Then there is my father asleep in his single bed. On his back, snoring, lips parted, eyes fluttering, hair a mess.
So let’s say that’s how I’m feeling coming out of The Owl. I’m falling from a high like this one. I’m dreading climbing into the truck and pulling on my seat belt and above all the sound of the slamming door.
Let’s say that.
But let’s also say, because it is the absolute truth, that on this particular Saturday night in October of 1991 sitting on the hood of my truck beneath the single street light is Tess.
Is Tess.
Is Tess.
Is Tess.
I want to write those two words forever.
A long ribbon winding through these pages.
I wanted to wait. I wanted to draw it out for you. Build the suspense a bit, but here I am now, here in this room with the late sun falling the way I like across the clearing and I cannot wait any longer.
To hell with you.
The cross is in the ballpark.
I want Tess back.
I want her on my truck in the lamplight. Twenty years old. Dark brown hair a little longer now since summer, pushing out from beneath a black wool watch cap pulled down over her ears. Boots on the bumper, elbows on her knees, unlit cigarette between her fingers and those narrow green eyes and that half smile, with her head cocked to the side.
Oh, for a while you think you’ll have unlimited moments like these. Soon you realize you’re wrong. Not soon enough, but you figure it out.
I want this one back, goddamn it.
There is Tess.
Is Tess waiting for me in the cool, rainless night looking just like herself. More luminous than ever. Posing for me with her cigarette between the two middle fingers of her left hand the way she did back then so that she could cover her mouth when she smoked.
There she was.
Here she is.
And I cross the parking lot with all the symptoms. Thudding heart. Singular focus. I stop in front of her and neither of us speaks for a beat or two because we have to play this thing out for posterity, for the record books, for the film on which we imagined our lives were then recorded. And I think, Maybe she’ll say, Got a light? Those days she’s theatrical. But instead she raises her chin, squints and looks down her nose at me. She squints and I could kneel right there in the parking lot. Wrap my arms around her ankles.
Ecstasy is an inadequate word.
She does not ask me for a light. I stand before her, and she is so much like a queen up there. And I mean a real queen. Not some kind of ornamental royalty, but a woman who rules. The first Elizabeth, not the second, not the one Claire was so enamored with at the beginning of her teenage love affair with Britain.
Not that woman they’ve got in there now with the hats. The other one. The virgin queen. As if Tess was any kind of virgin.
Tess reaches back and presses her palms on the hood of the truck. Looks down upon me, her subject.
Says: “You never came to find me. You never called, Joseph. Why is that?”
Oh, of the moments in my life. Do you know what that was? Can you know? To see her without warning. As if she’d risen right out of the ocean. Without progression. Was born of fog. Appeared in one fell swoop, as my mother liked to say. In one fail swoop, as I heard it for so many years.
Tess, like an apparition.
The sudden appearance of the single person you’ve been waiting for.
Sometimes, I hear, you look up from your seat on a crosstown bus and she smiles at you.
Some of us can’t be bothered, as Claire would say. Claire never the romantic. Claire with no use for the magical.
Sometimes I imagine her in London seated upon a great golden throne. Queen Claire the pragmatic. Regal and calculating beside her pink-faced king.
No waiting for Claire. Cut and run. Off with their heads.
But some of us are waiting all our lives.
In a different kingdom, we are waiting all our lives.
And here was Tess and what you want is what is next so what is next is this: I did not answer her question. No quip. No clever line. She’d done her best, but I was no good. I did not sweep her into my arms. I did not pin her to the warm metal. Instead I took the remaining steps until I was between her legs, until I felt her knees bracing my ribs. And then with my face pressed against her stomach, I cried.
So much for the glamour.
Out of sadness, out of terror, and above all, out of relief, I wept beneath the streetlight, between Tess’s knees, while from the door of The Owl, from across the dark parking lot, Seymour Strout looked on.
While I fell against my long lost love’s breast and cried like a child, Seymour Strout looked on. A thick goatee—goatees as common in White Pine as Craigs. As Matts. As sawdust.
An audience of one. An audience of Strout. Off-duty correctional officer, Seymour Strout, smoking a Virginia Slim, watched us impassively from the orange-lit doorway of The Owl Bar and Grill. A man great of chest and belly both, smoked those delicate Virgina Slims. Lit each with a match, never a lighter, held it between stubby thumb and fat middle finger.
This Seymour Strout’s single affectation.
And if asked? Those who dared? “Because I fucking like ’em.”
“Who’s that, Joseph?”
Tess’s first words to me after so long as she moved her fingers through my hair. I looked up and followed her gaze to the orange doorway beneath the blue neon owl where he stood.
I said, “Seymour Strout.”
And with that our reunion was witnessed. Notarized. It’s a fact, which you’ll see has poetry to it. Tess’s return to me, Tess’s arrival in White Pine presided over by gentle, lonely Seymour Strout.
“No one’s named Seymour Strout,” Tess said as she slid down and dropped to her feet. “Joseph,” she whispered, “I’ve missed you.”
