Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  In a pinch, we could be car internet surfers. The Blue Hill library’s wireless reached into the parking lot, and we could do a day’s errands then park and check our email without going in, though sometimes we went in to look at the books, a more than respectable collection since this area had a history, a sort of WASPy culture, a pedigree. I was trying to finish The Sound and the Fury and brought it along no matter what. He had contempt for Faulkner, a soup of the stream-of-consciousness, a mess. I said okay. We didn’t always agree. As a teen I’d spent about a third of my life in libraries. Before I got my driver’s license I’d had to ride the bus to get there.

  Entering any library, I felt my intestines buckle, and then I’d have to go to the men’s room, but every time. The smell of the books, the paper, the print, it was galvanic. It made me anxious because I wanted to write and have my words in one or more of those places on the shelves. So I went in and saw all the provocative filth written on, at times carved into, the stall walls, but never did I see any of the promises or come-ons acted on. There was never anyone in there but me. It was a late weekday afternoon, or sometimes a Saturday morning. I went back out to the stacks.

  Even now I had this intestinal reaction in libraries. In the Blue Hill library, I wondered if I wouldn’t run into one of those literary family men and women camping out in the cool thinking important thoughts and dreaming up characters and plots while their kids combed the aisles. I’d first discovered my lover’s books at the Regency Square Branch Library back down in Florida.

  He needed to lose weight and I was doing ballet trying to make healthy things taste good. I did not like cooking, which took time away from my reading, my compulsion. I experimented with combinations to season the rote vegetables and lean fish and poultry using ginger and curry, garlic, lemon and lime, rice vinegar, low-sodium Worcestershire, scallions, anything to make the flavor more complicated and thus savory. He was on a salt-restricted diet and the old butter he’d been a fan of, not to mention the bacon and sausage and salami and other cold cuts—all this was forbidden. I had to walk him, too. He wouldn’t walk himself because, he said, in his crazy mind there was no goal to that. More and more he cheerfully took my invitations to walk. He was on a cane but trying to do without it. His goals were to finish the novel and walk without the cane.

  There were blueberries, dark, musky-sweet, in size somewhere between BBs and pearls. Once a week I made french toast with pure maple syrup piled with the blueberries. When we’d first arrived that month, there were raspberries the size of shirt buttons tasting as intensely raspberry as any artificial “raspberry” flavoring from childhood. It was a challenge trying to gratify him and not make him feel like such a patient. I felt as a parent might, instructing a child through trickery.

  We would stop at a roadside stand and buy the produce directly from the farmer, who was better at growing than adding figures. He would have to stop and start all over. A line formed.

  Myself, I was getting older and more impatient, too. Intense home care had worn me out.

  At a recent New York dinner a female friend had told me, “Understand you’re at a special age, and I know because I was there a decade ago. You’re at an age where you’ll be looked at by different people, younger people, older people, men, women. Boys. Girls. Whether you know it or not you’ll be attractive to more people than you’ve ever felt attractive to before. Enjoy this!”

  But in Maine there was so little socializing to help me test her theory about my “appeal.”

  Really, I would have had to be famous, one of the literati among all the writers here.

  On the flight from New York a much younger flight attendant had handed me my coffee and cup of water, and I’d thanked him, smiling, and his responding look had lingered. I was in so many places at once mentally I’d wanted to give him my number. I had a whole scenario worked out. When we landed in Bangor, he announced over the mic, “On behalf of our New York–based crew, I wish you a pleasant stay, or pleasant connection.” I thought this was for me and began to wonder if I shouldn’t write down my number to press into his hand while deplaning, but I didn’t.

  And from Bangor, where on earth would you be connecting to? Nova Scotia, the Arctic?

  The house was surrounded by woods interspersed with vacation homes positioned mostly on the bluffs overlooking the inlet. On a wandering walk alone I’d skirted the property of one of these houses, negotiating the shingle of the sandless beach and scaling the bluff, and found a path I’d never gone down. Suddenly I was in different territory. In five minutes I’d happened upon a broken-down Airstream trailer fronted by a sagging wooden porch. A young couple was sitting on the steps, their baby lying at their feet in its portable plastic cradle. They spotted me from the moment I rounded the gravel bend. He studied me I thought suspiciously, hatefully—until I had passed. She barely regarded me at all but looked down cooing at the child. I didn’t look back. I thought of Stephen King’s novel Christine, grittier and more country-Maine than what the young and beautiful summering writers put out. When they wrote about Maine it was about bourgeois, educated liberals coming to terms with the loss of a child, divorce, or the fight to keep abortions safe and legal. Their characters had nice second homes and reasonable, right-minded spouses.

  My first reading compulsion had been Stephen King. Then Salinger, Fitzgerald, Irving. I thought about those early King novels, working-class, Yankee, angry, deterministic. I was down in Florida angry and alone, and I thought that everything in the northeast was like an idyllic New England Updike setting. Chill colorful falls. In Maine the setting shifted between Stephen King and John Updike. At the beginning of the rental’s gravel drive were piles of junk and unrecycled trash— loose pyramids of glass and plastic bottles, a rusted-out Jeep, a sagging and leaning travel trailer, broken deck furniture. We later learned that the aged owner of this property, Mr. Grange, redeemed this crap to help fund local scholarships. But we didn’t see, from year to year, that the heaps had actually diminished. Mr. Grange collected our recycling once a week—and there were still last summer’s wine bottles (from before I’d switched from cheap reds to certain cheap whites).

