by Dale Peck
Ricardo looked at me until I dropped my head on his warm damp shirt, and then Viva Zapatista, he murmured as I cried into his shoulder. Long live the revolution.
—2008
VII.
This much you remember: the light, beside the bed. It was thin, and it hid the color of his hair. You know his hair was—what color was his hair? Blond? Black? Was it brown, like yours? In your memory of that night it has no tint save that of the light that cupped it as though it were leaves—mint, chamomile, elderflower, rosehips. Anodyne soporifics, but amnesia’s cold comfort to one left alone. You’d take any color, fair or dark, any length, as long as it grew from his head. You’d even take a wig if it was him it capped, rather than a phantom of memory that holds your soul trapped in its own dreams, delusions, fantasies, fictions. Even now, thinking about him, the image is so nebulous that he could be thinking up you, the brush that draws the hand that holds it, the painting that dreams the man. Nouns are naming words, he told you once. Verbs are fluid, he said, nouns frozen. Names are power, he said. That may be, you countered, but verbs are revolution. He told you that everything he’s ever written has come, in some way, from his life, and sometimes he feels there will never be enough exciting moments for him to finish even this one book. And once he told you, right before he fucked you, that language is just a way to measure loss. Later, when you said his name aloud, you found that, indeed, it had no meaning. You spoke again: It’s me, you said. More empty words. After that you learned to keep quiet.
Summer Beam, pt. 1
The signs popped into Ellen’s head right after she got on 90. It was just outside of Albany, where Nathan usually launched into the second round of his rant against weekends at Popham Beach. The first installment would’ve come as soon as she’d backed out of the driveway in Saratoga. She couldn’t possibly expect him to drive for six hours in the dark, could she? He had night blindness, she knew that, although this condition didn’t prevent him from reading an entire novel by the glove compartment’s little light. After eight years the routine had become so familiar that even though Nathan wasn’t in the car Ellen still found herself arguing with him in her head. It’s ridiculous, she could hear him whining, we drive thirty miles south to go fifty miles north. We spend half the weekend in the goddamned car! The complaints were always the same, only the book changed: Dorothy Sayers or Patricia Highsmith or one of those other “lady detectrix sleuth-sayers” from the last century. And this road, she remembered him saying—last year? the year before? She couldn’t remember the date but she’d never forget the prissy way he’d turned a page, as if neither wife nor novel was worth the full measure of his attention. It has almost as many peaks and valleys as Miss Sayers’s—how shall I put it?—crenellated narrative. And he’d flipped another page he couldn’t possibly have read, tamped fussily on the stack of superannuated roadmaps in the glove compartment in an attempt to get more light to shine on Strong Poison or Gaudy Night and then, wheezing—why were these Samsungs so heavy?—pulled out his phone and propped it above his book, the screen’s glow illuminating the lines of text like a UFO hovering over a cornfield.
Ellen would try to remain calm. Would remind Nathan that even with the detour south the interstate knocked more than an hour off the trip; would tell him that if he thought the Mass Pike was torturous he should try the glorified deer paths laid over the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire like so many snippets of ribbon fallen from a seamstress’s scissors. She’d said all this—not for the first time but, it now seemed, the last—could it really have been two years ago? Three? When was the last time she’d talked Nathan into going to her family’s beach house?
As if in answer, a campaign poster popped into her head. It hadn’t really been a poster at all, just an 11 x 17 placard taped to a metal post on the edge of the road’s shoulder, thin cardstock flapping like a snared bird’s wings as they sped past. barack obama. change we can believe in. Although leave it to Nathan to have a different take: It looks like one of those memorials, he’d said the last time they drove up. You know, the smiling photograph of the deceased, the line of sentimental verse. All it needs is a few plastic flowers and you’ve got democracy’s tombstone right there. Ellen had thought Nathan was reaching (she thought that of most of his criticism), but had given him the benefit of the doubt and glanced in the rearview mirror. But it had been too dark to see the sign—too dark to see anything, in fact, and for a moment she had the vertiginous feeling that they’d left the road behind, the planet, and were hurtling through the void of space. But no, that was just their marriage.
