by Lily Tuck
Peter does not answer Maud right away. He shifts his body away from her a little before he says in the British-inflected, nasal voice, “Why, enlarge them, naturally.”
Instead of going ashore again in the Zodiac with the others, Maud decides to remain on board. Except for the woman in the wheelchair, who appears to be asleep (her eyes are closed and she breathes heavily), Maud is alone in the saloon and, from where she is sitting reading, or trying to read, her book, she can watch the passengers, dressed in their red parkas, disembark at Fort Lockroy, the British station. She watches as they spread out and start to climb the snow-covered hill behind the station. Some of the passengers have brought along ski poles and Maud tries to pick out which red parka belongs to Peter and which belongs to Janet, but the figures are too far away. She thinks again about the woman who tried to hide and again she wonders why. Was the woman suicidal? But freezing to death, Maud also thinks, may not be such a bad way to die. How did the Emily Dickinson poem go? “As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow— / First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—.” In spite of herself, Maud shivers. Then she makes herself open her book. When next she looks up, all the figures in their red parkas have disappeared.
“You didn’t miss anything,” Peter tells Maud when he returns from the station. Nevertheless, he looks animated. “There was a museum, which was kind of creepy—an old sled and some frying pans—but Janet bought some postcards.”
“Ah, lovely Janet,” Maud says.
“What do you mean by that?” Peter asks.
“What do you suppose I mean?”
“For god’s sake, Maud, why must you always be suspicious of me? Why do you always attribute some underhand motive to everything I do?” Peter says, before he turns and limps out of the saloon, leaving Maud.
The woman in the wheelchair has woken up; she gives a little embarrassed cough.
The first time, twenty or so years ago, Maud accused Peter of having an affair, the discussion had turned violent—Maud threw a plate of food at Peter and Peter picked up a glass full of wine and flung it across the table at Maud, shouting, “I can’t live like this!” Then he left home for three days. When finally he returned, he did not say where he had been and Maud did not ask. What Maud remembers vividly is her panic. During the time Peter was gone, she could hardly breathe, let alone eat, and she could not sleep. She was assailed by all kinds of conflicting emotions, but the dominant one was fear: the fear that she had driven Peter to some action she would regret and the fear that she would never see him again.
When the Caledonia Star crosses the Antarctic Circle, all the passengers crowd on to the bridge to look. The sky is a cloudless blue and the sea calm but the horizon is a wall of icebergs. Maud recognizes the handsome French first officer up in the crow’s nest, dressed in a bright yellow slicker and waterproof pants. He is reporting back to Captain Halvorsen on the bridge by walkie-talkie. The ship’s chief officer is tracing the ship’s course on a sea chart with a compass and a protractor; on the radar screen, the larger tabular icebergs show up as small luminous points.
Below on deck, Peter is looking through his binoculars.
“What do you see?” Maud asks but she cannot hear his answer.
By then, Maud is able to recognize most of the passengers on board the ship, and she knows many of them by name. One flight below their cabin, she has discovered the gym and she exercises regularly on the treadmill. She has also become more tolerant—even of Barbara, the golfer—and has made a few friends. One is the woman in the wheelchair.
“She’s from Philadelphia and she’s already identified five different species of albatross,” Maud tells Peter, “the gray-headed albatross, the sooty albatross, the wandering—”
“What’s wrong with her?” Peter wants to know. “Why is she in a wheelchair?”
Maud shrugs. “I didn’t ask.”
After dinner one night, a film is shown in the saloon. The film is old and grainy and tells the true story of the perilous voyage of a ship named the Peking. Sailing around the Cape Horn, the Peking encounters a terrible storm—the mast breaks, waves crash on deck—and, to make matters worse, the captain of the Peking has brought his dog, a vicious little terrier, on board. The terrier is seen jumping up and biting the sailors who have as yet not been swept overboard. The dog provides a kind of gruesome comic relief and makes everyone laugh, including Maud and Peter.
When the film ends, Janet tells Maud, “I once had a dog who looked just like that. His name was Pepe.”
