Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  “I believe there are people who are born for something,” she said. I noticed the way her breasts pushed against the white satin cups of her bra. “I’m not talking about destiny or religion. It’s just that some people are born with abilities, that’s all. And if they can’t do what they’re made to do—” She stopped abruptly. She closed her eyes, as if the conversation had already gone too far. “They’re a mess.”

  “And you think I’m a mess?” I said.

  “I know I am.”

  “You didn’t tell me what you were born to do.”

  “I said some people. I’m not one of them.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Because you’re nice. Laramie said you’re the nicest man he’s ever met.”

  “I want to know. What were you born to be?”

  “Just a mom,” she said. “Maybe just an overwrought, overweight mom with six kids and a big barn of a house.”

  “I doubt that. You work in a law office. Don’t you ever think of being a lawyer yourself?”

  “About a hundred times a day.”

  “I think you’d be a good one. You’re obviously smart. You’re experienced. You’re compassionate.”

  “And thirty-two. And a single mom. Much too old to go back to school. Too busy and too tired.” When I challenged her, she placed her fingertips over my mouth to silence me. “I’m doing fine, okay? I don’t need any help.”

  We were sitting in a cold room facing her unpacked boxes in a corner. The only lamp cast a sickly yellow light. Through the floorboards we heard a couple fighting. I said, “Of course you don’t,” and we both started to laugh.

  Looking back on the night I met Crystal, I realize I might have seen her differently. I might have perceived a burden. I might have made her a project or even a friend. If all I had wanted was to distance myself from Judith, I could have simply gotten laid. But on that winter night I was kindled with a more urgent fire, a mother and a child’s need for me. I thought my efforts could change everything. I thought I could enter her life like a god. What I imagined as Crystal’s weakness, however, proved to be my own.

  Sometimes in autumn when the storm tides recede, the soft, placid beaches resemble a killing field. Some claim to know the reason whales strand themselves, wash up to suffocate in the sand, their lungs crushed by the weight of their own bodies, their skin cracking in the sun like the walls of old tires. What faulty inner magnet could draw them to their deaths? The old fishermen say under stress and sickness, they follow a leader with the ancient memory of land in her genes, land as safety, land as home. But what if they were trying to save the leader? Or maybe, once committed to the wrong course, they were afraid of turning back? Many times I told myself the consequences of leaving Crystal were more dangerous than remaining in her bed. Many times it seemed to me that however damaging I knew our course together to be, that she was what I deserved. On that first cold night I had no idea. Only upon looking back did I realize that to wade into Crystal’s shallow life was to drown.

  Her back pressed to my chest, entwining her fingers in mine as my arms wound around her waist, she seemed to project her story on the wall. I assumed that not facing me was a way to avoid the pain, but of course I didn’t even know Crystal’s last name at this point, or that her version of history was only a shadow play.

  “Look,” I said, “maybe you don’t want to talk about this now. But I do think you could become something. You have two years of college? You could go back. Take one course a semester. Your life doesn’t end when things don’t work out the first time. You just have to start another life.”

  Before she kissed me, she said, “You’re also the nicest man I’ve ever met.” She opened her lips like the mouth of an infant asking to be fed. She suckled my ears, my neck, my lips with ferocious hunger. I was mother, she was child, there is no more accurate way to describe it. She put out the light before she undressed. She had heavy breasts and a soft belly, and when she saw me admiring her in the remaining light, she was ashamed. She took my cock between her breasts, guided my hand to her thighs. She told me lightly, lightly touch the rings in her nipples with my tongue. She placed me inside easily, locked her legs around my hips and rocked. But I tell you I was less a man than a source of warmth, a mass of comfort and kindness. I have never felt as purely needed by any lover nor as willing to be consumed.

  JUDITH

  By her seventh year in Saltash, when Judith was thirty-nine, she was becoming better known as a lawyer, an aggressive defense lawyer who would do a good job for anyone in trouble, a lawyer who would sue any corporation or government entity for a client. She was becoming even better known as a shark of a divorce lawyer who would get for her predominantly women clients a better deal than other lawyers even tried for. People saw her as unscrupulous, hard, even immoral, because she fought to win.

