by Daniel Stern
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “But there are other diversions.”
“Jay who?”
“Gordon.”
“Hello, Jay Gordon. I’m Elly Kaufman.”
“Oh, yes. Alec’s niece from Indiana.”
“What a horrible thing to say to anyone! Why won’t you play?”
Jay looked at her. What is this? he thought. I haven’t seen them like this for a long time. Her face was flushed, her skirt was a little grimy at the corners. She seemed a temporary visitation. The people around her belonged where they were so apparently, while she was quite transient.
“I don’t play in public any more.”
“I’ll pay you.” She laughed.
“Not even for pay. But you’re very generous. How long are you here for? Alec didn’t mention that you were coming.”
“That’s a long story. Who are all these people? Actors like Alec?”
“Mostly, but not all. I think we’re all going to the beach.”
“Then play something for me before we go.”
Jay realized, as if he were observing someone else, that he had been considering, for an instant, complying with her request. Seeing this, he immediately decided to play. What the hell, he thought, if I hesitated, I must have wanted to play for this little beauty.
“What shall I play?” Jay asked, seating himself at the piano and automatically fluffing out the nonexistent coattails of a suit of tails which had its existence only in the past.
“Oh, play something with thick textures. Something with lots of levels, plenty of big chords. Brahms, I guess.”
He began to play the Brahms intermezzo that Annette had asked for earlier that evening. He played the dynamics a shade softer, hoping no one would listen but her, and that no crowd would gather around the piano, making him live a lie, play a part himself, a ghost of Jay Gordon, acting like the pianist he had been. They did, though, come to listen.
In the kitchen Alec was surprised to hear the music and, poking his head through the doorway, he saw Elly standing near the piano and thought, I wonder if she asked him to play. He noticed that her clothes were pretty rumpled and not too clean.
“Ann,” he called, “could you let Elly have a dress to wear to the beach?”
“Okay. Although she might rather wear a skirt and one of your shirts. After all she is a college girl.”
“Would you ask her?”
“All right.”
While listening to the music, Elly glanced over the piano and saw there the painting of a girl in a forest. She liked it. It had a poignant quality, she thought, the feeling of the girl deep sunken in the forest, almost imprisoned. It would have been even more touching had it been a small boy, she thought.
When the music was over there was a ripple of applause which Jay did not acknowledge. He stared at his hands which rested on the keys like two dead things which had so lately been alive.
Annette touched Elly. “How about changing clothes before we go to the beach?”
“Good,” Elly replied. “People are always asking me when I’m going to change.” She glanced at Jay to see if he had heard this last but he gave no indication.
Annette had lovely clothes and Elly enjoyed choosing among them. They were not Elly’s usual kind of clothes. She was not, in spite of being a “college girl,” the shirt-wearing kind. She liked flimsy, light stuffs, even in the winter. This closet was full of dark brown or rust-colored skirts of heavy, rough material and of dresses which clung to the figure or fell straight down. Elly loved wide quilted skirts that would leave her legs at a moment’s notice to act as a flag behind her.
On an impulse she donned one of Annette’s leotards and then, losing her nerve, put on a long brown dress which tied at the waist. She rode in the car with Alec, Annette, the Rich boy and Jay Gordon. Annette and Jay sang a few folk songs but Elly and Alec were silent. She looked up at the sky and saw that it was mainly a moon evening with dots of stars at the outer edges of the sky.
At the beach Elly carried the bags of marshmallows, marveling at the fact that she had left snow behind her just a day ago and here the breeze seemed almost tropical. When they were close to the water Elly dropped the bags to the sand and stood by the shore. The moon was behind a cloud and at first she was rather disappointed by her first glimpse of the sea. It seemed only like a vast turmoil, indefinite, possessing only a hint of the excitement she had expected. But then the moon reappeared and the wind-crested sea was lighted so that she could see the whitecaps roll in the surf and far out beyond the last buoy, a presence, the sea itself, always moving. She held her breath and thought, Doesn’t it ever stop? Is this the final pulse that keeps us moving?
