After breakfast, her family gone, she made sandwiches of leftover pot roast, with mustard and horseradish, which she hoped he liked but he could always scrape off if he didn’t. She boiled two eggs, chose from the cold-cellar two wintered-over apples that were in pretty good shape and two large dill pickles. He would be sustained by this food that came from her hands.
He came at nine and they rode, the hills rising and falling, to the now-familiar dark cabin. She worried a little about sailing in the small canoe, but at least the wind was light and the air was warm. She helped him carry the sailing rig down to the dock—sail, spars, sideboards, rudder and tiller. She knew something about this from Cascom Manor. The summer before last she’d learned to sail, and last summer she taught the city people how to sail, as she would this summer, besides being waitress, swimming instructor, chauffeur and nearly everything else. The two Cascom Manor sailboats were heavy, broad-beamed, no-class boats, but with quite a bit of sail, and turnbuckles on the shrouds you had to loosen and tighten whenever you came about. The canoe was simpler but its hull was so sleek and tippy she was glad the wind was light.
“This isn’t what you’d call a scientific rig,” he said. “I made it from a picture in a magazine before I knew what I was doing.” Setting it up entailed lots of lashing and staying because, he said, he didn’t want to make too many bolt holes or leave hardware on the canoe. The wooden sideboards, with their own wooden thwart, clamped on the gunwales; the rudder bracket was a V-shaped yoke that clamped on the stern, and the sail had sleeves that slid over the mast and boom. Once it was all set up, the little canoe danced and shivered at its mooring like a horse.
“Why don’t you take her out,” he said. “She runs downwind like a champ. Close to the wind she’s not so good, but I’ve always made it back.”
Because of the prevailing wind it would be easy to leave here and hard to get back—just the opposite of Cascom Manor, where you had to beat up against the west wind but could come running back with jib and mainsail spread. When they’d stowed everything aboard, he thought for a moment. “We can have lunch on Pine Island. How’s that? I mean if the wind allows us to.” Over their swimming suits they wore bulky old cork-filled life jackets that looked as though they’d survived the Titanic “If the water was warmer I wouldn’t take these,” he said apologetically.
He got in the bow, facing her with his back against the mast, she carefully took her place at tiller and sheet and he cast off. They slowly gained sternway, she let the rudder bring them around, the sail filled to port and they moved smoothly across the blue lake.
“It might be better to go to the left of all the islands,” he said. “The wind usually veers to northwest. You must know that, though.”
“I’ll have to jibe, then.”
“You’re the captain.” He watched her, which made her conscious of how she placed her pale winter legs and how smoothly she ran tiller and sheet.
“Prepare to jibe,” she said. He smiled and ducked his head, the sail came over and they pointed more to the northeast, neatly cleaving the small waves. The sun was warm and the water cold. Where they glided, suspended at that meeting of forces, all was crisp and precise. They moved without effort, expending nothing, hardly even thought, except for the minuscule commands of the spine in which they were one with the delicately balanced keel and with each other.
They were alone on the lake. Time passed. Only the small green boat with the white sail ran before the light wind. To the northwest, Cascom Mountain rose out of the long green hills and showed its patchy bald granite top, the fire tower a dot against the sky. As they came around Merrihew Island she knew they would enter its lee and the wind would become patchy and uncertain. That tingle of danger and responsibility made her skin taut and shivery, though she wasn’t cold. He watched the passing land, the mountain, the sky, her. Had the sun already tanned his amiable smooth skin? She looked down at her pale legs. He looked at her legs and she saw in his expression what she wanted. She hoped they pleased him; her vanity was their shapeliness and she thought how homely women were always proud of at least some of their parts, as if parts could be detached and put on display.
The land moved past and they slowed in the quieter air. It would take them a long time in the sun to reach the broad lake’s wind again. He said nothing, showing his trust in her skill and feel for the boat. He smiled because she had looked at him for so long a time, and as she looked away she remembered her dream about the Canadian soldiers.
The closed and boarded cabins on Merrihew Island crouched among their trees as if blindfolded, waiting for their people and boats, outboard motors, docks, rafts and the screams of summer.
Why Canadians? Always the north was purer, simpler, harder—or at least thought it was. She wondered if she believed that. The local people around the lake, who depended upon tourists from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York, looked upon their guests with some disdain because they were summer people, a little flabby, careless with their money, and from the south. In a week she would be helping the crew prepare Cascom Manor for their arrival.
But those smiling soldiers—did they know they had been slain? There was something sad about their friendliness. They lacked force, or danger. There were no leers or shouts.
They could see Pine Island now. It was very small, uninhabited, less than an acre, but the pines that grew on it were as tall as the masts and spars of a sailing ship. To reach it they would have to cross the wind from the broad lake and she would have to sail on a beam reach. Now the wind was tricky, from no certain direction, coming in puffs. She saw whitecaps ahead, and nearer a smear of gusts darkened the water to blue-black. She nearly jibed as a gust overtook them, but then the sail snapped taut and they leaned, the wind showing its power. She was excited, in a kind of mild and distant dread, prepared to let the sheet out all the way, or to come into the wind—if the canoe would come into the wind. She sensed a tendency in it not to want to.
