Cape Cod Noir

by David L. Ulin

  In the morning, Albert awoke and immediately felt glad of the silence and the lack of tourist traffic, which would make it easier for him to get the furniture hauled away and clean the house. He fished out one of June’s phone books from under the filigreed, fake wood counter. It was ten years out-of-date.

  He decided to walk into Wellfleet. The Bookstore Restaurant, where he and Mark had once fingered stacks of overpriced vintage comics, was closed for the weekend, as was the small ice cream and candy stand at the end of the dock. Galleries had begun to spring up on Water Street toward the center of town, but Albert was not moved to examine them. It was the kind of thing Susan had liked.

  The summer she died, she had taken to making flowery observations about the region, hauling out maps to show a now-gawky Ludi that the ponds—Great Pond, Gull Pond, Long Pond, Spectacle Pond—looked like fingers, as if God had pressed His hand into the damp ground and let the impression fill with mud, then water.

  Albert had wondered whether Susan thought of these things in advance to announce to the girl, or if they sprung from her on the spot. Toward the end, it seemed a kind of mania, to be so lyrical about everything. Put it in a poem, he felt like saying. Once he had actually said it. Ludi and Susan had spent the weekend writing just such poems, and when Mark returned Sunday from wherever he had gone, he had them framed. This was exactly the type of item, Albert assumed, June wanted removed before he handed over the keys to Chequessett Realty.

  Susan’s death was an accident. Albert was told this, in the moment, so frequently, with such calm assurance, by so many faceless authorities, that it was only when he had roused himself from grief, and then paralysis, that he found to his surprise he could nominally agree.

  Mark had not been drunk, or returning late from one of his trips, or any of the many things it would have been easier to blame him for. He was picking up Ludi from the parking lot of the Great Island Walk. She was allowed to take the hike partway alone, now that she was fourteen.

  Albert and Susan had gone on this very walk with Ludi many times, although they seldom made it to the end of the three hunchbacked mounds that stretched out to the ocean. Ludi liked to haul herself over to the oceanside a mile in and pick through rocks, even when she was old enough, Albert felt, to be beyond such things. At least she had stopped examining hermit crabs. It was not uncommon for Susan and Ludi to gather a pound of unvariegated shards and give them to Albert to carry up the dirt-cut stairs when they were done.

  That summer, relations between Susan and Ludi seemed strained. Albert had chalked it up to Ludi’s adolescence. He noticed it particularly on a trip to Provincetown the weekend before the accident. Instead of raiding jewelry shops with Susan, Ludi stuck close to Albert. He would have thought she’d take interest in the drag queens who had begun to pop up in abundance, but instead she was fascinated by the lesbian couples, especially the biracial ones.

  “Why do you think so many of the girl couples are black and white?” she asked Albert when Susan, after many unsuccessful attempts at conversation, darted off to find a bathroom.

  It may have been the first serious question Ludi had ever asked him, and he was surprised to find himself with an answer. “I guess after you cross one boundary, it doesn’t matter if you cross another one,” he said.

  Had this hurt the girl’s feelings? It was only later that night that Albert remembered Ludi herself was biracial, something he knew, of course, but had failed to associate with the girl. At fourteen, how sensitive would Ludi have been?

  Susan returned from the bathroom and linked her arm with Ludi’s. “There are all kinds of families,” she told them. “All kinds of different constellations.”

  Albert hadn’t known she was listening. Maybe she was referring to their own childless state. That summer, their lovemaking also bloomed into a kind of mania, Susan frantically assuming new positions, climaxing so loudly he’d shushed her once or twice, afraid she would wake up June or the girl. Was she, at thirty-seven, desperate to have a baby, or had she abandoned the idea, and was trying to make do with what was left?

  “You just like to come,” she accused him. It wasn’t untrue. He couldn’t decide a position on children either, and was happy for Susan to lead the way. Then, around the time of the trip to Provincetown, Susan relaxed, a catlike smile spreading across her features. It was in this mood that she approached Albert and Ludi, and it was probably the same mood in which, not long after, she ran out to greet Mark and Ludi as they pulled into the parking space.