“I love dogs,” expansive, Maud answers her.
Peter moves to sit next to Janet and starts to describe a cruise he once took in the Mediterranean as a college student. “I was on deck one night after dinner —we were docked in Cannes—and my wallet, which was in my back pocket, must have fallen overboard—”
Maud has heard the story a thousand times and does not listen. Instead she strikes up a conversation with the woman in the wheelchair. “Have you always loved birds?” Maud asks.
“You can’t imagine! The most extraordinary piece of luck,” Peter is telling Janet as he leans in closer to her, “A fisherman caught my wallet in his net. The wallet had over a thousand dollars in cash in it—I was planning to buy a car in England, an MG—”
Looking over, Maud sees that Janet has stopped paying attention to what Peter is saying. She is looking past him toward the door of the saloon and Maud follows her gaze. She sees the handsome French first officer standing there; she sees him signal to Janet.
“Excuse me,” Janet says, getting up and leaving the saloon.
“Pinned up on the wall of the Cannes police station was every last dollar . . .” Peter’s voice trails off.
Maud looks away. She is fairly used to seeing Peter flirt but she is not used to seeing him defeated.
A few minutes later, Peter says, “I’m tired, I’m going to bed.”
Maud would like to say something that might be of comfort to him but cannot think what that might be. She merely nods.
When Maud wakes up during the night to go to the bathroom (or head, as she knows she is supposed to call it), she sees that Peter is not in his bed. The sheets and blankets are half lying on the floor, as if Peter had thrown them off in a rush.
“Peter,” Maud calls out in the dark.
Turning on the light, Maud goes to the bathroom, then quickly pulls her jeans over her nightgown, grabs her parka, a hat and gloves.
The ship’s corridor is dimly lit and empty. As Maud half-runs toward the stairs, her steps echo eerily. All the cabin doors are shut and, briefly, she imagines the occupants sleeping peacefully inside. The ship’s motor hums smoothly, there is an occasional thud of the hull hitting an ice floe. Her heart banging in her chest, Maud runs up to the saloon. The saloon, too, is dimly lit and empty. In the dining room, the chairs are stacked, the floor ready for cleaning. From there, she opens a door and goes out on deck. The cold air momentarily takes her breath away but the sky is unnaturally light. The ship’s huge searchlights move back and forth over the sea, restlessly illuminating here an ice floe, there an iceberg. Inside the bridge house, Captain Halvorsen, holding a mug of coffee, stands next to the pilot at the wheel. The handsome first officer briefly glances up from the radar screen as Maud comes in.
“My husband—” she says.
“Is he ill?” Without taking his eyes from the horizon, Captain Halvorsen asks. “Has something happened?”
“I’m looking for him,” Maud answers, intimidated.
His face expressionless, the first officer continues to study the radar screen.
Every few seconds the pilot at the wheel shouts out numbers, coordinates, compass points. He, too, pays Maud no attention.
Directly in front of the ship’s bow, a tabular iceberg that is taller and longer than the Caledonia Star appears yellowish green in the spotl
ight. In the bridge house all the attention is fixed on getting safely past it and not on anything that Maud says or does. For a moment longer, Maud stands motionless, not daring to speak or breathe, and watches the boat’s slow, safe progress past the iceberg.
“Where were you?” Peter asks when Maud opens the cabin door and switches on the light. He is in bed, the sheet and blanket neatly tucked in around him.
“Where were you?” Despite the enormous relief she feels on seeing him, Maud is angry.
Peter tells her he went up on deck for a few minutes and they must have missed each other. At night, he says, the icebergs look even more amazing. “All that uninhabitable empty space. So pure, so absolute.” Peter sounds euphoric, then, as if suddenly remembering something important, he says, “Maud, it’s four thirty in the morning.”
Maud does not feel tired, nor does she feel any desire to sleep. Back in bed, she has switched off the light when Peter calls over to her, in his slightly inflected British voice, “Sweet dreams, darling.”
Maud says nothing.
