The Salt House

by Cynthia Huntington

  Clearing up, I steal a last bite from the side of the plate, swab my bread crust in the bowl. As we stack the dishes, shaking crumbs for the birds out the door, I feel at my back the growing lure of red plush covers stretched smooth across the bunks. I think I might lie down for just a minute, sinking on to the mattress, stretch out long and easy… Then I’m being scooted toward the edge as Bert climbs in after me, taking all the space so I have to press back against him or be flattened against the wall. It is, he reminds me, his bed. Our two bodies mold into a space meant for one. Staring up at the underside of the top bunk, tracing its maze of coils and knots and interlocking wires, I feel perplexed, unable to follow the pattern. I close my eyes. Everything is quiet, my head on his chest, his heart beating against my ear, our soft breaths rising and falling, familiar rhythm. Rub my back. Yes. The world stops. Endless time and we’re in it, smack in the middle. One-thirty, two o’clock.

  We lie together in the bunk and the sun glares on the windows, so far away. The room is dim, green in cave-light, our skin is cool and smooth; my fingers find their way up and down his chest, the soft curling hairs, up his neck, touching lazy, and his hand begins stroking me in slow long waves, a soothing motion accelerating with subversive intent. His hand snakes inside my robe and pulls to loosen the knot. He runs his open palm up my body and the fine hairs on my thighs and flanks drag against the grain, a friction that makes me shiver a little, raising my flesh in little bumps; he is leaning over me, supporting himself on one arm and with the other stroking gently, insistent, waking up every nerve ending and then I am pulling him closer and all the alive nerves in my skin are touching his skin, our bodies meeting along their whole lengths: leg, belly, forearm, breast. I move against him to feel his weight pressing down. Where touch goes blood follows, flows toward the feeling spot and floods it with sensation. A kiss drinking the body of the other: how many nerve endings in a tongue, tasting, licking, taking the breath—this is play, so easy, and then it shifts, every time it shifts, turns perilous and meaningful; our hearts race, breaths quicken, we open and swell and grip one another hard, fasten ourselves. Beneath the quiet face of desire lies starkest need; grown men and women will beg: don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop… or even pray, oh God. And then lie breathing softly, not a space between their two bodies.

  Meanwhile time passed and we served nothing and no one and the world went on without us. We entered, separately and together, a dedicated space, giving the world the slip, to join our bodies and breath. For nothing, for just the way it feels. This freedom, this thoroughly private zone of pleasure, threatens the order of nations: every society tries to contain it, wanting to know what, where, and with whom. Refusing to account to church or state, desire presses up—we find countless ways to elude jurisdiction.

  When I was younger I used to count the times I’d “done it.” Then I lost track. Maybe two hundred—three?—times a year? In a lifetime, what? More than ten thousand? What is the national average—does anybody keep records of these things? Yet we do it over and over; nearly everybody does, everybody more or less the same, the same repertoire of nerves and membranes. And for nothing. For pleasure. And because we do the world goes on and there are people in the world to do it, the whole world losing count, not numbering its own delight.

  I lie here growing drowsy, warm, thinking this, imagining, for every person on earth, at least one instance when two someones let go of time and turned aside into their private space, thinking nothing of the world. The sweetness of that which is done for nothing, in the fullness of summer, in the late afternoon. I fall asleep with the sun on the windows, thinking this, satisfied as if something had been accomplished after all.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Sitting Down to Supper

  The afternoon grows late, and I begin to think of supper. There will be no surprises. Everything must be carried here on our backs, saved and afforded space on the narrow shelf over the west window or stuffed inside the small, ancient camp refrigerator, if it is working this week. There is what there is—everything visible at a glance, no surprises or last minute change of menu. We eat very well.

  Today the larder is low—it’s time for a trip to the dreaded A&P. Poorly stocked and overpriced, with narrow aisles, the summer crowds contending with increasingly hostile locals, all the employees fed up by July, the A&P is a dose of an alternate reality we try to deny from our privileged position two miles out of town.

