The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  On the wall above Betty’s desk, next to a framed journalism degree from Barnard, is a picture of Betty on a novelty Time magazine cover. “1990 Pulitzer Prize for Literature: Bette Britt.”

  With a warm smile, she pops the story into a wire basket on her desk. “Very good work. When did Nat give you the assignment?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “This morning?”

  I nod. Betty calls to Nat in the hall. “When’d you assign the Sedgwick piece?”

  “Sometime this morning. Why?”

  “Never mind.”

  Running her finger along a blotter calendar on her desk, she says, “There’s a PTA meeting tomorrow night. Get there early, take minutes, and write a summary.”

  The morning after the meeting, I hand in the piece, and Betty dispatches me to an away junior varsity wrestling match in Ellsworth. Then an eighth-grade band performance, a school budget meeting, the science fair. I don’t complain when she wordsmiths the shit out of everything I write, but I beg for more variety. Betty responds by giving me nothing.

  Andrea gets a full-time job at the Blue Hill Land Trust and a part-time job milking goats at five in the morning every day. I think they pay her in cheese.

  I reach out to every business on the peninsula, offering my services as a graphic designer/copywriter/website builder. No one responds. I make follow-up calls. Only one person will talk to me: Marvin Lebowitz, founder of a small local private school, self-proclaimed Manhattan refugee, and Jerry Garcia’s doppelgänger.

  During our first meeting, Marvin quibbles about the public education system in America for two hours before telling me he needs pamphlets and a website. He says he has no money and plies me with promises of karmic rewards and networking opportunities. I commit to the projects pro bono, and we schedule standing meetings on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. They always involve long walks.

  Starting from East Blue Hill’s one-room post office, Marvin leads me along the rocky coastline—an expanse of ocean and islands and fishing boats. The crisp autumn air is an intoxicating mix of salt water, damp leaves, and wood smoke. Work is typically discussed for two minutes.

  Marvin often stops midsentence to kneel down and examine a particularly smooth rock or drying jellyfish carcass. He’s full of stories of young couples who tried to make a go on the peninsula—the burned-out Wall Street executive who wanted to start a bank, the people from Philly who thought a bike shop was just what the town needed.

  When Marvin is late, I wait in the post office and smoke cigarettes with the postmistress.

  “This job would drive anyone to drink,” she says, thumbing the cap off a fifth of cheap whiskey. She takes a long pull, her weathered face scrunching as she swallows. “Sort the mail. Deliver it. Clean up. Dun’t nothin’ gets done less I do it.” She pokes an iron into the wood-burning stove and kicks a pile of dirt into the corner.

  “If you need some help, I’m looking for a job.”

  She laughs with a two-packs-a-day wheeze.

  Andrea reads The Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing, whose homestead is on the Blue Hill peninsula. Their simple lifestyle inspires her to learn more about sustainable living. She makes a deal with a local farming family: in exchange for shoveling cow shit in a barn on Sunday nights through the winter, we get space in their greenhouse.

  “They have only thirty cows,” she says.

  I worry we’re growing apart. Organic farming and sustainable living displace her interest in provocative art and hard-core fucking.

  Daylight hours dwindle. The air gets that “it’s going to snow any second” smell.

  Marvin’s pamphlets and website fail to yield any networking opportunities much less new business. Nana sends a check for $11,000, continuing my grandfather’s tradition of gifting me the maximum amount a family member can give in a year.

  For the first time in I can’t remember, I open Pilgrim. The writing sucks. The content is entirely peripheral—like watching Batman vacuum the Batmobile at a gas station.

  “Bat dammit, Robin! It’s going to take a lot more quarters to clean the mess from that super-interesting shit we’re intimating but not showing our audience.”

  After deleting hundreds of pages, my skin tightens and my muscles tense when I try to write. Soon, I stop fighting inertia and lie in bed all day, sleeping, jerking off, reading Infinite Jest, wishing I’d started reading books when I was younger, wishing for a fast-acting terminal disease.

  thirty-five

  Before dawn on my twenty-sixth birthday, Andrea wakes me with a cup of coffee. A lit candle is taped to it. After I blow it out, she gives me a card—on the front is a drawing of me at a desk in a cabin overlooking the ocean.