They had a fire going and bundles of little sticks were broken open and the marshmallows impaled upon them. Elly ran back and pitched in with the others. She watched Alec organize the operation with smooth efficiency and thought about how wonderful he was and how glad she was she had come. Jay, standing next to her, dropped his marshmallow and she swooped down and scooped it up, laughing.
“Clumsy!”
He smiled, more friendly than he had yet been and said, “I am.”
“I meant to thank you for the Brahms. It was lovely.” Thinking she had never met a man who seemed to need reassurance so much.
“That’s all right. I’m glad somebody liked it. I’m out of condition. That was the first time I’d played that particular intermezzo in a year.”
She shoved a hot, sticky marshmallow into her mouth and said, “People like you never get really out of condition, do they?”
He yawned and looked at the blue-black sky touched with orange by the fire. “If we don’t we certainly seem to.”
He had a smear of blackened marshmallow at the corner of his mouth and he looked, to Elly, much more human and approachable. They strolled away from the uncomfortable closeness of the fire’s heat. Elly stopped and removed her shoes, shaking sand from them. She remained barefoot.
“People in trouble ought to come to the beach, always,” she said and, turning to him, added, “I’ve been in trouble.”
“How many people here do you think there are that haven’t?” Jay asked.
“Oh, but I mean lately. Still, practically.” She was listening to the far-off whoosh of the waves, listening a little too carefully, as if they might have something to tell her. Some of the people were going swimming; Elly could see their heads washed by moonlight, bobbing in the suds of the breaking wavelets. Here near the end of land, she could almost feel the earth spinning beneath her feet, as if her feet were spurs and the sandy earth a great horse, responsive to her steps. Behind her, in a blur of dark-voices, she heard Alec’s rasping speech, but could decipher no words. It was as if when he spoke to others she could not understand.
“Cigarette?” Jay offered. “What kind of trouble? Bad trouble?”
She nodded. “Bad enough. I’m supposed to be out of the trouble now, but I know better.”
Rich and his pregnant wife strolled past them and he waved at Elly and called something. Elly waved back and said softly, “Screw you!”
Jay grinned. “Has he been giving you a hard time?”
She nodded. “He’s a drag. There’s something about the way he wanted to make me that turned my stomach.”
“Maybe the pregnant wife?”
“I didn’t know about that until just now.” There it was again, the long whoooosh. In the wetness of the sound, there was some message for her. This had never happened before—this promise of messages, of information from something like the sea. Of course she’d never seen nor heard the sea before, except in movies. She wondered for a moment if she should mention it to this so-much-taller-than-her stranger at her side. She did not.
“I’m not going to rise to the bait,” he was saying. “I’m not going to ask you what the trouble was. It was probably something to do with a man.”
“What makes you say that, Jay Gordon?”
“Because you’re beautiful.” Now what
had made him say that? He hadn’t known he was going to until the instant before the utterance.
Why was it always older men who told her she was beautiful? Elly wondered. “You know,” she said, “the last man who told me that was a great architect. I hope you’re a great musician.”
“The word has been used in reference to me by certain obscure music critics in even more obscure towns. Who was he?”
Elly paused, calculating her timing, and then said, “John Marron Lang.”
What was this kid doing with Lang? “Really!” Jay exclaimed. “That’s like being hung in a museum.”
“He built our house outside of Colchester, Indiana,” Elly blurted, losing her sense of timing in a spurt of enthusiasm, and then paused. Well, he’s impressed enough, she thought.
“Oh? You’re right about coming here when you’re in trouble. I’ve always lived near a river and I know how helpful water can be. But it was man trouble, wasn’t it?” But his mind was not on the question he was putting to her. He was wondering: Why did I play for this girl, when I have refused everyone from my sister on down for a year? And I didn’t feel too badly afterward. Why am I walking along the beach with her now, and feeling rather contented, knowing that the stinking tour starts again when we leave here in three days. There was an accepting quality about her; he had the feeling that there was nothing too awful, no failure too great for her to encompass with a toss of that loose head of hair.
