They both fell back in their chairs laughing. Dinner was eaten outside on our laps. Cornelia lit the citronella torches and quizzed Betsy about Uncle Bill and how they’d met, what their courtship was like, what it had been like to live in Japan after the war.
“You know, I did almost have an affair.”
“What?” I said.
Both women looked at me.
“What are you two talking about? I’m sorry, with who?”
Betsy laughed and turned in her seat toward Cornelia and took one of her hands, sliding the rings up and down her fingers as though on an abacus. “Bill, bless him,” Betsy said to Cornelia, ignoring me, “took on junior engineers in the summer. One year we had a Princeton boy named Ford. Fordie Wheeler, family from Virginia, I think. Anyway, delightful young man, smart, and very tall. Sort of a young Bill Holden. At the time, boys stayed at the house, that way Bill could work them around the clock and make sure they didn’t get into trouble. Well, Fordie was a good guest, very polite. A little too well trained. He’d eat dinner with us, help me with the housework, and always interesting, you know, telling stories about the fraternity, and could he play the piano! Well, one week Bill had to fly on business and it was just the two of us.”
Betsy sighed. “The remarkable thing,” she said a moment later, her head up, “I don’t think he ever would have laid a hand on me. And I was a looker, you know. But Fordie was soft, you see, he read too much poetry, he had ideas. Me on the other hand, I’d thought about it all summer. I was dying to be his ruin. It’s terrible to remember, I would go to bed dreaming. I couldn’t take my eyes off him at the club. Why, the legs on that boy.” She paused for a long moment. “This was a few years after Joel had disappeared. He’d resurfaced once or twice. We’d be relieved, of course, not for long, though. I was sending him money secretly, then he wrote these vile letters from Sacramento, of the most incredible rage, wishing us the worst from his hidey-hole. Bill really took it to heart, though he wouldn’t show it. Never talked to the boy again, talked to me less. Personally I felt betrayed. I’d given Joel quite a good deal of money by that point. Well, blame ourselves is what we did, and it divided us. It was like a ghost lying there in the bed, our failure. But the first afternoon I saw young Ford, it occurred to me right away, the idea of being with him, a clean slate. Someone new. We had our little jokes, you see. I’m sure he thought we were just picnicking.
“But you must see, you must see, Cornelia, I never cheated on Bill. I did not betray my husband. I loved Bill, I loved him more that summer than ever I had, I adored him. But you’ll have worked tremendously hard to build your life after a certain fashion, and then suddenly, one morning, you want something different. You want anything but what you have, you want it new and you want it just right then. It’s terrifying, the desire’s so powerful, you’re just sick with it. Or perhaps I’d had too much to drink.”
Cornelia tried to interrupt but Betsy wouldn’t have it: “Either I’d had too much to drink or not enough. We were out behind the house. I asked Fordie to bring outside the record player so we could dance. I said I was worried he could return to school not knowing how to court a girl properly, and then what sort of hostess had I been? Oh, I’d planned it for days, it was such a hot summer. Though of course the boy could dance. He was dashing, he knew it, he was very well taught and groomed and turned out, boys were in those days and Ford especially. And there was a moon out. And even at dusk it was still so hot. You smelled like honeysuckle. He put the record on and I instructed him on how to grasp my waist. Then we danced several times. And I kissed him.”
Betsy was staring off into the woods. I asked, “So what happened?”
She laughed. “Well, nothing, dear. He wanted to see what came next, I could tell, and so did I, but that was it, just about as far as I was capable. Bill returned home the next day and Fordie departed a week later.”
Betsy coughed and was seized by a fit. Her voice cracked and gurgled. Half an hour later, she threatened to drive herself home. I got her into my car after Cornelia gave her a hug and she and Betsy spent a few minutes discussing what dreadlocks required to maintain.
“A nice girl,” Betsy said as we drove through the dark to Northeast Harbor.