  In the slight wood surrounding the house on Chequessett Neck Road, around four o’clock every day, a sharp needle of light appeared as the sun set over the bay, sliding to midpoint on one of the larger trees until it was eaten by the dusk. It was this needle that hit Mark directly in the eye and blinded him as he pulled in with the car. Three hours later, Susan was dead, and another twelve hours after that, the coroner told Albert that his wife had been seven weeks pregnant.

  Albert was weeping. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought gathering the paltry leavings of his scattered family wouldn’t set him off, but it had been a long time since he’d cried for Susan, or any of them.

  There was a picture of Ludi’s graduation. The sight of the girl—now tall, almost obscenely comely, with ripe lips and languid, sleepy eyes—made Albert draw back with physical distaste. Since Susan’s death, he hadn’t seen her. Ludi looked both like Mark and like her mother, who had elected to attend the ceremony in a different portion of the seating and take Ludi for a dinner with her friends the night before.

  He placed June’s few wall hangings and prints in a box, then pulled a stack of photo albums off the bottom of a bookshelf filled with paperbacks he would not bother to save.

  He knew what was in the albums. On rainy days, when they were teenagers, he and Mark would look at pictures of their parents: his mother’s high school graduation photo, with the black velvet sweetheart neckline over her shoulders; the wedding photo; some early shots of the family on the lawn of their house in Edison, New Jersey; his baby picture and Mark’s. At some point, June had added a series of Ludi to the album, and Albert was shocked to see how much she resembled his own mother also, of whom he rarely thought. How strange not to remember one’s childhood. But Albert was beginning to feel that, in his case, it was more a matter of failing to pay attention. His life—his attentiveness—seemed to have begun only at his parents’ death, and culminated with Susan’s. Perhaps that’s why Aunt June had backed away from him, and Mark, who had maintained a decent tether throughout their twenties and thirties, absented himself completely. Perhaps Albert’s lack of attention was prescriptive.

  He was cramming a stack of maps into a garbage bag when he realized they were the ones Susan and Ludi had used to write those poems so long ago. He took the sheaf of poems, now removed from their frames, and placed them carefully in a neat stack. There were odes to Long Pond, Great Pond, even Indian Neck Road, some in Ludi’s careful, halting hand, and the rest in Susan’s confident, round script. Spectacle Pond: You can barely see the forest for the trees. That was Ludi. This road leads only one way, but the sand leads two. Vintage Susan. Where else would the sand be but on two sides, on the Cape?

  He turned the poem over.

  All my love, Your Susan, it said.

  Susan was the one who had wanted to go to Spectacle Pond. “It’s the only one we haven’t seen,” she’d said.

  Albert knew Spectacle Pond. It was barely good for swimming, just two flat rounds of shallow water off Long Pond Road. He had been there once as a teenager with Mark, who found it beautiful. Albert preferred Great Pond, which by that age he had mastered swimming across.

  The road to Spectacle Pond was not paved. It was deep, hardened mud, and several times Albert had to back the car up to keep the tires in the grooves. “I hope you like it,” he said. There was no answer, and for a moment he felt certain that Susan was restraining herself from telling him to shut up.

  At the pond, there was no proper beach, on
ly the same gaping mud, stringy with reeds. “Come in, darling,” Susan said to Ludi. “It’s creepy,” the girl replied. Finally, she joined Susan in the center, where Susan held her, as if she were still two years old. “Look up!” Susan urged, pointing at the enclosed circle of sky. “Isn’t it beautiful? From above, it looks like eyes!” On the shore, Albert heard Ludi either snort or murmur something like agreement.

  Ludi had refused to step in the other pond. “It’s exactly the same!” Susan exclaimed. “That’s what I mean,” Ludi said, her voice filled with that quiet Albert had only begun to learn, in children, meant terror. “Go wait in the car,” Susan said, suddenly impatient. “I’m going to go under, and so are you, Albert.”

