“Oh, don’t tell me.”
Regina laughed deep in her throat and pulled her T-shirt down against the breeze. Such chubby baby cheeks, I thought, staring from my position by the door, and grabbed my keys off the dresser.
I was leaving when she said, “You really don’t give a fuck about me, do you?”
Out of the blue, just like that.
So flat it could have been her alarm clock going off.
Friday evenings, I had a time-honored date with Aunt Betsy in Northeast Harbor, preceding Regina by several years. Aunt Betsy was virtually my only companion. She was an eighty-six-year-old gossip who shredded other people’s lives between her fingers over breakfast. Her family had long inhabited Mount Desert Island and she knew everyone, year-rounders like me as well as the summer people, and collected our personal affairs not for wampum, but like a pack rat, for the joy of hoarding. No one was beyond her reach. Her dispatch board was a dining table cluttered with newspapers, coffee cups turned into ashtrays, and a large black office phone. In town, she’d pick up tidbits at the post office, the hardware store, and from the owner’s twin daughters at Pine Tree Market, who’d inform her which customers were doing what and to whom. As an amateur anthropologist, Betsy studied misbehavior. She tracked her stories doggedly and did not hesitate to use them. She loved playing vigilante. A few years earlier, when one of her neighbors, Tim Winston, hit the lotto, he’d secretly financed a breast augmentation for his girlfriend, while his wife, Maureen, still worked two jobs. During the winter, Maureen had shoveled out Betsy’s car a few times and helped carry in her groceries. When Betsy got wind of things, Maureen soon was filing for her share, represented by one of the area’s most expensive divorce attorneys.
But Aunt Betsy didn’t know everything about us. If she suspected where I’d been before dinner, I would have seen it in her face. Aunt Betsy rarely blinked. Her eyes behind her glasses were always wet.
“You look terrible,” Betsy wheezed. She patted my arm. “Did you watch the tennis?”
“I have a job,” I said. It came out short. After Regina’s, though, I wasn’t in the mood.
“Not much else besides, I’d say.”
That made me laugh.
“Anyway,” she said, “you’re too skinny, dear.”
We were standing together on the front porch at Cape Near. From Betsy, “dear” was pronounced “dee-ah.” “Work” came out “wairk,” “hard” was “hahrd.” Her accent was a classic mid-Atlantic, a coastal Mainer’s, except with a highbrow, Anglican lilt. “Now, Agassi, the poor boy,” Betsy said, “you should have seen him, up against some Croatian, oh just awful, Victor. And this one wears his hair long to rub it in. You know how Andre shaves his head now, just like you, dear, well, poor Andre!” She fluttered her hands around her hat. “He barely squeaked it out. You can tell it’s his final season. Krackalovic, Milokavic, some nonsense. Victor, weren’t your people Croatian?”
They were, but I wasn’t listening. The gin on Betsy’s breath said we wouldn’t be drinking the wine I’d brought. Mixing her liquors, Betsy always said, made her blue.
Typical of the neighborhood and of Maine’s coastal resorts, Cape Near was an oversize shingled cottage, a musty and disjointed Victorian with cedar siding. The name, coined by Betsy’s father, referred to a cove past the front yard. In August, the smells turned rank indoors. A cigarette was always burning somewhere. The area’s heyday dated back to Aunt Betsy’s teen years, when Mount Desert was able to peer down its nose at Newport or Tuxedo Park as an enclave for the wealthy. Now the house just felt deserted.
I fixed drinks and went outside to the terrace, where the lawn was overgrown, rolling down a hill wild with beach plums. Sounds of summer rang through the dusk: children playing a few yards over, somewhere behind the hedgerow. And then I sat down, covered my eyes, and slipped back to that bedroom in Otter Creek, halfway across the island, to the late-afternoon revue starring Ms. Bellette, twenty-five, and her headlining question: Did I or did I not “give a fuck” about her?
It was all a bit too much.
“So how have you been feeling?” I called out.
“Stuff it, Victor,” Betsy shouted. “You’re a medicine man now? Why, poor Agassi, think how he’s doing.”