“The wind’s come up a bit,” he said.
“It’s making me nervous,” she said.
“Can you handle it?”
She didn’t really want to handle it, but she said, “I’ll give it a try.”
“Just think of eating a wet sandwich.” He laughed, but she could tell that he was nervous too.
As they came into the wind they heeled over a little too far, but she found that she could handle it, and then got used to it, gust by gust, until it was almost a pleasure to cut the waves and troughs, to steady the boat in three unpredictable dimensions at once, with lashings of fine spray that made them wince, but not from fear. Then, after that violent motion, they came into the lee of Pine Island and coasted in to its shore where roots held the bank together. Remembering the rough crossing was more pleasurable than the crossing itself had been.
He tied up on a thick root that made a ring, as if it had grown out of the brown bank, found nothing out there and grown back in. It was fairly calm here, but they could hear waves hitting the other side of the island, and high above them the wind hissed in the pines. “It’ll go down in a while, I hope,” he said. “Right now we’d have a couple of long, very wet tacks. But anyway, we’re here.”
They took off their life jackets and toweled off the spray, her hair in strings. They spread their towels on the pine needles in a patch of sunlight. The wind had shifted and came more from the northwest, stronger and colder. He opened the hamper and the always surprising formality of a picnic began. She approved of the sweet, hot tea he’d brought in his thermos and he approved of her sandwiches, but the wind was a shouldery presence they couldn’t ignore. It came pushing and shoving out of a clear blue sky, invisible and senseless. The crash of waves on the other side of the island was so clear she thought she could feel the spray, yet that was invisible too and it was probably her imagination that caused those pinpricks on her shoulders. She felt bullied by that unending force. A small branch of green needles came whirling down from above and they looked up apprehensively at the t
wisting trunks of the pines.
“At least the island’s not going to capsize. I think,” he said. He suggested that they might as well enjoy their last meal. “It’s been nice knowing you, kid.”
“I am worried, really,” she said. “How will we get back?”
“The wind’s got to go down sooner or later.”
“But how much later?”
“In a few days. Who knows?”
She thought of people worried, searching for them, and this was suddenly terrifying. “It’s not that funny.” Her anger surprised her. It was unjust and they were in no real danger, but she was cold and anxious and she resented his joking about it.
“Hey, Dory,” he said placatingly. “It’ll be okay.” He put his arm around her.
“Don’t patronize me,” she said, jerking her shoulder. She had never used the word before and she wasn’t sure of its pronunciation, which irritated her even more. He took his arm away.
She wasn’t sure why she had shown him anger, but it felt justified. After a time of listening to the wind he said, “Our first fight.” The way he said it made her have to smile, but she resented smiling. Inside her was a small but exceedingly hard little nut of resentment that had to do with him and his humor and college and his beloved canoe.
They sat side by side, chilly and miserable. Finally he said, “Let’s try it back, Dory. It’s the wind that’s making us cross.”
Us, she thought. Huh! But he packed everything up and she went with him to the canoe.
“I think the wind’s going down a little,” he said, but she couldn’t see any difference. The pines tossed overhead and the lake was full of whitecaps. He handed her the wooden scoop that was the bailer and she took it. They wore their damp towels around their shoulders under their life jackets, and had a last cup of tea before he tied everything down.
“I’m scared and I don’t care who knows it,” she said. “Maybe we ought to wait.”
“It’s no fun here because we’re worried. Hell, let’s go. We can make it all right.”
“Maybe we should go to the east shore, then.”
“To tell you the truth, I’d rather keep into a wind like this. The waves get bothersome when they follow.”
She was so anxious she was almost sick. She resented her willingness to get into the canoe. Why should she trust him? Why should she do everything he said? Another voice told her that she was insanely magnifying the danger, that the water wasn’t really that cold, that they wouldn’t capsize and even if they did they wouldn’t sink and they could right the canoe and bail it out enough at least to drift ashore someplace. That voice made her get into the canoe, while the other shrieked in resentment and despair.
When they were out in the full force of the wind she saw that they would make it; it would be cold and wet and she would have to bail constantly, but they would make it. The waves didn’t get any smaller but the slap and thump of the hull, the vibrations and reverberations, the tilting and planing, all grew repetitious rather than startling. Before they were halfway back she was ashamed of her fear. It was a cold and exhausting voyage, even worse on the starboard tack, but when they came, finally, under the pines to Cascomhaven’s dock, the memory was exhilarating. Being safe again was worth more than the memory of fear.
“I’ll decommission the boat later,” he said. “Let’s get dry and warm first.”
Again she stood warm and airy in front of the fire in the terry-cloth robe of his step-aunt. She said, “I’m sorry about being in such a snit out there. I was scared. I don’t usually act like that. I don’t know what got into me.”
