I told Kathleen and she was sorry to hear it. There was peace in her face. She was kind to me. I was surprised by her sincerity. This boy had been an irritant to her, I understood this. But Kathleen was not flushed with any relief, only with regret at her tardy delivery.
Is there anything I can do, she said, in her child voice.
I’d like a bath, I said.
I’ll heat some water.
The bath was good and it made me think of Gerald’s bath, and how you could hear the subway in it. That made me think of Jenny. She was the kind of woman who, in the bath, turned off taps with her feet. When we returned to our Monhegan bedroom there would be coins on the blankets from our pockets. When she spoke. There was something rude in Jenny’s face, yet she had a polished gait. I liked her shoulders, her big hands and wristbones, how they made her arms appear slender. Yes, there was something in the wrists, watching her open up a jam jar.
I’d met Jenny at a restaurant in New York. I was single then. I’d spent the day with Gerald Thayer. Gerald knew tricks that fascinated children. I watched him dress for his son and daughter. He had them sit on his bed: he was stripped to the waist after shaving, and he dried his arms with a towel then put on a dinner jacket. Just his bare chest and the jacket. He unhooked a blue shirt from his closet, held the shirt in his hands as though it caused a problem. It was as if he could not take the jacket off again. The children urged him, Take off your coat, Dad. No, he forced the shirt up the sleeve of his jacket. He bent his back, shrugged the shirt across his back, and then a blue cuff appeared at his other wrist as he buttoned up the chest. His children delighted. He did this nonchalantly, as if no one were watching him, as if they were watching a film of their father. I have seen him press his daughter’s wrist and make her fingers curl. He was the reason I married and had children — the sadness of solitude is forgotten by those with families: they envy solitude, but only the peace of it.
Gerald had been dragging a finger down an open atlas. You want to get a piece of pie?
Me: I’m not hungry.
Gerald: What’s hunger got to do with it?
Me: What are you doing.
Gerald: I’m looking up the Hellespont.
Did you find it.
What do you think.
He was staring down at the pale blue of the Mediterranean. It looked like a country.
What made you think to look in there.
Dont people go skiing at the Hellespont?
Me: People dont ski at the Hellespont.
It’s something I’ve heard all my life, and three times this week — I’m realizing I dont know what it is, okay?
It’s a part of the sea. Keats drowned there. Or Byron.
So it’s Greek.
You got it.
He turned to me and saw my new coat.
You must think you look really nice in that.
I scanned his bookshelf and found a guide to classical literature. I tossed it to him.
Look it up in there.
He did and read aloud about Athamus and his children and his second wife, who was mean. The way he read from the book made me love him. Gerald was the kind of man who made mistakes often, but he learned from them. If he did not know the Champs Élysées was the same as Elysian Fields, and even what those fields referred to, he said so and asked about it. So it wasnt embarrassing to hear him mispronounce a word. Nor was it sweet like my wife, who might refrain or avoid having to face the word.
Do you ever think of the ideal woman.
I think of my inability to be satisfied.
But the ideal, Kent.
I’ve built up a list of qualities.
Gerald: What does that tell you.
It tells me we should go eat.
Youre not hungry.
Youve made me hungry.
I make people hungry.
No, Gerald, you only make me hungry. And not all the time.
I’m not a man who encourages hunger?
You are an exemplar of the appetite, Gerald. Jesus, let’s go.
He put on his coat.
Gerald: Do you listen to what your body tells you to eat.
Yes, I said.
That’s a form of. What is that. That’s sort of mystical, isnt it?
It’s hunch-driven.
Yeah, a person who follows his hunger, who tries to give the hunger a brain to think with. That’s my kind of person.
You can reason with him.
That’s what I want in a woman.
Me: A woman with a brain in her hunger.
You know what I mean.
I think youre misjudging your current wife.
I might be one of those men who marries the same woman he’s just divorced.
You mean the very same woman.
Yeah. Not some twin.
Have there been men who do that?
It runs in my family, Gerald said.
Oh, it’s in your blood.
My mother’s brother. Also some cousins.
That I did not know.
And people leave each other. To return.
Without all the official divorcing and marrying.
Yeah, no paper trail.
Me: It’s living a life more intricate than the record shows.
But I definitely want to get divorced. I mean, I’m happy now, but when it happens I want to have that experience, legal and otherwise.
You want to be able to say youre divorced.
It’s the having something official.
You see it as like getting a degree.
You could look at it as a form of study.
You are a strange man, Gerald Thayer.
We crossed a wide road and the numbers, I noticed, were large: 1138 and 1140.
Me: Would you ever live in a house where your number was up in the thousands.
It would never occur to me to question the number of my house.
So that’s the difference. Between you and me.
Go live in your number 3, your number 24, Kent. Go bake your bread and smoke your pipe and thresh your wheat and hew your wood. Go, for fuck’s sake.
