“Good going!” you crowed down to me through your cupped hands. Then you clambered down the bank, grabbed the rope, climbed up again, swung out and dropped into the water next to me.
Farther downstream we could see a rope line of big orange foam buoys draped like a necklace from one bank to the other, preventing pleasure boats, as well as swimmers like us, from going over the steep falls just beyond the bridge.
“This was my favorite thing to do last summer,” I explained as we stood in shallow water and as Casey paddled leisurely back and forth between us. “I used to come here and swing out when I got really depressed.”
“Depressed? You mean, over Greg?”
“I even jumped from a few railroad bridges into the White River.”
“What were you doing, simulating suicide?”
“Sometimes a little exhilaration is a quick pick-me-up.”
You looked doubtful for a moment but then you nodded.
I took you to a place called Lake Echo for a longer swim. There, as we made our way out toward the middle, I could see that you had a fairly even stroke, just needed to keep your elbows higher, to relax and shoulder-roll a bit more, but basically it was all there. I swam a long, easy crawl, watching how the water deepened vaultlike while shafts of sunlight trolled the depths. At one point I dove way down. With my back to the bottom I watched the surface glittering above me like a living mirror, whose silvery skin was broken by Casey swimming in vigilant circles as he waited for me to surface. When finally I could see your body crossing above, I came up for air. “Do you know how to eggbeater?” I asked.
“Eggbeater?”
I explained that eggbeater was treading water with the legs so that one had free use of the hands.
“What’s the point of doing that?”
“Besides being the key to playing water polo, it allows you to swim and eat a tuna sandwich at the same time,” I said, laughing.
You caught on quickly because your legs were strong, and we hovered there, palms facing, doing eggbeater and kissing water-filled kisses.
As we were climbing back into the car, Casey spotted something dead by the side of the road and began sniffing at it cautiously. You went over to look and then flinched away. A small bird, wings and downy torso complete with a yellow throat, was completely flattened to the road surface like a fossil embedded in stone. One glistening bloody organ had somehow been spared the final crush of car wheels and hung off the remains. It resembled a small brain.
That was the funny thing about the country, I explained, once we were driving to the grocery store. Although it was soothing in all its beauty, in its profusion of plant and animal life, one always saw the remains of violence and heard grisly stories of accidents: drunk drivers felling deer and slamming into hundred-year-old trees, somebody losing control of a chain saw and severing a hand or a foot. I told a story I’d read recently about a guy milling among the tourists at the viewing point three hundred feet above the Ottauquechee gorge. He’d spoken kindly to a couple, who, moments later, turned around to see a pair of black shoes lined up next to each other. The man had jumped off. When they looked far below into the foaming water, they saw the bright red spot of his blood on the stones.
You were quiet. Finally you spoke. “And something about the city makes you think that you can beat dying. Something about a place where if anything goes wrong you can check into one of those mega-hospitals and be kept alive.”
I’d been required to remain in New York in order to complete an interview and you’d driven up to Vermont with Casey, spent a few days alone at my place before I arrived. At first you were reluctant to take on the responsibility of a dog, but when Greg got wind of this, he emphatically reminded me how much Casey loved the country. Not wanting to be the cause of a dispute, you had finally offered to take the dog along.
And so you’d been staying in my little red house, probably, I hoped, trying to picture yourself living the life of Will Kaplan, just as I’d tried to imagine myself living the life of Sean Paris on Grove Street. I imagined you working on your landscape drawings in the natural light, then going for walks with Casey in the Revolutionary War cemetery across the street.
We finally arrived back at the cabin. It had been built back in the 1800s as a one-room schoolhouse. The property had changed hands many times since then and had been updated and modernized. The most recent renovations were three-prong plugs and new bleached and pickled oak floors that made quite a contrast to the original aged and unsplit one-hundred-year-old logs that formed the rafters that vaulted up to the sleeping loft, which had to be reached by a ladder.
The moment we walked in the door with our bags of groceries, I noticed that the kitchen clock was wrong. You explained that the night before I arrived there’d been a torrential rainstorm that spewed hailstones the size of cherries. The lightning and thunder had knocked out the power.
“You’re actually a pretty good swimmer,” I remarked once we were sitting at my round dining table, sipping ice-cold beers that left ring marks on the gingham tablecloth. “Especially for not having done it competitively.”
You said, somewhat defensively, “I don’t like swimming very much. All the river and lake hopping we did today—it’s not something I would do normally.”
“I didn’t realize you were bored.”
“I was hardly bored. We were outside. And it is beautiful here,” you said, taking a swig of your beer. “I just personally feel more comfortable on land. Being a small child in the tropics probably did that to me. A lot of weird things grow and live in hot places. I associate living in Okinawa with constantly checking to make sure there wasn’t some kind of creature about to fall on me.”
“Like what?”
“Like the worst, ugliest mother-fucking spiders you’ve ever seen.”
“Big?”
Banana spiders, you explained, are the size of a man’s hand. Deadly poisonous to small animals. “A bite from one of those suckers is like getting bitten by a rattlesnake.”