And enough then of the weeping, of Tess above me. Now she looked up into my face. I pushed her back against the grill of the truck and I kissed her as best I knew how. With as much tenderness and strength as I could muster. I did everything I could to translate all of it—the relief, the fear, the shame, the love, the lust, the regret, the rage, the bewilderment, the wildness.
I tried and I failed.
But goddamn if I didn’t try. I was a kid, after all. A boy. Whatever I believed. And soon enough we were running onto the beach, running from the boardwalk lights, crossing the shadow edge, running into the dark. And then I was behind her pulling at her buttons. Behind her down on the sand, Tess raising her ass up and me yanking her jeans to her knees, her ear to the sand and one hand digging handfuls of it, and another behind, groping for my cock, and she’s saying “do it, do it, do it” until I was inside her fast and she’s making those low noises she makes, and her skin so much softer, so much warmer than anything around us—the cold, wet sand and the pummeling surf, and the hard black rocks.
41.
It was never enough with her. I was always doomed to failure. Whatever we did, it was never enough. No matter how close I held her. No matter how long I watched her sleep, no matter how long we looked at each other. No matter the fucking, the lovemaking. It was never enough. There was only so far. Only so deep we could dive until the air ran out. There was always a wall too high, too thick. For a while we tried with language. Long conversations. All the questions. All the answers. We tried with sex. Wrap your legs around me, hook your ankles, dig your nails, pull with all your strength, bring me in deeper. Turn this way, turn that. We filled and emptied each other in every way we could imagine. But that too, for all the rush and pleasure, that too was failure.
We tried and I like to believe, even now, that the trying counts for something. The trying in spite of doom. The trying to spite the doom. Isn’t that what makes heroes of us? Isn’t that the very nature of living? Isn’t that the subject
of all our stories?
I’m gliding upwards today. There are days when I’m weightless and sailing. I can’t keep up with my feeble, burning mind. Days like this I’m flying. I see to the ocean. Not a rabbit moves in the forest without my noticing. On days like this I’m as sharp-eyed as the sharp-shinned hawks circling above us. Understand? Days when the world is clear?
All my mind’s chaos and diversion. Its rhythms and languages.
The updraft.
The deadfall plummet.
Today I have faith.
Today I have slaughtered the bird.
Today Tess is on her way home.
Today Tess has a fist full of sand and her breathing is slowing and I am softening inside her and motherfucker you think I’m flying now? Goddamn you should have seen us out there on the beach that night in a postcoital smolder.
You just can’t imagine.
Let’s say that if you’d followed us out to the boardwalk and squinted into the darkness, we would have been shining in the night.
42.
I drove us home to the little white house, which should have been dark save for the porch light, but the kitchen was lit too, and through the window we looked in on my father, who was reading a newspaper in his red-and-blue plaid bathrobe. Must have been well after three in the morning and there’s my father as if it’s time for breakfast.
So that’s how Tess had found me at the bar. My father in on the plan, in on the surprise. My father waiting up to make sure all had gone as it should have.
There in the honey light of our little kitchen I put my hand on the hard small of her back and said, “Dad, this is Tess.”
43.
But what does any of this have to do with the good part? What does any of it have to do with my mother bashing that man’s head in with a hammer. With a hammer! Where are the brains leaking onto the asphalt? Where’s the blood? And the killer carefully buckling the victim’s children into the backseat of her Volvo station wagon? What of crime? What of punishment? And what of her daughter’s anger, humiliation and disappearance into the wilds of upper-crust London? What of the loyal husband who refused to leave his wife’s side? What of the long-suffering son, your proud and erratic narrator?
What of his beautiful girlfriend? (How I hate that cold, ruined adjective.)
What of those strange games they played? Of the trouble they got into.
What I come to realize. As I go on. Battle on. The good stuff hasn’t much to do with murder. Isn’t to do with Dustin Strauss. That coward. That bully. Fuck that guy. Had it coming if you ask me. Truth is. I don’t think about him.
44.
So we are three. In a white house, in White Pine, in the dark morning, in the dim yellow light of the small kitchen amidst steam and vapor and the rich smell of coffee. We are three at three sides of the square table. One place empty.
Father, son, and holy Tess.
It is early, but we are not tired. My father, having been expecting her, has bought sticky buns, which he’s laid out in the center of the table on a white plate.
Why is my father happy? Because he has, in a fashion, reassembled a family. Constructed one as if it were a cabinet. As if it were a sideboard. Because he believes our early morning meal is some kind of consecration. Because he sees it as forward movement. Because Tess replaces Claire in some way. Or because he loves Tess immediately. Because he’s loved her since before she arrived. Loved her from the minute they first spoke on the phone. Which he did. We know this, because he’s saying it now, between enthusiastic bites of warm, sweet pastry, he’s saying: “I liked her from the start, Joey.”
Tess is smiling at him.
She’s laying into a second sticky bun as if she hasn’t eaten in days.
“Ravenous,” she’d say.
But it’s not so much the satisfaction of hunger as it is happiness. Or are they the same thing?
