‘I don’t know. But if you looked at him without him realizing then you could see he was a man with burdens. I mean, burdens which he felt compelled to pick up whenever a moment arose. I think that describes it, Luce. He was burdened. Oh, for Chrissake, I didn’t mean to make you cry.’
I sob: ‘I should have been here. I should have been here for him.’
He puts an arm around me but his words continue. ‘It seems right that he died around the anniversary of Stevie’s death. It seems right because Eric was devastated when Stevie died and I’m not sure he’s been exactly the same guy since then. Like, it was one burden too many for him.’
Stevie’s small body lying in the blue crib as though it was floating helplessly in the sea. Causing not tiny ripples but a tsunami. I sob again and again.
Scott wraps himself around me and the porch envelopes us both like an elderly parent. The paint and former smoothness of its wooden uprights is weathered to a rough boniness.
The beach is deserted except for two swimmers, far away, walking slowly into the sea. They hesitate when they feel how cold the water is and then continue. Soon they are two tiny heads on the ocean’s surface. I watch the way the great body of water lifts and then lowers them like a big cat playing with its prey.
I ask: ‘Do you ever think of moving from here? Maybe buying somewhere again?’
‘There soon won’t be a choice.’
‘Does the owner want it back?’
‘The ocean wants it back. Next month the tides are going to be exceptionally high and if the weather’s bad too… well, I should probably get out for a few days.’
I imagine a big wave tipping its burden of water right into the cottage, smashing it to pieces. The little house, nothing more now than disjointed pipes and yellow lumber and the seats from the porch and a few rusty kitchen pans, would whirl and eddy as its components were carried away in different directions to be scattered on faraway shores. Islanders would wander along the tideline gathering pieces of roof.
‘At the highest tides last year,’ says Scott, ‘a window got smashed.’
I stare at him.
‘Were you here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh Scott. Were you alone?’
‘No. It was scary but it was only spray. Next time, it might not be.’
‘Was it at night?’
‘In the middle of the night. When we went to sleep the ocean had seemed pretty quiet.’
It was the middle of the night and someone else was here asleep with Scott. I feel something in my stomach contract inside itself like a sea anemone.
‘Who was here sleeping in the middle of the night?’ I ask, too quickly, then regret it. Scott does not look at me. His face is pinker than the sea now, pink as the sun itself. He turns to me and his tone is the mixture of aggression and mockery used by the Vietnam Vet who fought for his country but now has no home or job and feels betrayed.
‘Why do you care?’
‘I’m sorry I asked. I have no right to care.’
He glares at me. His shoulders are square suddenly so that his soft frame is all right angles. He says: ‘I have a girlfriend. She teaches French on campus. She lived in France for many years. She has a son who lives in France with her ex-husband. Right now she is spending a semester with her son.’
‘That would be in France?’
‘In France.’
‘In the house of the ex-husband?’
His face clouds. ‘You can stop right there, Luce. I’m not discussing this any more.’
‘I only asked if –’
‘Just stop.’
He’s angry. I’ve seen him mad a lot of times, but never with me before.
‘How about you, Luce? Do you have some guy who matters in New York?’
I get up to go. Scott gets up too. He stands right in front of me. ‘No,’ I say, walking around him. ‘I don’t.’
‘So. So now you know about Brigitte you’re leaving.’
‘I’m leaving because I want to get to Big Brim beach before it’s dark.’
He looks troubled. ‘Don’t go there alone, Luce.’
‘I want to.’
‘It will make you feel lousy.’
‘My father’s died and I already feel lousy.’
He sighs and his eyes search mine. ‘Then,’ he says at last, ‘I guess you should hurry before it gets dark. Wait… I have something for you.’
We go inside the cottage and the little living-room seems to jump at me. In my dreams and memories there was never this damp saltiness, shoes never banged on the floor with such a clatter, the faded red furnishings were never so vibrant.
