by Mark Slouka
And the door closed behind them. The new regime, neither more nor less brutal than expected, settled in. In six years, one letter arrived, smuggled over the border by a mutual friend. Her husband, a chameleon by choice, not weakness, capable of blending through sheer will into any background he chose, adjusted first to the size and speed and hustle of New York, and then (as the realization that they might never return began to dawn on them both) to the permanence of their situation. Happily substituting Duke Ellington for Dvořák, Horn and Hardarts for the cafés of Malá Strana, he forged ahead, creating a life for himself along the way. Sitting on our porch at the lake, a bottle of scotch on the table next to him, he would draw diagrams on a paper napkin with a fountain pen, trying to convince my father of the uniquely European virtues of American baseball: “The field isn’t grass, Mostovsky, it’s memory itself,” he’d say, the anglicized names with their hard consonants protruding like stones from the stream of fluid Czech. “DiMaggio forever sliding into home against Ernie Lombardi in ’39. Bob Feller pitching a no-hitter on Opening Day at Comisky Park. The individual game means nothing. History, tradition, is all.”
Of course, by the time he found himself discussing baseball and drinking scotch on our porch in the new world, twenty years had passed, and much had changed. At some point along the way, I suspect, Josef Kessler, like a man speaking to his wife at a crowded fair—pointing, commenting on this and that—had turned around and found himself alone. Neither unintelligent nor particularly insensitive, it must have come as a shock to him to realize that he’d left his wife standing ten or twelve or fifteen years back in the snow of the Austrian border; that as he and the smuggler had moved on, she’d turned to look back, and frozen with grief; that the woman he’d lived with, talked to, made love to for a decade and more was a ghost of sorts, paling with the years.
There was no point in talking about it. To return, he knew, would be madness: a guaranteed ten years, maybe more, in a communist prison for both of them. Apologies were also useless, nor, in fact, had anyone asked for any; there was no way he could have known then that what appeared most likely to be a two- or three-year spasm would drag on for decades. Or a lifetime. No, what had happened had happened, and the best they could do was acknowledge the situation, then move ahead and make the best of it.
Still, recognizing the heart’s resistance to reason, Josef Kessler did what he could. Hearing of a lake not far from New York, an old-world pond with twenty-three wooden cabins populated by a motley group of Irish- and Italian-Americans, Czechs and Poles and German Jews, he decided to rent a cottage. The place, he hoped, might, by small degrees, gain her love; might become, in time, a reasonable replacement for the world she’d lost. With the years, even, it might suddenly blossom—it was possible—so tenderly that his wife would find herself won over: the past, finally and forever, would fall away. The present moment would rule over her heart.
Though she woke late that particular morning, the air moving through the screen was cool, the insects quite still. She lay quietly on her back for a while, covered with only a single sheet. A lightning bolt of sunlight lay across her legs. A single jay screeched from the shade somewhere, the sound chill and clear. As a girl, she would like awake in bed, looking out across the mustard fields. She remembered how her body had felt then. It seemed odd to be nearly fifty. The years had shot by like chips in a flue, irresistibly rushing toward their destination. There had been nothing to slow them, nothing that needed her love. A forest suddenly appeared against the wooden wall, brightened—the individual leaves rising sharp and dark as though from under water—then faded quickly.
Outside, on the stone porch, she could hear the heavy, sumptuous snap of the New York Times, the small collisions of cup and saucer. Her husband, she knew, had been up since five, writing. At eight o’clock he had capped the pen, made himself a cup of coffee, slipped the paper from where a neighbor had wedged it between knob and frame, and retired to the porch. He never glanced at the paper early, never quit before eight, never sat in the Adirondack chair with the solid arms, preferring the rickety one she’d painted green two years before.
“Good morning,” she said, speaking up to the ceiling.
Outside, the chair creaked, the paper rustled. She knew, without seeing him, that he’d closed the paper, folded it twice, then turned partway around the high back of the chair to speak toward the house. “Good morning,” he said. “You’re missing a beautiful day. Coffee?”