And then the change we can believe in poster disappeared from her memory, replaced by the faded keep of the grass! signs in the dunes behind the Popham Beach house—by, more specifically, the fear that someone had finally pulled them down during her protracted absence. Could it really have been three years? The thought so plagued her that she had to throw her phone in the backseat to keep from calling her mother, and, five hours later, when she finally made it to the house, she rushed from the car, pulled the key from the mailbox, wound her way through the shadowy maze of furniture in the tiny living room to the double doors at the back of the house, throwing them open like the spurned woman in pretty much every opera she knew, and—
And nothing. It was as if the blackness she’d seen in the rearview mirror three years ago had been magnified a thousand times, a million. The darkness was so complete, so pervasive, that despite her grip on the door handles she felt that the world had ceased to exist. Moon and stars seemed every bit as improbable as the layer of cloud that the rational part of her brain knew was hiding them from view. She couldn’t even bring herself to step onto the deck, as if it too might have slipped away without the sun’s sentry light to keep it in check. All she could do was stand there, bewildered and exhilarated, as much at her reaction as at the darkness.
And then the sound of the surf pushed its way through her ears; the smell of salt; the cutaneous prickle of moisture-laden air, like static electricity pulling on the hairs of her arms, but cold. With each familiar sensation Ellen relaxed, and after a moment she took a step backward, pulled the doors closed, turned from the darkness as if it were nothing more than a black curtain behind which a stage was being set. Went upstairs, fell onto her unmade bed; and when she came back down three or four hours later (she didn’t know what time it was, or what time she’d gotten in for that matter) the sun was up and the signs were waiting in the dunes as she knew they would be. Because that’s what Popham Beach was. The place where nothing changed.
In fact she’d forgotten about them while she slept. Had come out on the back deck with a cup of coffee not to check on the signs’ persistence but because that’s what you did your first morning in Popham Beach: you made a cup of coffee and walked out onto the deck to sip it in the presence of the ocean—and there they were, pinned to the four corners of the Baldwin property as though it were a beach blanket that needed to be secured at the edges. The wet patch of grass they staked out was silvered like an old woman’s hair, the sand visible between the coarse strands flaky as a dandruffy scalp. The impression was of disheveledness, age, even weakness, but the signs she’d painted the summer between second and third grades served as a faint but firm reminder of the conservationist lesson her mother had taught her thirty-one years ago: that this tiny patch of grass and sand was all that stood between the omnivorous waves pounding the beach and the moss-edged shakes of the little house at her back. Half a mile north a dramatic stand of hoodoos testified to the waves’ power, the jagged pockmarked columns resembling a bombed-out city, right down to the wire and pipe tangled around their bases, the splintered rafters, the shattered glass. The Baldwin house was the last left on this stretch of 18. Her parents had bought in ’68, when Jackie was two, and over the course of four decades six neighbors had lost their homes, while the original Popham Colony (founded in 1607, the same year as its more famous rival in Jamestown) was now almost a quarter mile
offshore and twenty feet underwater. A whole shelf in her father’s study in Worcester was given over to bits of clay- and stoneware that still sometimes washed up on the beach, including a bone-white kaolin pipe with a stem as long and thin as a heron’s femur, remarkably unbroken despite the four centuries it had spent beneath the waves.
But for now the only thing the crashing surf obliterated was the sound of NPR at her back. A brisk breeze swirled loose grains of sand over Ellen’s bare feet but the steaming cup in her hands balanced out the chill. Well, physically anyway: she hadn’t stopped for coffee at the minimart in Brunswick last night. Hadn’t wanted to suffer the stare of some pimply sixteen-year-old at her mascara-scarred cheeks or field the presumptuous questions of a cigarette-smelling divorcée about what brought her here in the off-season—and at this hour too! And so the cup in her hands was decaf, and stale, a relic of Jackie’s third pregnancy, when, in addition to alcohol and tobacco, she’d given up caffeine, sugar, red meat, and—the kicker in a family whose nominal Catholicism manifested itself in Friday night spaghetti fests observed with Lenten stringency—the entire family of deadly nightshades. At any rate, Cooper would be five in the new year, and Ellen had had to scrape half an inch of permafrost off the top of Jackie’s coffee to yield a few useable if symbolic spoonfuls.