“I’d never heard that story before. About the boy.”
“A nice girl,” she repeated, leaning on the door. “Be careful, dear. Now, let’s have the radio, I want to sing.”
We sang along to Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five.” Halfway home, I was about to ask more concerning the almost-affair, but Betsy had begun snoring.
Our third day together was a Mount Desert belle. In the morning, I showed Cornelia my pick in the guidebook, Pemetic Mountain, one of the island’s tougher hikes. I was packing the backpack when I noticed that my iPod was out of juice. I’d seen Cornelia unplug hers from her laptop before breakfast, leaving the white cord dangling like a tail, so I sat down and plugged in mine, and then stared dumbly at the password screen.
“I just wanted to charge my iPod,” I said when Cornelia appeared.
“No worries. It’s ‘early bird special,’ no spaces.”
I typed it in. The password screen vanished.
“First thing I see,” said Cornelia. “At home, when I open my laptop, across the street is this sign for a parking garage. ‘Early Bird Special, Monday to Sunday, seventeen seventy-four, plus tax.’” She laughed. “I’ve probably looked at that sign twice a day since I was a kid.”
By eleven, we were halfway up the mountain, past the tree line onto granite slabs scaling the open ridge. Across the valley, a thin stream of cars was circling Cadillac, the island’s tallest mountain, in order to buy their I CLIMBED CADILLAC bumper stickers at the gift shop.
Plainly, I could have used a ride. I was stopping frequently for breaks, nearly dizzy. Pemetic may have been my favorite hike, but I hadn’t done it in several years, and crunching four Advil wasn’t rescuing my knees. It didn’t help that Cornelia had suffered a nightmare the previous night about dead animals, a mountain of babies piling on top of her, an apocalyptic shower of lab rats and minks and baby seals.
I was wheezing too hard to explain I’d never clubbed a baby anything.
“What’s weird is that everybody agrees torture is awful. Russell the libertarian agrees it’s the end point, full stop. So why is torture on humans so terrible, but not on animals? You think we’re the center of the universe. Nature prefers us, we’ve been selected for superiority. So you extract information, it’s justified cruelty and you supplant it, Uncle Victor, you’re responsible for it, and I’d be acting unfairly to myself, to my principles, if I didn’t hold you to it. And don’t say it’s for the good of research, as though research is more than means, is in itself noble, is not what brought about the fucking A-bomb.”
She turned on me and shook a branch to make her last point.
Where had she read this? Where did she get the lungs?
We dropped our backpacks at the summit signpost. I sat down, closed my eyes, and listened to the blood thudding in my temples. I’d been thinking about Regina, trying to reconstruct her face at that recital, but it was a blur, a Polaroid that wouldn’t come through. I put my head between my knees. Cornelia sighed, clopped over to me, fawn-like, and sat on my lap for a moment drinking water. I put my arm around her shoulder, though I could have shoved her off a cliff. Anything joyful and light needed crushing.
After a minute she whispered congratulations on surviving the hike, and I looked around. The view was stunning, panoramic from the ocean to the mountains. I caught my breath, feeling more fifty-eight than forty-six, but at least not sixty-four. Not seventy-nine.
I saluted Cornelia on proving me a war criminal. She started singing something old by Janis Joplin, then jogged me around by the hands, spinning us both until we were wheezing.
There was a whistle close by. We crept to the lip. About three minutes below, a dozen Boy Scouts in neckerchiefs and baseball caps and uniforms were climbing in a line, led by a
man in a brimmed ranger’s hat.
Cornelia grabbed me and started down the other side.
“Hurry, after them comes the Hardy Boys, and then Nancy Drew, let’s go!”
They taught us in Boy Scouts that the most important component in a fire was kindling. Without lots of small dry branches, your fire would self-extinguish, or never catch in the first place. I collected sticks for ten minutes in the woods, stooping, cursing my sore knees. Afterward, though, I had a good fire burning in the outdoor fireplace, adding a glow to what remained of the sunset.