  “I was thinking about the way Frida and Diego lived,” she says. “Having their own spaces for art. When we buy a house, I’m going to get you a writing cabin.”

  I open the card to a love riot of handwritten words and line drawings. It’s too much. We bundle up and go to the beach as the sun crests the horizon. Purple and orange and red and yellow streak across Mount Desert Island’s mountainous silhouette.

  Andrea wraps her arm around me. “Our lease ends in a couple of months. We should probably start looking for a place soon.”

  “Here?”

  “You don’t want to stay?”

  “I do. It’s just—it’s going to be ten times the price during the summer.”

  “What happened to the power of positive thinking and mind over matter?”

  “I’m not sure they apply to financial—”

  “They totally do. And we’re an unstoppable force, remember?”

  Andrea says she’ll talk to Jim, her boss at the land trust. “There have to be donors with spare cottages, right?”

  I say yes and hope the answer is no.

  Jim’s pessimism doesn’t tamp Andrea’s belief that the power of positive thinking will manifest a spare cottage out of thin air. I try to psych myself up to tell her I need (in addition to more sex and less cow shit shoveling) to leave here when our lease ends.

  While Andrea waits for a benefactor with a spare cottage to appear, I secretly look for rentals in Camden and Rockport. At the beginning of May, when we’re on the brink of homelessness, I sign a monthly lease on an apartment in Rockport with a terrace overlooking the harbor.

  “Why’d you do that?” Andrea says. “This is our home.”

  “Think of it as insurance in case our home burns down.”

  The next day, Andrea hears about a rental on a farm in Surrey.

  At the top of the peninsula—half an hour from the ocean—we cross Route 1 and venture into a landscape of untamed woodland, punctuated by small, cleared patches with double-wide trailers. We pass crumbling rock walls and “No Hunting” and “No Trespassing” signs nailed to trees.

  The pavement ends and we turn onto a narrow, horse-ribbed road. Beams of sun pierce a canopy of leaves overhead. Deer prance by, seemingly unconcerned for their safety, and chickens cross the road. Andrea rolls down the window and inhales. I hum the banjo lick from Deliverance.

  “This isn’t East Bumblefuck,” she says.

  “Yeah, I think it’s Northwest Bumblefuck.”

  In a few miles, a bucolic gentleman’s farm appears. I think it’s a fluke until we pass another and a small cluster of immaculate Federalist homes at the end of half-mile, tree-lined driveways.

  Fuck. The farm is going to be fucking awesome. It probably has a name, something with joy or happiness. I picture a row of tall, evenly spaced oak trees leading to a perfectly round pond and an archetypal white farmhouse with green shutters, and barns and outbuildings with weather vanes. Andrea will fall in love. What will I do? My neck stings and my shoulders tighten.

  Andrea points to a big red mailbox in the distance. “There it is.”

  I see a small shed and a patch of grass fenced in with chicken wire. I turn onto the driveway and slam on the brakes to avoid crashing into a double-wide trailer. Good.

  A woman
steps out of the trailer, a baby slung to her body, and a man strides over from the garden. “You must be Andrea and Dave,” he says, dirt all over his face. “I’m Carl. This is Erin.” He leads us to a small windmill that I think used to be the obstacle on a miniature golf hole. It has a single octagonal window with a square screen stapled to the outside.

  “No running water or electric,” Carl says, peeling back his fingers as if he’s keeping a tally of the missing features. “Oh, no gas and no phone, neither.”

  I’m tempted to point out the double negative and ask if it means there actually is phone service and gas.

  “It’s real cozy,” Erin adds. “And nice and quiet.” She kisses the baby’s forehead and says in baby talk, “Yes it is. Yes it is. Isn’t it?”

  Behind the windmill, heads of cabbage poke through the ground. Carl says he also grows spinach and tatsoi. Rent is $125 a month if we help with the harvest. Otherwise, it’s $150.

  “We grew tatsoi over the winter,” Andrea says. “We’ll totally help.”

  Driving home, she proposes we split our time over the summer between her—ahem—house and my apartment and look for a permanent place in Blue Hill.

