by Lloyd Kropp
About an hour later Miriam served martinis and bits of tartar beef on squares of rye bread as a prelude to her midnight buffet.
“But don’t you agree, Peter?” Mary Rhys Beacher was saying. “I mean as a historian?”
“Don’t I agree to what?” said Peter. He felt very weary.
“That we are all part of The Cosmic Dance, The Infinite I Am, as Coleridge put it.” Mary Rhys Beacher smiled at him and pursed her lips as if he had been a naughty child for not listening.
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Peter. He had the distinct impression that Mary Rhys Beacher was not a person at all, but a very large green frog.
“I’m not sure you really understand,” she said.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” said Peter. “But on The Drift they do a dance with Black Narwhales and fire monsters and bare-breasted maidens. I’m afraid it makes Coleridge look a little pale.”
“Wow!” said Tony Berendtson.
Mary Rhys Beacher looked up at him with what seemed to be great concern and interest. “I’m not sure I understand your allusion,” she said.
“I’m not sure you do either,” said Peter. “But you mustn’t feel badly about it, Mrs. Beacher. We all have our limitations.”
She stared at him and then at her silent audience.
“Peter, you’ve had too much to drink,” said Miriam. “You’re getting silly.”
“Yes, that’s true,” he conceded. “But then we’ve all had too much to drink. Everyone, that is, except Mrs. Beacher.”
“Your little fantasies are very interesting,” said Mary Rhys Beacher after a long moment of silence.
“So are yours, Mrs. Beacher. But let me tell you about my fantasies, since they do happen to be true fantasies.” And he began to tell her about his days in The Sargasso Sea. One by one people stopped talking and began to listen. Even Harry Ranton, who had been talking to Basil Queen’s wife, turned around in his chair and smiled at him. Rather maliciously, Peter thought. Harry had always been especially delighted at the prospect of Peter making a fool of himself.
“Peter, what in the world are you talking about?” said Miriam after he had gone on for several minutes.
“I’m talking about what happened during the two months after my boat sank,” he said. “I’m talking about a place called The Drift, where there is no wind and no current, a place where people live on ancient boats and listen to music and eat seaweed and everyone has true fantasies.”
“Peter’s pulling everyone’s leg,” said Basil Queen’s wife, who was an alcoholic. She stared at him with glazed eyes. “How charming,” she added.
“I don’t think he’s pulling anybody’s leg,” said Beverly, Miriam’s younger sister, from the farthest and darkest corner of the room. It was the first thing she had said to anyone all evening.
“Well Peter,” said Harry Ranton, who was still smiling, “I’ve never expected you to actually make sense, but even I am a little disappointed in that fruit cellar you call your mind. You must have lost it out there in the ocean.”
“And a good thing too,” said Peter. “It didn’t happen a moment too soon. I pity you, Harry, that you never lost yours. But then you’ve got your mind glued into your head so firmly I don’t think anything could ever shake it loose. No, I’m afraid The Drift would have had no effect on you.”
“The Drift? That’s the name of the place where you went off your rocker?”
“The Drift is all things to all people,” said Peter breezily. “To the eye only, it is an island of ships set in an eternal calm. To me it was a city of light and darkness where shadows were everything and the world was well lost. To you, Harry, it would have been just an eyesore. Something irrelevant. A bad piece of real estate. A large collection of plastic ducks floating in the pool of the Taj Mahal.”
Tony Berendtson laughed. “Never mind about the plastic ducks,” he said. “Tell us more about your adventure.”
“He’s still pulling your leg,” said Basil Queen’s wife. Her eyes were still glazed.
“Let’s talk about something else,” said Harry Ranton. “Peter’s little fairy tale doesn’t seem to have an ending.”
“Don’t be a snot, Harry,” said Tony Berendtson. “Let Peter finish his story.”
“Let me see,” said Peter, smiling at Harry Ranton, “where was I?” He tried to pick up the story of The Drift where he had left off, but somehow it would not come out right. It did not matter whether they believed or not, but he found that he simply could not tell the real story to all these strangers. And so Pao became a dream, The Drift itself a spirit city that rose out of the water once in a thousand years to cheer the hearts of shipwrecked sailors. Everyone seemed vastly entertained. Everyone but Harry Ranton and Mary Rhys Beacher, who had gone into another room to play billiards.
Later Miriam served her midnight buffet. Eight silver candlesticks glittered on a long table filled with lobster, ham, corn bread, and a profusion of cheeses, salads, and wines. At one end sat a great samovar filled with Flowery Darjeeling. Miriam made sure that Peter was served first, much to Harry Ranton’s annoyance. It was his reward, apparently, for being the raconteur of the evening.
Beverly came rather timidly to his corner of the room while he was eating his lobster roll and salad.
“What did your story mean?” she asked.
“What do you mean, what did it mean?”
“I mean, about all the fantasy things,” she said. “You were using it to tell another story. A story about something that really did happen.”