You warmed to the topic. “They spin these huge cottony webs that have twigs and leaves in them, webs so big that sometimes they stretch across the street between parked cars. There used to be this one web outside my window strung between a shrub and the side of the house. Big enough to catch birds! I was always aware of the fact that if I had to escape the house there’d be no way that I could climb out my window. Banana spiders have these long bodies, pointy, and angled legs, very thin. They cocoon whatever they catch and then suck the blood out. When grasshoppers and locusts get caught they usually put up a horrible fight. They tear up the web, trying to escape. And in the middle of all that thrashing, the spider keeps running all over the web, repairing the torn parts, trying to do damage control.
“Then there are the water spiders that were the size of, I’d say, a small doughnut. Those guys can flatten themselves out by exhaling all their air and then crawl anywhere there’s water. They’ve been known to hide under the rim of the toilet and, whenever you sit down, crawl across your ass.”
A shudder of disgust zipped through me. “All right, already, enough,” I said. “Now I understand why you prefer the winter.”
We divided the cooking chores and collaborated on dinner together that first night: roast chicken with lemon and rosemary and new potatoes, steamed carrots, and broccoli rabe, then fresh raspberries for dessert. Before agreeing upon the meal, however, we scrolled through many possibilities. You were surprised at the number of recipes I knew by heart, recipes as diverse as moussaka and couscous. I explained that being a child of an early divorce, dividing my time between two parents (both of whom were superb cooks), I had grown accustomed to two different kitchens as well as two different sets of culinary likes and dislikes. And yet you were a much more methodical and nimble preparer than I was. You measured out ingredients with speedy confidence, cleaning up carefully as you went along, slicing vegetables with a dexterity that obviously was part of your ability to draw so beautifully and so precisely.
At one point I tried to open a can of cranberry relish, but the can opener was unable to grip the lip of the tin. I kept fumbling until you came over and relieved me of the chore and, without hesitation, effortlessly completed what I’d been unable to do. I could tell that my lack of mechanical ability was surprising to you. I imagined that someone like Bobby Garzino, who loomed with his hands and probably cut things like onions into tiny square pearls, was the sort to spend hours tinkering with a faltering household appliance until he got it to work properly.
Later on, after dinner, we sat in the cemetery. Propped between my legs, you were leaning against me and I was leaning against one of the Revolutionary War tombstones. We kept passing back and forth a bottle of cold Chardonnay. The cabin was across the street from us now, dark but for one light still burning in the bathroom. The moon was stalking the horizon, fighting to break free of an embankment of clouds, but the stars were out in full regalia and the tombs themselves held a muted luminosity. The night was a hum of crickets every so often punctured by the whoop of an owl or the strangled cry of a bird stranded away from its nest. Casey lay next to me with his head on my lap.
“Up, there goes another one.” You broke the silence. “That makes three. Three shooting stars I’ve seen since we’ve been here.”
“My record is six in one sitting,” I said. “But that’s when I’ve spent the night out here watching.”
“You’ve spent the whole night alone in this cemetery?”
“No big deal.”
“You didn’t find it spooky?”
“Nah, it’s beautiful. Especially earlier in the summer when the fireflies are out.” The tombs, in their tumbling-down state, resembled pale soldiers collapsing on the last stretch of a battlefield, or perhaps enormous faulty denture work. “If there were any souls of these people hovering around, I’m sure they’re long gone. The last person was buried here a hundred years ago. It’s not like a modern cemetery with freshly dug mounds.”
You laughed. And then you exhaled a trembling sigh.
“What?”
“Nothing. I … feel happy here … It’s so different from the city grind.”
“I couldn’t be in the city unless I had a place like this to come away to.”
“How do you think I feel living there, a person who loves gardens? Sometimes I wonder what keeps me in New York.”
“What keeps you there is the axis.” I explained that I meant the Manhattan-Fire Island Pines axis. “And in the winter it’s triangulated with South Beach.”
You digested this for a moment and then you said, “That’s an oversimplification, it seems to me.”
“So you don’t agree?”
I could feel you shrug. “Whether or not I agree isn’t important. The fact is that you felt you had to break free of that axis—as you call it. You wanted something different.”
“Well, I had to break free of it or else I would never get anything accomplished. Vermont is hardly fashionable with … the smooth and the beautiful.”
“Come on now, be nice. No sweeping statements about your own kind.”
“Okay,” I said. “Except that I fundamentally don’t feel I have my ‘own kind.’ ”
I sensed a sudden shift in your mood. There were a few moments of significant silence. And whereas I was expecting you to say something that might be discordant or even distancing, I was surprised.
“That may be, but I’ll tell you something, Will. I’ll tell you straight out. You’ve got a lot of things that I want in a guy. Intensity, independence, you understand what it’s like to be burned by somebody else … and yet, well, the idea of having you also scares the shit out of me.”
“Don’t say that! I don’t get the impression that you were scared of that guy in Okinawa.”
You sounded annoyed. “How the hell do you know I wasn’t scared of him?”
“Just doesn’t seem like you were.”
