Gabriella was saying something should be done. Enough was enough. Someone should confront them, set them straight. Bert disagreed. “Not in a million years! Leave them alone.” He pressed the point. “That’s just the kind of person who goes off and pulls a gun. Think about it. Every night on the news you hear it, somebody goes too far. And the neighbors say, ‘Well we thought he was a little strange, but we never believed he’d do anything like that.’ Leave the crazy assholes alone, both of them. They never go past their fence, so do the same. Just keep away and stay out of it.”
“Mmm …” Annie was making little harmonizing noises, sipping her wine. It was hard to tell whether she agreed, or had moved off into another zone of thought. Annie and Gabriella are great friends, women who are raising their daughters alone and trying to take life as they find it. They are more relaxed about this than I could ever be, patient, and glad of small pleasures, managing to regard their children with constant affection and reasonable pride. Otherwise, they could not be more different. Gabriella is fiery, impatient, small and muscular, with a French passion for justice and political philosophy. Annie is calm, practical, inclined to take the world as it is.
I could feel the red wine spreading warmth down my limbs, bringing heavy relaxation after another day of sun. The talk moved on to other subjects and Gabriella began to calm down, having had her say. Maybe the wine was working on all of us. I felt it in my muscles first, sinking into the chair, my arm leaned on the table, the relaxation gradually spreading upward into my brain and tongue. Annie told of her talk that afternoon with Dennis Minsky, the tern warden. A great horned owl has been preying on the colony at High Head, wiping out over half of the chicks so far. Dennis goes down every morning to count, and every morning more chicks are gone. We said it was a shame, but what could you do? Owls, hawks, foxes, they’ve all been here forever. It’s nobody’s fault, we agreed. Than Annie called the girls in, got them to wash up after a fashion, and began slicing the cake. Phoebe was not interested in discussing her birthday. “Don’t sing,” she begged. The cake—a carrot cake—was sweet, heavy, and tasted overly nutritious. The girls sat at the far corner of the table, chewing with what I took for resentment until I realized they were practically falling asleep. Soon they were rolled into the corner where a foam mattress was laid out with an open sleeping bag over it, and a flannel sheet was spread over their unmoving bodies.
As the sun finished going down a few mosquitoes floated in through the open window. It got darker and cooler, and the mosquitoes went away. Bowen’s doesn’t have lamps, or propane for that matter—there’s too much danger of fire the way people come and go here. A battery-powered camplight on the table gave a weak yellow glow, and Annie had unpacked a candle stub whose flame glinted in a blue jar. In the dusk, talking softly now as the girls plummeted toward sleep, we heard the soft sounds of evening around us. Sand moving across sand, a gull crying overhead.
There began to be more light outside than in the room. It is the most private hour, this moment of twilight when inside and outside blend. The shadows gathering in the corners seem sheltering, safe. Nothing will come to us here, I thought. A fork scraped a plate, and on the other side of the hill a jeep gunned its engine in soft sand. Bert stood up and walked to the cupboard, filled a glass with water from a jug and drank it down. I watched his strong, confident movements. Would Roy Hunzinger really get a gun? It didn’t seem possible. The cock pheasant called from the far hill. Once, then twice again, nearer. He must be working this side of the woods as well. He keeps a large territory during mating season, nesting with several females at once, going from nest to nest. His cry was urgent, choked with need, and we laughed uneasily in its aftermath, embarrassed by its vulgar, ungainly desire.
Conversation halted, then resumed more slowly. The girls turned in their sleep, murmuring, shadows settled deeper in the corners of the shack and then the pheasant screamed, right under the window, and splintered the quiet. We all started and jerked our heads around. A flutter passed across the room, and then he screamed again, and our faces closed. Annie yawned and tipped the wine bottle over her glass, dribbling a last half inch of dusky red. Time to go.
We walked home in the ashy light, the little toads hopping away ahead of us in the tracks. The dunes were peaceful in deep twilight, a last glow of light on their crests. We walked down the middle of the road holding hands, feeling a little high, a little sleepy. Around us were small rustlings in the grass, some mouse or insect settling down. Up on the foredune a light flickered in the window of Boris Margo’s shack: someone had moved in after all.