“Isn’t he married to Steffi Graf?”
“Who’s no Brooke Shields.”
Betsy turned up huffing through the screen door. “Who would you pick?”
“Brooke Shields.”
“Now to be fair, Graf was a marvelous player.” Betsy paused to reflect. “In the modern game, Graf was best, bar none. Review any numbers you like, I don’t care if she lacked rivals. Now this was before the Williams sisters powered through, n’est-ce pas, but Graf really played like the men did, you know, and very much to her credit. But that nose of hers, imagine waking up to that in the morning.”
Regina’s nose was crooked in the middle from a childhood break. I unconsciously rubbed the stubble on my head, where it prickled around the crown. It had been Regina’s suggestion that I start buzzing my hair, a younger look for an older man. “Time to ditch the power doughnut,” she’d said.
Betsy settled herself in an upholstered patio chair.
“So how are you, really?”
“You know,” I said, “busy.”
She puckered her lips. “One day it will be important to surprise me.”
“I have a grant due soon, on top of one we just submitted.”
“You’ve had a grant due since you were twenty.”
“Well, you asked.”
She picked her teeth with the side of a fingernail. “And how’s the swimming?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Are you worried about something?”
“Be honest, dear, am I all you’ve got?”
“For what it’s worth.”
“Oh, I’m nosy, I know,” she said a moment later, gazing down the lawn, like we’d been lying out tanning all afternoon. “Now, Victor, did I tell you about Margaret’s David? So, apparently David ran his Mercedes into the picnic table again.”
Behind the trees, the sunset was really something, going from hibiscus to rose. Someone should take a picture, I thought. Sell a postcard to the tourists. As a destination island, we attracted four million visitors a year to smell the lupine. It was Aunt Betsy who’d told me how, around the end of the nineteenth century, a planning committee had renamed the town Bar Harbor, to attract rusticator money and sound more resortlike.
Previously, the town was called Eden.
Betsy reached out and pinched me.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you, I found a poem of Bill’s you’ll like. Remind me, I’ll give it to you when you leave.”
“That hurt, you know,” I said, and massaged my hand.
“You’re a fart. Now go inside and set the table.”
Funny thing was, Betsy Gardner was Sara’s aunt, not mine. Yet I was the chauffeur to Betsy’s doctor appointments, her lunch date on Mother’s Day, her every-week Friday-night special.
The Gardners had been some of Mount Desert Island’s earliest settlers. They’d gotten a head start on tourism by planting hotels on bedrock, and then turning enough profit so they could bet on steel. Come another generation, the family focused on their daughters: socializing in higher circles, breeding with Hookes and Pughs. There’d been an admiral, Betsy’s father, whose portrait hung above the guest toilet. He was also the author of a family genealogy he’d self-published in four volumes, a Social Register for the extended Gardner clan of which Betsy had recently bequeathed me a copy. My own story wasn’t much to note, just a chain of Long Island pharmacists and roofers trailing back to the Balkans. I was named Victor after my mother’s father, a wife beater no one liked to sit near during holidays. My last name, Aaron, was incidental: it had been assigned to an ancestor by an immigration clerk, since Cikojević didn’t sound much like baseball.
None of my relatives ever had a head shot of FDR above the fireplace, signed, “Dear Betsy, who ev
er swam with more grace? Adoring, Franklin.”
From her end of the dining table, Betsy related the scoop of the week: A famous fashion designer was whispering about dredging Bass Harbor so that he could park a yacht off his backyard. Fishermen were outraged and neighbors were bearing arms. It would be the scandal of the summer once it broke in the newspapers, Betsy said, with town, gown, and sea rights in a single basket.
And all I heard was, “You really don’t give a fuck about me, do you?” as if Regina were throwing out a clue for a crossword puzzle.
More than cartoons, more than an addiction to diet soda, most researchers I knew shared a knack for submerging into musing—or worrying, to be honest—at the cost of social graces. We were well-trained minds, but poor dinner guests.
Betsy shouted, “You must know Martin Filsberger, Victor, for Christ’s sake!”
“What?”
