by David Downie
Beverley had agreed to meet me in the lower parking area, and she kept her word, dragging an outdoor extension cord from one of the abandoned cottages. Unfortunately, it was not long enough. I assured her that was all right, like her, I had a generator. We could, I told her, buy a longer extension cord tomorrow, or plug in another one to cover the last ten feet. I wanted to go to the hardware store anyway. When I was growing up, Alioto’s was my favorite store in town. Does it still exist?
She was also concerned about my water supply and began a long-winded explanation of how she knew how much water I had remaining in my tanks, and how that in turn had led her to make serendipitous discoveries in town about my need to do laundry, and so on. She is exhaustingly garrulous and a magpie for details. I admit she has first-rate powers of observation. I was being truthful when I said I would have been glad to have her as a researcher.
This comment of mine was, I gather, the real reason she said this afternoon that she would have hired me despite the bogus “revelations” about my misdeeds, which were not misdeeds and never occurred, in any case. My judgment may have been deficient. I reacted emotionally and was not coolheaded enough to cover my tracks. So, my good deeds were uncovered, and I was identified as the author. No good deed goes unpunished, they say. Moral turpitude has become the norm. The unclean are tarring the cleanup crew. Who could have imagined the extent and depth of the changes that were on the way? Once upon a time we spoke of mob rule, meaning a form of populism and the tyranny of the majority. Now what we have is the Mob that rules, as in mobsters.
With luck, Beverley will not broadcast my presence or mention my name to her guests or the locals. I wonder how she can resist the temptation, especially when she plays cards with the “old bags” as she calls her friends. This is not the first time I have heard of talking or card playing as therapy. They’re right up there with laughter therapy. I prefer not to be the subject of discussion, that’s all. She has assured me she is equally capable of being “a tomb.” I like this expression and wonder where she got it.
By the time I drove the RV onto the blocks, the garden was pitch-black. Perhaps I should attempt poetry and say “buddleia black.” The blossoms of the bush so beloved of butterflies are, in the case of those on the Eden property, such a deep purple they appear black the moment the gloaming arrives. I purposely parked as close to the buddleias and ceanothus as I could, to drink in the honey scent during the night and as soon as I awaken before dawn.
Is this because we had buddleia in our garden on Five Mile Creek? It grew outside my bedroom window, a bow window with a view over the creek through panes of glass turned wavy and purplish with age. The buddleia blocked much of the sunlight, but I begged my parents not to cut it. I remember lying in bed watching the butterflies dance and twirl and spin, buffeted by the breeze. They were like the notes from a color organ, yellow and orange and blue notes, blown in the air. How could I not be happy watching the butterflies, and how could I not want to fly with them, and be as free as they were? These were secrets I could only commit to my scrapbook, not share with my parents, especially my father. The garden was my mother’s preserve, my father had no say, but there was always the risk she might reveal something about my unmanly love of butterflies. The patter of their wings on the windows when they were trapped was a torment for me until I released them, opening the window wide. That part of the garden facing my old room is no longer, from the looks of it. I think it collapsed onto the beach several years ago. I must return to the bluffs in full daylight and have a closer look.
Since I myself have never possessed a copy of my high school yearbook, and since I would never have thought of googling myself, let alone searching for such a thing, Beverley’s revelation this afternoon took me very much by surprise. Should I attempt to locate the yearbook? With Taz’s help I’m sure it can be found. But I am not sure I want to see it, or anything else about my former life here. I do not miss a computer or smartphone. It has been hygienic to live without them. I never particularly enjoyed watching television. Giving it up was not a sacrifice.
It is true that the Internet, when you are wagging it and not the other way around, can be both useful and a source of pleasure. For instance, I had forgotten about those chainsaw races. I did not remember that I had won any of them. I must have participated in several. Whoever made the comment in the yearbook might have been recalling the one I won. Was it against Harvey Murphy? I think so, another nail in the coffin of our friendship. He was a good athlete and average in most other things, but I did not take to his sadistic, vindictive side, and he was envious of me. I always thought he, too, was in love with Maggie, and her rejection of him made him even more envious. It alarms me to think he is the county sheriff now. But it doesn’t surprise me. Sooner or later I will encounter him, as Beverley says, unless I pull up stakes in the next few days. I might. It would be smart.