At the bottom of the trail, where we should turn to climb up to Euphoria, we hesitated, and turned instead toward the beach. Between dunes, the beach opened before us, dusky pale sand edging the sea’s cool mirror. These days there is so much light on the world, there is almost no nighttime to balance it. Just a pocket of darkness slipped in between the days. The whole sky lay floating on the skin of the water, its pinks and violets intermingled with blue, a gleam spreading along the horizon.
Bert skipped a stone. The gulls had all gone off to roost on the western side of a dune. The terns had left their nests for the night to float offshore, leaving the owl to take what he would. A sliver of moon came forward, materializing in the sky where it had hung since afternoon. Slowly lights offshore appeared, then stars. The Big Dipper reclined out over the water at Race Point, while other stars began to show themselves singly. Behind us, Antares hung down in the southeast, a bright star, christened “not Mars”—red like the planet, but not so belligerent.
THIRTEEN
The Thicket
It’s summer now: I wonder if anything here knows. All of spring’s spendthrift energy and carnal excitement has settled down into a purposeful mode; the songbirds are full of secrets, diving in and out among the green leaves. I see a flash of wing, the flick of a tail feather, and they’re gone. Tall grasses, heavy with seed plumes, sway on the crest of the hill and rose hips fatten under the full petals. All day the southwest wind pushes at the walls, carrying a scent of hot, dry sand across the dunes. I hear a whistle, a trill of notes past the window. I step outside, and in a flurry of wings, something disappears into the brush.
Mornings, alone in the shack, I work well now. Bert is gone soon after daybreak, to crouch at the edge of the cranberry bog, chided by chickadees who interrupt their own business to investigate his doings. Feebee, they cry at first, inquiring, or a more companionable tseet, as they get used to him. Slowly the sculpture is taking shape as he goes on coiling loop over loop, fleshing out the framework of sticks with spirals of reed, making a figure in the air you can see into and through. The birds watch him curiously, and when he is gone, they fly in and out of his designs.
As for me, nobody can see what I’m doing. My hand moves over the paper, left to right; the pages close up; it’s a secret.
My writing table sits under the back window, looking straight out onto a collapsing dune overgrown with bayberry, roses, and poison ivy. This thicket is deep and green and full of life, supporting rabbits, redwings, catbirds, finches, toads and ants. A network of roots props up the hill, and the ivy weaves a thick mat over the surface: there’s no way in if you’re human size. Mice sprint along invisible trails beneath the green canopy, but underneath the leaves the earth is sand.
I start off by pacing back and forth across all six feet of floor space, opening all the windows, chewing on my pen, and staring out as the world goes on beyond me. The shack is a retreat in the center of endless space, offering just the finest separation between inside and outside, its open windows and the cracks between its boards entangling me in a continuum of light and sound. Okalee-—that’s a redwing, sounding happy, but who knows? A goldfinch darts across the hill in a dazzle of yellow, crying sweeeet, and dives into the undergrowth. Almost immediately, an invisible force drags me onto the bottom bunk, where I lie motionless, staring upward at the mesh of wires that holds up the top mattress. These wires knot and regroup
in a complex, dizzying pattern whose meaning I haven’t been able to decipher. Someday I will crack the code. Finally, after twenty minutes’ study I am able to get up and approach the table, sit down, and pull out a folder from the plastic file box. I have been working on a dozen new poems, with about twenty versions of each so far, the lines all crossed out and written over. There is an archaeological quality to the levels of revision here, descending strata of evolution approaching a first cause. I read the pages over, pretending someone else, someone very wise and very famous, has written them and I have only to transcribe her message. Finally I pull out the third poem in the pile, the piece of paper which still has the most white space on it, and begin.