“Mmm,” she said.
“You should see the paper. This Nixon thing is beginning to gather momentum. By the way, we’ve been invited for drinks at two.”
“Already?”
“Goldstein rowed by this morning, getting his exercise.”
Marie Kessler was moving her head, trying to find the source of the bolt lying across her legs without breaking the fragile envelope of warmth surrounding her body. At that moment something splashed far out on the lake; she could distinctly hear the two-part concussion of the body hitting the water, the chest and arms followed a split-second afterward by the feet slapping down. Curious, she sat up in bed. A swimmer had dived off the float—which was still rocking gently—and was now cutting a bright V across the tight surface of the lake. She watched him play, now sliding through the water with slow, powerful strokes, now rolling on his back, squirting thin streams through his teeth, graceful as a porpoise. Returning to the float, he lifted himself effortlessly out of the water. She watched him shake his hair like a dog, then throw himself on the wood already warming in the sun.
From the porch she could hear her husband’s dry chuckle, three puffs of air escaping the nose, no more. “Youth will be served,” he said.
She would have been the first to recognize the cliché: a childless, middle-aged woman, not so much unattractive or uninterested as simply, quite reasonably, beyond all that (ready now for large sun hats and sensible clothes and the steady compensation of small, expected pleasures), making an utter fool of herself over a man—a boy, really—just exactly young enough to be her son: a boy with eyes like a cat’s drowsing in the sun and a mouth just slightly cruel; a boy, above all, superbly, effortlessly fit, his every movement an affront to age.
But so it was, and there was no one on the float later that August afternoon, regardless of age, who didn’t sense the sheer force of it, who didn’t feel at least some awe in the face of an attraction so unlikely, so abrupt, so utterly undeniable. It wasn’t subtle, it wasn’t slow. Kessler, a trim, attractive man at seventy-two with his white mane of hair and white tennis shorts, brought the rowboat alongside and slipped the rope over the post of the ladder, then held the boat still for his wife. The others were already there, laughing, talking, some in beach chairs, some lying on towels, all nursing drinks in wicker holders. He lay on a deep-blue towel, quietly dripping water, twenty years younger than the youngest there, unaware or unconcerned that he was in the way.
Someone made a gesture and she came over, stepping carefully over the arms and legs and drinks, and he moved aside for her, not so much moving himself as just pulling in the edge of his towel a bit to make room for hers. Virginia, in her own way, introduced them, leaning over Goldstein (already arguing good-naturedly with Josef Kessler) and calling across the float: “Marie, the attractive young man whose towel you’re sharing is Anthony Musker. He’s the brother of that nice young man who moved into cabin twelve with his family a few weeks back. Anthony’s watching over things for them.” Marie Kessler, drawing her knees to her breasts, nodded a quick hello. Young Anthony, still lying on his back, breathing hard from his recent swim, turned his head and regarded her for a moment. Behind his sunglasses, she could barely see his eyes, moving over her face. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, not smiling. She looked away, accepted the drink being handed to her. A child—muscular, lean—probably the terror of undergraduate virgins at some local community college.
They said later that Marie Kessler drank too much during the course of that afternoon, that by fou
r o’clock she’d had one too many glasses of the Chablis my father kept chilled in an ice bucket under a wet towel in the rowboat, that this was why she behaved, well, the way she did.
They were wrong, of course, or only partly right; like religious naïfs who substitute a bauble for the glory of god, they mistook shadow for substance, a small intoxication for a vastly greater one. The fact is that, forced into proximity by the crowd around them, they started to talk. He asked her about herself (a young man’s questions—personal, often quite tactless—about her life, her dreams, whether she slept on her back or her side …), and she answered him, at first, in the mildly amused, slightly condescending tone women of a certain age will employ to keep attentive young men they suspect of being merely polite in their place.