  But what could she do against the enemy stealing Gordon from her? The cancer had returned, in the other lung. The cancer had touched his liver. More chemotherapy. Another operation. Sometimes Gordon could work, but not as he had; mostly his profession was his disease. He would not go into a cancer support group. “What am I supposed to do with a bunch of people whose only connection with me is that parts of our bodies are sick or missing?”

  Over their years together they had dined out frequently. Now she cooked every night she could, to tempt him to eat, to get good nutrition into him. At night in bed, besides briefs she read cookbooks. She had given up low-fat cooking. Gordon kept losing weight. She was congenitally thin herself. Natasha compared her to a shrew who had to eat every ten minutes or starve. Now she cooked whatever might tempt him to eat. If it was hollandaise sauce, so be it. When she spent the night across the bridge in the loft above her new law office on the harbor, she had arranged for Jana Baer (who lived on the island) to come in to cook him a meal.

  Gordon had been her rock. Since the first year of their marriage, she had relied on him as she had relied on no one since the death of her mother. They would fight, they would yell at each other, they would violently disagree about people or the exact interpretation of political events or a movie they had seen, but on the big things they agreed, on values, on their love, on how they should live. Now she would sometimes look at him, his face gaunt and visibly showing his age, and she would feel fear serrated, cold, sawing at her. He was her joy: the center of her life was collapsing.

  That spring, she suggested they try to cut back on the number of summer guests, that they simply reduce their entertaining to be less of a strain on him than the usual delirium. She had wanted to cancel the big Fourth of July party too, but Gordon insisted that while he was alive, it continue. He had begun to use that phrase, which angered her.

  Tonight she called him on it. “Anyone could say that. A truck could run me off the road tomorrow. I could choke on a chicken bone. I could die of food poisoning from fast food. Some ex-client could shoot me in court. Or somebody who just hates lawyers.”

  “Judith, you want to avoid thinking about my death. Dr. Barrows says I have two years at the very best, probably less.”

  “It could go into remission. You’re more stubborn than he understands. It’s a lottery.” She would probably throw herself into the law, continuing the process that had already begun. Because of Gordon’s illness, she had become a better lawyer, fiercer, more inventive, because there and only there she could still win.

  “And I’ve never been fool enough to play the lottery. The odds, Judith, you perfectly well understand odds. I’m not sentimental and I’m not delusional. The odds are I’ll be dead soon, and we have to think about that together.”

  “I don’t want to think about it! What good does it do?”

  “What good does it do to pretend I’ll live forever? We have to make plans. I can’t stand the pretending. I need to know you’re going to be all right.”

  “Gordon, there’s no way I’ll be all right without you. But I’ll go on. I have my work. I’ll just work harder.”

&nbs
p; “Do you intend to go on living out here?”

  “How do I know?” She threw her hands up, furious at him for insisting on talking about something she preferred to think about alone in the middle of the night when no one could see her cry.

  “Your practice is here. Your reputation is growing. You have as many cases as you can handle. If you moved back to Boston, you’d have to start over.”

  “I hardly want to do that. I’m thirty-nine. So I imagine I’ll stay.”

  “I’ve split the land and buildings between you and Natasha. Nobody else has a claim. I’ve left a modest bequest to all my children.”

  “Gordon, you gave me a copy of your will two months ago. Do we have to dwell on this?”

  “Judith, you’ve been the best choice I ever made in my life, because you’re bright and level-headed and you’ve always brought your full intelligence to bear on everything you do, from practicing law to choosing a broom. I love that. But you haven’t been willing to bring any intelligence whatsoever to the situation we’re in. When you married me, you didn’t think I was twenty-seven too. You knew I was much older than you and the odds were enormous that I’d die first. Now I have lung cancer. You read all the books. You know what the survival rate is for recurrent lung cancer. About a five percent chance of being alive in five years. When you refuse to be open-minded and clear-eyed about this event so important to me, then I’m left to face it alone.”

