Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  “What’s visceral?”

  “You are,” she said. I lifted my fingers to her breast. She grabbed my hand. She was fast. Strong. “What are your goals?”

  “I’m supposed to ask you that.”

  She studied my face. She wasn’t smiling now. She spoke slowly, forming every word. “I want to be with you, David Greene. I want us to be happy.” The game was over. She whispered, “Let’s make love now,” and led me to my bedroom as if it was her own. She was wearing a little cream-colored camisole through which her nipples stood up hard and brown. She was mine for the night, all night until morning, and I kept myself from sleeping even after we’d made love a second time, after she succumbed to sleep. The scent our bodies made together, the lingering stickiness of her sex on my face: I wanted it to last. The moonlight overlaying the furniture and our clothes on the floor; her panties where she stepped out of them like a puddle; all mine for one night.

  Late the next afternoon, she phoned me from court. Her case wouldn’t finish until tomorrow. She would have to work late at the office but she was going to sleep there. Would I like to join her?

  The following day at work, my sister seemed preoccupied. I went my own way all morning. By noon she was shoving things around her desk, avoiding me in wide conspicuous arcs.

  “Is there something the matter, Holly?”

  “Why, David, have you done anything wrong?”

  Only one thing I could think of. “Does this have to do with Judith?”

  “Are you fucking anyone else?”

  “How did you know?”

  “David, your own mother knows. She heard it at the beauty shop.”

  I started to laugh. I was thirty-seven years old. “Am I supposed to care?”

  “I think it’s a pretty cruel thing you’re doing, don’t you? Screwing a sick man’s wife. Or did you think you could keep it a secret? If so, you shouldn’t have parked your bright red truck with the name of my business on it outside her office all night.”

  “Your business.” Holly had always treated me as a full partner although I’d had no money to buy in.

  She sighed, “Mine and Marty’s.”

  “Is that what this is about? Did he go out for his morning New York Times and hear the gossip at the Binnacle? Did he blame you?”

  “He’s protective of Gordon,” she said. “He thinks what you’re doing to Gordon is wrong. And so do I. And if you were thinking about anything but getting laid, so would you.”

  Judith didn’t talk a lot about Gordon, but he was a presence, always; a looming figure, like the portrait of a great progenitor. She never acted guilty about sleeping with me, never complained about their marriage. I assumed myself to be a pleasant secret; that however brightly Judith glowed in my dim life, I was only a flicker of warmth in hers. My sister, like her husband and a legion of former students and ex-colleagues, saw the man as a living legend.

  Gordon Stone’s compound had been notorious for dancing that lasted until daybreak when people coupled off in the dunes or lay in heaps around the fire to sleep. Holly will still talk about the night Gordon’s guests, men and women both, came to blows over politics, then tore off their clothes and ran naked into the bay. She’ll tell you that Johnny Lynch wrote the town’s antinoise, anticamping, and antinudity bylaws as a response to Gordon’s annual summer solstice celebrations; that people still remember the FBI men snooping around and the marijuana bust—a small-scale military operation at four-thirty A.M. that sent one of the summer neighbors to the hospital with a heart attack. Since then, Gordon’s botanical projects were legal: He collected hearty succulents, yucca and cactus from all over the world, so that the compound looked like a patch of high desert in the New England sand dunes.

  Long before Judith arrived in his life, Gordon had laid out a courtyard with a mosaic of stones and beach glass. He had no vision of a compound when he began, Holly said, but followed his whims. The idea of espaliered peach trees spurred him to build a wall blocking the north wind. The wall reminded him of a cottage in Taos—so he built one. Unable to house all the students like Marty who used to descend on him in summer and the colleagues who managed to appear without their wives, Gordon built a second main house larger than the first. He used massive beams from an abandoned mill in New Bedford which he floated across the inlet because the Squeer Island bridge couldn’t bear the weight of big trucks.