  Four o’clock: rice rattles in the bottom of the jar and other ready ingredients seem to consist of salt. Three days of heat have defeated the powers of the little fridge and yesterday we finished off wilting lettuce, brown-spotted pears, and a precious square of cheddar edged with mold. As ever when in doubt I set beans to boil, and slowly, around this homely nucleus, a meal begins to constellate, drawing bits and pieces to itself, and ordering each in relation to some slowly revealed whole. My friend Patricia Greene instructed me in the Spanish way to “punish the beans” —quicker than soaking, with the same effect. You boil them fast and hard for ten minutes and then plunge them into cold water, then simmer again. This weakens their internal structure, and apparently so confuses them that they just fall apart, entirely compromised, their self-image shot straight to hell.

  Five o’clock, and the beans are cooking, dissolving into a broth helped along by a half teaspoon of olive oil coaxed from the seeming-empty bottle, some garlic and pepper. Rice steams secretly under its lid and the smell of what is becoming food lifts into the air, gathering strength in the shadows. Perhaps steam permeates the walls and releases old odors of meals—a memory held inside the wood, mixtures of spices and fat—or is this really grown so rich, just beans with oil, garlic and pepper, the actual faint smell of rice cooking?

  I have a carrot and an onion. I’m chopping the onion three times—giving small chunks to the brown, softening beans, and hoarding raw slivers to sprinkle over them later, and I am shaving off translucent half circles to scorch in a hot skillet with the carrot. Liquor of onion is on my hands, sweet and pungent, leaching into the cutting board, shining on the knife blade. Each new surface releases flavors and essential juices. The fat, aging carrot turns to strips of gold, curling slightly at the ends as the knife finds surfaces within surfaces, exposing layer after layer, grain within grain, to release, from this compressed, dark root, mounds of gleaming orange shards. At the last minute they will tumble into the hot frying pan, along with crescents of onion, and, quickly stirred in hot oil, pile onto the sticky plain mound of rice. We will sit side by side on the bench before the window, substantial with our meal, its pleasures plain and full, eat everything, drink cool water from a cup, and wish for no more.

  Other nights we sit down with friends who arrive late, bearing news and bottles of wine, who come out for the beach and stay for supper. They bring us treats from town: newspapers and peaches, cold beers, fresh gossip. Ken and Harriet showed up three days ago, by surprise of course; every visit in the dunes is a surprise. They brought fish and wine, and were followed, within the half hour, by our friend Roger, who surprised us all even further by bringing nothing. The fish—a fine slab of cod—was firm, dense and white; it flaked off in layers when it was well cooked, and I fried up potatoes in the big cast-iron pan. We cooled the wine in a bucket of pump water and drank from little cups, and ate and talked, sitting out on the hill under the weathervane. The taste of fish on my tongue, sweet, with a spray of lemon, and our friends’ names on our lips—we took the last half loaf of bread, cut off the stale crusts and dipped it into the buttery sauce and ate until the wind came up, driving sand into our plates, and then we moved inside. Five of us disposed ourselves around the cabin, two on the bench, backs to the table, plates on their laps, one on the bottom bunk, two of us cross-legged on the floor. I served seconds from the corner by the stove, and we argued loudly over someone we all knew in town, waving our forks in the air, our faces flushed with the day’s sun. Afterwards we piled up the plates and went out to watch the sunset from the
hill. The dunes were turning deep gold as the sun rolled down the side of the earth. We sat with our legs drawn up to our chests as the great ball lowered and flattened itself along the horizon, squeezing out light, turning the clouds pink and blue.

  “Look at the grass,” Bert said suddenly, pointing down the hill, and at that instant the grasses turned silver along their entire lengths, a platinum overexposure, dancing like photographic ghosts, as the long rays of sun slid up the hill, lighting them from beneath. Spears of translucent color bands raced along each stem and blade—red and purple and yellowish green glinting as the sun went down in a big red lump, melting into hill and water. Moments later it sent up a dusky afterglow, thinning to streaks of pink, and a pulsing bank of sullen embers.

