5
PENNY PRESENTS HER idea to me a few days after I return on a warm summer afternoon some ten years after we first met. She’s aged well, and here on the patio of the Provincetown seafood restaurant where she’s asked me to meet her to talk about this, age seems to have brought to her mostly poise. She’d quit smoking some years ago, reviving what turned out to be a rosy-cheeked complexion, and she’d stopped dying her hair that henna red, finally, and allowed it to be dark brown, a color more like that of a stone than a coin. She plucks at her hair as I approach her through the dozen Perrier umbrellas on the deck and she rises to kiss my cheek, so that I catch the faintest scent of sandalwood. I never think to wear scents, but I like hers and make a note of it. Hello, she says, against my ear.
You look fantastic, I say. Teaching hasn’t done a thing to you that’s bad.
She’s an art teacher now at a private school on the northern coast of Maine. Your fault, she says of it, when she first tells me. You always made it sound so beautiful up there. Where she is now, though, East Knot, is more beautiful than where I grew up. She’d helped me get settled in New York and had then left me there, and I resented it. I tell her so.
It is so beautiful, she says, and her eyes take in the view. I can’t imagine being anywhere else. She lifts a glass of iced tea and plucks at it. The men are far away though, she says, and surveys the men around us. Which, this being Provincetown, is mostly what’s here. Single men, she adds. Of a particular kind.
She tells me that she’s become the swim-team coach. I can’t believe it, I tell her. You hate and abhor athletics.
No. I hated and abhorred me, she says. And the tone is so sad, the phrasing so alien, I realize it is both true and something someone else has told her about herself. Like a check mark on a calendar, the ten years since our first meeting is duly noted. Penny, who had red hair and smoked and hated athletes now has brown hair, coaches swimming, smiles, and, she now begins telling me, wants to have a baby. Wants me to be the father.
The lunch arrives: fried fish sandwiches and fries, sparkling water. I am trying to place all of this. You want me to donate the sperm, I say.
Fee. I want to have a child, and when I think about what man I want the child to resemble, considering the amount of time I’ll be with him or her, I thought of my oldest friends. I’ve not known anyone as long as I’ve known you, besides my family. She smiles and scratches behind her ear. I’ll be with the child so long, and it only gets harder as I get older. I don’t want to wait to meet some guy I’ve not yet met. I’ve got a good job, secure, with housing, at a nontraditional school. I’ll be able to have the baby with me. How’s a baby at swim practice? Fine. There’s every reason to think it’s a good time for me. I’ve been healthy now for years, my gene plasm repaired, I hope, from the hard years.
I’ll think about it, I say. The hard years of course means the years when we first knew each other. And in the bright light of the patio, where everything seems to have a sharper harder edge and color, I can see that she will have her way in this, as she had her way in other things, that of what has changed about her, her ability to get me to do what she wants is not included in that.
You’ll be my replacement, she says. At the school. I’ve already told them I think I’m pregnant and that I know of someone.
What? I say. You did what?
It’s not like its not going to happen, she says.
And so it is decided, and soon Penny is telling me all the details. Bridey, too. In the attic room of the apartment we have taken for the summer, Bridey tells me he has decided, if I will have him, to accompany me on the move, as I’d asked. I’ll be the faculty wife, he says. I’ve always wanted to grow roses. When I tell him northern Maine isn’t much for roses, he tells me he will show me how it can be done. Sure of each other, we go to tell some friends from New York, here for the week, who are frankly confused by my decision, and further by Bridey’s.
Well, says one, when we announce the news before getting dressed for a party on the other side of the village, That will mean you guys are off in the middle of nowhere with nothing but each other.
Delightful, Bridey says. Imagine all the lack of interference. The absence of sweet young things looking to poach a husband. This last is a pointed comment to another, silent friend, who walks the house naked until it is time to leave for the beach, where he takes all his clothes off again. Bridey takes my eyefuls in stride, punishing me later by moving all my bookmarks. I’m trying, he says later upstairs, to make sure your attention is properly occupied.