  “What do you want from me? To sit down with you and plan your funeral?”

  “I’m not into that yet, although given my flair for self-dramatization, I won’t miss that last grand opportunity. What I have to know is how things will be with you. I have to leave you set up.”

  “Well, I’ll have the house and my practice. That’s as much set up as any person has a right to expect.”

  “I don’t agree. I brought you out here, away from the city. It was to please me.”

  “Gordon, I love living here. I probably enjoy the Cape’s natural resources more than you do.”

  “But you’re here because I was an old man and I retired. Otherwise we’d both be working in the city. And this land is important to me. This compound is a crazy but vital creation. It’s my monument, if you like. I hate to think of it going on the market and being dismantled by somebody who wants to replace it all with one of those millionaire’s atrocities.”

  “Gordon, I live here. I live with you. Enough!” It was a recurrent quarrel. She did not know what he wanted from her, that she produce a projection of her life without him like an entrepreneur drafting a plan for a new business? It was gruesome.

  At last Gordon finally found a project he could immerse himself in. He began writing a book with a photographer about Saltash, its history, its sociology. It was a true collaboration, and Brian Peyrera, a photographer from New York, had moved to Saltash for the duration. Gordon had begun several projects since the onset of cancer, but he had abandoned them all, losing interest. Working with someone on a project of limited scope seemed to be exactly what he needed. He began to fight less with her about the future. She was immensely relieved. The photographer, just about her age and recently divorced, was a very thin young man with a dazzling smile and lots of dark brown wavy hair.

  “Brian ought to move in here,” Gordon said one morning at breakfast. “It’d be much easier for us to work together. He’s spending a fortune at the inn.”

  “Live here?” Judith squeaked. “Couldn’t we just find him a rental?”

  “In June we’re supposed to find him a summer rental? Be real. He could live in the cabin Ben built. He wouldn’t be underfoot.”

  She could not deny Gordon his wishes; she had never been good at that. So Brian moved into one of the cabins in the compound, and he was indeed underfoot. He was a wistful good-natured man, a little sorry for himself, talkative but not much of a physical presence. He did not dominate space the way Gordon always had, which was a plus under the circumstances. He took over making lunch and some of the shopping.

  “You have the domestic virtues,” Judith said as he was helping her clean up from supper. “I appreciate that.”

  “My wife didn’t.”

  They had tried very hard to have a baby, but the wife miscarried time after time. Finally they had decided to adopt. They were still waiting for a baby when the marriage came apart.

  In some ways having Brian around did make life easier. When she could not make it back to the island because of the tides she did not have to put in a desperate call to Jana Baer. Brian was always there, and he was good company for Gordon. The book was marvelous therapy, aside from whether it would ever be finished. Brian seemed in no hurry to be done. He was happy to live with them. Why not? Saltash sure beat Manhattan in summer. The most awkward times for Judith were the evenings, since Gordon often grew weary and went to bed early, leaving the two of them tête-à-tête for hours. Sometimes they both read. Brian was not musical, and if she put a CD on, he would talk over the Mozart until she gave up trying to listen. The trouble was, he was beginning to stare at her when he thought she would not notice, to dote visibly, to sigh and gaze and otherwise exude a gentle but disconcerting desire.

  “Gordon, I think maybe having Brian living here is not a great idea.”

  “I thought you were getting along splendidly.”

  “Brian’s easy to get along with, unlike myself. But Gordon … I think he has a crush on me.”

  “Of course he does. How could he live with you and not fall in love? He’s a sweet young man. He’s bright and vulnerable—”

  “And as crazy as you are.” She stomped out of the room, overwhelmed with the suspicion that Gordon was intentionally throwing them together.

  Gordon followed her into her room and shut the door. “You can’t live out here alone. It’s too difficult.”