Peter smiled. “That’s true, Beverly. But I can’t tell you the real story. When I first got back I tried to, but no one believed me. I can see now that I’ll never be able to tell the real story.”
“Maybe someday you’ll tell somebody,” she said, looking rather unhappy. “I mean, maybe someday you’ll trust someone enough to tell the real story.”
“Perhaps.”
“It’s a very sad story, isn’t it? With all the ships sinking back after a few days for another thousand years and no one knowing where they went. And all the ghosts who wanted you to stay with them and live at the bottom of the sea.”
Peter thought about it for a moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “It’s a sad story. But I think it would have been a sad story if I had stayed. You see, I don’t think I could have been happy there at the bottom of the sea. Not for very long.”
“I’m sorry,” said Beverly.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Choosing between The Drift and Connecticut is kind of an absurd position to be in. It’s like choosing between your liver and your lungs. Normal people don’t make such choices. But then perhaps there are very few normal people. Most of us go around chopping ourselves to pieces, making absurd choices that ought never to have been made. We let some things become so important to us that we miss everything else in life.”
He could see that she was trying very hard to understand. Suddenly, before he could think what he was doing, he took her hand and then kissed her on the cheek.
“Perhaps someday I’ll tell you,” he said.
She looked at him and her lips parted in astonishment. “You mean we could be—friends? I mean, in spite of my sister and everybody?”
Peter pressed her small hand inside his two large ones. “We are friends, Beverly. We’re very good friends. And don’t be too hard on your sister and her friends. They’re probably not such bad people. I never really got to know them, so I’m really no judge.”
“But The World of Feeling is something that seems to escape them!” she said, trying very hard to control herself.
Peter laughed in a friendly way. “Yes,” he said, “they certainly do. I mean it certainly does.”
As Peter was leaving, Harry Ranton clapped him on the shoulder, a little too roughly. It was not a gesture of friendship.
“Well, Peter,” he said. “I guess I can admit one defeat. I mean, considering all the other times past and yet to come.”
“You d
on’t have to admit anything,” said Peter.
Harry Ranton walked away and then stopped for a moment and turned, as if there were something he had forgotten.
“What were you going to say, Harry?”
“I said it all tonight, Professor. I haven’t got another thing to say to you. Not for a while.”
“I thought perhaps you were going to point out in a rare moment of honesty that this was really a very silly game we played this evening.”
“Why silly?” said Harry Ranton.
“It’s silly that you should fear me and work against me and sleep with my wife just because I’m a professor with an advanced degree. It’s silly that I should fear you because you talk too much and make too much money and know too many people. It’s silly that we should treat each other like beastly objects and play these lousy war games year after year at cocktail parties.”
Harry Ranton smiled. “Are you trying to be friendly?” he said.
“I’m not sure. But it does occur to me that people who have lived as narrowly and as defensively as we have, will never really get along with anybody and don’t really deserve to be happy.”
Harry Ranton frowned. “I get around and I do pretty well,” he said. “But you’ve never been anywhere or seen anything. You don’t know anything about the real world. That’s your main problem, Professor.” He looked away, out across the shimmer of Miriam’s nightblue swimming pool to the copse of weeping willows beyond. Again it seemed to Peter that he was thinking about something he could not quite bring himself to say.
“I’m not talking about where you’ve been or what you’ve seen,” said Peter. “I’m talking about how you’ve been there, about how you look at things.”
“That’s really food for thought,” said Harry Ranton. “You’ll just have to give me time to think about all this.” He grinned maliciously.
Together they walked out toward the copse of trees which hid the large oval lot where their cars were parked.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” said Peter. “I’ve had an awful time with you and with a lot of other people. It hasn’t been easy. I don’t really understand what I’ve been up to for the last twenty years.”
“Yes,” said Harry Ranton flatly. “That’s clear enough.”
“But I’m working on it, Harry. I’m coming out of the woods.”
Harry Ranton turned to him, and for the first time since their confrontation in the living room he looked directly into Peter’s eyes. The sarcastic smile faded from his lips. He looked doubtful for a moment and then stared at his shoe.
“I wish you luck,” he said. “Perhaps we should wish each other luck.”
The next morning, on a whim, he began packing some shirts and socks and a few books into his old navy bag. He would go on a short trip somewhere. After all, there were still five months to kill before the second semester began at Harrington University. His mind was filled with a restlessness, a quickness that made him think of a dozen things all at once: he would visit the house where he had grown up; he would rent a cottage near the water somewhere in Connecticut and swim every day and read every night until four in the morning; he would write Beverly a long letter; he would give up teaching and go into newspaper work or the diplomatic service; he would travel through Venice and Rome and Greece and The Aegean and write a book about the effect of the sea upon man’s imagination and spiritual growth.
