Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

by Jincy Willett

  “Sorry I missed it.”

  “But let’s go anyway.” She fished around in the cabinet over the refrigerator and came up with two bottles of Nuit-St.-George. “What I do, I save up my carbs and have one of these every three days. Not bad, eh?”

  No, not if you’re going for the enlarged-liver-bas-relief-on-skeletal-frame look. “Are you doing this with a doctor?”

  “The Stooge? Please.”

  “Abigail, you shouldn’t be doing this on your own.”

  “I’m not. Conrad’s helping me.”

  I had a wild urge to wrestle her to the ground and stuff her with Italian bread and cheese. She looked weak enough, almost. “That explains,” I said, “why you look like crap.”

  Abigail bagged the bottles, and put a corkscrew and two goblets in my picnic basket, and we set out for Napatree Point.

  Napatree Point, the southwesternmost tip of Rhode Island, can be reached only by tramping over a mile and a half of barrier beach. There was once a road of sorts; there were houses, too, but all that ended up in the drink after the unnamed hurricane of 1938, dubbed the “Long Island Express” by chauvinistic New Yorkers. The harborside waters off the remaining sandspit are sometimes referred to as “the kitchen,” because of the wealth of common household items still to be found on its kelpy bottom. Napatree is a fantastic place for birding, especially in the fall, because southward migrating birds can’t resist the stopoff, and so I had at least that to look forward to, as Abigail slogged on ahead of me, insistently carrying both wine and food, for exercise. She walked this beach every day now, sometimes twice, often at dawn. I couldn’t recognize this new industrious creature, except, thank God, when she opened her mouth.

  “The only thing that shits worse than walking on sand,” she called over her shoulder, “is sitting on it. I brought this blanket.” Which she whipped out midway to the Point and attempted to spread out before us in the damn wind. We each put a foot on two corners and knelt down at the same time, facing each other. For me it was more of a pitch forward than a controlled act, and while the landing wasn’t too bad, I must have jarred myself, because I had a moment of real vertigo then, kneeling, my face inches from hers. Not so much loss of inner balance as bewilderment of place. I lost track for a second of where we were, and how old, and what was going on in the world. We were wordless in some ancient, private spot, and weightless too, and peaceful. She still had a baby’s face, to me.

  “What the hell’s the matter?” she asked. She regarded me with alarm. “Are you crying?”

  “Apparently,” I said, sitting back and fiddling with the picnic basket. I couldn’t look at her right then.

  “You never do that.”

  “I just suddenly thought about Mother,” I said. In a way this was true. After a while I heard a cork pop, and she handed me a goblet of what turned out to be pretty good red. After a time I said, “The seashore is so beautiful in books. I keep forgetting that I don’t care for it all that much. It smells bad and the surf makes such a racket.”

  “You’d always rather be reading.”

  “That’s not true.” I thought awhile. “I like real birds. I like a few real people.”

  Abigail snorted. “Name one.” I opened my mouth. “Besides Anna and me.” I shut it again.

  “Big Bob,” I said, after a long pause. “Big Bob Flynn.”

  “Yeah.” Abigail sighed. “He was a sweetheart, wasn’t he?”

  “He was a good man, and he loved you.”

  “No, he didn’t. You were always wrong about him.”

  “He ruined his life for you. I wasn’t wrong about that.”

  “He ruined his life,” Abigail said, “for…I don’t know…”

  I knocked back half a glass. “For laughs? For nothing? For a Platonic ideal? Give us a tiny clue.”

  Abigail scooted off the blanket and crawled a few feet to wet sand. She began to mold something. “He did ruin his life,” she admitted. “But he didn’t really want me at all. I would have made him miserable.”

  “You would have shortened his life, for sure.”

  “That too. His heart was bad.” She was making a sand castle, a pretty good one. I couldn’t remember her ever having this skill, so she must have perfected it recently, during her exile here. She had piled up a big mound of loose sand and was digging a moat on its outskirts. “We didn’t have sex much, actually. I had to be very careful. It was kind of fun, to tell you the truth—”

  “Spare me.”

  “What we had was good times. We laughed a lot. He had a great laugh.”

  She was building a tower, not a castle. A cylindrical structure etched by the tip of her corkscrew with rectangles of stone, narrowing gradually, with a single window at its apex. There was no doorway at its base. She tried to make a conical roof, but the sand kept crumbling. It was impressive nonetheless. A medieval prison tower, a place of durance vile. She must have built them before; her steps were so economical.