Tomorrow I must ask Taz to google “chainsaw races.” Do people still do them? Competing to see who could cut fastest and straightest through a foot-wide tree trunk reveals a great deal about the world I spent my formative years inhabiting, often as an outsider, a kind of Martian of those days, though my hair was never green like Taz’s, and I would never have worn a stud in my tongue. I was a reluctant conformist. Did I use my father’s Husqvarna or the Stihl, or might I have borrowed Mr. Egmont’s McCulloch? All three were powerful. Think of the noise, the stench, the destruction for no good purpose. We didn’t cut trees for firewood the way I cut them on my summer job, during my senior year. We raced, using pine logs dragged down from Big Mountain, logs left over from the first big clear-cuts on the reservation. Sometimes we used blue gum. They were too sappy to burn in a stove, but we burned them in campfires or barbecues, though I don’t remember the details.
It had not occurred to me until now, but in some ways those good old days were as destructive, mindless, and macho as today. The contrast comes from comparison with the halcyon days of the early twenty-teens. That kind of behavior was no longer thinkable. Since then, we have reverted to the 1970s if not the 1950s or the 1850s. But that is not right. Those pre-digital days, though anything but golden or innocent, were incomparably different in spirit, immeasurably freer in comparison. The first gilded age of the 1800s was an orgy of greed and violence, but it was not a police state. Coincidentally, that is when Beverley’s cypress tree was planted. It survived until this morning, shortly after dawn.
At the beginning of today’s notes, I mentioned Amy. Over lunch I spoke of her for the first time in months. Now this is the first time I have written her name in these yellow pads. Is that good or bad?
There have only been two true loves in my life, Amy and Maggie, the last and the first, with several dozen between of varying intensity. I did inventory them, and made a note of the tally, not as a boast before old age claims me but as an exercise in memory, as suggested by a smart, sensitive male therapist friend whose name I will not mention. The connection between sex and love is tenuous, that much is clear. I would need an entire yellow pad to begin exploring the topic.
Speaking of names, Amy Adams was a fine one. Even when you added her maiden name, Sasaki, between the two, it was still euphonic. There must have been some heroic, self-effacing Japanese substrate in her, though on most levels she was more than 100 percent American and did not even speak Japanese or like Japanese food.
Amy instructed me to do two things when she was gone. It feels like a betrayal to write of them here. I will do so as part of the cleansing process. “Do what you always dreamed of doing but never dared” was the first. It sounds cliché. It was simple wisdom and sincerity, two things we have great trouble dealing with as adults. The second I tried to keep her from saying, shushing her as she spoke, with tears in her eyes, and her shorn head on the pillow. “Find someone to spend your life with,” she urged, “let yourself fall in love again, and be happy.”
I have blotted this legal pad more than once. Ballpoint pens do not run, but the paper warps when it abso
rbs tears. Be happy? Who’s to say how you define happiness? In my own way, I am happy now. The prospect of seeking love is daunting after nearly three decades with the same partner, and with an aging, shriveling body and half-dead spirit. My hormones are on the wane, my fantasies and recollections waxing nostalgic. I admit, I would like to know what happened to Maggie. We would not recognize each other, almost certainly. Two years younger than I but only one year behind because she was smart and skipped a grade, she was an ethereal, translucent being with ridiculously long strawberry-blond hair and the soul of Beauty seeking the Beast. Her physical delicacy and robust appetites seemed incompatible and alarming to me at that age. It has been nearly forty years since I last saw her. The mention of that cottage, Sea Breeze, is all it took to revive her again, though in truth she has never entirely disappeared, and needs no reviving. Was it on the creaking, sagging, worn-out old mattress in Sea Breeze that we made love that first time? I think so. Mr. Egmont knew. He gave me the keys but said nothing and did not wink, only smiled to himself.
