The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  * * *

  Irene hasn’t taken a day off since she started working for the town. The long days of working what feels like two jobs, or three, if you count Phil, has finally hit her. She needs a break. She’d been running like this to take her mind off of Robert, but Robert is in the wind, and a trip will do her good. Tickets to Miami are cheap in August, and she doesn’t mind the heat. If anything, she’ll sweat off a few pounds. She calls Francine and asks if she’ll be able to watch the boys for a long weekend.

  “Are you reconciling?” Francine asks.

  “With what?”

  “Your husband, dear. I can’t stand seeing boys without their fathers. All this new feminism stuff is making our men weak, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll leave a check for groceries in the mailbox. Please remember Andrew needs to have his inhaler with him if he goes out.”

  “See?” Francine says.

  * * *

  Irene spends the first half of the flight in peaceful rest, then wakes to the sun beaming beneath the eyelid of the small window beside her. She opens the window and puts on her sunglasses. The plane sweeps over the coast, out to the ocean, finally descending as if to pluck a fish from the water, catching the runway with a thud.

  She fidgets with the seat belt and grabs her bag, suddenly impatient, then flings her purse over her shoulder and steps out into the aisle, bumping into the man in front of her.

  “Excuse me,” she says.

  “They haven’t opened the door yet,” the man says.

  She knows that voice. It is Eddie Prince’s voice. But when she turns, he’s so thin, he’s nearly unrecognizable. His skin appears to be dripping from the places where it used to make him look strong—in the shoulders and neck and thighs—now sloping off his sides and buttocks, his chest narrow, head shrunken and laced with curled lines. She doesn’t want to feel superior to him, but it comes natural to her at this moment, as though she’s back in grade school, the prettiest girl, the funniest girl, the girl who they all had said would be a major artist one day: she had a perfect steady hand, a graceful stroke, she knew how to make colors work, she had “perspective.”

  “Irene?” Eddie Prince says loudly, her name sounding as though it’s being advertised over the intercom as the place where passengers can claim their luggage. “I must’ve been sitting in front of you this whole time.”

  “I thought I recognized that hair,” she says, uncomfortable by her own words, wanting to take them back; his hair is much thinner now, graying, and there’s a boil on the back of his neck, which she had first seen when she had sat down. That boil on a stranger’s neck had taken away her appetite, and she let the sheepish, chubby boy beside her have her extra bag of party mix, which he opened with enormous pleasure, glancing at his father in the next row to see if he noticed he had two bags now, then carefully emptying one into his palm and putting the other bag in his pocket to save for later.

  “Please,” Eddie says. “I’m a complete mess.” He coughs into a punched fist, a deep, heavy cough. “Lymphoma. I have an appointment with a top specialist down here. Second opinion, though I don’t see how he would know any more than the doctors in New York.”

  “Oh, no,” Irene says. “I mean … no, they can’t be right.”

  She looks into her purse for something she doesn’t need and retrieves a piece of gum. She offers a piece to Eddie, who takes it but doesn’t peel off the wrapper.

  “Are you alone?” she asks, bitterly, as though she knows it’s wrong to ask, but their history, the coincidence of being on the same plane.

  “They don’t know,” Eddie says. He coughs hard into his fist again. Irene places her hand on his back. Finally, he catches his breath. “My family, I mean. I haven’t told them yet.”

  He takes the piece of gum out of the wrapper and pops it into his mouth. As he chews, white spit gathers in the corners of his lips.

  Irene can’t look at him. She huffs and stands on her toes and sees an old woman being helped out of her seat by a young steward who holds the woman’s hands like they are two pieces of finely wrapped glass ornaments.

  “I hope I don’t get old,” she says aloud, and only because Eddie is there, wanting him to accept this idea, though she would have said the same to herself, and often when she sees how difficult it is to be old, to require assistance in public and need help in private, she wishes for a sudden death.