Not that she could have expected any better. After four decades her mother had become adept at eating down the staples, so that when she shut the house at Labor Day the cabinets were bare of perishables, and just about everything else. When Ellen looked for coffee this morning she found three half-empty bottles of olive oil, four different kinds of vinegar, two boxes of kosher salt; she also found two cans of cat food, which was odd, since the Baldwins didn’t have a cat. The sea air had rendered the boxes of salt hard as bricks inside their cardboard casing—but it was the smell of that same wet air that had filled Ellen’s nostrils as she sat in the car last night after Nathan made his announcement. The ocean, she’d thought. Seagulls and sea shells; cormorants and knobby tangles of kelp; watery dawns flooding her family’s 182-year-old cottage with umber waves of light. Above all, the smells: brine, fish, the ineffable algid damp. The remembered odor had drawn Ellen all the way across Massachusetts and up the Maine coast like a bear in a cartoon following a ribbon of scent, and the reality hadn’t let her down—although it was tempered by another smell, sharp, unpleasant: a dead horseshoe crab probably, or one of those seabirds that ominously dropped out of the sky every few months.
But it was the grass that provided her first measure of solace this morning. The signs. keep of the grass! The optimism—the blind trust!—in their diligently repeated misspelling spoke to what her father unironically called the core Baldwin belief, namely, that the present could only be understood through its relationship to past and future. We owe a debt to one and a responsibility to the other, he’d said more times than the Baldwin children could count (even if the debt and the responsibility changed places with almost every iteration). “The emperors of Rome preserved peace by a constant preparation for war” was (according to him anyway) another way of saying the same thing. He’d said this to Nathan once, identified it as a line from Gibbon, but Nathan had one-upped him, told her father that Gibbon got it from someone called Vegetius. Si vis pacem, para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Ellen, clueless how to handle a conflict between her husband and her father, had done the first thing that popped into her head: she put her foot on Nathan’s crotch under the table, and been surprised—but then, on reflection, not—to find him already erect.
She smiled at the memory, one of the few pleasant ones involving Nathan and Popham Beach, held her cup to her chin and breathed in the idea of caffeine and let herself take comfort in the insulating emptiness of a house full of fond memories but, mercifully, lacking a telephone line. There was the cell, of course, its bloc of stored family data waiting on the floor of the car. Three numbers each for Jackie and Paul (home, work, cell), home and cell for Mom, work and cell for Dad, a bulwark laid out like the Slavic states between Ellen’s private and public domains. Though Ellen, the youngest, was now thirty-eight, the Baldwins remained a close-knit unit. When she took the job at Skidmore ten years ago—she taught her first class the week before 9/11, so it was easy to remember—she’d pledged to spend every other weekend at Popham Beach; and when, the following spring, Nathan accompanied her on the very first trip, it seemed like some key piece of the generational puzzle had fallen into place. Jackie had William, Paul Lane, and now she had Nathan. The frame had been completed, all they had to do was fill in the details. In many ways the invitation to Popham Beach was more important than the wedding (held a year later at the beach house, as had been Paul’s and Jackie’s). In true Baldwin fashion, Nathan’s presence had been treated as a purely logistical issue: the twin bed in Ellen’s room had been replaced with a full, and that was that; and when she started coming on her own, Nathan’s absence was similarly unremarked upon (the bed, however, remained). Even so, she found herself making up excuses as thin as the ones her students came up with. Nathan had a sore throat, he had computer trouble, he was on deadline, he was at a conference. One time she’d even said he had to stay home to take care of a dog they didn’t own. We’re dog-sitting, she’d said, though no one had asked when they got a dog. When she could no longer face her mother and Jackie’s double-barreled silence, she made one last-ditch effort to get him to come up with her, after which they both stopped going.