  Gordon had been fired from three colleges and written fourteen books. (Marty had all of them on a shelf in his study; signed first editions.) He had marched with Martin Luther King in Selma. When he was still healthy, Holly said, you might see him skirting the roof rim of some new building going up—shirtless, a hammer in his hand, a butt in his lips. Or he might be sitting on his deck, naked, in front of his typewriter, inhaling as if ideas could be dragged out of a Marlboro. Holly said that Gordon was still with Judith only because she was wife number four. Like a greyhound, he had needed to sprint for the better part of his life before he was tranquil enough to live with. He was over fifty when they married; she was in her twenties.

  Gordon had a reputation as a satyr, an American Picasso—tyrant, genius, egomaniac—an undisciplined savant who could not write in solitude but threw enormous parties in which he talked himself into an intellectual frenzy before stealing off to a shack with a bottle of scotch to pour out his book. Gordon was rumored to have lived with three women at once, and every night to choose the one with whom he shared his bed. Holly knew only that Judith had broken into his life like an ax through a window in a room full of gas. “Judith is not a warm person,” Holly said, before leaving me to contemplate my behavior. “But she’s been good to Gordon. At least until now.”

  Later that evening, I called Judith at her office to tell her we’d made the headlines in Donna Marie’s Beauty Salon.

  I was ready to concede we had to cool it for a while. Instead she said, “Come out to the house Saturday, can you?” Her voice trailed off as she checked the tide chart. “About one? Gordon’s been asking to meet you.”

  DAVID

  The first thing I noticed was the pistol in Gordon Stone’s hand. He approached my car with a steady smile. Although Judith hadn’t warned me to expect something like this, I knew I deserved it. Half the town was talking about his wife and me.

  Judith protected Gordon. Once I’d asked her: “Do you sleep with your husband?”

  She grimaced. “Could you sleep with somebody who snores like a bull moose?”

  “But do you sleep in the same bed?”

  “How can I sleep if he keeps me awake?”

  “Judith, do you have sex with him?”

  “Does the idea make you jealous?”

  I didn’t think I had the right to be jealous. “Do you know that whenever you don’t want to answer my questions you ask me another one instead?”

  She seemed intrigued. “Does that annoy you?”

  “You’ve just done it again.”

  It had more to do with how I judged myself than anything I actually knew about Gordon, but I assumed that Judith had turned to me out of desperation. I invented an image of her husband as a man who depended on a regimen of drugs that erased his pain as well as his ability to satisfy his wife. I told myself they lived like dear friends, that affection had replaced passion. I simply had to picture Gordon as more intellect than flesh. I could not imagine him watching her dress, for instance. I refused to believe that any husband, however frail and disinterested, could bear to watch my Judith step into her black silk panties in the morning and know she would slide them to her knees for another man.

  I had left my house that afternoon as late as I dared and drove at a coward’s pace down the road to the island, only recently emerging from the last high tide. The salt marsh grass was silver in the sun, the creek swollen and meandering. To me, heaven would smell like a salt marsh, fresh and yeasty and sweet with life—a little like a woman. I rolled my window all the way down and inhaled. As my front wheels hit the first loose plank of the bridge, a
great blue heron rose from the creek, the scythelike shadow of its wings guiding me like a bat to Nosferatu’s castle.

  Just beyond the first dune, the road made an abrupt left turn in front of Stumpy Squeer’s new house. About a quarter mile up a dirt road I made out the letters on an old driftwood oar, STONE–SILVER. I was hearing loud cracks, five or six in succession, pistol fire. Two men were plinking cans arranged on a picnic table. As I drove into the parking area, the taller man stopped shooting and turned. He was broad from the back but willowy, craning slightly forward at the waist as if nursing a pain in the belly. A baseball cap cast all but his mouth in shade. He moved in a slow straight line to my truck. “David Greene?” Gordon spoke my name like a bailiff in a court of law. I climbed slowly out of the truck. Judith appeared on the deck of the house just above us. Gordon said, “If you’re going to be coming to this house, do not be late for lunch again. I am famished. Damned woman wouldn’t serve until you got here.” He switched the gun to his left hand and extended his right to shake mine.

  “That’s a nine-millimeter automatic, isn’t it?”