‘Here!’ Scott yells from the bedroom. He wants me to go in. ‘You can’t keep wearing those city clothes. I still have your old ones.’
He is bent into the closet. Inside it, I see a few women’s clothes hanging with Scott’s shirts. They could be Brigitte’s but no, I recognize them as my own, my California clothes, not the kind I wear now. There aren’t many. When we came here right after Stevie died I threw out most of my clothes and I recognize that now as the beginning of my absence.
‘I’m not sure I want to wear that old stuff…’
Scott puts them in a bag, a swimsuit on top.
‘Take them. It’s getting too warm for city suits now and they’re forecasting a heatwave.’
‘In March?’
‘That’s what they say.’
He walks me around the. cottage to my car and stands watching me until there are so many pine trees between us that they seem like one enormous tree. When I reach the coast road I can see him far below on the beach, his hands in his pockets, walking towards the sea. I wish he would look up but his eyes are fixed on the ocean. Brigitte. I wish he hadn’t told me about her.
12
I pull in at Big Brim’s exposed parking lot. It lies at sea level and runs right alongside the highway. There are no trees. There is no shelter of any kind. Although I know from the intensity of the light that the sea is nearby, it is masked by the mountain of sand which runs alongside the road. Traffic zooms past, rocking the car. When I open the door the trucks feel too fast and too close. I cross the blacktop as soon as I can and start to walk up the dune.
At the top I can see the red sun but the ocean is still invisible behind two more dunes and only when I have climbed these, sweating now, does the flat beach sprawl beneath me. I sit down, breathing heavily. I try to imagine Daddy walking these dunes. He was fit but not so fit he could climb them without stopping frequently for breath. Did he choose to swim at this beach or did he stumble here against his will? Did he walk this way with someone he believed to be a friend? Or behind him, next to him, was there someone he was powerless to resist?
The sun burns low now, throwing a massive red searchlight towards the shore. Far out to sea I locate a couple of fishing boats. They are up the coast a little towards Retribution. The boats look immobile. The sea looks immobile. How did it carry Daddy’s body so swiftly, in just three hours, from this beach to those boats?
The beach stretches for maybe a mile, unbroken by anything more substantial than driftwood and seaweed. There are long, curved sand spits at each end which, someone must once have thought, shaped the ocean like the brim of a hat. I can see no rocks to bruise or scrape against Daddy’s body, although some may hide beneath the water’s surface.
I. run down the last dune towards the sea until I feel the damp sand by the water’s edge firm beneath my feet. The sea is the colour of blood, stained by the swollen sun. I feel the water biting at my toes. I stand ankle deep, lifting the hem of, my skirt. The ocean is icy. It is deceptive here. It rocks quietly. It invites you to swim because there are no big rollers rising up and smashing themselves against the sand. It beckons you to walk out into its calm depths but Scott says its cross-currents make it the most treacherous place to swim in this whole stretch of coast.
The beach is empty now except for a couple of people and one of them is heading back to the road.
The other, a large man, is marching, almost running, along the tideline towards me, a small white dog trotting a few feet behind him. When I turn my back on the Pacific and follow my footprints up the beach I see that the man and his dog have halted nearby, collecting something, driftwood, perhaps, or clams, although there is little of either to break the monotony of the sand.
I reach dry sand and sit down. Only half a sun remains but it is powerful, its colour running across the sky and the water so there seems no difference between them. I feel my face, turned towards it as though in worship, shining red back at it.
I think of next month’s high tides and how they could demolish Scott’s flimsy cottage and any trace of our brief life there together. Except that, even when it’s gone, the beach house will still be there. It will remain until everyone who goes to Needle Bay sees the pine trees without thinking: wasn’t there once some kind of a hut here? Sort of small and square, squatting by the trees? When no one’s left who imagines for a moment they can see a house beneath the pines, only then will the house be gone for good.
The sun is disappearing. The sky still glows where it used to hang and the water remains bloodstained. I stare at the place the sun was a moment ago, silent as I think of all the ghost houses and landmarks which once were, and then which existed in people’s memories and were gone for ever when the people died.