  Ken poured out the last of the wine, and we sat and waited for the second sunset that always comes just when you think the sunset is over, when it returns and stretches along the horizon, diffuse and somber, and deeper than any color you have seen there before. This second sunset, this echo of sunset, spread around the horizon, growing darker, and then the first stars began to appear. We turned the wine bottle upside down in the sand and it hung there glinting, a jade object, waist-deep in shadow, floating clouds in its giant fish-eye, until it too went dark like the end of a prophecy.

  And before anyone was ready they had to leave to find their way home across the dunes while there was still some light. Bert and I watched from the hill until they were out of sight; then we went inside and lit the lamps and heated water and carefully washed and dried the plates and the glasses and the silver, the big fry pan and the smaller one with bits of fish burned into its center.

  This is a story Hazel told me:

  One evening almost fifty years ago, Jack and Wally Tworkov walked out to Thalassa to eat supper with Hazel. The sun was glinting off the grass spears and smearing the windows gold as they came over the rise. Inside, they could hear Hazel moving about— from shelf to stove, water jug to dish rack—busy with preparations. Coming around the side of the shack, they passed the west window and peeked in: the room was filled with rainbows! Hazel was moving in colored bands of light that danced on the glasses, and glinted and leaped at the walls. Jack and Wally came inside, exclaiming, and when she turned to look the rainbows danced faster, and they were thrown from the glass beads she was wearing with her summer dress that night. It was only a brief time that the sun came in the windows at just such an angle to turn glass beads into prisms, and for a little while they all sat together, talking as supper cooked, and red and green and blue bursts of light rose and fell with her movements, fading slowly as the sun went down behind the west window and all the colors died.

  Stories of summer endure. We all sat together one winter night looking at pictures. Hazel recalled an evening sixty-five years before, when she sat on the town beach while the moon rose, and listened to laughter floating from high windows, coming from a party at Eugene O’Neill’s. She was sixteen and her mother would not allow her to attend the wild “carousels” of the writer and his friends, but she was a little wild too, and pretty, and full of wanting, and the sounds of that party filled her with a longing two-thirds of a century has not taken from her voice as she tells it, turning pages of an album with hands that tremble. They are all dead now, she said. They had many parties, and in later years she would go, but that is the only one she really remembers.

  They talked of later summers, when the artists came and galleries began to open along Commercial Street. One summer everyone’s marriage broke up. Jack tried to remember whether he had known Hazel then. “I had a red beard,” he said, and she nodded doubtfully. They recalled a woman they both knew, the summer temptress of that year. She drove all the men crazy, a mysterious, sylph-like creature, older than the rest of them, with a rich husband back in Philadelphia. What was her name? No one remembers. “I was a little in love with her myself,” Jack confessed. “What kind of expression is that, a little in love?” Wally demanded to know.

  We sat listening to the old people talk. Someone should remember all this, the bits of history, the stories we’re sure to get wrong when we try to tell them again. But I am too moved to take them as history, to try to store them up. I think of my own memories of summer, of summer turning into the past, and of time passing. It’s winter and the wind huffs and coughs in the chimney and as we sit there I can feel this evening already going away, hear the voices of the old people and I can feel us losing them, and going after, not able to follow.

  Fifty or sixty years later, what is it to have been “a little in love” with someone you can’t quite remember, someone quite possibly dead for years? A memory of forbidden parties, of being too young and seeing a life half glimpsed just beyond you. All of it coming toward you then, the world coalescing its energies to flower in you, intense and personal and full of pent-up longings? How strange that we were ever too young, that we have seemed for so long to be just approaching the absolute moment, and then years have passed, summers, and laughter from open windows, and the slow fading radiance of the evenings. Someone should remember all this, we should begin remembering now, how slow the summer can be, how many layers there are to pleasure, the fullness of it, how much remains when even the names are gone.