You made me read the same forty pages of Ulysses over again, I say, and clap him with it lightly on the head.
You’re the one who didn’t notice, he says.
I’m practicing, I say, in case I get dumped.
Wedgies tonight, Bridey says.
Bridey. What is he made from? A secret, apparently. He meanders the party that night, looking through everyone there like dresses on a sale rack. I don’t know why he comes. I’m the one who likes parties. This one is loud, lots of New Yorkers, the same people we see all year but here they are sunburned, thinner, in bathing suits and T-shirts and Adidas sport mules. Ropey, gleaming bronze flesh alternates with the occasional pale, hairy limb of a newcomer or midweek visitor. I watch Bridey’s neck, where his white coral necklace hangs like a wide smile on a string.
I don’t remember, Bridey confides, that people used to get this sunburned. Ozone layer really is going. Look at her! She looks like a radiation victim.
When I go to put my arms on his sides he draws them away with his hands. Holds them. Kisses me once on the lips. You really want this shirt, he says. I’ll leave it on the bed for you later to look at. While I go buy some more.
And then at the party, someone talks of something, another of another, and then this.
. . . It’s amazing, isn’t it. How people just tell you about it.
Aren’t you tired of it? I am so tired of it. “Oh, my father raped me.” So? Why tell these things?
I see two women talking to each other at the food table, dipping chips into a guacamole bowl and scooping it out. Empty beer bottles fill the table and so I start picking them up, as a politeness to our host, gone missing now for about an hour.
These people are just crawling out of the walls these days. It seems like this shit was just invented for the end of this century.
Well, if you read John Boswells book about foundling children in medieval times, he talks about how early prohibitions against prostitution were in place in order to avoid having sex with children you’d abandoned, sold to brothels. And here she breaks her chips with her tiny teeth. You realize, she continues, that children have always had a lot of sex. I smile at them across the now-clear table, and head out the back door to the porch, where I sit down, a bottle on every finger. I set them down next to the recycling bin, and notice that several are partially full. Unable to move, I begin finishing them. Like tongue kissing strangers.
Crawling out of the walls. I think of the catacombs on Judgment Day. I think of Andrew Hunter and my tunnels, still waiting for me. Why am I still alive? I light a cigarette. Look across my hand to the pinkie nail I still keep silver. Bridey asked me about it a long time ago. When I told him the story of it he kissed the tiny nail. He said, It’s beautiful. I think of Freddy.
Did you drink all these? I hear from behind me. Bridey sinks down then and his knees cover my ears. What are you doing out here by the trash, anyway?
I had help, I say. When do we move to Maine, I ask.
Come on, he says. Inside. Right away.
6
UP IN EAST Knot on one of the first nights in our new house Bridey calls me into the yard. Look, he says, and there’s the Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis, pieces of the sun striking the outer surface of the atmosphere and exploding. We stand there and watch. They’re magnetic pulses. When Penny has her baby, I decide, I will tell him or her that the Aurora Borealis is her great-grand-aunts, dancing with each other, fo
r us. The colors their fiery fox tails.
My grandparents died within several months of each other. Theirs had been a long marriage, arranged for them at their births. That they died near each other in time was no surprise. Both deaths happened while I was in California, near the end of my time there, and both times, I was awake late at night and found by something near to a hallucination. Or a vision. It reminded me of the mudang trying to call my ghost to me, and what I saw that time. My grandmother went first. On that night, my room filled with a huge shadow cat, eyes as big as lamps. She regarded me for some time and then left. When my grandfather followed her, the ceiling light fixture in my room became the center of an enormous face, ancient beyond belief and exhausted. He seemed to be trying to speak, and then he didn’t, and was gone soon after.