  He seemed impressed. “A Smith & Wesson. Do you shoot?”

  “A little.” Before my uncle Georgie married and moved to Hawaii, it was something for us to do together that didn’t involve talking.

  “Got another shooter here, Stumpy.”

  Stumpy Squeer was a Saltash legend. Some said he never left the island, but actually he rowed across the harbor to town every couple of weeks for provisions. Stumpy was short and thick, fifty more or less, with barrel-like haunches that made him seem to roll forward as he walked.

  Judith stood on the steps. “Let’s go, you guys. Gordon? David! Lunch!”

  “Will you join us, Stumpy?” Gordon’s voice was deep and courtly.

  Stumpy shook his head no. People said that he had stopped growing at eleven, on the night his father shot his mother in the face. She had just returned from a party where she danced with another man. Her blood seeped through the floorboards on Stumpy, sleeping in the bedroom below.

  “Going to get back to your book?” Gordon asked him. “Stumpy’s been working on one for three years now.”

  “Four,” Stumpy said.

  “Really?” I loved the idea. Stumpy Squeer, hermit scholar. “What are you writing about?”

  “Not writin’. Been readin’ it,” he said. “Almost finished too.”

  Judith called again. “I said, let’s go!”

  The house was situated at the base of a tall clay sea scarp protecting it from the beach on the other side. Gordon climbed the outer stairs with effort. The Smith & Wesson seemed to weigh him down. I wanted to take it, or even grab his elbow to help him make the climb, but I wasn’t about to embarrass him.

  The deck wrapped around the house and offered a quick view of the compound, six wooden structures of differing colors and sizes and styles, some with porches, one with a cupola, one painted pink, all built in a protected bowl between the dunes. Gordon seemed to stagger as he led me through the kitchen door. Although the afternoon temperature hovered just above freezing, I noticed a few drops of sweat rolling into his collar.

  Judith took the gun, ejected the clip, then disappeared with him into one of the back rooms. As my eyes adjusted, I took in a large kitchen of hardwood and tile, mostly in shades of brown and yellow. Baskets were suspended from hooks on the ceiling. Bowls everywhere overflowed with fruit, with dried herbs, with balls of yarn; some filled only with other bowls. Where there weren’t windows there were bookshelves and hundreds of cookbooks with broken spines. Judith had referred to this as the Big House. Through an archway and three steps down, a baby grand stood in front of a truly fantastical hearth. As much a sculpture as a fireplace, the bricks flowed and changed directions like brush strokes in an Impressionist landscape.

  “Gordon calls it his wailing wall.” Judith caught me running my fingers along the grooves between the brick. “Because he groaned and complained the whole time it took him to build it.”

  She had to call him several times. When he appeared, he was older than the man I had met outside. His skin was gray and his chest looked hollow. Gordon felt stronger or weaker during the day, sometimes energetic, sometimes enervated to near exhaustion. Mornings were good (I was to find out), while by late afternoon his strength ebbed. Judith served a beet and cabbage soup with bread and salad. Gordon stared into his bowl, chewing without interest.

  I imagined the man’s shame in my presence, the rage he must feel. Although I found the silence intolerable, I couldn’t think of a thing to break it. “How’s the campaign going?” Judith said finally.

  “What campaign?” Only after I spoke did I realize that I’d probably blown the only thing we all had in common. “Well, I was asked to speak to the Saltash Friendship Association.”

  Gordon lifted his eyes from his bowl. “The old Johnny Lynch clubhouse.”

  I’d never heard that one before. “I thought it used to be a church.”

  Gordon seemed livelier. “A church, and then a grange hall and fishermen’s co-op and a social club. Used to be a dance there every Saturday night.” His eyes narrowed mischievously, “That’s where Stumpy’s mother was spied in the arms of another man. But for years and years, Johnny’s group met there for cocktails before the Board of Selectmen meetings. Johnny used to get to Town Hall so drunk that the minutes of the meetings made no sense. The secretary couldn’t understand half what he said, and when she asked him, he couldn’t remember.”