I’m eating the same way, ignoring the fork, and shoveling the thing into my mouth by hand, by fist.
And why am I happy?
Because Tess is there.
Yes.
Mystery solved.
And Tess? Why is she happy? Why is she so full of appetite? So full of lightness and warmth? Why does she accept so easily my father’s hand on the back of hers? Because she has been reunited with her love? Because she is touched by my father’s eyes? His gentle warmth? His small kitchen, their knowing references to secret telephone conversations? Because she’s missed me?
Well, whatever it is, we were happy. Chatting away, eating ourselves sick, the sky lightening outside and that good exhaustion slowly setting in.
We’re leaning back from the table. The quiet has come now. The coffee is useless.
“Well,” Joey March says, “we should sleep.”
What he wants now is to slip into bed with Tess, to draw his knees behind hers, to take her breasts in his hands, to kiss her shoulder and fade away.
So he stands. He is lean and strong with thick curly hair messier and longer than he likes it, but just as Tess does. He stands without pain, with a fatigue that has nothing to do with age. He stands behind his father. He bends down and kisses him on the top of his head.
“Thank you, Dad,” he says and says it again. “Thank you.” All the while looking at Tess who rises now and follows him to bed.
The morning is coming faster. My father, who is as old then as I am now, will leave in a few hours for work. And our young heroes, in bed together for the first time in so long, will sleep deep into the afternoon.
And in that late afternoon, I whisper, “Good morning, Tess. My love, my love, my love.”
I whisper straight into her skin, which smells of sweat and coffee and sex. Of the lemon oil she uses as perfume.
And what is the first thing she says?
“Joseph, I want to meet her.”
Before she has opened her eyes.
And for no good reason I say, “Who? Who do you want to meet?”
She sighs. It’s understood then. That’s what we’ll do.
Tess Wolff and Joey March. The two of us when we were young.
45.
It couldn’t have been the next day. You don’t just show up at White Pine Penitentiary. The Pine, you learn to call it. You don’t just show up there. You have to be on a list. There are rules.
So one day not long after Tess made her dramatic entrance, not stage right, not stage left, but there as the curtain opened, as the lights came up on a short-haired girl riding the hood of a Toyota truck, we went to see my mother.
Offstage, the wind whipped at the ocean and the waves crashed. Concussive sounds in the night. Unlit cigarette between her fingers.
Not too long after that we find this young woman in black combat boots, scuffed and unlaced. Torn jeans over long johns, waffled, color of cream, old-fashioned, five bucks at Army Navy. Tight Fruit of the Loom wifebeater. White, new, the term hers, not mine. And don’t argue. She’ll roll her eyes.
“Fuck those women,” she’ll say. Or did once. “Feminists in language only. I’m a fucking feminist.” She laughs. “See? No bra.”
Over which a wool shirt. The Pendleton classic. Red and black checked. Insulated. Satin lining. And the watch cap. Let’s say black today. Sometimes navy. Sometimes white. This is the uniform now. A little tougher than in Cannon Beach. But it’s not that tough. If you’re following the chronology, keeping an eye on the years, you’ll know she’s in style. All of us dressing like half-assed lumberjacks back then.
God, do I see her. Unbuttoning the Pendleton, her nipples through the thin white fabric. Doc Martens on the dash the day we started out. The two of us driving up away from the beach, turning onto the ridge road. To our left, to the west, the town of White Pine, and the ocean. To our right, the prison of White Pine, and the vast valley and all its farmland beyond. Tess has turned to me and
is beginning to speak. She’s raised her hand to the back of my neck and is running her fingers through my hair.
“How is it, Joe? Is it better?”
I’m watching the valley, waiting for that moment when the road breaks slightly to the east and the spaceship comes into view.
“Is what better?” I ask not knowing what she means this time. Not pretending. Not delaying.
“The bird,” she says.
“Ah,” I say.
“Is it?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because it’s the beginning. Because it doesn’t come in the beginning. It only comes in the middle. And now you’re here and no way it would dare now.”
“If only,” she says. “But those are lies.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” I say, which is evidence of just how defunct language is.
She stops moving her fingers and instead cups the back of my head with a new firmness.
“What do you mean it’s the beginning? What do you mean it only comes in the middle?”
“There,” I say. “There.” I point down into the valley. The prison slides out below us as if set in a slowly opening drawer.
I pull the truck off the road. It’s about the same place where I stopped with my father. About the same place he comes to look over her as she sleeps. Or whatever she does in her eternally illuminated cell.
We have brought her earplugs. Balls of wax in a plastic box.
Tess will give them to her. Her first offering.
Tess doesn’t run into the onion field to vomit. We lean against the grille.
“She’s in there,” I say, pointing for no reason.
“I hate it.”
I nod.
“We should help her escape,” she says.
I wrap my arm around her shoulder. We wait a while before climbing back into the truck and slipping into the valley, to the prison parking lot. The doors closing and our four feet moving across the asphalt.
Shelter in Place Page 9