A horn sounded. It sounds like a tongue depressor, Gerald said, stuck up a cormorant’s ass.
We sat outside a small restaurant and ate. We shared sour cabbage served in a cast-iron pan. We talked like this through the afternoon in the open air as traffic passed us. It was all theoretical. It was, Assume this. It was, Consider the following. It was analysis, but it was honest. Gerald said it’s true you can’t work when youre drunk.
But good work, he said, gets done six hours after waking up from a hangover.
Like me, Gerald liked to speak the truth as the truth appeared to him. He’d had such a good summer, he was tanned. When he smiled, a dimple on his cheek opened up and the skin was white.
He said, You know what Alma said? She said, What kind of life can I have with this Gerald Thayer. There’s only two people my husband will eat with. And Rockwell Kent is one of them.
Gerald was broke before they were married. Alma said to me, I’m gonna take care of Gerald.
Me: I dont think love has to be like that.
It gave Gerald an anxious feeling. They lived hand to mouth. Alma had fifty-four cents. No, she said, money is coming in tomorrow.
They didnt have enough money for a marriage licence.
Me: Strange that you didnt have enough money.
Gerald: No it’s not. We often dont have enough.
At the behest of his wife, Gerald had begun clipping his nostril hair. I knew him when his nostrils were abundant with hair. I liked him that way. This is what married life does to some men: it restrains them. Or they become conscious of scrutiny. Most women are aware of this without getting married. It ruins people, this reconciliation with majori
ty perception. Later in life Gerald liked to carry a roll of dental floss.
We were so theoretical in those days. We thought we could control the heart.
As we ate it grew colder and we thought about going in. Gerald noticed a woman inside plunge her fork into a table full of yellow flowers — it was a pot of flowers outside the window that seemed to sit on her table. She was eating alone. Well, she was eating with a book.
Me: She knows how to dress for summer.
Gerald: She knows how to dress for all occasions.
We went inside for a drink. We stood at the bar. It had darkened, and Gerald Thayer watched the woman’s reflection in the window — outside the yellow flowers, their stems pushing through her head as if attempting to rub out her poise.
Someone at the bar said, Did you say read the box score?
Another: I said read the Bible.
Gerald: What’s your favourite bit of the Bible.
Me: When Jesus allows Mary to wash his feet. She dries them in her hair. And then she uses that expensive ointment.
How lavish, how decadent, yes.
I watched Gerald Thayer slam his hands against the bar and go over to her. She said to him, Good to meet you.
Gerald: We’ve met before.
I dont remember.
Gerald: You dont recognize me with all my clothes on.
Pause.
I’m joking. What are you reading.
The woman looked up and said, It’s not that important.
Gerald was ordering the drinks. He looked old. He was less than twenty-five.
You love architecture, he said, with animals. Or figures with a lifted leg.
It makes them look more relaxed, she said.
Like the caryatids, he said. How they carry weight on their heads and yet have one knee bent, to make the roof light.
With lions it’s a rampant gesture.
Her pale blue eye appeared between Gerald’s lips. That was the angle I saw them at. So as he spoke, bent over to her, it was as if his lips were massaging her eye.
The rest of the night was the drink and my saying goo night to Gerald Thayer as he took Jenny Starling back to her apartment. He wiggled his eyebrows at me as they left. A bicycle ran over an empty cigarette package. He woke up, he told me later, with scratches on his face from her earrings.
7
Gerald Thayer could not take her on, could not take care of Jenny Starling. He was married, so he sent me in. Jenny Starling, the divorcee musician with a house on the island of Monhegan as part of her settlement with Luis Starling. It was an excuse to go there. I ended up spending a year on Monhegan, built a house, learned to lobster fish, and Jenny and I were together for two hundred days, though I could not promise her anything. It was this trust thing. I could not allow her to be open. My refusal to let her be open caused her anguish, for it closed her down and she grew weary. She was so smart to grow weary.
Then I met Kathleen Whiting.
It was her youth and utter devotion. It was the way she closed her eyes before she nodded her head. The way she played with children. There was no risk, really, and at the time life was a struggle to achieve grace. I knew there would be no war out of Kathleen Whiting. I could dominate her. I’m not sure I knew this then, but I learned my lesson. About being loved. How the worth is in the giving. The permission to be oneself.
The truth: one is erratic when one is of high hopes. I would say that if you were involved with someone who is on the cusp of exuberance, who feels the wing of inspired thought, my advice is to beware. But more: there is no one else to be with. Be with them. You may as well get into it as live a life of hesitation.