Across the beach, farther away from the water’s edge, a question nibbled insistently at a corner of Annette’s consciousness as she mopped her face with a handkerchief and moved away from the circle around the fire. What was it about Alec’s niece, Elly, that put life in him, in an odd sort of way, that seemed temporarily to resolve his conflicts (although, of course, objectively nothing had changed)? It was as if she filled out with flesh a relationship with his past, his family, that at other times was ghostly, at other times was only the signature on the check in the small, cramped hand, Max Kaufman. She didn’t like it. It made her guilty of keeping that relationship ghostly. Alec had not gone home since they had begun living together. But perhaps she was confusing it all. Maybe it was Elly, and only Elly, with whom Alec made contact in his family. It all made her feel suddenly like a stranger, after she and Alec had been so good together and she was slowly working on him to break the dependency on his brother. She determined to make him take her home with him for their holidays this year. She refused to feel like a criminal. She glanced over at Alec, shaking the sand from glasses and laughing with some people Annette did not know. How good he is with and for people! she thought. That’s pretty rare out here.
What have I done to her? Alec was thinking, flicking his glance away from where Elly strolled with Jay. What have we done to her? The fact that she came to me when she was in trouble is the biggest indictment of all. She thinks I got away and she’s to follow my example in whatever strange ways she can think up. And I told her: Find your own kind. Since she was a little kid I saw it. Nothing ever satisfied her. Even I am closer to Rose and Max than she is. She fought so damned hard to get away and now she has to go back. I wonder what this seems like to her. Probably like the promised land. Uncle Alec’s life, the dream-world, seeing nothing of the insubstantial foundation, the sudden fear that the kind of life led has been exposed in all its evanescence, because somebody breaks into your house and takes nothing. Of course, there was nothing in his and Annette’s life to take except some very shaky hopes. He would have to talk to Elly. But what was there to say? Don’t sleep with men. Don’t get knocked up again. Don’t try to escape whatever it is you feel holds you—the family, being a young girl in the world. Give in. Accept…. But could he tell her any of that until he had done it himself? And wouldn’t she know he had no right to say it?
“… And it began to rain and it was the craziest sensation as if the whole forest had gone mad and we didn’t stop—I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” Elly said to Jay, thinking, Maybe it won’t be too bad. The house is wonderful—to live inside glass again—but now it’s different. Now I’m stuck. Before, it was a bunch of windows on the world. Now the door is closed and the farthest I can see is down the hill—I wonder if the filling station is still there—and to Crofts and the same faces, just another girl in the classroom, and no dancing.
“Because you want to tell someone,” Jay was saying. “I don’t blame you. It sounds like a rough time—afterwards, I mean,” he added, a little embarrassed, thinking: No one has spoken to me like this since I first met Jeannie. It’s as if I were to say, blurting it out in one breath: My wife divorced me because I had no future and I gave up what future I had and now that it’s over with her I find she’s right I have no future and very little present and I haven’t enjoyed sleeping with a woman since her or talking with a woman until you.
But he said nothing, feeling a sudden gust of wetness in the face. I really should notice things more often, like whether a breeze is wet or dry. I really should. I must keep my mind and sensations alive in case I should ever have to use them again.
“You’re easy to talk to,” Elly said.
“I guess we both are, then.”
Annette waited until there was no one near Alec for a moment.
“Al,” she said.
He kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Hi. What’s up?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What for?”
“The business about the money. It’s your decision to make. I shouldn’t push you.”
“It’s not so much that you shouldn’t, but that it doesn’t seem to work too well with me. I’m just not pushable. I’ll have to work it out somehow. But don’t you start feeling guilty. You’ve got a stake in the whole business. You’re my wife.”