  How angry had he been as he waded out into the water and dunked his head? He couldn’t remember. He only knew that when they returned to the car, Ludi’s face floated out at them, ghostly, accusatory. She was in his seat. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  All my love, Your Susan. On the back of the poem that Mark had had framed. He looked at that a long time.

  But Ludi hadn’t answered that she wasn’t afraid. She had said: “I can drive.”

  He could see them, even now, as he walked by the bay, hovering over his wife, June emerging from the house, cigarette in hand. Was there any chance she hadn’t known? It seemed unlikely. She would have colluded immediately, as would Ludi, who, after all, would only be continuing in her mode of silent and opaque adolescence. By the time Susan was in the morgue and her death dispatched as accidental manslaughter, Mark had disappeared with the girl. June had, with relief, seen her younger nephew off. Now he understood.

  Now he understood a lot of things, all the signals that he’d missed. Such as Uncle Travis’s departure, for instance, which had coincided with the arrival of two teenage boys, or Mark’s abiding distance, which seemed less a rejection of his younger brother than a rejection of their relations at the core. They had known—they had all known—and not only had they not protected Albert from their knowledge, he had barely figured in their calculations. Even Susan, no blood relation, still carried more weight in his family than he.

  It was dark. He left the house. He was in Spectacle Pond, staring at the water, in the far pond, where Susan and Ludi had looked at the sky. His stomach rose before him like a white moon.

  No. There was the actual moon, a delicate, high-set orb, stars twinkling all around it like the crystal earrings Susan often picked off the black velvet trays of vendors in Provincetown. His own stomach was a slab of green cheese, buoyant, like the half-eaten Styrofoam below a float.

  He was surprised to find that he was crying again, tears running down his face in hot straight paths. When Susan died, he had cried for years, it seemed—for the first months, vast bellowing gasps of bewilderment, and then a stretch of shamed whimpering that emerged while he was waiting in line at the grocery store or standing in an elevator.

  These tears were different—less bewildered and more astonished, as if he had suddenly learned he was adopted, or born on a distant planet. As if this world was the distant planet. This was, he supposed, the moment when he was meant to give up, to leave his corpse, his white bloated body, washed up on the needled shore. Or maybe he could seek out Mark, and gun him down in the middle of a performance of Our Town. Then he would track down Ludi in whatever hovel she was in, remind her of the many dinners Susan had cooked on her behalf. For a moment, he saw himself dragging her into a cab, shouting orders as some Spanish boyfriend gesticulated in the distance. Albert had never been to Spain.

  He was not going to do any of these things. The black sky over the pond was a lid, he suspended in its jar. Through a conflagration of circumstance and other people’s will, he was floating alone two miles from a dark small road smack in the center of a barely peopled peninsula, with nobody to know or care. He was not angry or murderous. He was lonely, merely lonely—or at least, he thought, lonelier than anyone like him had right or reason to be.

  LA JETÉE

  BY DAVID L. ULIN

  Harwichport

  He had been here before. Countless times before, not the physical space but the emotional space, the roiling space inside. That summer on the Cape, summer he’d turned thirteen, he’d had this … vision was the only word for it, as if it were a movie in his head. Ever since, it had dogged him, like a distant memory: black-and-white, herkyjerky, somewhere between a film and a collage of stills. Always, he was at the center, moving heedlessly along the jetty, around its great stone curve. He was running from something but he didn’t know what, only that it kept coming, relentless, unforgiving, like a simple twist of fate. The jetty made no sense, it was a dead end, a blind alley, but it was where the vision took him, while the big waves crashed against the rocks. He had been drawn here in reality also, drawn to the vastness, to the brackish sweep of steam-drilled boulders, to the tension between industry and nature, the breakwater holding the waves from the harbor and the waves pushing to take it back. They were inevitable, the waves, as inevitable as the vision, in which it was always high tide, and as he tore out past the breakers, the rough water pulled at his feet, until, just beyond the halfway point along the jetty, a big wave crashed across the rocks and swept him out to sea.