How to find her? I admit, I did search a year ago in a haphazard way, but I had no success. If Maggie is alive, she has changed her birth name, doubtless adopting her husband’s name or perhaps husbands’ names, as Beverley and Amy did. She was here during my first return from college, over Christmas, in 1977, and she was here the following summer, the summer of ’78, our summer of love. But ours was more than a summer romance. We dated for nearly three years, until college, and then life got in the way. Her parents moved at some unknown time, my parents divorced and moved in opposite directions, so that I had nowhere to land except on borrowed couches. She disappeared without leaving a forwarding address. Why?
I remember the shock I felt upon hearing that she had married the man she had taken up with after I returned to college that last summer we spent together. Professor Johnson. What was his first name? I should know it. He was our editor and friend, at least I thought he was a friend, a grown-up ten or twelve years older than we were, smart, good-looking, a spirited role model. With a search engine, I might find him. “Teacher of English at Carverville High in the mid-to-late 1970s, created the school newspaper, The Voice of Big Mountain, reportedly married one of his students, Madeleine Simpson alias Maggie, Maddie to some . . .”
Then what? Find them and their three or four children and dozen grandchildren in some suburb of Little Rock, Arkansas? That was where Professor Johnson came from, and where, I heard, he had returned when he left Carverville with Maggie. Perhaps they made it to New York City as she always said she wanted to, and perhaps they are still married. I doubt it. I’m not sure why.
It’s still hurtful to think she might have been two-timing me, carrying on with him when she and I were inseparable that summer, in August, when I knew I was incurably in love with her, and I promised to come back when I graduated so we could marry. She said I wouldn’t, and she was right, for the wrong reasons. I would have but had nothing to return to once I found out.
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, why did you forsake me? It was no juvenile infatuation but rather the divine chemistry of body and soul. Maggie was my first love. I certainly was not hers. She was too self-assured. We were too young. She was too wild. She scared me. If Maggie is alive today, she has gray or white or dyed hair and is a grandmother or a great-grandmother, unless she, like me, decided not to have children. It seems improbable. She might be a pink avocado or a giant purple pear like Beverley. If she’s healthy, what does it matter? But it’s hard to imagine those bird bones of hers buried in flesh stretched by maternity and rich food.
She probably doesn’t even remember me. If she does, she remembers a clumsy, earnest, gawky boy she initiated in a cottage or a Victorian house overlooking the sea. For her it must have meant little, but I never forgot her despite the others, and despite being in love with Amy and blissfully married to Amy forever and ever, hallelujah. Except “forever” came early, too early.
This is a betrayal. I must stop. Writing this is too painful. I am still ashamed, though I never acted upon my feelings and fantasies and never betrayed Amy. How can you be in love with two people at the same time, one of them not a person but a memory, a ghost?
Rereading his hastily written entry, James made several corrections and let the deeply scored pages of the legal pad fall back into place. They curled like the leaves of a medieval parchment. He would have to stop pressing down so hard when writing, he told himself. It gave him a cramp and made his already crabbed script harder to read.
Twisting and turning his wedding band around his finger for what he decided would be the last time, he worked it off with difficulty, weighed it in his right hand, and then taped it down to the legal pad with an adhesive. “A scrapbook,” he murmured to himself, “another one.”
Stowing the pad inside a large ziplock bag sandwiched between baking pans in the cooker, atop a stack of other scored legal pads, he stretched his aching arms and shoulders, and listened to the wind and the branches of the buddleias brushing against the RV. He had overeaten again at dinner. Air is what he needed.
Following the beam of his flashlight, James crossed the poorly lit garden uphill along the scented path leading to the lawn and office. Beverley should install night-lights and motion sensors, he told himself. How did her guests find their way in the dark once they had left the floodlit parking area? That could be another project for Taz. Then again, was it really such a good idea? Darkness did not scare him, darkness and silence were restful, the portals of enchantment, he reminded himself, and something to get used to before the final big sleep.