  We talked about Anna for a while, about where she might go to college. We had plenty of money saved up between us, fifty-fifty. Abigail and I were both equally prudent about money. It was about all we had in common. As we talked we were briefly visited by two stilts and a killdeer, and she widened her moat to accommodate the encroaching sea.

  When we pulled the cork on the second bottle, she began to talk about her husband.

  “I know you think it’s some kind of sicko masochistic thing,” she said.

  I said nothing for as long as I could stand it. “Well,” I said, “that’s what I can’t understand. You’re not a glutton for punishment. You never went in for that foolishness. Not to my knowledge, anyway.” It was fantastically hard to talk about this. Abigail and I have always been close; necessarily so. And it’s true that we liked to analyze things—people, events, local gossip. But we rarely got personal. Twins are hypersensitive about that sort of thing. We are intimate enough by our very natures. We don’t like to push it. Most people are alone in their lifeboats, for the duration of their lives; twins share theirs, and so our lifeboats have deck plans, drawn up over time. It isn’t all shared space. It couldn’t be. You’d go nuts.

  “He’s mean to me, all right. But I don’t like it. I hate it. I put up with it.”

  I just stared at her.

  Abigail smiled.

  “Look, I really don’t want to hear about your goddamn sex life. Hell, Abigail. Just leave it alone.”

  “I’ve had better,” she said.

  “What?”

  She looked right at me. “I’ve had better. It’s not about sex.”

  “I’ll be back,” I said, rising, and hurrying away toward the Point. She didn’t call after me. She was newly patient, as though she had all the time in the world.

  It was autumn, and warm everywhere but here, by the damn sea. The constant wind chilled my face, whipped my hair into my eyes. Sandpipers and their cousins, the whimbrels, avocets, and whatnot were all over the place. They are my least favorite birds. I don’t know why. They are delicate creatures, all with long crooked stilts for legs, and fancifully drawn bills, and they leave enchanting patterns on wet sand. But they do little for me. By the sea I prefer the common herring gull, a creature much maligned for its Dumpster-feeding and its raucous cries. They are so common that people don’t notice them anymore, except to badmouth them. We don’t notice, for instance, their substantial size and weight. They could do us spectacular damage, if they chose to.

  I had assumed it was all about sex: that Conrad Lowe provided my sister with the Ultimate Orgasm, or some such thing. I’ve had better. What did this mean? For the first time I wondered if Abigail truly loved him, loved him in a complex, adult way that began in carnality and extended to compassion, humility, readiness to sacrifice. Loved him in the sense that our parents must have loved each other; in the sense that I have loved no one. I had always taken it for granted that Abigail was equally incapable of this emotional and spiritual feat.

  And for some reason this was
distressing to me. Even though the object of her love was unworthy, I should have been happy for her. So her husband was a creep. So what? Who deserves complex, adult love? Everyone or no one.

  In a quarter hour I came to the tip of the Point, to Fort Mansfield, built some years after the Civil War, when politicians and generals began to worry, in a hypothetical way, about naval bombardment of the Atlantic coast. At first they were hypothesizing about English or French bombardment, which must have been fun: Picture boatloads of Fabianists and Apache dancers lobbing shells into Long Island Sound. When the Spanish American War came, Hearst whipped the country into such a paranoid frenzy that a ghostly Spanish fleet, intent on the annihilation of New London, menaced its dreams, and Fort Mansfield, along with sundry other tri-state fortifications, became a near reality, which it still is. The war ended before Mansfield could be armed, and it remains hypothetical to the present day. It’s just a low, square concrete structure, festooned with graffiti. There are supposed to be tunnels underneath, running nowhere in particular. I sat down on a slab. The wind stopped, and soon I was hot, sitting there with my face exposed to the October sun. I picked up a clamshell and scratched

  Dork

  next to

  Albert Rumford is an A hole

  The calumny, if such it was, about Albert Rumford had been accomplished with cobalt blue spray paint. It’s probably good that I didn’t have any of that with me. I was in a confessional mood.