I read the page over twice, making mental substitutions between the typed version and my scrawled emendations, then roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter, bang out the title, skip down five more spaces and retype the first line. Seven words, mostly good ones. Then the invisible force compels me to get up and turn on the radio. WOMR has the fishing report this morning and I listen thoughtfully to predictions of bluefish past Chatham Bars, bass running, “schoolies,” out at Herring Cove, and somebody in Falmouth who’s spotted a killer whale. I’m sure I can use this somewhere, and I conscientiously record the information in my journal, feeling virtuous and field-worthy. The naturalist at work, always alert to hints and signs. While I’m writing this down the reception starts to get fuzzy so I fiddle a bit with the antenna, aiming it toward Boston, then Truro, but it’s no use, the batteries are low. I consider breaking out a new pack of Duracells, but switch it off instead and sit back down. I cross out the title and rewrite it, add a second line to the first, stare at it a while, and get up to make a cup of tea. This takes some time because I’ve filled the kettle up with a half gallon of cold pump water, and the little flame from the gas range puffs and sputters under its massive stainless steel load. It’s no use sitting down until it boils, I tell myself. I’d no sooner get started then I’d have to get up again and lose my entire train of thought. While that train sits derailed somewhere in Iowa, I decide to make a great pot of tea in order to justify the effort expended. While the kettle heats, I strip the tags from a half dozen tea bags and lay out my fortunes in a row. “The noblest revenge is forgiveness.” “Stay awake to make your dreams come true.” And (my favorite today): “A gem is not polished without rubbing.”
I ask myself: is this stuff lame or what? Do they PAY someone to make up these things? I think it must be ridiculously easy, and then I think: is this guy a WRITER? How much does he make, is he paid by the hour or by the fortune and could I get his job? What fortunes I would write, secure in the anonymity of the Salada Tea Company, each message folded inside a little paper pouch, softly scented with oolong and orange pekoe, dried leaves from the Orient. I could bring real intrigue to the art. Imagine the customer’s face after dinner, his destiny in my hands, reading real omens, not advice: “Beware a dark woman with a shady past.” “There is a killer in the room beside you.”
The tea looks like swamp water. The overload of iron from the pump yields a greyish, streaky brew, like liquid aluminum. I add sugar and stand gazing out the window. Waves turn over down on the beach, and a cricket begins cheerfully scraping his wings in the high grass. What language is that? A herring gull lets loose his gargly cry, flying over, followed by a long huoh, huoh, huoh. I sit back down and stare at the page. Scratched over, rewritten, crossed out, the writing looks abstract, the words strange and foreign. I’m following something I can’t see clearly, led on by hints and whispers, alert to every movement up ahead, where small lives hide themselves among the leaves. Teased forward, I lean toward a cry, a voice, three notes of song, ready to leave my body and fly after.
Where did the goldfinch go when he sliced through that wall of green and disappeared? I heard him ratchet in the leaves, and then no sign. The brush has grown thick and ivy trails across the path, closing up before me.
I return to what I’ve written, insert another word in the margin, trying to find my way through the maze. There is sense here, order beneath the confusion. Here. No. Not yet. Calm down, go slow, take it line by line, or word by word if need be. As my teabag says: “A gem is not polished without rubbing.”
And rub I do. I write for a good hour—a patient, craftsmanlike hour, during which I forget for whole moments that at my age Eliot was already putting the finishing touches on The Waste Land, and just do the work. Version twenty-one seems less intimidating than version twenty; it’s simpler, more willing to say something, even if it gets it wrong. Now it resembles an actual draft of a poem rather than a botched translation of the Dead Sea scrolls. It’s a good morning’s work, an hour of struggle and accomplishment, marking countless small victories over sloth, disorder, and self-doubt.
When I raise my head I’m astonished to find the world is still here. Sunlight lies in stripes across the tabletop, the pattern moving slowly at an angle, and a spider the size of a semicolon crawls over the screen.
