by Mary Robison
“Hey, Nanook!” I heard. “Hey! I can’t believe it!”
The context was so wrong and weird that it took me six long seconds before I recognized Raymond.
He jogged down the dune and grabbed me, lifted me, twirled me half around. In this pale landscape, he looked Technicolor, with his still-brown face and rope-blond hair. His eyes too seemed different—sapphire blue—out here in the white and gray.
“You look wonderful!” I blurted.
“Well, thank you, Paige. But I never been so fuckin’ cold ever. Ever. I am dying.”
I dragged him at a trot toward the path up the bluffs to the Seahorse.
“Pru sort of reverted in little ways and big ones to who she was before, and I did too, after you escaped, and I just one night was loco and she says to me, ‘We got real problems, Ray,’ and I said, ‘No we don’t, none,’ and put myself in the beaner-mobile and hit the road.”
He ate a chunk of corn bread and swallowed some espresso Dottie had brewed for us.
“Me and the car made it to Newington, Mass., it’s called, where the car caught a flu bug and died.”
Dottie, who was listening with me, said, “Oh . . .”
“So I was stuck there five hours, in a doughnut place, when this black bus pulls on in with this rock band.”
“You know, I was . . .” I said.
Raymond said, “So’s I asked the driver where they were bound and he says, ‘Boston,’ and I say, ‘Where?’ and he says, ‘Where you going?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, in fact, Cape Head,’ so he tells me, ‘Fine. That’s where we’ll go!’ ”
Raymond tossed up his hands. “And then I’m thinkin’ this is not the world’s most successful rock band.”
I said, “You know, I was . . .”
“And then last night I’m sleeping in the bus, ’cause the driver can’t find this place and we’re lost, and it’s the first sleep in three days, and real cold, and they give me clothes and shit for blankets, but I’m sleeping, but it turns out later that you, Paige, are standing outside the bus telling ’em how they’re gonna drown!”
“I’ve been trying to get that in,” I said.
Dottie said, “Well, you made it, you’re safe now.”
“Goddamn, I’ll say,” Raymond said.
Up from the dining table and standing behind Raymond, Dottie caught me with a look and mouthed: “Wow!” and “Is he cute!”
“So you had John Donne with his sonnets that he called divine meditations. Probably because he lifted the idea from Loyola, who made up a three-part meditation for his Jesuits. In Loyola’s, each part inspired something—memory, empathy, resolve. A combination prayer and workout for the imagination.”
“Whoa, stop the speedboat, man overboard,” Raymond said.
I apologized. “I’m a little nervous,” I said.
“I am not un-nervous, darlin’,” Raymond said. “But at least I’m comfortable at last.”
I had come in here to deliver a food tray for Raymond. He lay under three quilts on the Shaker four-poster Dottie bought from an auction house in Pennsylvania. This was usually my suite, in fact; the only heated bedroom in the inn besides Dottie’s.
“It’s what time?” he asked me.
“Two. You slept about three hours.”
“And I’m ready to hunt bear,” he said. “This is ideal.”
“Except, Raymond? Raf’s due tomorrow.”
Raymond looked at the food tray on his lap. Because he didn’t touch it, didn’t even seem to see it, I knew he was mining a pretty deep shaft of thought.
“You got to quit believing that’s ever gonna work, Paige. You and Raf.”
“Why? Do you know something I don’t? Tell me what!”
“Most people,” Raymond said, “finally, they come to simple dreams, you know? Of getting money, or building a good house, or land, or a kid growing up great. They gotta leave behind the ones where they’re famous—like a hero jock or movie star—and see that the world’ll never know who they are or that they even lived. It’s a bad moment, havin’ to swallow that one. Especially for such big strategists as Raf and me, ’cause we were gonna make films, and act in ’em, and write books, fuckin’ you name it.”
I said, “But that bad moment passes.”
“For some. For Raf, it never. And he’s got you around, with your poetry you publish, reminding him. He can’t afford to be happy with you. That’d be caving in.”
“I’m a minor artist, a footnote in modern poetry.”