Cornelia made pasta and we split a bottle of white wine. I started on a second while Cornelia drank herb tea. The phone rang after dinner and she took it upstairs. It was the fourth time the phone rang since we had gotten home. The previous three had been from Betsy, but I’d checked the caller ID each time and elected not to answer.
Going in for more wine, I heard snippets of conversation floating down the stairs. The voice mail light on the machine was flashing. Cornelia came back and sat opposite me, deeply buried in her sweatshirt, her tea mug hidden up her sleeve. The night fell in around us. I thought about Russell sitting there, exactly where Cornelia was, only weeks earlier.
“Who was that?”
“Who do you think?”
“Did he want to speak to me?”
“No.”
“Well what did he want?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Cornelia jeered, “He wants me to come home.”
“Have some wine,” I said, offering her the bottle. She drank straight from the neck.
“That’s ridiculous, you’re doing so well up here. Don’t worry, I’ll call him.”
“Victor, don’t.”
“Anyway I want to. For other stuff. I won’t mention you at all.”
“Please, Victor.”
I found Russell’s number in my address book.
“I knew you’d see the light,” he said.
“Russell, it’s Victor. How are you?”
“Christ, I thought you were Connie. Did you just talk to her? What’d she say?”
“Nothing. I didn’t talk to her.”
“So what’s happening?”
“Nothing. I’m just calling.”
“You’re just calling. Okay, listen, I’ve been rethinking. I think Connie would do better down here for the rest of the summer. I need her, okay? I tell you I broke up with that Ukrainian chick? Nightmare, I can’t tell you. Slavic women are all kinds of fucked-up. But about Connie, I need her back home, preferably this week.”
“Because you got dumped again? What about her job?”
“Hey, I know how it looks. On Connie’s end, I talked to a chef who’s a friend of mine—”
I interrupted, “You remember that fall, when Sara was out in California?”
“What?”
“Did you go out to see her? In California?”
“Buddy, are you drunk? Put Connie on the phone.”
“I want to know is, did you go out there?”
“Did I go where?”
“Were you two having an affair?” I said.
“Jesus. I don’t know who I’m talking to right now.”
I heard the door slide open and slam shut. Cornelia went by in a blur, a hooded ghost running up the stairs. “Sara called you,” I said steadily into the phone. “From Los Angeles, when she left me.”
“She called me to talk. To talk about a fucking movie. Why you would think—we talked about her script. I read dialogue.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Get what?”
“Tell me where you got the pages.”
“The pages? Victor, I did not go out there. Are you listening, are you recording this right now? Because I don’t want to hear a question like that again from my oldest friend. We are talking about two phone conversations, maybe three. I told her about a girl I was dating, I needed advice.”
“Tell me about the movie.”
“Okay, you’re drunk.”
“Tell me—”
“Put Connie on the phone.”
“Send me the pages.”
“This is over right now. Victor, put Connie on the phone. Will you put Connie on the phone?”
“Don’t call here again,” I said.
“All right, I’m calling Connie’s cell phone, you go sleep it off. Good night.”
In a childless marriage, there can be no secrets, Sara once said.
Technically, it was a line from The Hook-Up.
Three in the morning, I couldn’t sleep, I was still drunk and the shelves in my music room were spinning. I wondered if Cornelia was awake. I cracked open her bedroom door. She was sleeping on her side, her hands clasped together near her face. One of the windows was open. I slid it closed and pulled a quilt down from the closet and draped it over her bed.
Downstairs, I went into Sara’s office and turned on the light. I took her laptop out of the drawer and opened it on her desk, right where she’d always placed it.
A picture of popcorn. Right behind her laptop, slightly to the left, tacked to the bulletin board was a postcard of popcorn overflowing from a red bag.
I laughed when “popcorn” worked. I was making a mental note to tell Sara about it, when I realized what I was thinking.