  “So I’ll get a roommate.”

  “Judith, you’re still young enough to have a family.”

  “Gordon, you’re way off. And you’re a damned control freak, you know that? What are you trying to do, plan out my life for the next twenty years?” She stalked from her own bedroom, slamming the door.

  When Natasha came home from vet school, eventually Judith told her. Anger roughened her voice. She could not hold it in. “He’s pushing me to have an affair with that Brian, can you believe it? As if I’ve ever, ever shown interest in another man! It’s just sick!”

  Natasha had a conversation with Gordon. After that, she saw the situation differently. “He wants to know you’ll be all right. And he loves this place. I think he wants to control who lives here, who shares it after he … in the future.”

  “It makes me feel dirty.”

  “Why?” Natasha propped her sharp chin on her hands. Her hair was her mother’s, pale apricot, but her eyes were Gordon’s, fiercely blue. “Why does it scare you so much? It would give him a sense of survival, to know who you were with, to know that the family goes on. He wants to have input into the choice of your next husband, Judith. Can’t you understand?”

  “I can’t accept it.”

  “Even to make him happy? Even to give him some peace about how things may go? Maybe he’s right. We all want to know that we can still come here, that we can feel at home here.”

  “I’m not shopping for a husband. I have one. Can’t you just trust me to make the family feel at home?”

  “He thinks you don’t know much about men. He doesn’t want you to get hurt after he’s gone.”

  Judith paced, clutching her arms. “This is unbearable!”

  “He wants to have an afterlife in your life. Of course it’s weird, Judith, but this family is pretty weird. You play housemother to children older than you are. Gordon tries to stay friendly with all his ex-wives, and mostly he manages, but he doesn’t think much of the husbands they acquired after him. You were more like an older sister than a mother to me, but you were the main woman in my life for years and years, and you still are. Listen to me. Don’t be conventional about this. You didn’t
marry conventionally. You didn’t live your married life conventionally. Listen to Gordon. If you don’t agree with him on the man he chooses, say so. Say you’ll pick out your own.”

  She told Hannah what was going on. Hannah was silent for a while. Then she said, “You know, a minor affair isn’t the end of the world. It needn’t damage a central and serious relationship.”

  Hannah had been with the senator for nine years. Judith asked, “Have you been involved with anyone else?”

  Another silence. “I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say involved.”

  She wanted to ask Hannah how could she, why would she, but she did not, for she did not want to alienate her closest woman friend (unless she counted Natasha, whom she did think of as her daughter). She did not want to make Hannah defensive, so slowly and carefully she circled toward the questions she wanted to ask. But even as she did so, she realized it was futile. Hannah was not her; the senator was not Gordon.

  Finally she spoke to Barbara. “Why a man?” Barbara made a gesture of dismissal. “It’s so like a man to discount half the world. I like Gordon, but it never seems to occur to him you have other choices.”

  “Barbara, I respect your choice, but it isn’t for me.”

  “You’ve never been involved with a woman …. But he’s pushing the envelope so hard he could rupture it. Why do you have to torture yourself now? Why can’t he let you enjoy the end of his life with him, as much as you can?”

  “I wish he would. I feel coerced into a complication I don’t need.”

  “But you don’t have to do it, Judith,” Barbara said calmly, putting her hands flat on her desk. “He can inflict Brian on you in the house, but he can’t make you fall in love with him or even in lust. After a while he’ll let it go. It will be too boring to continue.”

  “Barbara, you’re always right, do you know that? Or at least fifty percent of the time.”

  “Eighty-five.”

  “Fifty-five.”

  They grinned at each other. Judith felt as if she had been an idiot. She had always taken Gordon’s desires, even his whims, seriously, because she wanted so much to please him. If he saw a shirt he liked as they walked past a clothing store, she would return the next day and buy it. If he dropped a hint he was curious about a show, she would call at once for tickets. Perhaps she had had a lot to prove, being the fourth wife, being the child bride, being the youngest, being … the last.