But even as she spoke, laughing off some question or comment, now and again glancing toward the others to see if someone else would enter the conversation and relieve the young man of his duties, she found herself, quite to her surprise, enjoying his company. He laughed easily, listened well, seemed genuinely curious about everything she had to say. They seemed, more often than she would have thought likely, or possible, to agree on things—important things. Her idealism, her sense of outrage, always slightly embarrassing to their circle of friends, found a receptive and enthusiastic audience here, and, in spite of herself, she found herself moved by this. He seemed, instinctively, naturally, protective of her.
An hour passed. Then two. The shadows of trees began to extend from the western shore. The sun, well past its meridian, seemed mellower now, sweeter than before. At some point, Josef Kessler, feeling slightly guilty for having abandoned his wife, glanced up from his conversation. She was sitting shoulder to shoulder next to a young man who seemed to be listening intently to what she was saying. The two of them were holding their knees, their heads tilted toward each other, nodding, smiling now and again (like children at a picnic, Kessler thought), and, pleased that his wife, who often seemed so out of place at these get-togethers, had found someone to talk to, Josef Kessler turned back to his friends.
When someone dived into the lake, rocking the company on the float, Marie Kessler was surprised to find that three hours had passed. It was nearly five. Someone had rowed back to the shore, and now a plate of hors d’oeuvres was making its way around. Her husband, in a heated debate with old Rheinhold Černý (where had he come from, she wondered), suddenly seemed far away.
To her left, one of the Bartlett sisters was saying something—to her, she now realized.
“I’m sorry?”
“… a little sandwich, Marie?” Joan Bartlett was saying, passing over a plate of small, open-faced breads.
“Yes, yes, thank you. They look delicious,” said Marie Kessler, passing the plate to her right. Anthony’s hands, she noticed as he took the platter, were brown from the sun. He looked away quickly.
Marie Kessler and Anthony Musker sat next to each other, silent for the first time, as though suddenly aware of what had been happening to them, as though suddenly conscious of the intimacy they’d found—of the space, like a warm blanket, that had slowly wrapped itself around them over the course of that afternoon, separating them off from the crowd. For a moment, and a moment only, they felt naked in each other’s company, and perhaps, at that instant, one of them might still have broken the spell. But neither moved, and the moment passed, and when their eyes met a few seconds later, when he moved to make room for someone passing on his right and his thigh momentarily touched her knee, she felt a soft trembling current run through her as distinctly as though he’d touched some cord, some secret wire, unprotected and bare.
“C’mon, let’s go for a swim,” he said, suddenly, as though she were nineteen, as though she were in the habit of just diving off the float rather than climbing cautiously down the ladder, the skirt of her bathing suit slowly spreading like a spent blossom around her, and seeing him leap and crash into the water, she followed, and before she knew what was happening the lake was coming up around her and he was there and splashing playfully, teasing her, and the water, warming in the evening air, was dark and smooth, and when he suddenly disappeared under the surface and tugged her under by the ankles, she screamed his name in surprise and splashed him, laughing, when he came up for air.
Even in the retelling, it smarts like a slap. How the two of them returned to the float, sometime later, only to find it oddly quiet and emptying quickly, the atmosphere thick with decorum and the strained casualness of people determined to show their good breeding by not taking advantage of someone else’s social embarrassment. No less than five people went out of their way to say good night to her personally and to tell her that they’d see her in the morning, and her husband himself, already sitting in the rowboat, spoke to her with the terrible civility of a parent addressing an ill-behaved child in a public square: “Come along, my dear, it’s getting late. I think we’ve all had quite enough fun for one afternoon.”
She was furious, of course, indignant, and her husband, neither a fool nor a monster nor even incapable of love (just incapable, perhaps, of loving her), found himself pressing the only advantage he had—the truth—all the while knowing, pathetically, that it would not be enough. That his reproachful silence would avail him nothing, his attempts to shame her, only feed a fire that had been slowly devouring itself, drawing in the walls, suffocating, like a blaze in an airless room, for decades.