  In the gate area, Irene and Eddie stand near the blue arrivals-and-departures screens. Eddie spits his gum into the trash. They walk together to baggage claim. Irene reaches for his hand, awkwardly grabs hold of two limp fingers, and lets his palm seize the top of her hand, the little finger and thumb clamping over it and moving horizontally. It can’t be easy, she thinks. But they are on the fringe. How they suffer is nothing compared to how the rest of the world suffers. Over there a bar alight in neon holds plump-faced people drinking tall glasses of foamy beer. And there is a bounty of candied fruit and salted caramel pops and flavored water. And there are head-sized sandwiches stuffed with meat and cheese slathered in mayonnaise. You desire so much and leave with nothing. This will make you feel good, as though you possess self-control, when, in reality, to buy and buy and buy—“purchase” is the word you were taught—is the only way to keep everyone on their feet, alive, in a sense, producing what you wear on every part of your body, down to the diamond ring you have slipped onto your right-hand finger, scraping against Eddie’s callused palm.

  “I don’t have any bags,” he says.

  She looks at him absently.

  “I can wait if you want to catch a cab together.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. I’m renting a car.”

  He seems dejected. He has only one place to go.

  “I can come and see you,” she says quickly.

  “I’ll only be here a day and a night.”

  “Still, if you give me the name of the hospital.”

  He gives her the name and she snaps her forehead by flicking her middle finger off her thumb—a fun thing her father used to do to her when she was a little girl—and says, “Got it.”

  “It was good to see you, Irene,” Eddie says.

  “You, too, Eddie.”

  After she collects her bag, Irene starts toward the car rental outlet. Eddie is standing by the window, watching the yellow cabs pull up to the curb, collect their passengers, and pull away.

  “Eddie?” Irene says.

  But Eddie doesn’t appear to hear her. He stays staring out the tinted windows with his hands in his pockets. Irene watches the shadows of people pass by with their luggage. She steps closer to Eddie, and finally he turns toward her. She smells his stale breath—he’s breathing heavily—and kisses him on the lips, lightly, without pressure, or intent.

  * * *

  At the car rental desk, she convinces a small man with a pockmarked face to give her a free upgrade, from a midsize sedan to a convertible. She is thicker in the middle and back, but what weight she has put on doesn’t show in her face—smooth, bright, with thin lines of age curled around her lips. So to act like a sexual being is not outside her power yet, and men, this man, if shown the slightest suggestion that she is willing—a closed-lip smile, eyes lowered, hand on hip—might just think he has a chance to put his dick inside her.

  The car is yellow with a black interior. A bee, motor buzzing as she feels the weight of the vehicle pulling her out of the lot. She flies through the city, over the MacArthur Causeway, sunlight dancing on top of the waves. At South Beach, she parks outside the Full Moon Café, where the diners look at her from their lunch plates—maybe she is someone important, maybe they have seen her somewhere, maybe she reminds them of someone—as she tosses her shoes into the backseat and walks out onto the warm sand. She pulls down the straps of her dress. A slight wind tickles her legs. No one knows her here. No one can tell her she’s ugly or fat or too old to be wearing this kind of dress.

  She stops at a fruit vendor on the beach. He has strawberries, red and plum
p. A warning, a memory, tells her she can only indulge in three or four. She was allergic. She knew what it would feel like once she bit into the fruit. Like a giant hand squeezing her throat. More than three or four and she’ll break out in hives, her throat will close up, and she might be found on the shore of the beach, a withered artifact, herself.

  The vendor has cut up a dozen and packed them into a plastic cup with the back of a spoon. When she was six or seven years old she hadn’t known she was allergic. She relished the sweetness, and the black bumps like poppy seeds she tried to break in half with her teeth. It was only a minute later, after this instant joy, that she felt her tongue go numb and the air stuck in her chest. She panicked, grabbed her throat, ran into the living room, but her mother wasn’t there. She knocked a lamp over and ran upstairs and tried the bedroom door, but it was locked. She kicked and punched the door until finally her mother opened it. Her father was lying on his back with his pants down.

  “Oh, God, you’re choking,” her mother said.