“The Washington Post reporter? No, you’re too busy with a microscope up your fanny.” Betsy threw her napkin down and lit a cigarette. “See here,” she said, “now, Martin was married to Jane Paul. Sort of a canine girl, Jane, with a snout. Martin and Jane used to summer in Pretty Marsh until Martin started running the Jerusalem office. But listen”—she blew smoke across the phone—“one afternoon I ran into Martin at the post office. Now, remember, this was the year of Monica Lewinsky, so I said, ‘Martin, what is the story here? Clinton was a Rhodes scholar. The man was an Eagle Scout. What in God’s name’s happening?’ And Martin took my elbow, we walked outside, and he said, ‘Betsy, I am forced to swear you to secrecy or my editor will have my neck,’ and I said, ‘Martin, if anyone can keep a secret, it’s not me.’ And he liked that, he gave me a nice smile, he leaned down, and whispered in my ear, ‘It wasn’t just a blow job. It was one hell of a blow job.’ And oh, I was dying, Victor, what a card, what a card!”
Betsy made off for the liquor cabinet. A boat horn tootled from the harbor down the road. Outside, through the window, the night was full of fireflies and searchlights, children running around the street playing flashlight tag. I did the dishes while Aunt Betsy paced the kitchen, stamping the tiles with her cane.
“So why don’t you come out to Cranberry this summer?”
“What? You know I can’t do that.”
Little Cranberry was a smaller island south of Mount Desert, where Betsy kept a cottage.
“The camp is just to pieces,” Betsy said. “Or perhaps I shouldn’t go out this summer, is that what you think?” She stopped by my elbow. “But you must come, Victor, visit for a week. You could commute by ferry.”
“I’m working all hours as it is. Plus, I have a conference in New York.”
“New York isn’t going anywhere. Oh, listen to me for once. You promised.”
I stared down at my hands.
“When? Exactly when did I promise?”
She ashed her cigarette into the sink. “Anyway, you work too much as it is. You’ll be reminded that Uncle Bill worked too much, too. Aside from work, Victor, what have you got? Just look at your forehead.”
“What’s wrong with my forehead?”
“Dear, you are inhumane.” Betsy sat down and folded her arms in her lap like two mannequin limbs. She’d won, but the fight had drained her spirit. I wondered if one of her spies had told her something about Regina. Was this how she’d exhibit jealousy, by nagging?
I finished the dishes, poured a scotch, and escorted Betsy out to the screened porch. We watched TV on a wheelie cart, an hour with the great Belgian detective Hercule Poirot while he investigated murders on public television. At a scary point, Betsy grabbed my hand.
“Tell you what,” she said when the program finished, “I found an old draft of Sara’s movie that she gave me. You should have it. That one I saw at the Criterion.”
This was a new habit of Aunt Betsy’s, giving away things she’d unearthed around the house.
“The Hook-Up,” I said.
“Shame she never wrote another.”
“She wrote several, you know that. They just weren’t produced.”
“Well, I never saw them,” said Betsy. “I’ll give it to you with Bill’s poem. Remind me.”
She squeezed my fingers and held on. It was understood but never spoken aloud that our Friday-night dates, figuring out how Poirot could know so much from so little, were our weekly shift at the widows’ walk. Seven years earlier, Betsy’s husband, Uncle Bill, had died from a stroke at the Harbor Club. Four and a half years after that, on January 5, 2004, Sara, my wife and Betsy’s niece, was killed in a car accident on the island, above Seal Harbor. We’d been married thirty-three years. Pipes had burst in a summer cottage and flooded the street, and Sara spun out, crashing her BMW through a metal barrier.
She’d grown up on the island and had known the roads as well as anyone, but this was black ice, impossible to spot.
At the time, Sara had just returned from six weeks in California. Our marriage was going through a rocky patch, and what could never happen became indelible over the telephone. Instant history. Called to the hospital, I cried over her face. I lost my balance in a corridor. Betsy was driving me home that evening when I insisted on visiting the accident site. It was a curve of road with a southern view, where in daylight you might see cruise ships. The full moon made the ocean look frozen.