“Maybe. But you still might crank up some day and do a killer. You got that chance. Could happen any time, and then somebody in two hundred years might be readin’ your poems when the rest of us are just dust blowin’.”
“This is such baloney. Five billion people on the planet and my poetry doesn’t count any more than stuff Raf’s done or you’ve done. The buildings you two have worked on have steel girders. They’ll be here.”
“We worked on ’em, but we didn’t fuckin’ make them. That’s the difference. And Raf does his best work in the air, you may’ve noticed—talking his talk.”
“It’s not my fault that he drinks, Raymond, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“No, but how could he be around you and not wanna drink? And it’ll stay that way until he finds something better than popping bottles and girls and tracking after the mayor’s daughter. What’s this in this bowl? Looks like cat chow.”
“Ah, lemme remember. Dottie said it’s chopped mission figs and oat bran. Very healthful. Dottie digs you.”
“I can hold off urinating till after I eat,” Raymond said. He got the breakfast tray positioned, shook open his napkin. “I’m sorry I made the speech at you and I’m even sorrier that I think it’s true,” he said.
I pulled a peacoat on over two sweaters and went out the main entrance. Some of the front lawn had been leveled by the wind. It was still snowing. Grass patches showed. I paused under four stunned birch trees, listening to the far-off whizzing noise of car tires on ice.
From the hoop gate, I saw the stuck car—crunched nose first into a scoop of snow—down on the Point Road before the climb.
“Raf,” I thought.
The inn stood on such high ground and in such hard wind that the driveway had been blown nearly clear.
I went snow-blinded into the cold Dutch barn and started up the smoke-colored car. It always started.
On the Point Road, I faced the stuck car—a long Granada. Its engine noise was no more than a sewing machine’s. Only two of the pistons were firing, I guessed, and those pretty meekly. Thin twists of exhaust spun away.
The Granada’s driver got out into the light.
“Where were you trying to go?” I asked from my rolled- down window.
“Lost,” the man said.
“I’ll tell you, your car’s blocking the only way in or out. You have to move. Any ideas?” I asked him.
“Sure, but not about getting the car going,” he said. “More about blowing it up with a stick of dynamite if I had one.”
He was thick-waisted, thick-necked, with a ski cap tugged down to just over his eyes.
“Well, I’ll call you a tow,” I said. “But I bet they’re busy out of their minds, so if nobody comes in a while and you get cold, just come up to that inn behind me.”
The man didn’t thank me, and he looked so skeptically at the Seahorse I got angry.
“And don’t tromp on your gas pedal anymore, it makes things worse,” I said.
“How could things be worse?” asked the man.
I backed my car around, drove up to the inn, and telephoned the tow garage. They said no, try again tomorrow.
I told Dottie, in her bathroom, that we’d been blockaded by an ingrate in a Granada.
“Where did you need to go?” she asked. She was brushing shadow on her eyelids, blusher on her cheeks.
“You can tell there’s a man in the house,” I said, stepping around her.
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“What is wrong with you, Paige?”
As I opened the medicine cabinet, my reflection swung woozily away. “Raymond,” I said. “He came up with something pretty smart, bordering on wise. I hate that.”
“You wish he were just a big hunk of beautiful cowboy?”
“Wouldn’t that be fucking enough?” I said.
By three, the storm had us caught; Dottie had smoked a couple joints and fixed me with a warm brandy-coffee mixture.
Raymond had found the inn’s wine stock. He was stewing in a dark corner of the saloon with an unopened bottle in his fist. He raked the wine’s label off with a thumbnail, saying, “Now this here’s distressing. A huge temptation, altogether. It’s not enough I’m corralled with two pretty women. But I got on top of that enough liquor to drown a bull. You, me, and the booze could just get into bed and pull up the covers.”
“In fact,” I said.
Raymond wore my baggiest sweater, an old blue Norway, with snowflakes and reindeer. Still, the sleeves ended too soon for his wrists.