  Irene shook her head. She was sweating furiously.

  “Cliff, call an ambulance.”

  Her mother walked Irene down the hall to the bathroom, rubbing her back, telling her to keep her eyes open, that her eyes could breathe. She ran the bath and helped Irene into it.

  Cliff came to the door. “They’re on their way,” he said. Irene covered her private parts. “She doesn’t look good,” he said.

  “Thanks, Einstein.”

  “It was just an observation.”

  “I’d like to observe you putting on something decent,” Irene’s mother said, and Irene nodded confidently, as though these sudden developments had become a diversion for what was happening to her. She felt like she could breathe again once her father was gone, as if he had been the one choking her.

  She could hear the sirens nearing the house. Irene’s mother dried her off and helped her get dressed and carried her outside. The paramedics quickly put her in the back of the ambulance, and Irene’s mother held her hand while they administered a shot into her thigh. Then the night in the hospital, the rattling of the air conditioner, and her mother standing by the window with her arms crossed.

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  “In the lobby,” her mother said. “It’s hard for him to see you like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, sweetie.”

  Her mother came to the bed and brushed her hair aside and kissed her forehead.

  “Hospitals make him nervous, that’s all. Nothing’s wrong with you. It’s just that strawberries aren’t your friends. You have to remember that. They’re an evil fruit.”

  An evil fruit, she thinks. How gratifying.

  She pays for the strawberries, and, for a while, she sits on the beach with her eyes closed, listening as the waves grab the sand and rake the shells and seaweed and stones back into their folds. She eats one of the strawberries, slowly, with great pleasure. That’s it, she thinks. All that matters is this: the sand, the water, and a berry so sweet. There cannot be anything more perfect in the world. The waves, the sun, the sand. She closes her eyes. She remembers the old bungalow on the beach. The phony artists lying naked and stoned under the moonlight. Then there was the day before the day everything had changed, and she was here, on this beach, fifteen years ago, the same waves, the same sun, the same sand.

  She eats two more strawberries before her skin begins to warm. Flushed red spots appear along her arms. She has eaten her limit. The light has begun slowly to melt across the horizon like a spread of honey. The sky has turned pink and a few stars are visible along with the moon. She loves to see the moon in daylight. There is something otherworldly about it, an occasional reminder of infinite strangeness.

  Irene remembers reading from one of Sybil’s New Age books that once you die you become a point of light and inside that light is everything you have ever lived and dreamed and thought, so that each point of light is like some fantastical world of your own devising.

  She continues along the beach, then walks a jetty out to where the moss grows, nearly losing her footing. She steps back and stands looking at the clear aqua-blue of the water. She sits on the rocks and dips her feet in the water. Radiant, luminous fish gather about her toes, then swim off. For the next three days, she wakes early and walks to the same spot, but she never sees the fish again. In the airport, and on the flight back to Boston, she looks for Eddie Prince, but she never sees him again, either.

  PART II

  NATHAN AND ANDREW

  2017

  TWENTY

  Andrew lies in bed with his eyes closed, tugging at his limp penis, as Kirsten, naked beside him, reads from her tablet some new self-help book, whose belief system she’ll follow for a week or two before giving up.

  Andrew imagines he’s a warrior in some Viking land, about to go into battle, and the young, golden-haired women of those hills are ready to please him before he ventures off into war. He feels something, a slight tingle, but then Kirsten sputters a laugh. He turns to her, and she covers her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No. Something. Say it.”

  “It’s just, you look sort of ridiculous. It’s hard to believe this is what boys and men do when they’re alone.”

  “Ridiculous? Maybe if you—”

  “Oh, please. You never had these problems when we were in college.”

  “Back then I was actually attracted to you.”

  “So now it’s my fault you can’t get it up?”

  “It’s your fault you don’t care if I get it up or not.”

  “Stop it. I do care. Come on. Keep going. It’s entertaining.”

  “I’m not trying to fucking entertain you, Kirsten.”

  She moves onto her side and plays with his curly patch of chest hair. It’s just enough to be touched. He pushes her arms back and holds her wrists above her head.