8
Gerald visited us in Monhegan. How he murmured at Jenny’s description of an oar stirring a phosphorescent shoal. But it wasnt even an oar, it was a comparison to the oar. The thing was Gerald Thayer’s fingers stirring up a trail on the inside of Jenny Starling’s thigh. And Gerald murmured at that and I knew he would fall in love with her. He had slept with her, but I am talking about the heart. When a man lets out such a sound. It is a betrayal of the inner course, and that course will have its way even though he is unaware of it at that moment. I heard the sound of mmm come from his throat, hardly out of his mouth but through the skin of his throat, and I knew that body would be after her.
It felt like the final chapter in my life with Jenny Starling, now that our son was dead.
9
Kathleen: Tom Dobie looks like he’s working hard not to do anything.
Me: It takes a lot of effort on his part to stop from doing something.
No, this is it — he looks like he’s trying hard to stop himself from doing something bad.
I love you.
Kathleen: I love you too.
Would you say that out of a hundred times that I love you gets said, you say it first forty times, and then I reply, I love you too. And I say I love you first maybe thirty times, and you say back, I love you too. We each say I love you about thirty times without it being answered.
It’s just a lone I-love-you.
Me: So, on average, youre moved to say I love you slightly more than me.
Yes, that’s true.
It is?
Yes.
Youve noticed.
Well, you noticed too.
But I was assuming I was a little crazy.
No, I know what you mean.
10
The important thing is for change in belief to occur. If one is born an atheist, one should become spiritual. A person with no change is not searching. My wife was a Christian and she stayed a Christian. For the fifteen years she was with me she suppressed her feelings. But she had an underground river of Christianity that bubbled up in fissures through the years.
A death in the family can be an agent for change. I wondered what my son’s death would mean. Would it renew my faith. My father’s death had caused me to question my belief in God.
Kathleen peeled apples for a pie. You rotate the apple around the centre of the peeling. It is a motion I caught her doing, so as to keep the apple turning clockwise and the peeling to unravel counter-clockwise. There was something in this that explained how we peel away time and yet manage to return to it.
Kathleen was singing a song, over and over. Or maybe she was singing several songs. But it sounded the same. Until Rocky growled, How long is this song anyway.
Tom Dobie looked at Rocky’s face: The eyes of him. He’s just like a husky.
Me: He’s just like you.
Kathleen said a dog had followed her. A three-legged dog. She paints a white mark down her forehead and nose. A beautiful —
Cape Shore water dog, Tom said. And smiled. Yep, a registered breed. I once had a dog, he said, with only two legs. One in front and one behind. It’d be like a bicycle. Every time he stopped he’d have to lie down.
11
Tom Dobie and Stan Pomeroy at the head of the wharf, their legs splayed, sorting through their fish. How theyre elbow-deep into fish. They were tossing crab into the water.
Can I have some crab.
Stan: You gonna eat that stuff. We’ll set you aside a tub if you stop sketching off pictures.
Then he wanted to see what I had of him.
Tom: He lines that off pretty good, dont he.
Stan: He marked out a likeness of me there.
Then they turned to watch a small boat come in.
Tom: Look at that skiff.
Dory.
She’s a skiff.
She’s a dory, boy.
Go on, you useless article.
Look at the rake on her.
Look at the side, the ramp.
Okay, a flat.
She’s a dory, okay? A dory.
What about that V in the back there.
That’s a li
ttle skiffish. But she’s a dory.
What about —
Ah shut your face.
Go fuck yourself.
12
Kathleen boiled the crab. I laid newspapers over the kitchen table. The children could see I was excited. There was pepper and fresh bread and butter. I had them sit down to this. I gave them each a large napkin. Then we tore into the crab. We pulled the meat out of their shells. The children chewing on the pliable hoses of their legs. We boiled another batch. We had enough for three boils. I got the water galloping and we sat there and ran out of bread. We were delighted with the work. Then I realized it was no work at all. It was pleasure. So often I mix up work and pleasure. It’s true that I’ve hardly ever felt like I’ve worked. For me it’s all about eating as much crab as you can.
I decided to get to work on the tennis court. There were six boulders on the Hearn field. Five I dug out with a pick and rolled to the side, and one I left to bury. I dug a hole to the side of it and pushed it in. I felt like a gravedigger. Tom Dobie and Stan and Tony Loveys were trimming logs nearby: shores, beams, and longers for their flake.
They might lose some brinkles, Tom said, but that makes them better.
They worked at their work and I worked at play. I filled a barrel with stone and rigged a set of handles from a grass cutter and pulled the barrel over the field. This is grooming. This is flattening a fallow field. Jim Hearn came over.
What are you doing.
Waiting for a train.
He thought about that. Now that’s not very friendly.
I decided to stop. Youre right, Jim. You are correct. And I’m trying to change my behaviour. I’m trying to be gentle. In the way that gentle is meant. Truth is, I hate being asked obvious questions, Jim, but youre only trying to be neighbourly.
The Big Why Page 13
