat basin in Vineyard Haven where Cassandrais moored, and not on any of the beaches where there are other people—I was simply too much of a public figure in the community, my face was too well known to too many people I couldn’t even begin to know. And she couldn’t come to the house immediately because my handyman had just begun to fix a leaking pipe and it was impossible to send him away. Find something to occupy you through lunchtime, check out of the hotel, and wait for me on the sidewalk outside the movie theater at two. I will pick you up, in a red station wagon. Then I asked about her flight back to New York. She said it was the first plane. That was perfect, I told her, I would put her on it. Here is more ignominy, said North: I rather liked the symmetry of putting Léa on the same flight as Lydia twenty-four hours later, after a night that I thought would be rather agitated.