Lucky
The sound of cries from the cottage next door drift across the lawn to where Helen is sitting on her deck painting a picture and it takes her a moment to recognize what they are. A woman having an orgasm. The young tenant’s girlfriend, she thinks. It is a Sunday in June and the only other sound Helen hears is the twittering of the barn swallows who, miraculously—or so it seems to Helen—have returned all the way to Long Island from Peru or from somewhere in South America to the very same nest they built last year, which is right over the door leading from the house to Helen’s deck, and are now noisily occupied feeding their young. The tenant, a carpenter, is named Craig and he is tall and has curly red hair and Helen knows little about him except that, so far—he has been renting the cottage only since March—he has been a good tenant. He has paid his rent on time and has not yet given Helen cause for complaint by playing loud music or by blocking her parking spot with his white truck. Quite the contrary, she has found Craig helpful: he offered to take down the storm windows, and when, in May, Helen went to Tuscany for a week, Craig picked up her mail and kept an eye on things. Now, in spite of herself, Helen cannot help but wonder how Craig is making the woman come.
Helen starts to collect her easel and her paints in order to move indoors but then she remembers the barn swallows. She does not want to disturb them by opening and shutting the door while they are feeding their young. Five baby chicks were hatched two weeks ago and Helen has watched their progress almost obsessively—a part of her wishes she had installed the video camera she had read about on the Internet that was fitted with infrared lighting so she could watch the nesting activity—but she has made every effort not to upset the birds by her presence. She has kept her cat inside the house and away from them, and, except for placing a few sheets of newspaper under the nest, she has also refrained from cleaning up the birds’ mess. Already Helen can tell, by the way the chicks lift their heads and open wide their bright yellow beaks and how much more aggressively demanding they are for their food, that soon they will be ready to fledge. Picking up her brush, Helen sits down again in front of her easel. She had been copying a picture postcard she bought in Tuscany of a painting by Ghirlandaio before she was interrupted. Mostly, she knows that she is afraid to step down onto the lawn and circle her house to go to the front door in case, in addition to hearing the woman’s cries, she catches a glimpse through an open cottage window of naked, young bodies coupling.
Helen is no longer young, neither is she so old—and hasn’t she heard tell how one always feels at least ten years younger than one actually is?—which would make her feel in her midforties. In Tuscany, Helen felt even younger. Something to do with the air, the wine at lunch, the light. She could have walked the streets of Lucca, Siena, San Gimignano—her favorite of the three towns—forever, there was so much to see, to do. In addition, she had experienced a feeling of freedom that she does not often feel at home, where she worries too much about the lawn, the plumbing, roof repairs. On the way back in the plane, Helen had promised herself that from now on she would travel more and go to places like Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, Luang Prabang. She would be more adventurous.
All appears to be quiet again—no more sounds are coming from the cottage and the barn swallows have left to find more insects to feed their young—and Helen is at last able to go indoors. A few minutes later, she hears Craig’s truck drive away and when she goes to the front window to look, she sees the back of a woman’s dark head resting against Craig’s.
“What’s she like, anyway?” Gina asks.
“Who?”
Gina does not have to be at work until the afternoon and they are driving to the beach, which, this month, is still relatively uncrowded. Too cold yet to swim, they are just going to walk. The truck windows are open and Craig breathes deeply—he likes the smell of freshly mown grass. Most of the houses he drives by are large and expensive and are surrounded by well-trimmed privet hedges, the gardens he can see are filled with lush hydrangea bushes and are manicured down to what he calls a “fare-thee-well.”
“Your landlady. How old do you suppose she is? I bet I know why she rented you the cottage.” Gina laughs and rolls her dark eyes. She has a wide mouth and very small teeth—they almost look like her baby teeth—her only flaw. Last fall, she enrolled in law school and she plans to do environmental law so that, among other things, she can protect the wildlife on the island and keep the dunes from further eroding on the beach. Gina prides herself on her boldness and the boldness is what first attracted Craig, but now it tires him a little. “Seriously, she doesn’t look half bad for her age.”