Maybe it’s the same with humans. Maybe they still exist until there’s no one alive to recall them. It feels good to think that. It makes Daddy seem not so dead and involuntarily I look up the beach as though, if I’m quick, I’ll glimpse him walking here. And in the evening light, which isn’t failing yet but which is already thickening, there is a figure. It has appeared over the dunes and is heading towards the sea. It gets closer and I see that it is the tall, thin figure of a man, incongruous here in a suit and necktie. He must have stopped on his way home from some city office. The driftwood collector straightens up and stares. The little dog dances.
The man heads towards the ocean. He carries his shoes and walks purposefully. It occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, he is not going to stop when he gets to the sea. He is going to walk right into the water until he disappears in his suit and necktie beneath the waves. Involuntarily, I jump up. The driftwood collector jumps too. I hear the puff of his breath, the slap of his dog’s feet on the wet sand. But before they can reach him, when the ocean is almost touching him, the newcomer turns suddenly and walks back up the beach. I sit down. The man with the dog diverts.
The tall figure is framed by the fiery sky. It seems he is walking towards me. Soon I can see his face. It is cadaverous. Hollow cheeks, prominent nose, immense mouth which is pulled clownishly but not humorously downwards.
‘Hi,’ he says in a reedy voice. ‘Forgive me for disturbing you. Is it Lucy? Lucy Schaffer?’
I stare at him and my astonishment answers his question. The mouth splits his face in two. He is smiling.
‘I’m Detective Michael Rougemont. I’m involved in the police department’s investigation into your father’s death. I live not so far from Professor Schaffer’s house and I knew him a little. I’d like to express my condolences.’
I nod my thanks. I remember the thin, elongated figure I took for a shadow which stood talking to the woman detective in the kitchen doorway. And this morning she named some colleague who had questions for me. He flashes some kind of an ID which I ignore because my surprise has changed to anger at this intrusion. He has cornered me on this vast stretch of beach. And the way he walked right up to me, without looking at me first, suggests that he knew I would be here. With an intensity which is physical, which emanates from somewhere inside my belly, I dislike him. I look away from him out to the darkening sea.
‘Take it,’ he advises, waving the ID a little. ‘Look at it. You should check these things, Lucy, to make sure they’re real.’
‘I think you’re real,’ I say. He smiles again and holds out his hand. Gingerly, I shake it. My hand feels as though it is inside a bag of bones. He sits down next to me and I turn away from him again.
‘I hope you don’t mind me talking to you right now. But I was passing and I thought that, in the circumstances, I’d like to take a look at this place again.’
‘You’ve been here before?’
‘Many years ago now, more than thirty.’
I am flippant. ‘And has it changed much, Mr…?’
‘Rougemont. But call me Michael.’ He is looking along the beach to the right and then the left. He puts his huge head on one side.
‘Well, I don’t remember that guy being here before,’ he says at last, gesturing to the pear-shaped man, who now strolls back along the beach, one arm pressing driftwood to his side, his dog behind him. I look at Michael Rougemont and his face has cracked into the broad smile again. He likes his own jokes. He has yellow teeth. I do not smile back at him.
He looks suddenly serious. ‘Your father was a rare man, the kind people listen to and trust. It seemed to me that he placed his family at the centre of his life. A lot of men don’t do that, can’t do that, or won’t, and we lose something, sometimes our whole family. So we admire men like your father. I’d like to hear you talk about him, Lucy, and not his recent history. I’d like to know about him right from the beginning.’
‘You’re investigating the end of his life, not the beginning, Mr Rougemont.’ I have no intention of calling him Michael.