  We called this first length of winding gravel drive our security system. Who, pulling in, no doubt by accident, would have thought anything of value was beyond these Gatsbyesque ash and trash fields, and what would they steal? Laptops full of unprofitable fiction, porn site links?

  On my way back, two boys appeared from the woods, suddenly marching when they saw me, their voices dying. They waved, grinning; I waved back. I was salacious and having had an impure adolescence thought their joyfulness smacked of a guilt I could recognize. They were of the right age to remind me of when I was first alive to getting off with a boy; they’d come out of nowhere not following the main path. I had grown up in a north Florida subdivision bordered by the undeveloped woods where I’d had my first adventures. Later, aroused by my crafty younger being, I stood at the kitchen sink, looking out at the inlet debating with myself over combinations of soluble and insoluble fiber: my fate. Both fibers were necessary to a sound, balanced diet, but too much of either, or heaven forbid both, and you had a meal akin to wood pulp or pond scum on your hands. He anxiously wanted to finish this book but at the same time needed to lose weight. He was used to pigging out toward deadline. Before, I’d satisfy his yens for bacon and sausage, let him eat toast slathered with butter and jam around teatime, midnight snacks of cheese and rice and broiled steak. Now he was cooperating, a compliant heart patient. But I was dreamy, losing the thread. I’d done plenty of odd-job cooking and serving on my way through the wilderness of college and graduate education. A school friend now in AA told me that she’d benefited from her twelve-step program’s primary ethos of service. Serving others was not merely therapeutic but it helped restore others’ belief in your sincerity. Step Nine—I think it was—had her apologizing to those she’d hurt before getting sober. Ironically, my friend’s name was Faith, and before she got sober Faith would m
eet me at a movie. We’d plan to have dinner afterward as well, but once she said, “Since it’ll be so late already after the movie, I was wondering if we could get a drink after it gets out, and you give me the money for a taxi. The subway to East Harlem is dicey so late and I fear for my life, honestly, I’m afraid. You know I’m small, and the chiquitas and mamitas, they can be quite large and intimidating in their packs, and there’s been a lot of rape and theft lately in my neighborhood, which you can’t do anything about of course. I’m so poor. I am a female who is nearly forty and unemployed, though this new temp job could become something when it starts, but for now I can’t even afford to get my hair done or buy new clothes. I’m obviously concerned about looking professional and presentable, not to mention trying to meet a man—and how will I ever be able to do that if I can’t pay to have my hair colored by experienced professionals? They look at me like I’m special needs, those girls on the train. They think I don’t speak Spanish, but I know what they’re saying after Bob’s and my time in Chile and Argentina when I was still stupid enough to think what people like them needed was a good dose of Marx—what a dope!—and the people on all the buses looked at us like we must be crazy for carrying copies of Noam Chomsky in the station and on the bus—like we had no idea. And we didn’t, is the hilarious part. We were typical, guilty, spoiled liberal middle-class kids, with slightly better-than-average state university educations, the first in our respective classes, big whoop. And I’m standing there chattled with a giant backpack, four-feet-eleven, and they’re towering over me and having the best time thinking I’m ignorant to their insults and hypocritical grins at me. They probably believe I’m a colonialist in their ’hood, an idiot—but you can’t be both. I mean, aren’t colonialists supposedly clever?”

  I’d paid for her movie ticket that night, her refreshments, her wine, but not her taxi fare. I stood on the corner and hailed her taxi, and she was tipsy and maybe forgot to ask for the twenty.

  “Can I have that twenty?” I can hear her say in her honking Cleveland accent at any other time. She wasn’t too shy. Faith was the last in a line of nine children in an Irish Catholic family, and you can imagine how exhausted those parents must have been (Faith was born ten years after the eighth child), trying to respond to the needs of their kids in college or starting high school, all of them experimenting with dope or having adolescent crises. She couldn’t act meek or be silent but said what she wanted or needed. But when she was drunk she’d sometimes lose the thread.

  I would go months without seeing her then an email would pop into my box or there’d be a message on our answering machine. I’d write or call her back, loath to do it but feeling the tug of obligation. She just always seemed beset. Her problems were romantic—Bob was still trying to get in touch with her from Istanbul and she didn’t seem able to cut him off—or else there were everyday practical problems. She got bed bugs, difficult since she had a cat. She got another job and this one at a publishing house—an absolute dream for her—but felt blocked from moving up by the two younger Asian women she said were trying to thwart her progress, always telling her the wrong things to throw her off and edge her out. When I got back from Maine one year there was, however, a sudden burst of sunshine in the form of a long email. She’d gotten sober. She’d been unable to take it anymore. The night before her first meeting, frustrated in her effort to find weed (since her dealer was mad at her for no real reason, it was all a misunderstanding), she had somehow known that when she woke up from her drunken, stoned state, she’d get out of bed and shower and go to the Spanish-language Pentecostal church basement and confess her addictions.