  Out to sea … and didn’t that describe him, didn’t that get right to where he was? Thirty-eight years old, adrift in a life that didn’t fit him any longer, if indeed it ever had. He’d felt it for a long time, the looping tendrils of dissatisfaction, the sharp pangs of regret. Regret for what? He didn’t know but recognized the longing, the way that, even in the calmest moments, there was an undertone of discontent.

  Now, however, he was really in it; now, it was more than dismay. Over the past few months, his life had narrowed to a pinprick, as if he were being pushed through a series of checkpoints, each one stripping away another piece of who he was. If he’d been a philosopher, he might have seen this as some kind of purification ritual, but he wasn’t a philosopher. He was a man.

  Or not even a man, not really; not a very good man, anyway. As a kid, he’d sworn that when he grew up, he would pay attention, and here he was living in the fallout of his in attention, a junk bond trader in a collapsing market, laid off and understanding in a whole new way what was meant by out of luck. The day they’d canned him, he had seen the old man in the corridor, but that fucker hadn’t said a word. Instead, he’d disappeared behind the mahogany door of his office—to make lunch plans, to cash out an option, to do God knows what while the HR robots did the dirty work. All morning, people had been summoned, an e-mail or a tap on the shoulder, and then the long walk to the conference room. When his time came, he felt his throat grow dry and a blade of panic slide down his windpipe. He sat for a moment, looking at his computer. There were numbers tracking stock transactions, but as usual they didn’t add up. Briefly, he wondered if he should do something—throw the monitor on the floor, hurl his desk chair through a window. Then he got up and trudged down the hall, reminding himself to keep his head up, reminding himself not to let it show.

  That was the idea, not to let anyone know it mattered, not to make a scene. In the conference room, they offered water because you couldn’t cry when you were drinking water—or at least that’s what he’d once heard. It’s not personal, the robots were saying, your position has been eliminated, but it sounded like they were submerged. They handed him a folder with some papers to sign and instructions on how to get his severance, and just like that, he no longer had a job.

  He couldn’t say how quickly the plan had started to develop, but the earliest inkling came before he’d finished cleaning out his desk. Standing on the jetty, watching the sky grow pale and silver-pink at sunset, he drifted back to that moment, emptying his drawers into a trash can, realizing that nothing he’d gathered in the last five years, nothing he’d accumulated, meant anything at all. In a weird way, he felt hardened, kilnfired, as if those few minutes in the conference room had heatblasted him into some new shape. Not purified, though, nev
er purified. Not unless purity could be defined in terms of rage. He’d kept going through his papers, not registering their contents, seeing all those columns of numbers, those transactions, break down into abstract lines. His eyes kept drifting to the old man’s office, and he began to imagine what it would be like to walk through that heavy door and slam him through a wall. That little troll—he’d mismanaged the investments, he had overextended, selling short and buying long. Now, all of them had to pay for the mess while the old man went about his business, buying fancy suits and spending weekends on Cape Cod.

  But here he was on Cape Cod, having taken the Plymouth & Brockton bus from Boston to Hyannis, and the RTA to Harwichport. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and he’d come down here for his own kind of celebration, a personal reckoning, Thanksgiving with a kick. He knew this town only from that one long-ago summer and the presence of the jetty in his dreams. But the more he’d thought about it—thought about it? Obsessed about it, sitting in his Central Square apartment in the months since he’d been laid off, watching his severance dwindle down to zero—the more he’d had that sense of being whittled, of his life leading toward a single moment. That moment had arrived.

  It had been twenty-five years since he’d last been here, and yet, he knew, there was nowhere else to go. The town hadn’t changed much: the old movie theater was gone, reconfigured as a shopping complex, with some seasonal stores and a failing bookshop, and the bakery had moved to a new location, but otherwise, it was as if he were tracing a passage inside himself. Unencumbered but for a small backpack, he had wandered down Main Street, sand rustling in the gutters, sidewalks empty, summer businesses closed up tight. Past the liquor store and George’s Pizza, through the intersection of Route 28 and Bank Street, to the residential lanes that led to the bluff. The house sat on one of these near the end of the blacktop, where the road dead-ended into an ocean path.