I said, “I better stay alert, though. This’s a killer storm. We’re marooned. The Mass. Turnpike’s closed. The villagers’ll probably be evacuated when their heat and lights go. They’ve already got choppers lifting out hospital patients.”
“I hear you,” Raymond said.
The man from the stuck Granada, chilled to rose pink and shivering, came through the front doors. He kept his cap on, still down to his eyes, and inspected the place warily.
“I thought you’d show up sooner or later. There’s hot coffee if you want,” I said.
“Did you call a tow for me or not?”
“Yes, but they can’t come just now. You might have to spend the night and wait until tomorrow. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not paying for anything,” he said.
Raymond came into the foyer. He said, “Goddamn, it didn’t work, Paige. You arranged a blizzard just to get this guy’s money but he’s too smart for you. Now I’ll have to escort him back outside.”
The Granada man stiffened as if he believed Raymond on all counts.
“Sit down,” I told him. “That’s free.”
I went into the hotel kitchen to get the mammoth restaurant percolator started. The rock-band girl from the black bus stood there in her drapings of rags.
“Do you mind we came in?” she asked me. “We didn’t have anyplace else to go. We were freezing in the bus and ’sides, it’s stuck.”
“I sort of mind that you broke in,” I told her. “Where’re the rest?”
“Off down that hall,” she said, and pointed her stick at the door of a wing with locked guest rooms.
“You should get them and bring them in where it’s heated, where there’re fireplaces and chairs. Raymond’s in the sitting room,” I said.
“Raymond?” she said. “Whew, is he hot!”
“I’m just letting you know we have emergency guests,” I said over the phone to Candy, at the Cape Head Police Department. The CHPD was one man, a guy named Walt Barber, and Candy Barber, his wife, worked the switchboard.
The rock band and Raymond and the Granada man were in the fancy sitting room, curled up on the puffy couches, lying on the Persian rugs, lined up with their backs to the noisy fireplace.
“Who am I talking to?” Candy Barber asked.
“Sorry. It’s Dottie’s daughter, Paige, at the Seahorse Inn.”
“Paige! We went skinny-dipping together one Fourth of July, right? Walt almost had to put your husband in jail, remember?”
“It was a grand day,” I said.
Candy’s voice got lower, more confidential. “Walt’s out there on a Ski-doo.”
The rock-band boy with the beret was shadowing me at the registry desk. I looked him a question.
“I gotta piss, I admit,” the boy said.
“Should I tell the police that? I’m talking here to the police.”
“You could send me to jail,” the boy said. “They’ll let me piss there, probably.”
Dottie came down the spiral staircase from the inn’s second floor. She wore a blue serge dress and a cardigan sweater, mules with cotton ankle socks. Fredo skittered along after her.
“Who are these folks, Paige? Why’re you using the desk phone?” When she got close, I smelled her spicy perfume.
“Candy Barber’s on the other end,” I said.
“Candy Barber from the police? Why’s she calling?”
“We’re helpless, Paige, tell Dottie,” Candy Barber said.
I told my mother. “These’re the bus people I met on the beach? They’re a rock band, I found out. I just wanted to let Candy know they’re here and then she can send the Wasnascawa force if we need them.”
“Will not. We can’t send help to anyone at present,” Candy said on the other end of the phone.
“What do you want, son?” Dottie asked the boy in the beret.
“Gotta piss, ma’am,” he said.
We could hear the storm leaning hard on the inn.
I jerked my thumb, directing the boy to the closest washroom.
Candy Barber spoke now as if I worked for her but didn’t follow instructions well. “Look, you tell Dot that I’m probably sending over more victims. The shelter’s full. We’re getting severe power outages. You know, blizzard of seventy-eight out here, people died. You’ve got the room, heat, hot water, food. . . .”
“You’re her mother?” the boy in the beret asked Dottie. “I miss mine.”
Fredo arched and stretched, put the tip of his snout on the boy’s knee.
“Sweet doggie,” the boy said.
“Very sweet,” Dottie said, watching as the boy crouched and roughed up Fredo’s mane.
“You must be a good son,” she said.