  I reach across the console and slide my palm into hers. “Perfect.”

  It’s my first night in Rockport, one in the morning. I’m on the terrace, smoking cigarettes, reading Plato’s Republic. Moonlight reflects off the calm ocean.

  Plato said, “To know the good is to do the good.” I think the context is our actions—awareness of the right thing in a situation means we’ll automatically do it. My awareness of what I should do and my inability to do it proves how hopeless I am.

  The door opens, and Andrea comes in, tears streaming down her face, swollen and red with bug bites.

  “I can’t live there,” she says. She strips off her clothes and gets in the shower. I join her. We have intense, pre–Blue Hill sex and sleep naked in my bed, our bodies intertwined. She leaves before dawn, drives two hours to work, and returns at night with all her belongings.

  I cobble together freelance graphics and copywriting projects with local clients, as well as with a private equity firm in New York—a former client of the boutique agency I worked for. The money is good, but it feels empty and I’m inside for days on end in a purple bathrobe and boxers, pacing around the house, taking clients’ feedback by phone.

  Andrea commutes to Blue Hill on weekdays through the end of June, when she gets a job at a gourmet deli in Camden. She cultivates friendships with her new coworkers, going for drinks after work. I’m always invited but seldom go.

  One night when I’m at home alone, it occurs to me that Andrea has tons of friends and I have none. She maintains contact with former coworkers and her old crew from college and high school. I can’t remember the last time I hung out with a friend or connected with one via phone or email.

  At the end of summer, my old house on Sea Street is available to rent. Andrea and I snap it up and celebrate the symbolism, returning to the first place we lived together. My old shower curtain, which I bought when I moved to Camden two years ago, is still here, now ripped and slightly moldy.

  After New Year’s, I get a part-time job as a line cook at a decent restaurant in Rockland. The objectivity of working in a kitchen is a refreshing contrast to the subjectivity of advertising. Orders come in and food goes out. No ambiguity about my performance. Every day is a fresh start.

  In April, my responsibilities increase when Ken, the chef, breaks his arm. The details change every time he tells the story. Usually it involves a fall from a tree. Alcohol may or may not have been a factor. He tries to help, but there’s only so much a one-armed chef can do.

  On a Monday, as the lunch rush winds down, Ken pulls a prescription bottle from his backpack and waves it at me the way you’d offer gum to someone.

  “Vicodin,” he says. “Want some?”

  I say yes without thinking and twist off the cap and tip a white capsule-shaped pill into my hand. Eight or nine remain. The label reads, “Vicodin 2.5/300.” Each pill contains 2.5 milligrams of hydrocodone and 300 milligrams of acetaminophen.

  “Have them all,” Ken says. “They make me nauseous.”

  I pop two pills in my mouth and open a bottle of Pellegrino to wash them down. My body immediately warms and loosens in psychosomatic anticipation. The effect fully kicks in half an hour later. No customers, the front of the restaurant awash in sunlight. Outside, small trees on the sidewalk sway in a gentle breeze. Life is good.

  When my shift ends at four o’clock, I take two more Vics and drive home with the windows down under a cloudless sky. Penobscot Bay on my right, flecks of gold and silver dancing across the water. Sigur Rós on the stereo. Ágætis Byrjun.

  I turn onto Sea Street and pull in the driveway behind Andrea’s car. The sight of my pinned pupils in the rearview mirror triggers a wave of guilt, but that’s all it is—a wave. Cold water laps at my ankles and pulls back, my feet melting into warm sand on the shore. This is a fluke. I wasn’t looking. Dope found me. It’s okay. You’re okay.

  Andrea is lying on the couch in the living room, reading E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat—essays about his saltwater farm in Brooklin, Maine, near Blue Hill. I greet her with a kiss and jump in the shower to wash away the raw onion smell.

  I’m drying off when Andrea comes into the bathroom. “I miss my job milking goats,” she says. “Do you think we’ll ever live someplace where we can have goats?”

  The slideshow projector in my brain flickers on with a carousel of scenic locations on the Blue Hill peninsula: the path on Little Deer Isle abutting Eggamoggin Reach, Naskeag Point in Brooklin, pretty much all of Cape Rosier, Parker Point, and Lighthouse Beach in East Blue Hill. I imagine an apple orchard with old wooden ladders that narrow at the top and goats cavorting about. Yeah, I could get down with that.