The mist had curled into the vegetation. The air was moist, droplets clinging to leafy tree branches and the convolutions of the creepers. In the night, he knew, the drops would swell and fall in silence to the parched soil, where surface roots would drink them in before daybreak and the first drying winds. That is how the plants survived in this rainless part of the world.
The lights in the office were on. Beverley stood by the threshold in conversation with a guest whose car idled on the far side of the deer fence. James signaled to them and then, excusing himself for interrupting, said good night, he would see Beverley in the morning. He let himself through the deer fence into the wind-lashed darkness before she could call him back.
NINE
Awake even earlier than usual, James did his ROTC stretching and muscle-building routine in deep darkness, amid the honey-sweet buddleias, listening to the surf and the animals scurrying through the underbrush. The garden’s residents were unused to his company, he told himself. The skunk was displeased. Though he had not sprayed the RV, he had made his presence known.
Red circular reflectors flared as James clicked on his flashlight and recognized the eyes of not one but three raccoons, two standing erect with paws in the air, as if ready to shake hands. Unafraid yet blinded by the light’s beam, they observed him for a full minute before sauntering away. Were these the raccoons he had heard on the RV’s roof each night in the public parking lot next door? Or had the noise come from prankster teenagers?
The bleached bonelike banisters of the staircase seemed to glow in the predawn darkness. The foghorn moaned and mooed, “mooing sea cows,” his mother had always said, hearing “cows, and wounded mermaids, and drowned sailors.” The mist hung above him in the tops of the cypress and eucalyptus trees. A new moon shone bright enough that he did not need his flashlight as he descended to the beach, the surf pounding. Breaking with habit again, on the spur of the moment, he began walking south toward the mouth of the Yono River. It was usually his afternoon route.
The beach and bluffs looked different in the shrouded darkness. The breakers were even higher than they had been the previous day. He was forced to stay close to the cliffs and meander through the forest of totem pole pinnacles of stone calved from the steep escarpments, his feet alternately sinking into loose sand or sliding on decomposed shale.
Since meeting Beverley, he had failed to take his afternoon walk, a four-mile round-t
rip indistinguishable along most of its straight length from the beach that continued north as far as the Headlands. When added to the six-mile round-trip he did each morning, it brought him to his daily ten-mile total. Though segmented in a different order, it was the same route he had run every morning before dawn when a student at Carverville High, five miles up, five back. Forty years later, he could no longer run that far or that fast, but he had to walk. It was a psycho-physical necessity. Anything shorter than ten miles meant unsound sleep.
After resigning from the legal partnership, stepping down from the bench, then leaving the boards and, finally, roving the country in an RV, he had become a stickler about walking. Gardening at the Eden Resort also provided plenty of good exercise. He anticipated another session with Beverley and Taz later. Nonetheless, when he neared the end of the beach and saw the navigational channel and the concrete walls of the Yono embankment ahead, he did not turn back. Lacing up his uncomfortable new boots and feeling himself pushed inland with the crying seagulls by a powerful wind, he followed the paved bike path upstream a mile or more along the estuary, passing under a towering wooden trestle bridge, until he reached Yono Harbor. Until now, he had not possessed the psychological strength to revisit the harbor, afraid to see what had become of it.
Infrastructure projects had transformed South Carverville, but the estuary still curled like a giant question mark in the Yono River Valley. From the 1800s until the late twentieth century, this had been the historic nucleus of Carverville’s fishing industry. One of a dozen fisherman’s shacks, and a single warehouse, had been preserved, James observed, at least their facades had. Rising out of the windblown river mist, the bleached gray clapboard exteriors were now false fronts on postmodern glass and steel structures, surrounded by parking lots, empty at this hour except for the gulls and resident crows. The remnant shack housed a café–restaurant, The Yono Coho, its terrace spilling along the old pier. The inevitable chocolate factory, candle works, and souvenir shops filled the shell of the old warehouse.