Back at the house were groceries to be unpacked and Sara’s Ray-Bans by the telephone. Near the answering machine was an envelope from American Airlines. We’d been scheduled to go to Italy in February for a two-month sabbatical. A second honeymoon. She’d thought of it on the return flight from Los Angeles.
According to the police report, Sara’s not wearing a seat belt was a determining factor in her death. It was the kind of detail she might have used in one of her movies. Sara never wore a seat belt. She refused to, all her life, and I let it slide, the way some spouses will tolerate a smoker. But it drove me crazy. A year before the accident, on a trip to Boston, she’d proudly labeled not wearing a seat belt “my thing.”
It remained the clearest thing I could hear her saying.
Regina’s voice played louder than the radio on my drive home from Betsy’s. For our Friday afternoons, I’d been ready to sign over my house and my car, chop off my hands and leave them as offerings, remove my head, extract the calcium from my hips, whatever Regina found of value. Now, driving through the dark, I was prepared to toss it all out the window.
For two and a half months, Regina and I had had our own island. But I’d had that before, for thirty years. She’s twenty-five, I thought, she wears corsets for fun, no wonder she’s moody. She needs a companion who can share her vocabulary. If you call that a vocabulary.
After showering, I gave “wife beater” over to the Internet. A moment later I was running back upstairs, grabbing my undershirt from the laundry basket. On the stomach was a good-sized stain I hadn’t noticed before.
I thought of my grandfather, the wife beater.
Later, I was falling asleep when the telephone rang.
“Remarkably, she knew they’d fit,” Regina said. “And, I quote, it was for the kick of it. Cute, right? I mean, I found them in her closet and she has the balls to tell me first I left them there, my Givenchy pumps? Right, so she goes on elaborately about how she could never steal from me, and who am I to accuse her, my roommate, the victim everlasting. Finally she apologizes, has a heart attack, now she’s weeping in her room.”
Regina called like this once or twice a week. When I was steering the conversation we’d talk about old movies, the antique stars we loved.
Say nothing, I thought.
“About this afternoon,” I said.
“Okay.”
“About what you said when I left.”
“Well?”
I didn’t know how they put it these days. “Regina, you know I’m crazy about you.”
A pause.
“Victor, why not just call it what it is?”
“Which means what?”
“Never mi
nd.”
She hung up.
The poem and screenplay from Betsy lay on the bedside table. I picked up the screenplay and focused on Sara’s name on the cover. By Sara Gardner. Losing someone and being left behind were two separate things. Didn’t matter where I was, any room could become a vacuum. A void to precede mania, or nothing at all.
I picked up Uncle Bill’s poem instead and read the first stanza by moonlight.
ON THE 38TH BIRTHDAY OF SEAL HARBOR’S SALLY PARKER
I shall not this tale embellish.
Still and all I’d be a chump,
If I did not view with relish
Mrs. Parker’s curvesome rump.
Science historically supported Renaissance and monastic types. I was neither. Research in my experience was less a devotion than a small business, a type of farm-league baseball where most of our work was keeping together a decent team and raising money for new uniforms. As a career, it offered little instant gratification. Science was marriage: once the sizzle faded, there needed to be a long-standing love for the discipline to keep you going. Those who worked in academic research for ego fulfillment didn’t last. Without an ardent love for the job, the work was too discouraging. Generally there were three possible outcomes for an experiment: one, the experiment worked and the results were consistent with your hypothesis, occurring about ten percent of the time; two, the experiment worked, but not really, since the results were contrary to the hypothesis, about twenty percent of the time; or three, the experiment didn’t work, and you started over, about seventy percent of the time. Meaning nine times out of ten our experiments didn’t work at all.
Also, the money was better in the private sector, as long as you didn’t mind working on an assembly line. Or so I’d heard.
Monday morning, following a weekend in the lab, I woke up from a dream in which I was begging Bruce Willis for help. Normally my dreams took place in deserts, but this was in my yard, and Bruce Willis was ordering me to start a garden. And Regina was there. Or maybe Regina was the one who said it, playing mistress of the grounds, and Bruce Willis was the gardener. I wasn’t sure.
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