  “By ‘someplace we could have goats,’ do you mean Blue Hill?”

  “Actually, I was thinking of somewhere around here since you hate Blue Hill.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Come on, David. You think I don’t know you by now?”

  Late in the afternoon, Camden has the light of an Edward Hopper painting. I propose a walk to French and Brawn, an upscale grocery store, to pick up dinner supplies. Andrea agrees and we take the extra-long way: Bay View Street to the loop at Beauchamp Point in Rockport. We buy lobster, asparagus, and fresh greens with nasturtiums. When we get home, I stage a trial for the lobsters.

  “Claws McLobsterpants and Lobstey McTrousenheimer, the jury finds you guilty of being lobsters on a Monday. You are hereby sentenced to death by boiling in lightly salted water. Bailiff, the fleur de sel, please.”

  Andrea laughs. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is playing on the stereo, and there’s a nice cross breeze in the kitchen. Andrea makes salad dressing in a coffee cup, whisking Dijon mustard with olive oil and Herbes de Provence and lemon. She licks the whisk and offers me a taste.

  “I wasn’t a mustard person until I met you,” she says. “Or sushi or . . .”

  “I didn’t know how to drive a stick shift until we met . . .”

  Andrea pours a glass of wine and takes a sip. My gaze travels from her lips to her shoulders, her black bra straps poking out from behind her ribbed, form-fitting tank top. I get caught on her breasts for a beat, then move to her legs, smooth and muscular from running up and down Mount Megunticook every day and working out at the gym.

  As we eat, I think about coming clean—the Vicodin and the whole shebang. Between field hockey and lacrosse and wisdom tooth extraction, Andrea must have taken some kind of painkiller in her life, right? I write a script in my mind: Opioids are a category the way alcohol is a category. If you’ve had beer, you know how moonshine feels. If you’ve taken codeine, you know how heroin feels. Oh, you had codeine when you broke your toe? And you liked it. Drugs are legal in Portugal. We should move.

  After dinner, I duck into the bathroom, take two more Vics, and decide it’s too
risky to come clean, and besides, I don’t have enough pills to share. We snuggle on the couch and watch Being John Malkovich. I take two more before bed and fall right asleep. In the morning, I take the remaining pills, brush my teeth, and go to work.

  Ken looks at me with a crooked smile. “Bet somebody had fun last night.”

  “Actually, I opened the bottle at home and all the pills fell into the toilet. And I’d just told a friend I had some Vics and—can you get more? He’d pay you.”

  Ken studies his cast poking out of a blue sling and then raises his eyes. “I’ll ask my doc. If I can get ’em, buy me a beer one night. I don’t want to be a drug dealer.”

  Two days pass. Ken doesn’t say anything about the Vics. I don’t bring them up.

  I’m too distracted to work. In a period of ten minutes, I reach into the pizza oven and grab a steel plate without a mitt three times. When it happens again, Ken laughs and gets Bacitracin from the first aid kit. He points to scars on his hands and non-broken arm and tells the story of each burn, knife mishap, and mandolin malfunction.

  Nell, a baker and co-owner of the restaurant, complains about her back and all the painkillers she had to take when she slipped a disc last summer.

  “Vicodin, Percocet, OxyContin. You name it.”

  I start to look for ways to injure myself with minimal pain and maximum visual impact. My eye keeps wandering to the knives on a magnetic strip above the prep station. Once a week, Nell pays a guy to come in and sharpen them.

  When Ken steps out to make a phone call, I pick up the meat cleaver, surprisingly heavy with a cold, smooth, contoured wooden handle. I lay my left hand on the cutting board, palm down, and raise my right arm. I hold the position for a few terrifying seconds. Then I hear Ken’s voice in the back of the kitchen, and I return the cleaver to the strip.

  The phone rings after midnight. Daniel says, “I just spent my last four bucks on a lukewarm Bud Light. Now I’m thinking of walking into the ocean.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I have no job, no money. I just . . .”