Beyond the window, time speeds up in a flurry of bird song and a clash of wings. Flies swarm against the south wall where the full sun makes a tropics on the boards. A fleet of tree swallows is bombarding the side of the shack, picking the sleepy, sun-dazzled flies right out of the air. They dive and swoop at the wall, brushing past each other with eager wings and open mouths. Between the thumps and twitters of the feeding swallows, a catbird is practicing a new melody in the thicket. Three short notes and a trill, followed by a series of chirps and whistles. He pops his head up from the underbrush, tries a few measures, discards them and starts over. It seemed a good beginning to me, but he’s dissatisfied. Such are the exigencies of art, teased along, coaxed into being, forever unsatisfactory. He gives one cry, breaks off, and disappears. I hear him rustle the leaves, and then nothing, though I sit very still and listen. If he calls again, I will go after him.
July
Nature is always the artist’s best source of inspiration, but in its spiritual, not physical sense. In nature every object exists in relationship to other things. This is what we must seek.
—HANS HOFFMAN,
The Hoffman School of Art, Provincetown
FOURTEEN
Beach Days
In the afternoon, after lunch and a long rest in the cool shade of the shack, working or writing letters, when we’ve put down our books and the noon glare relents, in the afternoon, say two or even three o’clock, we go to the beach. We may walk along the shore in the mornings, picking up beach wrack, maybe playing at the edge of the waves, but then we remain in command of ourselves, in motion, and with some active connection to intelligence. Afternoons we just lie down. We spread towels the length of our bodies and stretch ourselves along them, flat to the ground, stunned under skylights, as we surrender flesh, blood, and brain cells to the wash and roar, the malleable sand and changing sky, the glaze of water breaking and skimming across the flat sand.
The sky is hazy; the old bedspread molds under my weight, shaping the sand in woman-shaped hills and valleys, making a negative print. I lie with my belly on the sand and surrender to physical bliss. First the long muscles let go; the body falls into the earth in parts and by increments: a shoulder releases, a hip, and the pelvic girdle unlocks, spilling soft, trusting organs downward. Intestines unknot to lie against the earth; I feel the pleasure of my spleen and liver as the sun warms through to deepest organs, a deep sigh in my diaphragm releasing. Emotions flow through my relaxed muscles and humming nerves.
The sun, just crossed over from Asia, is doing its own Turkish massage, heating the small of my back, probing between my shoulder blades to unroot a knotted tendon, melting the little bones of my neck like syrup. My legs lengthen as the hip joints unlock. My face goes calm and slack and I gaze like a serpent, dimly aware, a single gaze of this and then this, threaded through slitted eyes.
Looking, staring, because there is nothing to see, because you can only see a single thing, and then another. A sanderling chases the water’s
edge in a state of continuous panic, cloud shadows float across the sand, and something dark out there caught in the second tier of waves turns over and over, thrown to shore and hauled back: a log, a rubber tube, a dead shark. A dune tour bumps down the beach, swaying in the deep ruts of other jeep tracks, and passes slowly; I raise one arm to wave to them. Our first summer here we snubbed the tourists, but we’re over that now. When I turn over, millions of grains of sand stick to my thighs, covering me with a new carapace, a skin of sand, ivory and brown with black flecks and orange ones and grey, all glistening with oil.
Looking, listening, unguarded, I float in that aptly named “oceanic state,” in which prayer, meditation, and genius are one. “Genius,” declared the inventor Edwin Land, “is nothing more than a momentary cessation of stupidity.” Thoughts and feelings previously unrelated have time to interact and group themselves into new formations. This state requires an ability to submit, a feeling of safety in which the mind is free to detach a little from immediate concerns, best accomplished where there are no lions about. Most of all it requires time. Two ends curving around to meet one another, the beginning meeting the end. Giving up control, I submit to the sun, its slow hours marking a passage across the prehistoric sky.
Bert stretches and hauls himself from the sand to saunter down to the water; I close my eyes and sink deeper. I might lie here forever in this relaxed, druggy state, sweating under blue clouds, the sea birds fluttering and swooping overhead. The pound of the surf surges through me; I slide my hands under the sand, wallow, make hollows for my knees and elbows, heap up a pillow for my head, swimming in a bliss as mild as bread dough. I’m slung out like a slab of fish, delirious, serene, stippled and sun-anointed. Look at the cool cool water lathering up the beach, waves turning and shaping, scrubbing the world up into a glare and shine.
The Salt House Page 8