“Am I?”
“Aren’t you?”
Elly was alone now, Jay having gone off to get some sandwiches for them, and she was angry at herself for having told a stranger so much. Far off, close under the horizon, there was what seemed to be a ship, but she couldn’t be sure. It distracted her from her attempt to decipher whatever it was the sea was trying to tell her. Won’t it ever end? Ah, if one could stop the sea! But then it would be a lake, like Lake Crescent, where they used to spend their summers. She envisioned the entire ocean lying still under the moonlight, but it became unreal, awful. Better any kind of movement, even the idiot ceaseless beating of wave on shore, rather than the silent lake-death.
“Where’s Jay?” Alec asked.
“Oh, you scared me! He went to get some food. This is so lovely. I’m almost glad everything happened so that I could come out here.”
“Well, in any case, it’s good to see you.”
She took one of his swinging hands and studied the sharply protruding bones. “Alec, we’re different from other people, aren’t we?”
“How do you mean, baby?” (Here it came. This was his work.)
“Oh, I don’t know exactly. The way we don’t accept what’s around us, like Roz, or Lois at school or Mom and Dad, Charlotte, everybody. The way you’ve always been running off since I was a little girl, coming home mostly on holidays—there’s always a quality of going, of out-away that I have too. I knew it before I went to school and I knew it when I got there and I know it now and the—” She stopped short; she had almost begun to tell him that this was what the sea was trying to tell her with its long whooooosh in her ears.
“We’re not that different. I’ve been a little slow in adjusting, that’s all. Believe me, I’m looking forward to settling down and having a family and all the rest of it I never cared for.”
“Yes. But you’ve had the journey, haven’t you? You’ve been somewhere, haven’t you?”
“I don’t really know. You’ve got to slow down, Elly. Take it easy and let things run their course. I’m not being very clear, I know. Well, look, there’s a line in this play we did last month—I played the father, an old man, and I had this line—I think you’ll understand it. To li
ve, I said, is to exist always on the brink of freedom. That’s something important to learn.”
She nodded slowly. “And you told it to me on the brink of the ocean.” Perhaps that’s what the message was: that the brink of the ocean was the brink of freedom. But what did that mean? Death by drowning or across to new places?
“You see what I mean. Annette and I have a long way to go for any kind of freedom, and we may never get it at all.”
“Yeah. I want you to marry that girl, Alec. I like her. Are you definitely going to marry her?”
“Yes, honey.”
“When?”
“Soon,” he lied. “Anyway, try and make it easy for yourself and Mom and Dad at home, as much as I know you hate being there. Right now there’s nothing you can do. It won’t be so bad.”
“Will you come for the holidays this year like you used to?”
“Yes, I’ll show up. Here comes Jay…. What’s the matter?”
“Mrs. Rich is ill,” Jay said breathlessly.
“It’s not a miscarriage, is it?” Alec asked. “Did she fall?”
“No, she’s just ill. We’d better go.”
Jay reached, surprising himself, for Elly’s hand, as they started to leave. She let him take it and then after running a few steps she slipped her hand out and said, “I’ll be right along,” and turned away from where she could see them all clustered around the prostrate woman on the sand. That was one thing she’d been spared. The swollen belly, the sickness and danger of accidents. She ran, slipping a little in the sand, over a near-by dune so as to be entirely out of sight. She went ever farther to make sure no one could see her. Her back to the sea for a moment, she could see the lights beyond the low cliffs that rimmed the beach.
This was the Pacific Ocean she was turning back to at this moment, and in a few days she would be on the shore of the Atlantic. Fantastic. Two oceans in a few days. How could she feel nothing for Danny except hatred for him as the instrument of her forced return? And what did she feel for Lang, the other man, the first man? She didn’t know, except she wished she was with him right then, to love in the sand. Alec was wrong—they were so different from the others.