“That’s your projection. And anyway, I was stupider then. Lots younger. A lot more willing to throw myself into the flame.”
“We all were stupider back then,” I said. “Nothing had broken us—yet.”
“I’ll give you a quick difference between you and me.” You now swiveled around to peer at me intently with your sad and silly expression. “No matter where we are in the ever-changing flux of this … whatever it is—an affair, a relationship—you probably never even wonder why I’m interested in you, right?”
“Why should I wonder about that?”
“Well, I can’t understand why you’re interested in me. And don’t even bring up the idea I’m your true physical type or any of that bullshit. Because there’re plenty of my type around. And you know how long that fantasy lasts.”
“I wouldn’t talk about type,” I said, defending myself. “But okay, so you don’t want to hear your list of virtues?” I said somewhat irritably. “Fine. I won’t burden you.”
“Top of that list, I think, is that I bring him back to you. I think I bring back Chad.”
“Who says that’s a virtue? If anything, that makes it harder. But obviously the more I get to know you, the more I realize how different the two of you are.”
“The other thing is I have the feeling that you’ve run through the story of your life before with other people, with your other lovers. Whereas I really haven’t.”
Just then the gleaming eyes of an animal crossed the cemetery, swerving toward us with a feral glance. Casey could smell it and raised his head from my lap. A low growl erupted in his throat. “Look at that,” I said. “Look at those amazing eyes.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Probably a raccoon. Maybe a possum.”
When Casey made a move to pursue the animal, I threw my arms around him and grasped him to me until whatever it was finally scurried away into the darkness.
You leaned back against me. “I’ll tell you, though, I’ve never seen a sky so full of stars. Not even in the South Pacific.”
Your past was like some great tidal wave that had been sighted and seemed perpetually to be on its way toward landfall. And as we continued to watch for plummeting stars I said that I was confused about how much time you’d actually spent in Okinawa.
“I was born there,” you said. “I lived there till the age of eight. Then I basically grew up around Camp Pendleton in San Diego. But I spent a year in Okinawa right after college with my mother and my stepdad. That last stint was when I met Randall Monroe.”
“How long did your real father live with you?”
“I was two years old when he first left us to go to Saigon. And then he came back when I was four. But I think I remember as far back as before the first time he left. The psychologists, the Freudians—whoever they are—say memory isn’t formed that early. But I remember lots of things. I remember sunlight in a room and a man with white hair—my father went gray prematurely. He’s leaning over me in the crib, dangling these … they’re like wind chimes. I remember the sound they make, like husked-out seashells gently clattering together. He blows on them. Apparently, there was such a mobile in our house at the time. Made of fish bones and shells and hollowed-out nuts, one of those baby amusements that my mother got rid of early on. Because the noise it made drove her crazy. Anyway, I only ever saw him a few times in my life.”
“But when did he die, exactly?”
“Just before I turned eight.”
“Was it hard, I mean, how much did you understand what was going on?”
“I understood everything. Plus the fact that my mother was an emotional wreck for so long afterward, for what seemed like forever. But what’s more distinct, believe it or not, is my memory of him coming home the last time, the time before he actually went back to Vietnam and got killed. Because there was lots of leadup to his coming home. I kept getting told that my brave, wonderful father was returning, and I was really looking forward to seeing him. The man who’d been sending me these reel-to-reel audiotapes that he made in Vietnam. He would talk to m
e on them. He would describe his life in his village, what it was like being the commander and the people he worked with. He always finished by reciting a Mother Goose rhyme: ‘Jack, Be Nimble,’ or ‘The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.’ And sometimes I could hear the sound of mortar rounds in the distance.”
I asked if you still possessed the tapes, but apparently your mother had managed to lose them. How could she have lost something so important? The answer was that even the possibility of hearing the voice of a dead husband had been too much for her.
“But the day he arrived my mother told me at the last minute that she needed to speak to him privately about a few things and sent me next door to Roseanne, her best friend, whose husband was also stationed in Vietnam. I was really upset because I’d wanted to see my father the moment he came and suddenly I was getting shunted next door to Roseanne’s and being fed this Betty Crocker chocolate layer cake—I’ll never forget that’s what she made for me, this pathetic-tasting box cake, whereas my mother always used to make her cakes from scratch. There was supposed to be a phone call that would summon me home. That’s how our lives were then, waiting for phone calls—probably why I hate the phone so much. Phone calls from Saigon, calls that sometimes wouldn’t come and left my mother so inconsolable that she’d bring me to sleep on my father’s side of the bed.
“Anyway, as I waited for them to call me home that afternoon, I was afraid that they might never call me back. Afraid that I would have to spend the rest of my life with Roseanne, eating her cardboard chocolate layer cakes. Afraid that I would be forced to go back to ‘the world’—which was what they called the States.”
“So you didn’t want to go back to the States?”
“No, I loved living in Okinawa, even though I didn’t love the spiders or the heat. The States—‘the world’—was something you always heard about, something always referred to. But to me it was like the great unknown….Anyway, the phone finally did ring at Roseanne’s house. And I was told to walk home.
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