“This is mine,” the All-American says. He holds their father’s hands in his as if reading his palms. “These are mine. You are mine.”
He feels as if he is shrinking. Before this thin reed of a man he is receding, growing bent. It is barely light out, the sun shining only on the sky now, not yet touching the land, not yet shining over the rise or the blueberry bushes. Only the sea and the sky are lit, one reflecting the other.
He needs to leave before they wake up. He should’ve left last night. But he couldn’t go without this, his forehead pressed into the dip of the young man’s collarbone, their fingers laced together. Their father shakes with sobs. Can he ask the young man to come with him? No. But God, how can he leave him behind? He has never left him behind. Every trip, every cruise, they were together. Maybe it is the young man that makes the wind blow, and without him her husband will drift and flounder. But he wants her. He wants him because he can’t have her. He wants her with him. He wants her to ask him to stay. He is happy to be loved, and destroyed to be loved, by the wrong person.
“I’m still hers,” he says. “I want to be hers.”
“Even if she doesn’t want you? You’re pathetic.” The All-American goes to his trunk, the hatched back of his little red car, and takes out a small box. He dumps its contents onto the road, by their father’s feet. Stones, gray and speckled, frosted nubs of sea glass, and one knotted bit of rope lie scattered in the grass of the track. He recognizes the lump of red glass, like a gnarled raw ruby found deep underground, given on their second trip in honor of their first time. There was a stone, black and polished, from their sail to Brimstone. They had talked about sailing away, down the coast, to the Vineyard, Provincetown, farther to Fire Island, where they could be just a bear and his cub. But they always stayed close to shore, close to their summer islands. They always came home again. The All-American stands with the empty box in his hands. Their last four summers now mixing into the gravel of the road.
“This is your chance to get out, and you are too weak, too fucking cowardly to do it. You love your safety, Bob, you love your children, you love your 1950s sitcom life,” says the All-American. “That’s not the same as loving your wife.”
Her husband is receding, like a tide leaving, exposing the sad collection of rocks at his feet, leaving crabs to scuttle for shade, for forgotten pools that grow too hot in the sun. But this tide keeps going, keeps leaving, out and out. And now boats are beached, tilting on their sides, and lobster pots snake their lines through the caked sand out to cages. Everything in him is emptying out: the house, the children, their love, his wife, her love, their twenty-four years of marriage, his dignity, this young man, his love, and the sweet relief of being with someone who wants to be with him.
Her husband grabs the young man by the shoulders, hugs him too hard, and says, “I’m weak. I’m a coward. I’ve brought us here. I’ve ruined things for all of us. I’m so sorry.”
He cries into that thin T-shirt. He cries into those ringlets. He says his name over and over. Jeremy. The young man smells of deodorant and chlorine. I will never swim in a pool again, her husband thinks.
“How can I let you go?” their father asks.
“You’re the one going,” says the All-American. The young man’s nose is red, and red flecks have appeared around his eyes too. Their father picks up the sea glass and puts it in the young man’s hand.
“You’re right. I’m going.” He says this knowing there is nowhere for him to stay. Their father takes a deep breath; this is the last time he will have to pull himself together for anyone. Soon he will be able to let it all unravel.
“Time and tide, and all that.” He tries to look bright, to look ready, but he feels cracked, worn. Again, he is a liar.
The All-American gets into his car; he reaches out the open window and pulls at the hem of their father’s sweater.
“You are making a mistake,” he says. “I won’t be alone for long.”
He imagines the young man swimming with a school of porpoises; the alternative is too much for him to even consider. The car throws up dust as it backs up the driveway. He hopes it can’t be seen from the house.
Their father is drowning in the dust, in the air, in the sunrise that is coming up too fast now. She will be up soon to make coffee. He will have to sneak around the side of the house to go down to the dock, to get back on the boat, to find the sea that is disappearing. He will sail away. He will let this tide go out, and her love go out, though maybe he never had it to begin with. This thought makes him wretch, doubles him over, spitting into the ferns. He wants to walk into the kitchen; he wants her to see him, to stop him, to tell him. But then he’d have to say why he is still here, why he was out in the drive, and then she wouldn’t say anything he wants to hear. He knows that once he is out on the boat, out past the thoroughfare and into Penobscot Bay, then he will let the weight of what is gone return, and what is now too exposed and dried up will be destroyed in the churning flood. There is a tsunami coming. He will go aboard his boat and drown.
EIGHTEEN
TOM
July 9
Tom had started the morning out on the south porch with everyone, drinking coffee and eating honey toast. First, the women went off to start their day, and then Danny, leaving Tom to finish his lukewarm coffee, squinting at the cove and thinking of how much he wanted sunglasses but refused to wear them. Sunglasses, he felt, on anyone over thirty were the first signs of a midlife crisis. From the small precarious base of sunglasses, he knew, a house of cards could be built that included sports cars, affairs with younger women, and, worst of all, nostalgia for one’s youth. Youth, he was sure, had been horrible for everyone and just seemed wonderful in hindsight. He figured many middle-aged people, in the face of sagging skin and stamina, longed for seventeen. He did not.