My grandmother had been a Christian, my grandfather an animist. Chongdokyo, Korea’s oldest religion. He remembered his sisters by placing a bowl of water by the window, and a lit stick of incense. When we went to the family temple in Moolsan-do he had done the more traditional observances, but every day, the bowl and the incense. Chongdokyo is an attempt to mirror the ways of heaven, which flat water does effortlessly, reflecting the sky. The incense is meant to symbolize that aspiration. I’d made a bowl for this purpose recently, and so after we come inside I look for it among the boxes we are still unpacking. I find the bowl, a simple thing made to look like my grandfather’s bowl: eggshell on the outside, sea blue on the inside. I light incense, and set them out, by the back kitchen window.
You’re a good son, Bridey says, when he sees it, and kisses me on the cheek. He’s thrilled by the new house, by his freedom from New York. I feel like everything dirty is so far away, he says.
I kiss him back. We kiss all the time now, some three years into this. Penny’s pregnancy is healthy and seems to come along quickly. The school had been apprehensive about meeting me but then the faculty were quickly assured that I should take Penny’s place during her leave. The affordable house had, after the vagaries of Manhattan’s real estate market, come to us with startling suddenness. Our friends had thrown us a party at a restaurant before we left, where the waiters came out singing the Green Acres theme song and clapping tambourines, and everyone made vague promises to come visit. Bucoholism, Bridey called it now. Addicted to the Bucolic.
I think of my grandparents, the listening quality they always seemed to have whenever I saw them. What were they listening for? When they had decided to leave Korea, they did so and then left quickly. It was difficult but not impossible, and they never seemed to express remorse. Their whole difficult lives seemed not to weigh on them at all. Taken as mornings and meals, suppers and evenings, all of the world could be carried, both the sad and the delicious, their lives seemed to say.
I turn and go upstairs, to prepare to meet the students the next day. Bridey undresses for bed, reminding me of no one but himself. I sit down and take off my shoes.
Sometimes, I think I know what my grandparents were listening for. Sound waves don’t ever go away. Not one sound goes away. The wave simply expands, infinitely. The sound remains. Imagine a cosine arc the size of Jupiter, and that might be the size of the wave of the last thing Peter said. I’d need an ear the size of another solar system to hear him again.
Tomorrow I would meet my students.
Good night, Bridey says, when I pull the sheets up over us, and it rolls off into eternity to join every other sound ever made.
That night we both dream. I have my recurring dream, Bridey has his. This is how we find out about them. My recurring dream: I am in a barracks, walking back from having gone to the bathroom, and I know it in the way you know something in your life: where you had coffee that morning, where you ate your breakfast. And the corridor is dark. I begin to feel it then, the dread, a chill like someone has opened a door to the outside, except that the chill is in my mind, the door, in my mind. The chill is coming from somewhere else through an opening somewhere inside me, and I start to slow down, to try and turn and face the demon. And then instead, I try to run faster, to the main room, where everyone lies asleep. But I never get there. I always wake before that happens, with the knowledge that I am dead. I didn’t make it.
I have the dream again. I wake up, to see Bridey looking at me, one eyebrow raised. Coffee, he says, and leaps out of bed. I wait as I hear the smooth feet echo across our wood floors. I drowse off, and awake again to him naked, holding two cups of coffee. Hiya, he says. Had a nightmare. A recurring one of mine.
Yeah, I did, I say.
No, he says. I meant, I did. You did too?
What was your dream, I ask.
I dreamed I was in a massacre. That all around me, people were dying. And I couldn’t move. There was some monstrous invisible force, ripping through people. Blood everywhere. We were in some kind of barracks. And everyone was dying. All soldiers, all of us. And then I couldn’t see it but I felt the monster come for me. And I woke up. He slurps his coffee then, and settles himself into the bed beside my knees.
I love you, I say.
What was your nightmare, he says.
I don’t want to talk about it, I say. Not now.
I think of it later, though, when he’s left the house, to go swimming. What if you meet someone from your future life? You are in your past life now, as far as the future is concerned. That morning it seems to me that Bridey and I are somewhere in the future, both a part of a massacre. We are different parts to the same dream. That we were given this present to make us strong for the future to come. I’ll think differently of it later. But for the purpose of the events to follow, this is my opinion, now.