  “Now you’re ready, Daddy,” she says.

  He feels the warm pull of her insides and closes his eyes again. A warrior with his giant sword, the woman tied up, whimpering at his massive piece of justice.

  “Remember, don’t pull out. Dr. Larry said my eggs are really fertile this time of year,” Kirsten says, matter-of-factly.

  “Fucking Christ,” Andrew says, and his penis slips from her like a small fish in a hand.

  “What? Keep going. It felt good.”

  “I can’t fuck and think at the same time.”

  “Yes, you can. You’re brilliant at multitasking.”

  “Stop calling him Dr. Larry. You’re not a five-year-old and he’s not a pediatrician.”

  “I like calling him that. Makes him seem less intimidating. Now come on. Back in.”

  “I can’t. All I can picture now is Dr. Larry massaging your eggs like meditation balls.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Andrew flings his legs over the bed, gets up, and goes into the bathroom. He runs the faucets, biting his hand in rage.

  Nothing frightens Andrew more than being a father, except maybe other people’s noses. Sometimes he’ll look at a nose and his stomach will knot up and his legs go numb. For five to ten minutes, all he sees are noses—wide, narrow, pudgy, pinched, bulbous. He’ll hide in his office and breathe in and out into a paper bag. But the idea of being a father, of him becoming part of another, with all the same tics and demons and fears, sends him even farther into a debilitating panic, and he’s lucky to get out of the cubbyhole under his desk by lunch if suddenly he’s thinking about Kirsten’s eggs, a pooping puking pissing baby, reading it stories, acting as if he cares that it discovered a neat rock, or that the drawing it did of a house with Mommy and Daddy bigger than the house and the sun smiling is some kind of fucking masterpiece. According to his friends and coworkers, these early years are supposedly the best ones. So, Jesus, what must it be like when they’re ten, eleven, twelve? He remembers how annoying he was as a kid, how for an entire month, all he did was skip
everywhere. Why? He can’t remember. He just skipped from the kitchen to the living room, and down the street, and through the school hallways. Then one day Chris Schroeder called him a fairy, and he went home and told his father, and his father said, “Maybe think about not skipping so much.”

  Andrew looks at his limp cock in the mirror, stretches it out, pushes it in, slaps it, then lets it hang there like a piece of dripping skin. He studies it for discrepancies—a mark, a bump, a discoloration—because it makes sense for a man of thirty-seven years to look, even if he’s frightened by the possibility of finding something new on his body. A few years ago he had discovered the scar across the back of his head when he finally gave up trying to cover his baldness and told the barber to go ahead and shave it to an inch. The barber held the mirror in back, and he saw the white line like a backslash carved into his head. He had asked his mother what had happened, where did this scar come from? And she had told him his father had tried to get him walking earlier than normal for a baby, had him up on both feet, and when he stepped forward it really did seem like he was going to walk—“You had such a confident look in your eyes, looking at me”—and he took one step, fell, and hit his head on the coffee table, hard, apparently. Why didn’t you catch me? he had thought to ask, though he understood why, he understood her shock. Seeing a falling thing, no matter what it was, always made him stop, forget, and watch, and anyway they had stitched up the gash and she cried for hours and had said she felt guilty for years and, again, when he had called her about it, she had said, “Andrew, I’m so sorry,” and cried—so pathetically emotional. “Okay, Mom. It’s okay,” he had said. “It’s not like it hurts or anything.”

  Then, as if waking from a bout of sleepwalking, he remembers what it is he’s trying to do in here. He has to get rid of this stuff inside him. It isn’t good for your health to hold it in. Coming is a natural stress reducer. He read that somewhere. And, Jesus, if anyone is stressed, it’s him.

  Just in the last month, his mother had taken a fall on the icy steps leading up to the Wequaquet town hall. Since then, she’s been suffering bouts of dizziness and forgetfulness. Photos were taken of the steps, where it should have been salted down, but she wasn’t interested in suing.