  We sit down to supper later now, at our table under the window. Our hunger tamed, we take our time. In Euphoria there is time to rest, to prop our arms on the table as we eat and gaze out the window down the dune and across the water. Sometimes Bert tunes in a baseball game on the radio; we feel a distant companionship with the calm, statistics-remembering voices that arrive from over the sea, blown east from the mainland. Boston, Maine, New Bedford. Dark makes the shack cozy, the room gathering shadows into itself. Nothing more could be wanted, except perhaps a square of chocolate to nibble with coffee, but we don’t have that, and besides the coffee tin is empty, there isn’t any milk, and we really will need to go to the damned A&P. It doesn’t matter. Soon the sun will set. The horseback riders are moving along the beach. We sit down to supper at our table made of salvaged boards, with our menu of what is, and are grateful.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Night Lights

  Satellites in the sky, at first mistaken for stars, that night we stayed awake to watch the moon’s eclipse. Bert is there and our friend Susan, who is a sculptor. They are talking straight up into the sky and staring at the full white moon, just beginning to be covered over as our planet moves its shadow across the surface. Warmth is rising up from the earth, around them and through them;

  their voices hover in the space warmed by breath. Susan is describing a way of tying branches together with vines, inventing sculptures in thin air. Their lines, frozen in the cutting, still give an illusion of motion. The problem is how to make them stand up. It’s not geometry, she says, her voice high and quick with speculation, but it’s not nature either. I come out, balancing mugs of coffee, and sit down beside them. They are talking about the branches and then the conversation turns to a friend who has just broken another promise. That’s just how he is, we finally agree; you can’t take it personally. Expectation has crashed up and cracked its head against this person’s ways so many times that just being able to see a pattern in it is reassuring. It becomes a story, a tale that can be told over and over. As we speak, our words are thrown up against the sky and hang there in a grid. They hesitate a moment, glittering, and then disperse into the air.

  The eclipse began after midnight, a simple darkening of the moon’s phases in fast time. Waiting for it to begin, we lit the shack with every lamp we could find—eight oil lamps flared in the dark, sending flickering shadows up the walls. The place looked like a Western saloon from outside, a bright raw hole in the night, full of jazzed-up talk and laughter risen unnaturally loud. We drank some vodka, but it made us sleepy so I put on coffee. We tried to be interested in scrabble, and then gin rummy. Can you play poker with three? I don’t know, how do you play poker? By eleven-thirty everything was going silent. The only thing for it then was to bl
ow out the lamps and go out in the warm night, to walk down to the beach, the grasses bright in the moonlight and the tops of the waves glinting silver as the tide pitched them up the beach. The water shimmered and gleamed where the light hit it, but under the surface the ocean was dark and wild, alive with riptides, currents, fish running up the coast. We stood and watched the lights out at sea, where a few ships were passing, and some anchored far out, with lanterns hung on their masts. Highland Light swept its beam across the Truro hills, and a change of wind brought voices from a boat. “Come forward,” a man’s voice said clearly, and whatever reply there was blew away toward High Head as they sailed on south.

  As the moon darkened, the stars started to come out, faint at first, then growing brighter. We lay on a sleeping bag spread open on the sand, and heard the little toads hopping about beside us in the grass. Lying there, gazing up, we talked easily of anything that came to our minds, our voices warm and matter-of-fact, our breaths crossing in the dark.

  Is that a satellite? It has such a strange path it must be—or maybe a UFO! People tell of sightings on the Cape, seem to remember abduction in dream. It seems possible, anything’s possible, what do we know? Now the moon was nearly dark and we could see all the stars and so much else glittering above us: satellites and garbage from spaceships, cosmic junk, occasional flaring meteors, and low, irregular paths of airplanes beginning their journeys out over the black ocean. And were there cosmonauts still circling up there in the lost, unrecovered satellites? I remembered horror stories of the sixties, desperate tales of transmissions picked up from Mexico, spacemen, always Russians in our stories, pleading to be brought down, then losing radio contact and floating off in space forever. But we are spacemen too.