  Now when she called and cried she said, “I just need to sit with my feelings. That’s what my sponsor would say. I want a child. I’ll never meet anyone. I have, like, no fucking money!”

  Then I had told her to relax and tried reassuring her that she’d meet someone in AA.

  “Really? You think so? But no, you’re right—I have much to be grateful for. I have an education, I’m intelligent, I’ve regained my dignity. But in this country, now, in this culture …”

  Before, the demon had been capitalism, now it was socialism. Now she was proud of her ninety-year-old father, a member of the Greatest Generation because he had fought in World War Two, the one she used to make fun of for his funny old-fashioned beliefs. And though she never made fun of me, more and more I felt like a eunuch, a gay housewife in an imaginary suburb.

  “You’re unbelievably lucky,” she said, “and I’m not saying you have no idea because you work as hard as anyone I know. And it’s not because you’re a New York homosexual, privileged in the era of gay rights, on the heels of civil rights, which I made my subset in my anthropology major. It’s not even that. It’s the media. It’s the media and the liberal political establishment.”

  Once I met Faith after one of her meetings, her “Atlantic Meeting,” which meant she was among celebrities and artsy ex-drunks who made her feel envious. It was full of writers, theater people, and small-film directors. There she hoped to meet empathetic types who’d read her South America writings. “Not that I’m even counting on it, to be honest. Bunch of flimsy socialists.”

  I didn’t remind her that I probably leaned more in their direction than in hers. They were all outside the Atlantic Meeting smoking, Faith too. “And I hate myself for smoking,” she said.

  Afterwards we had dinner at a Second Avenue diner that had a reasonably priced menu of salad, entree, side, and bread—a full, home-style spread. I was feeling very optimistic for Faith.

  She’d ordered the flounder and things and she was several months into sobriety and said, chewing a roll, bright-eyed, she had gorgeous gray eyes eye-lined just so, “When I think about it, really fucking think about it? I’m just so grateful we ate so well at home, such healthy food. My mom was insistent on it. Whatever her problems were, and they were legion, when we got home every night, there was a nutritious hot meal waiting for us,” she said, sounding like a Department of Agriculture propaganda film narrated by a lab-coated scientist-actor. “Such delicious food!”

  She had once made fun of the lineup of packages of Birds Eye frozen vegetables on the counter next to the ground beef or split quartered chickens thawing in the sink. “The industrial-agricultural corporate interests in America,” she’d said, “is no different, when you think about it, from the military-industrial complex now waging war in Latin America. Eisenhower, Dwight D. fucking Eisenhower, coined the term military-industrial complex. Eisenhower! And yet this son of American wars, the war-maker, had been prescient. Not that anyone in post-Nixon America—Jesus Christ, it makes me ill. And shampoo, do you know what the difference between shampoo and soap is? Like one ingredient. I shampoo with Ivory soap—not to be their corporate dupe!”

  Way back when, Faith was this little adorable imp with a buzz-cut hairdo. I had instantly fallen for her, wondering if she wasn’t a lesbian. She was an Ohio State grad done up in a baby-doll dress, Doc Martens lace-up boots, black tee, and coral lipstick, a feminine firecracker. How she’d hated her parents, the Catholic school she was sent to, her narrow childhood. She’d been “owned” from the get-go, she was a “product.” She could deconstruct the whole pathetic deal.

  And then, gradually over a couple of decades, then seemingly overnight when I’d gotten the bright, hopeful email, she’d made the swing into the other direction. It was breathtaking.

  Her life had been a sketchbook of mistakes—she could admit in the diner, following the Atlantic Meeting. Her notebooks from South America urgently told her, “Make us into a novel! Inform your country!” Only they were not really mistakes. She’d been led through those trials.

  “And I really believe this,” she said, “that they were a test—in my faith in God—which I never really lost as it turns out. My father, my mother, thank God for them and their example.”

  She was still fragile and feminine, but also the fierce pixie I’d met in writing workshop. I couldn’t count th
em all, the tightly grasping loves she’d had, and I was the promiscuous gay guy.

  You had to go twenty years back to graduate school to see us both, when I was still puny.

  I couldn’t judge her for leaving the first boyfriend for the second, Bob, who was married. Her hurricane graduate school life—the parties she had in her too-tiny apartment, her late nights arguing with all of the workshop newcomers about the Beats and Bukowski, gulping Pabst Blue Ribbon and smoking menthol lights until she coughed and made no sense. Faith meant what she said, even when she was far gone and next to unintelligible. She had to be carried to bed, or she missed the Monday freshman comp class she was scheduled to teach. We graduated, she took off with Bob to South America. I joined the Peace Corps and ran away to the Middle East and then Eastern Europe. We fell out of touch. And then in New York through a mutual colleague we had gotten back in touch a decade and a half ago, when she was still a bemused leftist, bitter like me.

  Already, before 9/11, she was showing some signs. 9/11 and she came unhinged.