7
I SEE HIS blond hair first in the morning light warming the natatorium. Towhead. The color of a beating.
Penny is funny in her suit, her whistle. The boys and girls yawn, push at their hair and faces. She leads them in stretching and visualizations. I pretend the boy on the other side of the room doesn’t look like Peter. I stretch as they stretch, close my eyes when they visualize and see myself walking out of the room. Selling the house. Leaving. The silliness of it cures the moment and when I open my eyes I am still smiling from it. I am in love with Bridey now, anyway.
As I stand behind Penny, I imagine telling Bridey about it, and him telling me, it’s easy. You have blondphobia. You have the irrational fear of blonds who have caused you pain and their look-alikes.
Kids, Penny says, meet your new assistant coach, Aphias Zhe.
What’s your name? I say, not hearing the first time this new apparition speaks. We are stuck in the handshake then, hands clasped.
Warden, he says, and he takes his hand back.
Nice jail you got here, I say. Penny rolls her eyes.
He’s not the new comedian, she says. That’s for sure.
They follow me, I tell myself, as I drive home. When Bridey opens the door I say nothing about this, in the manner of anyone avoiding calling the name of a ghost.
I go to Portland every two weeks on a Saturday and sit with Freddy. Bridey comes with me sometimes. Is this the reason I moved back to Maine, I ask myself, as I drive the long black road south to Portland or north to Bangor. As I head out to East Knot. As I watch Bridey move through the kitchen. I think of some of the stories I know to fill the silences of being with Freddy: a man who found out he was positive and shot himself in the head, his house rigged to burn to the ground. Another who found out his status when he collapsed from walking pneumonia, and died a few days later. I wanted to be a teacher; my namesake was a teacher, and ever since knowing that, a tiny part of me has known, I was meant to stand in front of a group of children. I love my job, my fast students, my bright swimmers. Love watching someone figure something out and then use it, watch the idea go from me to them and see how it belongs to them afterward. Not mine at all. And afterward, you can only wonder at how it happens. It doesn’t happen all the time. But when it does, it feels like this is what magic wants to be, when it grows up.
I bri
ng flowers to Freddy, cut them down and set them in a water glass by his bed. I straighten the edge of his sheet, check his vital signs. He never makes a noise while I’m there. I understand he sometimes sings. I don’t know what I’d do, if he started singing.
Afterward, I go out to Two Lights. A small state park out in Cape Elizabeth, on the water, it boasts a lighthouse and an abandoned six-story gun tower, left over from World War II. The park was never really closed when we were younger, which is to say, it was easy to break into, and we used to go out there to drink sometimes or smoke pot. The police were ordinarily an amiable bunch about it, having grown up in the area and come here to do the same things when they were our age. It was called Two Lights because Cape Elizabeth had two lighthouses, one on each side of the cape.
Here the lighthouse sits, new luxury homes around on its hillside, and down by the water, on a bedrock point, the Lobster Shack, where you can get fried seafood and steamed lobsters. At night, you can sit out on the rocks, and the lighthouse here as it sends its beam out into the night becomes a pinwheel of light, the beams reaching out across the dark water and fading as they head for the horizon. Where, as soon as the light seems to thin and vanish, it appears again, thickens and turns, into a distant pinwheel.
As I sit on the rocks and the light swings out over my head, it seems to me there is another, far, lighthouse, its arms of light reaching back to this one, though I know there isn’t, the two of them reaching for each other and never quite touching as they match each other in these huge sweeps of the sky’s night arch. It’s a trick in the sky. The light bends, somewhere out over the bay. I come here after my visits with Freddy. Here in the dark, what I see: the light, the distance, the night. And what it shows me: that even light bends. That even light is made to carry weight. And if there is a God, and he does attend to all things, if he is with even this beam of light as it heads out across the Atlantic into the night to warn distant sailors of danger, then the place he touches it is where it bends, where it disappears for a while, because that is where it needs help.
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