The smell of raspberry bushes growing around the south porch, with their serrated leaves and bristled stems, was strong at high tide when the smell of the ocean drowned itself. The lichen, too, was strong now. It grew not just on the rocks but on the tree trunks and tangled in the branches of a fallen pine, clogging the fine mesh of its limbs. With the tide high the seaweed, light brown, plumed on the surface of the water. It was windless, the fog having just burned off. So the seaweed rose and fell on the glassy surface like the gentle sleeping breath of the sea, still calm in the late-morning sun. But all that softness hid the rocks below. There was menace in those plumes, given what they were anchored to. They were scattered, an archipelago. As you glided over them in a small craft, the waving forests of corpuscled weed looked softer, strangely less wet when underwater, more graceful and serene. The sharp points of their rock base could be much deeper or just below their fronds. In the silly look of seaweed, all bumps and shaggy locks, Tom saw the shadow of death at sea, broken hulls and misjudged dives and dark storms and misread charts. The seaweed didn’t soften the sharp edge of death among the rocks, but hid it.
He followed the sun to the front porch. From here, facing the water, the fog had gone completely and the Camden hills showed blue over the treetops of Crabtree Point.
The pines here have started to die, he thought, reached the end of their life span. It must have begun a year or two ago, but this summer suddenly the trees that framed their view from the porch had gone dry and rust colored, listing precariously to one side. Even the low shrubs along the path had begun to lose parts of themselves, large regions gray and dead, overtaken by lichen. Things had been changing. Even the mussels seemed to be disappearing. Once his mother could spend hours in the rocks of the boathouse beach pulling up their dinner, and now, not a mussel remained there. They still clung to the large boulders just down from the house, but less each year.
He could see the ferry in at the landing, a hulk next to all the sailboats and lobster boats moored in close to town: Dorothy Gail, Ladies First, You Bet Cha, Reel Life, Doctors Orders, A Parent Lee Knot II, Jolly Roger, Miss B. Haven, Santa Marine, he never understood why naming a boat was
an opportunity for bad puns, slogans, testaments of love. Like permanent bumper stickers. Even his own father, a lawyer, had felt it necessary to name his first boat the Misdemeanor. Tom preferred simple names that connected with life on the water, Osprey, Leeward, St. Ann.
The Native Son just motored past and slowed up, resetting traps. Hook, pull, check, bait, back. The stern man couldn’t have been more than about eight, just a day out with his dad, what a different life. Tom couldn’t imagine spending time with Buster at his office, much less in the confines of a working lobster boat. He tried to get his son interested in boats, taught him to sail early, but seasickness won out over father-son bonding. And Kerry, he’d felt awkward with her ever since she turned eleven; knowing that she was no longer a gender-neutral child, that she was entering a world of femininity. It made him nervous. As if she already understood her sex in a way that he would never fathom. He did what he thought little girls might like to do with their fathers, took her to tea at the Four Seasons, bought her dresses of all types—sailor, flapper, sun, and party—he gave her an assortment of beads and yarn, thinking that while he did not know what to do with these things, she would.
Tom couldn’t remember what his father did with his sisters. He’d been too busy rushing out of the house himself to notice. And even if he had he would’ve done the opposite, striving to be the opposite of his own father. He promised his children honesty and assumed the rest would come. But the rhythm of parenthood was in constant flux; just as he understood and adjusted, things would change. “Ride the wave,” Melissa would say, sounding disturbingly like Gwen. No, he was relieved that the kids had chosen to stay home this week, to leave this place to the adults. He didn’t want the pressure of trying to make them happy too; to understand their moods and needs too. Melissa was enough, too much. Hot from the sun, Tom decided to head down to the float to consider the water. He, in the last few summers, had become less willing to swim.
On the float he found Melissa, Libby, and Danny. Melissa and Libby had gone down with intentions of swimming. Danny had given up the porch with the intention of going for a row. Tom found that all their good intentions had been submerged under the high tide. Libby and Melissa lay on small bath towels facing each other on one corner of the float. Libby, in a black one-piece that she had been wearing for the last ten years, lay facedown, a straw hat over her head. Melissa lay face up, arms stretched out wide beside her. She wore a small bikini he had not seen before, purple. There on the hot, gray planks against her baby-pink towel, she seemed to be drawing the light to her. She looked thin and young, and Tom thought in that moment she was strangely unchanged physically by the two children and fifteen years. Danny lay on a large pile of life jackets in the bottom of the Little Devil, which floated away from the dock, its bowline tied to a ring on the float. He had one leg hung over the side, and with each lazy wave his limp heel was kissed by the water and then released. Gwen had apparently gone to take a nap. She was napping a great deal this trip. He assumed she was living too hard at home.