The telephone felt lighter in my grip and I realized Candy Barber had hung up on me.
I went through the crowd of guests into the taproom. I squinted out a bubble window—like a porthole on a cruise ship. I saw branches, all gristle and knots, pieces of broken trees flying by. Beyond was the straight edge of ocean-horizon.
“We can feed you and give you tea or coffee,” Dottie said, mingling and speaking loudly to the guests. “Or hell, wine and beer.”
There was a little cheer from most, a groan from Raymond.
“But. I have to charge you for any hard liquor. I’m not the owner, you understand. It’s not my stuff to give. If you steal, I’ll have to pay and if I can’t, I’ll be sent to jail.”
“Hey, but what isn’t jail, really?” asked someone from the rock band.
“You may be right about that. Still. The Cape Head jail has no TV. And the beds are hard as boards, I hear. Nor do they give you a pillow,” said Dottie.
The aqua lobby—with the strange people and the peach- colored light from the fire and wall lamps, and with Dottie seeming readied for a date—became a distorted version of the lobby, to me like a colorized film.
Now Dottie was announcing to the room: “Last spring before the red-tide law there was a huge storm and afterwards a smorgasbord washed up—short lobsters, which’re illegal. Jackknife clams and ocean clams, not so good. But cherrystone and blue clams. I filled up twelve trash bags and I have a freezer full of chowder. I should go warm the restaurant’s stove burners.”
Raymond swept her under his arm and toward me for a whispered conference.
“Clam chowder? Mom, what’re you thinking?” I asked.
“Keep them busy so they don’t steal us blind and rape us.”
Raymond said, “This way, they’ll rape you on full stomachs, with more energy.”
We looked over at the storm victims.
The teenage girl, lifting her mime-mask face, held up her stick and rocked it back and forth like the needle of a metronome.
“Bus crash on the way to the bughouse,” I sang. “All the inmates here at the inn . . .”
“I can handle them,” Dottie said.
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bsp; “As you’ve been doing! Why not throw them a clambake.”
“Oh, lay off that, Paige. I was only going to feed them. The chowder might be contaminated anyway,” she said.
“Atta way, Mom, give them salmonella.”
“What you two should do is smoke some of my Colombian,” Dottie said. “There’s a shoebox of it left, and believe me, it helps.”
The walls outside the Colonel’s Suite wore faded paper with an egg-and-dart pattern. On the north wall an aneroid barometer said the air pressure was falling fast. It was dusk.
I swung open the suite’s door.
Balanced on the vanity was Raymond. He held a Bible, didn’t turn his head, but said, “Hi ya, Paige.”
The sea window on the far wall vibrated. Its shutters were latched, nailed, and ribbons of caulking were plugged all around the inside glass, yet the window rocked tensely in the wall.
“You ever read the conversion tables, back of the Gideon? Like the weights and measures? Says one talent’s the equal of seventy-five pounds. Or a shekel’s same as two- fifths an ounce. Now, a handbreadth . . .”
I slid down the wall like a thrown plateful of noodles, and said from the floor, “I’m flattered and grateful that you came a million miles in a holocaust just to visit me, Raymond.”
“But?”
“Why did you? I don’t mean that how it sounds. But why did you?”
“I felt dirt miserable about scarin’ you off,” he said and shrugged. “And wanted to see you.”
I said, “I’m glad you came. Which is wrong. I shouldn’t be . . .”
We could hear the voices of more people arriving; hear Dottie chattering.
“Get up on the bed,” Raymond said, as he hopped from the vanity. He dead-bolted the door.
Raymond awakened as I slid from under the quilt out into the ferocious cold of the drafty room.
“Time is it?” he asked with his eyes closed.
“Only four-thirty or five, but it’s getting dark. Sorry I woke you.”
“ ’S all right. Snap in and out. Haven’t really slept since my drinking slip. That’s the problem with me.”
“Only problem,” I said, pulling on my T-shirt. I looped the silver chain with Raf’s miraculous medal around my neck. I always wore the medal but it hid under my clothes.