That had been three years ago, if the Obama memory was correct. Hard to believe it’d been so long. The thousands of meals and hundreds of classes and . . . and what else had she done during the past three years? It was all blurry—all a darkness, she wanted to say, like the narrator of The Good Soldier, then pushed that thought into the maudlin pile.
But that final disastrous drive was as fresh in her mind as if they’d come up last weekend. I mean, divided highway, she could hear Nathan saying as clearly as if he were on the deck with her. Aspirated voice indicating air quotes, deep breath presaging a lecture on the—would it be Orwellian this time? Chomskyan? Žižekian?—relationship of bureaucracy to language. I mean, it’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? Roads are supposed to connect things, not divide them. It’s as if the failure of this particular motorway to get you to your destination mirrors—manifests—an existential failing. It’s not just that it can’t get you there: it doesn’t want to. The little quaver in his voice, as if he knew that she knew that he was reaching—was, if you wanted to get right down to it, conflating the participial divided with divisive, which shared an etymological root but wasn’t an inflection of divide (if you were going to call out Dr. Nathan Miller, PhD, you damn well better be ready to back up your claim). But all Ellen said was: The joke is about parkways and driveways. What—Why do we drive on the parkway and park in the driveway. That’s the joke. Nathan hmmmed. I did not know that, he said (though he knew very well what dropping contractions did to his voice). The ribbon metaphor was nice, he said then. Although I might’ve said tailor’s table instead of seamstress’s scissors. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Seam-stresses. Seam-stress-is. Not sure the pro-woman slant is worth it. But otherwise good work.
It was the otherwise good work that had put her over the edge. Well, pro-woman slant followed by otherwise good work. It was what he wrote at the end of a student critique when he felt he’d been too harsh: Derivative, unintelligent, inarticulate, and a week late, but otherwise good work! Nathan couldn’t bear the idea that a student—even one of the idiots—should be angry at him.
Lady detectrix is redundant, she heard herself saying. She’d done her best to rein her voice in, keep it casual, as if this could hide the fact that Nathan’s barb had found its mark, or that she’d been unable to think of a comeback when he’d said it an hour ago. As far as that goes, there’s pretty much no way to say detectrix without sounding like an asshole. And sleuth-sayer, she added before Nathan could cut her off, is a Pepleri
sm.
The term came by way of Roth, whom Nathan loved for the way he wrote about men but hated for the way he wrote about Jews, and Ellen loved for the way he wrote about writing but hated for the way he wrote about women. “The writer should be restrained from spilling the beans before they are digested,” one-time quiz wiz and aspiring writer Alvin Pepler says in The Anatomy Lesson, and demands of enervated novelist Nathan Zuckerman an opinion of both the sentiment and its expression. Ellen and Nathan used to love to quote Zuckerman’s response verbatim: “As serious and uncondescending a man of letters as there could ever be, Zuckerman said, ‘I wonder if it’s worth the effort.’” In the early days of their relationship Alvin Pepler had been Ellen and Nathan’s go-to for the aspirational, self-consciously literary prose manufactured by most of the college’s visiting writers. Pepler had served them faithfully through four years of endowed lectures and department meetings and conferences both home and away, had allowed them to mock neurotic novelists and pious poets to their faces until the day Nathan used his name to characterize one of her own stories. Ellen was still an adjunct at the time, a one-time visiting writer whose popularity with the students and faculty (in particular the up-and-coming editor of the relaunched IGNIS magazine) had prompted the department to find her one or two classes to teach each semester: a freshman comp roundup no one wanted, an intro to literary theory, the occasional workshop. In other words: it stung when Nathan used the term against her. Not like a bee sting (or a wasp’s, or even a goddamn manta’s) but like a home invasion, a long con: it was as if she’d returned to her house to find everything gone including her husband, who’d been playing her this whole time, pretending to be something he wasn’t so he could steal all she owned.