At one o’clock he caught a train for Paterson, New Jersey, and the next day he walked through the streets where he had lived as a boy. He discovered very quickly that no one he knew lived there any more. Very soon he was depressed and lonely. The next day, with the distinct impression that he was wasting his time and money, he took a bus to Newark and from there caught a plane to Miami. In Miami there would at least be lots of people, even if it were off season.
When the large four-engine Constellation left the ground, he suddenly felt very tired. The motors droned in his ears. The air within the pressurized cabin was cool and heavy. A ray of sunlight slanted in from his window and traced a line of warmth on his cheek. His head sank into the soft cushion.
The plane rolled gently with changes in the air currents. Outside he could see that the wind was green and thick. Occasionally pieces of Sargasso Weed floated by, and sometimes a school of yellow fish would glitter and flash in the green light. Slowly the plane began to sink into the deep water.
“We’re going to the bottom of the sea,” said Pao, who was standing next to him in the bow of the ship. “Fasten your safety belts everyone.”
The ancient sails waved and rippled in the currents of green water. The droning of the boat carried them deeper. At the bottom of the sea lay a great forest, alive with voices. The trees spoke to one another. Hundreds of pathways, marked with spired houses of white coral, wound their way in and out among the trees.
Together they traveled north along a river of ice that moved beneath the forest. They listened to the songs of white birds perched like glass ornaments in the labyrinth of branches above them.
The river emptied into a land of ice that rose up in great towers to the surface of the water. He took Pao’s hand and together their spirits rose on shadow wings to the surface, where they saw The Great Island of The North Pole, and beyond that, glittering points of icy starlight a thousand light-years beyond.
“I see now that the stars are made of ice and snow,” said Peter. “Seawater frozen forever and thrown up into the sky.”
Beyond the stars they followed a great black river as wide as The Milky Way. And beyond the river, white shapes moved in a great city of light that stretched on and on into forever.
Pao put her arms around him and pressed against him as they flew on together through eternity. “Nothing can touch us now,” she said. “Nothing can take you away from me.”
But suddenly he felt a subtle shift in the universe, and he began to fall through space. From somewhere came the droning of engines. “Fasten your seat belts,” said Pao. “We’re now arriving in Miami.”
He opened his eyes. The world came back to him with a painful, sudden rush. He closed them again, but he was awake now and there was no way back to The Drift. The Drift was a lost romantic century that old men remember as it never was. Or a childhood that in real life he had never known and had always longed for.
There was of course no one to meet him at the airport. For a while he wandered through the terminal, listening to the voices and the mechanical droning of the loudspeakers announcing the arrivals and departures. There was nowhere, really, that he had to go, no appointments or schedules for months and months, not until the second semester began that winter at the university. He would have time to think about all that had happened to him. Perhaps too much time.
His adventure on The Sargasso Sea seemed now like a dream, a bizarre sea-delirium, but he knew that in many ways it had changed him. It had taught him the desire to give in, to drift, to follow the course of experience for its own sake and to open his mind to sensation, to the color and texture and shape of things, and not merely to their uses. And so he had learned to touch with his mind and his feelings instead of with his hands only. He had learned that all things were variations of other things, that life was a series of metaphors, and that the play of the mind expanding in a circle of associations and feelings was perhaps more valuable than the objectives that he had once set for himself.
His childhood, his schoolwork, and his marriage had all turned him away from that kind of insight, and then, for a short while, his adventure on The Drift had turned everything upside down. It had taken a miracle, a world of impossibilities where nothing in his old life was relevant or real, to change him after so many years. It made him think of an enchanted knight lying on a medieval hillside, a knight who found an important truth woven into the allegory of his sleep.
But dreams must end, he thought. There was night for sleep and the stars for meditation, but there was also morning and noon that were not made for sleep, save for those who are content to
grow pale, to atrophy in caves of silence where sunlight cannot enter. What was it he had said to Beverly? Something about the absurdity of choosing between The Drift and his old life. Yes, like choosing between night and day. But suddenly it came to him that he had not really chosen between those two forces, the centripetal that drew him inward and the centrifugal that drew him outward into the world of man’s progress and failure, for in leaving The Drift he had not really left his dear friends and the timeless, ruined ships where they lived. He was free now in a way that he had never been free before. His life seemed open, full of vague possibilities. Even the next school year appeared as an uncharted territory to him, a territory that he must somehow travel in a different way, not knowing what he would encounter or how he would respond. No, he had not lost The Drift. He would carry it with him always.
Then he thought for a moment of Pao and Tabor, and his heart filled with pain and loneliness. He thought of the book they had planned to write, a book that would never be written. If only they might have come with him from their world into his. But then he remembered that the figures in dreams cannot live outside their shadowy land. They cannot cross the dark sea that separates the dreams and ideals of the imagination from reality, though he knew he would never lose them, never forget them.
The next day he discovered that the beaches, contrary to his expectations, were nearly deserted by the end of August except for the beachcombers and the police. And so for hours every day he brought his towel and lay on the warm sand, staring out into the sea.