  “Did people know?”

  “Everybody knew. But they didn’t care. Because he was the nicest, funniest, friendliest guy in the world. They loved Johnny Lynch. Hell, I loved Johnny Lynch. He handled all my mortgages and wrote my wills and never charged me a dime—until I spoke against him one night at town meeting. Then I got a bill for fifteen years’ worth of work! Johnny never made his money from the law. It was my vote he wanted, and my loyalty. He had to be a town official, you see, that was his access to government contracts, to the pot of gold.” Gordon looked at the table as if a mistake had been made. “Judith, where’s the wine? Don’t we have some cold white wine?”

  “For lunch?” she asked, but was quickly on her feet, searching the refrigerator.

  “Understand,” Gordon said, “and I should never tell this to a politician, but people don’t care what you do. It’s what you do for them. Johnny Lynch took care of people. He saw that every nitwit who couldn’t find a trade drove a truck for the town. If you couldn’t make your taxes, Johnny had a word with the tax collector. He intervened when you were in trouble with the bank.”

  “He was Chairman of the Board,” I said.

  Gordon seemed impressed that I knew. “He took care of your wife if you went to the army.”

  “That’s never been proven.” Judith set the glasses and the bottle on the table.

  Gordon winked. “Johnny had friends on the Selective Service Board. One of his girlfriends was married to a boy who’d left her. Summer of ’sixty-nine. ’Seventy?” he asked Judith, who shrugged, working on the cork. “When the boy showed up in Saltash again and started making trouble, what do you think happened?”

  “He got drafted?”

  “Johnny Lynch was King David in this town. And do you know why? Because people wanted a king.”

  When the wine was gone and the sun filled the space between the clouds like a pink neon fire, Gordon led me outside, literally by the sleeve. “Help me with something, will you?” Four rolls of roofing paper, four pallets of asphalt shingles, were piled at the foot of the drive. Gordon asked me to carry them up the dune. As I lifted the first, he turned his back to the house and slipped a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket. “Ever do any construction?”

  “Some,” I said. I had worked for my father-in-law in Florida. Not a period in my life I cared to talk about.

  “After you played baseball.” He watched my reaction. “Davey Greene, the Pitching Machine. I used to take my son to watch you play.”
He led me up the slope. “Wind lifts these damned shingles like feathers. Finish one roof, start another. One a year, every year. Used to do it by myself, if you can believe that.” He stopped outside a cottage with a peaked roof.

  I managed one roll on each shoulder, all four up the dune in two trips. I couldn’t carry more than one pallet of shingles at a time. On my last trip up, number six, I was laboring like an old mule. Gordon was waiting for me, smoking his pipe, staring at the purple silhouette of the peaked roof. “Don’t mention to Judith I was smoking. She won’t let me buy cigarettes, but she doesn’t know I have a pipe. So are you going to do it?” There was no question what he meant.

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s a line drawn right down the middle of this town.”

  “If this is about the dike, it’s not as simple as that. People stand on both sides,” I said.

  “And where do you stand? With Johnny Lynch?”

  I didn’t like him trying to push me. “Why don’t you run?”

  “I’m an old man.”

  “So is Johnny.”

  “But he’s desperate now, don’t you see? He’s fighting for all he’s worth. Johnny’s been in and out of court for years. He never invested his money. Why bother? Saltash was a money farm. He could always grow more. Now all he’s got left are those lots in the river valley. As long as the dike stays closed and the land stays dry, he can build. To make sure it does, he needs the Board of Selectmen. He’s got two votes, we’ve got two. You’re the tie breaker.”

  “That’s a lot to drop on my shoulders.”

  “From what I hear, you’ve got some pair of shoulders.”

  What did Judith say about me when they were alone? How much did he know?

  “Will you do it?”

  Was he making me some kind of deal in exchange for his wife? “Why me?”

  “You’re bright. Fair-minded. You’re perceived as neutral.”

  “Tell me something, Gordon, have you people asked anybody else?”

  “Oh, yes. Maybe twenty people.”