And now, suddenly, the blast of cold, clean air: like fall, like rain, like life itself. And why should she care who it was exactly that flung open the window, who kicked down the door? And what did it matter? Through the open rooms of her heart the fire raged and stormed, and how could it not, in its gratitude, consume them all? I imagine she recalled, with a mixture of embarrassment and wonder, the quick frown that passed over Anthony Musker’s face when she stepped, chastened, into her husband’s boat, his defiant “Good night, then,” as her husband pushed away from the float. I imagine she remembered bits and pieces from that afternoon: his smile, the warmth of his skin, the arc of his body entering the water; that as she ate her dinner, she wondered (like a schoolgirl, she thought, like an absolute schoolgirl) what he was doing, who he was with; that later that evening, naked in the dark under the outside shower, smelling the crushed mint growing between the boards beneath her feet, she recalled the broad curve of his back as he turned to reach for a book, the smooth muscles of his thighs and calves, the small, tight package pressed between his legs, its shape just outlined by the wetness of his suit … and barely breathing, in an agony of remembered need, lifted her breasts with both hands to a lover even then sitting three hundred yards across the water, looking toward the shore.
Everyone could see him, all that next afternoon, reading, swimming, waiting on the float. Just before six, he rowed back to shore. An hour later he was back, sitting cross-legged by the boat, sipping a cup of coffee, fully aware, and utterly unconcerned, that everyone on that lake knew he was there. The next afternoon, he was back; and the one after that. When she walked outside on the third night she could see the bulk of his boat, still tied to the ladder, blocking out a boat-shaped space in the reflected stars. The float itself seemed appropriately named, adrift in a medium no thicker than air. It was just past midnight.
On the fourth day clouds rose and burst. The lake, roughened under the rain, turned the color of stone; the float, reflecting sky, was empty. Far from making things easier, his absence made them infinitely worse. Agitated, nearly on the verge of tears, Marie Kessler cut herself with a bread knife across the soft skin at the base of her thumb. It took a long time to stanch the flow of blood that kept flowering on the paper towels she held to the wound and dropped like crushed flowers on the kitchen counter, and her husband, concerned, offered to drive her to the hospital for stitches. She didn’t hear him. Shortly after ten that night, Marie Kessler abruptly got up from the couch where she had been reading and walked into the humid dark.
Crossing the stone veranda, she took off her
shoes and socks and slipped them under the Adirondack chair, then stepped down to the path leading to the shore. The rain had stopped, though everywhere around her the soaking woods still dripped and splashed. With the leaf mulch sticking to her feet, she walked out onto the narrow dock. The sky was clearing quickly. Before her, pressed between sky and sky, lay the shores she’d known for almost ten years, perfectly doubled like some exquisite, troubling Rorschach, its ink still wet.
She knew what she was doing, of course. Would have insisted on knowing. Would have taken in everything, every detail, with an almost hallucinatory attention: the way the reflected moon, troubled like a tuning fork by every mayfly’s touch, would quaver and break its strange white yolk, then draw it back; the way the strokes of her oars, like tracks pressed in some quicker soil, would silver for a moment, then quickly go black. And more: would have noted, and ignored the fact, that the single fisherman suspended where the shore’s dark palisades dropped abruptly into starry space (or anyone else walking out on their small wooden dock for that matter) would be able to see her row—brazenly, unashamedly—toward the lamp burning in the window of her lover’s cottage.
I don’t know why I followed her that night; perhaps, even at my age, I sensed something in her manner—an intoxication, a rapture—that fascinated me, and moving quietly through the open patches of light between the trees, I cut north across an open meadow, then ducked down again toward the shore. Her boat, as though swallowed up by the night, was nowhere to be seen. I came down low to the cattails, thinking I might see it more clearly against the sky. Nothing. I turned quietly along the trees, expecting to find the boat anchored somewhere under the overhanging branches, and nearly stumbled over them. First frightened, then confused, ultimately mesmerized by their passion, I crept back into the dark, then turned to watch.