On her computer’s desktop were the usual icons, plus one that had been dragged to the center, a file named “In Progress.” I double-clicked on it and Sara’s screenwriting program started. “THE PERFECT HUSBAND,” the screen said in big letters. “BY SARA GARDNER.”
I booted up the printer, ran off a copy, and turned off the light. I stopped again by Cornelia’s door. She was snoring. I must have stood there two minutes before I noticed that she’d kicked off the quilt. I put the screenplay down on the floor and slowly crawled around the sides of the bed, tucking the quilt into the crack between the mattress and the box spring. When I reached Cornelia’s side, our faces were inches apart.
Her eyes popped open.
“What are you doing?”
“Tucking you in,” I whispered.
“What?” She bolted up and pulled the sheet up to her chin. “Jesus, get out of here!”
The parking lot for the Somesville bookstore was jammed. Some people I recognized from Soborg, or maybe they just looked the type, happy people my age in river sandals giving friends the smallest of waves.
I’d spent the last days of my vacation alone. Cornelia hadn’t mentioned the night I tucked her in, except to say nothing whenever we were in the same room. Two nights in a row, she’d slept elsewhere. The first night, she left me a note on the kitchen counter saying I shouldn’t worry. Second time, no word at all.
Chapbook readings were bigger events than I’d imagined. I stood leaning against a shelf of cookbooks, trying to remember the name of someone in the audience I recognized when I spotted Regina sitting in the front row, facing forward. I tried willing her to turn around. Then a girl’s hair caught my eye: third row, green streaks, Lindsay the roommate who was turning in her seat. Our eyes met. She didn’t see as much as absorb me, then turn away with some inscrutable expression quivering around her mouth.
I wondered, Would antlers require four hands to carry?
The store manager shushed the crowd. Someone shouted back, “You shush, Barbara!” The manager thanked us for coming and begged us to forgive the lack of air conditioning. She introduced the readers, winners of the University of Maine’s Aroostook Prize. When her name was called, Regina turned in her seat and waved to the audience. My face burned, but we didn’t make eye contact. I looked around in case I knew anyone else in the crowd.
Too much, too much. I felt unsteady on my feet. I turned to leave, but three young people had just walked in behind me, stopping in front of the door.
The first two poets went quickly, reading abstract poems that meant nothing to me. A woman in a crimson velvet vest went next. She wore so many silver bracelets, the clacking noise nearly drowned out her voice. Her last poem was titled “Bush, Cock,�
�� which turned out to be pretty much the only words employed. When she finished, the crowd applauded loudly, some of them stamping their feet.
When Regina stepped behind the lectern, I slid partially behind a book display. She pulled back her hair and stared at her pages—my Regina of the pronounced shining cheeks where the glow from the skylights was caught trembling.
“Why, hello,” Regina said slowly into the microphone, drawling her words and then smiling. People laughed. “Now, I don’t know if I can top that, but I will try, I will try.” She was gazing around. “As many of you know, I work at Soborg, but my calling, my true vocation, is to catalog my insecurities. So here we are.”
She had them in the cup of her hand.
“This morning I was asked by my roommate where I got the title for this book. It’s called Fair Merman, there are copies for sale in the back, please remember to tip your waitress. And I told her, I found it in a poem my uncle Mitch once sent me. He said he’d found it in a collection of old Scandinavian love poems. I figured: similarly cold environment, a good place to start. The piece I stole from is called The Fishermen, it’s by Johannes Ewald. The stanza I borrowed from goes like this:
And if my arm so pleases you
With solace and with peace,
Fair Merman, then hurry! Come and take
Both my arms, take two!
“I just love that, I don’t know why,” Regina said after a pause, smiling to herself. Then she shifted her line of vision. She stared straight through me. Her mouth turned into a tight, thin line, turned up at one corner, but her eyes didn’t change, as though she didn’t see me at all.
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