“I was scared too, but of course I couldn’t admit it in front of you.”
She sat on the couch. “It feels good not to be drowned.”
“It feels great,” he said.
“It was tiring. All that…fright.”
He sat beside her and put his arm around her, tentatively, making a joke out of her anger, but now she couldn’t remember why she’d been angry. The passage across the lake to the wildly shaking trees, the flash of whitecaps, the water’s heaving solidity and their lightness upon it were all that remained. She turned toward and into him. His green eyes seemed mineral. Hers closed, as if to say to her in the dusk behind their lids that it was none of their affair. He could do whatever he wanted because she trusted him and she was only half of what they were becoming. They were both melting, a disembodiment they both acquiesced to. It wasn’t necessary to be responsible for a happening so vague and cobwebby, so diffuse and incomplete. Warnings had no force against this new wholeness, though they could be heard faintly, unconvincingly, shouting contempt. She might say, “Don’t,” again but she didn’t want to. Existence was to accept what would happen without niggling reservations. But other voices frantically warned her that she could be used and discarded. There were all the stories of poor stupid girls who had been seduced and betrayed, lied to, smirked at, hushed up, and it was no different with her because all of those girls had trusted their seducers.
But she couldn’t find a way now to care enough about all that because she was alive only within his interest and insistence. Their only attention was toward the one creature they were becoming. There was no idea of time, only an intensity that was forbidden yet soft, languorous and yet stretched. It was like stretching in the morning. After what had seemed a long time but may not have been, she did know, sharply, when the actual thing began. The strength and motion he used to pierce her was new and seemed involuntary. She really didn’t care. It was like a pulled-at hangnail for a moment, a non-pain but as powerful and debilitating as pain because it was out of control, a surge and a contraction that brought her center all together upon him as if she were one fleshy vice. So this was what it was, this dreadful shuddery pleasure. If only she could deserve to have it feel so good. If only it could be forever, her power to contain him like this.
8
He sat on the couch with the brass-handled poker in his hands, more or less staring at the fire. He was depressed, dully and deeply heavy in the mind. They had dressed and Dory was down on the dock, sitting there looking out at the windy lake. He felt that he should comfort her or something but she didn’t want him to. She was stuck down there and he was stuck up here being thumped over the head by hideously unworthy practicalities, each pulse a surge of shame and anxiety. Choices were so interesting before you acted upon them, and so awful afterwards. For instance, he had two condoms in his wallet; the Army had handed them out in connected segments, like tapeworms, and he still owned a string of them over a yard long. The idea of using one with Dory must have seemed, at the time, unworthy of their passion. That and something more stupid: he had wanted no film of rubber between them. That and something reprehensible: she might have had time to think of what she was getting into. And now she was confused, pensive, facing up to what must be to her such an important and dramatic change. Her delicate mortal balance must be in danger. That she might get pregnant—all that tawdry folk history suddenly possible to her. To her! But it was not just that. Three days ago he had looked out of his window and noticed a young girl spading her mother’s garden and now that young girl was no longer a virgin and maybe in the irreversible process of becoming pregnant. It might be an old story but he was in this one and she was not like any other girl. This time he could not slide away from what he’d done.
He put the handle of the poker to his nose. Brass had an interesting odor, something like sweat, maybe the sweat of an old soldier, everything sour except his polished frogs and buttons. No, he couldn’t get away from what he’d done. He’d been the person who did it, but he couldn’t now understand the person who did it. Who was he, so incomplete he was still afraid of the dark, of the monsters his mind placed there, to initiate all this? Sex, flesh at its work, was generally forbidden except under circumstances he didn’t yet want to be under. He remembered that the nerves at his skin had screamed for it, faintly but urgently, like a battle heard at a distance. In his life it had been the
subject of willful, even gleeful misinformation, jokes told with a smirk that had seduced him to laughter, stern, perverted films in the Army of pus-globbed crotches and lesions of the throat. Love hovered elsewhere, whatever love was. And yet life’s deepest command, in slime mold and in man, was to perpetuate itself, an order that couldn’t be countermanded by anything as flimsy as foresight. Thus, perhaps, all the chaos and hysteria. Yahweh’s name must not be spoken.
A child might ask why love and sex should ever be combined. He could have a certain amount of disdain for the chaos and hysteria, but he could have none for her, or for her feelings. He went out on the porch and looked down at her. She sat on the end of the dock, her back toward the land. Her head, her neck, her shoulders, her printed blouse, her dungarees, her gentle increase, waist to hip—the reality of her was beautiful and horrible. She was the treasure in a dark tale where a last wish must undo the first. Her thoughtful silence was also pitiful, and he had to find out how she felt. She could be crying, or angry—God knew what. He had to know, so he went down to her, but as cautiously as if she were a mine.
He came up behind her and said, “Are you all right?”
He thought she wasn’t going to answer, but finally, still watching the lake, she said, “I don’t know. I’m just thinking about it.”
The Moon Pinnace Page 5