That awful smile again. ‘Oh!’ he says, and it is an exclamation of pleasure. ‘Oh. Well, it happens that the two are often connected.’ I survey his smile with disgust. I see that he likes connections. ‘It reminds me of a toy I played with as a kid. I used to line up little tin soldiers. If you pushed the first they’d all fall down one by one. You knew it was inevitable but it was fascinating anyway, it was probably the inevitability which was the fascination. Oh hell, Lucy, but you never had any little tin soldiers. You had soft toys which you hugged a lot, furry things, like a dog.’
I stare at him in surprise but he isn’t looking at me. He’s watching the sea. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he’s right. I did like soft toys and I remember now that my special favourite, my friend, was a brown dog with winsome eyes and floppy ears. His name was Hodges, I don’t recall why.
‘What do you want to know about my father?’
‘Anything you can remember. Stories about himself, his family, his youth…’
‘Stories were my mother’s speciality.’ Head thrown back, eyes widening and narrowing, voice rising and falling, hands gesturing. Mother could sure tell stories.
‘He must have said something about his past. You must have asked him.’
I look at the detective and recognize his odd, sad expression as one of habitual pain. Some distant suffering has left its tyre tracks across his face. He’s already talked about loss, about men losing their families. For a moment, I feel curiosity, even compassion. But I say: ‘There’s no way of knowing about Daddy’s past. He left it all behind a long time ago.’
Rougemont chuckles, an odd animal sound.
‘Oh, Lucy, forgive me. But you can’t lose your past any more than you can lose your shadow.’
I shrug. ‘Then he dissociated himself from it.’
There is a silence. We both look out to sea as he waits for me to speak. And to my surprise, I do speak. At first my words come fast and low so that the gentle sloshing of the waveless ocean competes with my voice and Michael Rougemont has to lean one large ear towards me. Then, gradually, my voice gains strength as though it is stiffened by the ocean’s saltiness.
I tell him about Daddy’s strange beginnings in a small religious community high in the mountains in Utah. The hours of the day and the days of the week were regulated by prayer and worship and communal diligence. The community was closed to outsiders and dominated by its religious elders, one of whom was Daddy’s own father. Daddy hated it. Too smart for open rebellion, when he was just a teenager he worked as a carpenter and mechanic. He
learned to fix almost any machine. He looked like he was praying a lot but mostly he was planning. He was planning his escape.
A man with a truck came once a week in summer to buy the fish which the community caught in the mountain lakes. One visit, the truck broke down, Daddy spent most of the evening fixing it. He was excused prayers to do this: the community didn’t want the driver spending the night with them, dreaming about doing who knew what to their daughters. When the truck drove away, Daddy was in back with the fish. He had three dollars and a hunk of bread and, although the driver let him into the cab when they were half-way down the mountain, Daddy already smelled awful. When they got to Salt Lake City, the driver took Daddy to a hostel. He lived here and found a day job and enrolled in night school. His native community gave him a lifelong aversion to organized religion and the lifelong love of mountains and rocks which became his career.
‘Uh-huh,’ says Michael Rougemont, grimacing, nodding his big head. ‘Uh-huh. That’s very interesting. Who told you all that?’
‘Daddy.’
‘Did he tell you he ever went back?’
‘It wasn’t that kind of place. If you left, you never could go back.’
He rearranges his black-suited legs so they stretch towards the sea, knees bent like a gigantic spider’s. ‘Did he have siblings?’
‘Seven. He was the youngest of eight.’
‘Utah, huh? Eight of them. Were they LDS?’
‘I’m not sure if they were members of the official Mormon church. I think their community may have been some sort of splinter group.’
Rougemont is still nodding as though his head’s a toy on the end of a piece of elastic. A cheap, clownish toy, definitely Mittex, not the sort Gregory Hifeld makes. ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh,’ he says rhythmically. His mouth meanders all over his face. Old man river. ‘And he never, to your knowledge, tried to contact them?’
Pig ignorant, dirt poor, God fearing and God awful. Daddy described his family that way when, years ago, I was foolish enough to ask about them. His words frightened me. There was an angry harshness about them that sounded more like Mother than Daddy. I never asked again.
Summertime Page 12