Tom stood on the end of the ramp and thought how young they all looked. How old he felt. How Melissa’s breasts curved lasciviously out from her rib cage. He wanted to lick them, wanted the rest of the family to disappear. Should’ve come here alone, he thought, just the two of us. That hot day, skinny-dipping, how long ago was that? He wanted to fuck her there on the hot planks, get splinters in his knees, the heels of his hands. His stomach turned, ashamed to want her here with his family draped all around. Ashamed that he couldn’t control those feelings. Scared at what could be behind them. He wanted to fuck her in broad daylight in a public place. He wanted to tie her up. He wanted to feel her thumbs press against his windpipe, to feel things go black. He wanted to turn her over and find a new place to fuck her. And these thoughts as he looked at her body, barely covered, made him burn with the heat that runs up the back of the neck before vomiting.
She had let him tie her up once, on the guest bed with the pineapple posts. He wouldn’t do it in their own bed. He had never come so hard. And for days afterward he didn’t want to look at her. She had defiled them both by letting it happen. Really, it had been her idea, a game, an experiment, like she was just testing a new recipe or attending a costume party. She wanted to do it again, and he had explained that he hadn’t liked it. She had laughed at first, had thought he was kidding.
He wasn’t going to let himself like it. Because if he did, if he tied her up and fucked her ass and devoured her body, forced her to do all the things he wanted, she would see what he truly was. Or what he truly was, something even worse, something that he could not even imagine, would find its way to the surface. Because there could be some even more perverted longing inside him. He knew what happened when these boxes were opened. He knew if he stayed, eventually she would find out. She would force open the lid with all her good intentions, the writhing contents would pour forth, and she would leave disgusted.
He had to leave her before that happened. If only she’d let him alone, let it go. His predilection might not be his father’s, but he was sure there could be much worse, that really it was all the same in the end. He would not find out, but he knew all the same. Melissa said she was always up for anything. He knew that was simply a saying, a phrase that, if tested, she would regret ever uttering. So he would love his wife as he should, face to face in their own bed, no rope, no throat, no covenant broken. Soon he wouldn’t even be doing that. God, he wished she’d cover up.
He pulled off his T-shirt, with an uncertain impulse to give it to her, but instead let it drop to the decking. He felt the nausea rise, felt almost faint from it. He stepped down from the edge of the ramp, walked to her side where she lay at the edge of the float, and dove over her into the water. He went down deep to where the water felt heavy and sharp, so cold he felt his body seize for a moment, then he turned up and pulled strong for the surface. The feeling that his air might give out before he broke the surface made him swim fast, fighting the cold. Sputtering and thrashing he stroked for the float and hoisted himself up, not willing to swim the long way around to the ladder.
Danny gave him a cheer. “Takes balls to jump into that shit.”
Libby peeked out from under her hat as if to verify that he’d actually done it and not just thrown a rock into the water. But Melissa sat all the way up, having to move quickly out of his dripping, panting way.
“You alright?” she asked.
“Just hot. Water’s nice, you should go in.” She looked skeptical and, pressing into her feet and one hand, like a crab, lifted herself from the float, pulled her towel out from underneath her, and handed it to him. He scrubbed his back and head vigorously and then sat down beside her with it draped over his shoulders. They looked out toward town. Libby flipped over. Danny adjusted a life jacket behind his head.
“That’s new,” Tom said, nodding at Melissa’s suit.
“You like it?” she said, smiling, pulling at a strap.
“Aren’t you a little old for a bikini?”
A thumb still strung under her shoulder strap, her smile gone, she stared at him. Then she stood, turned her back on the town and the water, lifted the towel from his shoulders, and walked up the ramp toward the house.
Danny shaded his eyes with his hand. “Dude, you will never get laid with comments like that.”
“I don’t think getting laid is your area of expertise, Dan,” Tom replied.
Danny leaned out over the rim of his boat and with a sweeping arm showered the edge of the float with water, with Libby bearing the brunt of the splash. Libby sat up quick as if the water burned her, her hat falling into her lap.
“Holy!—Danny, what is your problem?” Libby smoothed the drops from her legs and arms.
“Sorry, Bibs. Was aiming for Tom.”
Danny’s such a child, Tom thought, still reverting to violence.
“Yeah, well, I’d be careful who you catch in the crossfire; that boat isn’t the best cover.” She pushed at the bowline with
her foot, and the Little Devil immediately started rocking. But she was already losing interest, leaning back on her elbows, the soporific sun had too strong a hold on her.
Tom realized as the two of them settled back in that he shouldn’t have said it. He didn’t even know if Danny was sleeping with anyone; he just assumed not. He assumed that if Danny had actually done it that he would’ve told him. Not that Tom told Danny much of anything, but that was different. A man’s marriage was private; a man’s conquests were not.
White downy thunderheads rose soft on the horizon and gave the water a porcelain cast. The sea’s native green lost beneath the reflection. Tom wanted to be this, to reflect the purity of the clouds, to let the green darkness within him stay sunken with stones and traps. He would let himself be wide, expansive, smooth water that had more to do with the sky than the sea, more to do with clouds than sailboats and rowboats and other things that grow barnacles on dark undersides of their hulls. Tom picked up his T-shirt where he had dropped it. It had grown hot in the sun. He put it back on, then pulled the Whaler in from the outhaul, hand over hand, untied the line from the soggy loop, stepped in, and pushed off. He’d go glide across that porcelain sky.
North Haven Page 18