“You just said you didn’t know how old she was.” For some reason, Craig feels protective of Helen, whom he hardly knows. The two of them, he thinks, have probably exchanged no more than a hundred words in the three months he has rented the cottage. And, if truth be told, he has not given her or the life she leads much thought except for the one morning when he was leaving for work early and he saw a young man in boxer shorts and a T-shirt standing in the kitchen with his back to the window and holding his cup out to Helen to fill. The young man’s presence had surprised Craig but later she had said something to him about her son who had come to visit.
“She has grown-up kids, doesn’t she?” Gina asks, as if she could read his mind.
Craig nods. Although he likes his work as a carpenter well enough, his secret ambition—not so secret, perhaps, since he has told Gina—is to save enough money to buy a boat, a sailboat, and sail for a year or two: sail across the Atlantic with a girl who is not afraid, a girl like Gina, maybe. “So far she hasn’t hassled me about anything,” he says.
“She paints—paints pictures,” Craig also tells Gina, as if to vindicate Helen in Gina’s eyes.
“She must be rich,” Gina answers.
Up ahead on the road, Craig sees the flashing blue light of a police car and he slows down. A red BMW has gone off the road, leaving deep tire tracks in the grass. The car has hit a tree. The hood is completely smashed and the windshield is splintered into thousands of shards. The front door of the car on the driver’s side has folded up at an odd angle and black smoke is coming out of the hood.
“Oh, my god,” Gina says.
A policewoman, her hands on her hips, is standing next to the car. A policeman is sitting in the car talking on the radio.
Craig opens the door of the truck. “Stay there,” he tells Gina, but she too is getting out.
“Turn off the ignition,” Craig calls out to the policewoman.
“The door,” policewoman yells back, as she starts to go around to the passenger side of the car.
“I’ll get a fire extinguisher—I have one in my truck,” Craig says, as he starts to go back.
Behind him, Craig can hear the wail of an ambulance. The wail is getting louder. Also, the siren of another po
lice car.
By the time Craig has freed the fire extinguisher from where it was wedged under his seat, a second police car and the ambulance have arrived. Craig watches as the two paramedics carry a stretcher to the wrecked car; the smoke from the hood, he notices with relief, has dwindled to a thin wisp. From the way the paramedics move, Craig sees that they are having trouble getting the driver out of the car. When finally they do, the man—Craig can tell by the trousers and shirt that it is a man—is having convulsions; his body doubles up then straightens out again in rapid succession, and the paramedics have to strap him down tightly so that he does not fall off the stretcher onto the ground.
“Let’s go,” Craig says to Gina, who is standing next to him. He takes her arm and also says, “I wonder if he is going to make it.”
A long time ago when he was first learning how to drive, Craig ran over the neighbor’s cat. It was not his fault—the cat had darted out on the road and Craig did not have time to stop the car. When he got out—Craig had run over the cat’s back—the cat was convulsing, arching and straightening its body just like the man, and Craig, to put the cat out of its misery, had gotten back into the car, shifted into reverse and run over it again.
“He must have been going like hell,” Craig says once he is back in the truck.
In the seat next to him, Gina bursts into tears.
Helen has been married three times: once widowed and twice divorced—how did the rhyme about Henry VIII and his six wives go? Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. Somehow, she feels as if she, too, has survived—only just. Her first husband, Raymond, decided, after they had two children and had been married fifteen years, that he was gay and left her for a man. Raymond and the man, a Cuban, live in a condo in South Beach, Florida; the children keep in touch and visit him and Javier there. Her second husband died less than a year after they were married; he had a heart attack in the street, outside his office on Wall Street. Alec, her third husband, is an alcoholic and a liar. He can also be very charming. The last time Helen saw him, about four months ago, she was on her way to the city and they happened to take the same bus. They rode in together. He told her then how he was on the wagon and had been sober for nearly a year, but she had known better than to believe him. He also said how he was on his way to an exhibition at the Whitney and she remembers that he said something that made her laugh—only she cannot remember what exactly—about how dreadful modern art was maybe. Helen met Alec in a life class she had signed up for. He was the teacher.