  While in this mood I saw my one and only American oystercatcher. A jaunty black bird with a silly bright orange beak regarded me from the battlements, and we had a long moment of mutual inspection. Many birds, songbird and not, are performance artists: starlings, gathering in alarming numbers in late summer on the branches of a suburban tree, sing a Wagnerian chorus of steadfast intent (hypocritically, since they never actually migrate); cardinals, those great showoffs, are resplendent, seductive mike singers; and, in the hush of afternoon in the deep woods, the hermit thrush, whose voice is loveliest of all, begins his ballad, like Bartell D’Arcy, only when he’s good and ready, when the party’s over and the other birds have gone home for a nap. The oystercatcher, who doesn’t sing at all, is a true vaudevillian in his aspect. This one looked like he knew a million jokes. Hiya, hiya, hiya! D’ya hear the one about the librarian and her brother-in-law? Yes. I’d heard that one.

  She was lying on her back, munching on limp celery, and there were two inches of wine left in the second bottle. “Sometimes,” she said, “I’m not hungry at all. I can go for half a day without thinking once of food, and then at night I dream about it.” She rose up on an elbow. “Last night I dreamed about Cheerios and milk. The bathtub was full of Cheerios and milk. And sugared blueberries.”

  I told her I wanted her to move back in with me. I told her she was killing herself. She didn’t deny it. “I’m stuck,” she said, “at one thirty-five. I’ve hit some sort of plateau.”

  “Why did you get me down here? What do you want from me?”

  Abigail sighed. “I want you to be nicer to him.”

  I thought I saw the whole thing then, and it made me sick. “This was his idea, right? He made you call me? I quit.” I rose unsteadily, whacking sand off my legs, trying not to cry, again. “You’re disgusting, the pair of you. You deserve each other.”

  “Sit down and shut up.” She said this extraordinary thing softly, with her eyes closed. After some time I sat back down and waited. “He wants you,” she said, “just around. He says he can talk to you. He says he’s lonely.” She sat up and regarded me seriously. “I don’t mind. I mean, I wish I were enough for him. I wish he could talk to me.” Her voice broke, but she went on. “I’d rather just talk with him than fuck a hundred other guys.”

  “Just what do you mean by ‘around’?” I asked her. Did she know that I had already spent a drunken evening around her husband? I honestly couldn’t imagine. Should I tell her now? I honestly didn’t know. My ignorance was the only honest thing about me that day.

  “I mean, just come down more often. Anna’s okay on her own once in a while. Come down next time when he’s here. Which is most of the time. As a matter of fact, Guy and Hilda are coming back next month, just for ten days. It would be great if you came then. Guy’s going to be driving me around the bend.”

  “Abigail. Did he tell you…”

  “I’ll say it again. He wants you around, to talk to. You interest him. Okay? You always did. I was jealous at first, but I’m not now. Come on.” She was shy with me. She had never been shy with her needs—what’s that guy’s last name, take Anna for a week, gimme that cookie—but this was a favor, and she couldn’t quite meet my eye.

  Which was handy for me. Had he told her about the other night? Well, did it matter? Sure it did, and still I said nothing. Until finally, in my most censorious voice, I promised to come. And I let her be grateful, too. And after a while I got back in my car, and went la la la, all the way home.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Paeans from the Peons

  Chapter 18

  The Last Golden Time

  The reader will forgive the inevitable elegiac note in this chapter, for we have arrived at what [apparently] I can only call the last golden time of our association with Conrad and Abigail Lowe. I refer, of course, to the occasion afforded by the National Book Award which Guy earned for Persephone’s Grotto, and our joyous celebratory reunion at Watch Hill….

  This was also the occasion of the last major literary award her husband received. Even if we had all stayed in place, drawing breath and out of the slammer, the DeVilbisses’ golden days were numbered. Guy made a big pretense of nonchalance about his critics, not to mention his book sales, but really it just about killed him to be overlooked; and after 1976 he joined the ranks of the literary dust gatherers, shoved aside to make room for the Next Great Writer. Which even I will admit was unfair. But it was fun to watch, too.

  The three of us met them at Logan, an absurd two-hour drive each way, as Hilda wouldn’t hear of shuttling. She claimed they were too anxious to see us, but obviously she didn’t want Guy to experience any more mass transit than he had to. They were a sight, struggling down the concourse, Hilda manning the heaviest bags. “When you see him from a distance like this,” Abigail said, “you remember he has legs. It’s kind of a shock.”

  “Look at that lazy asshole,” Conrad said. “If he could figure out how, he’d make her carry the fucking typewriter.” He approached them, tossing his keys to Abigail. “Bring the car around,” he said. “We’ll be lucky if he makes it to the curb.” Conrad, to my astonishment, embraced Hilda and kissed her on the mouth, and then relieved her of both suitcases, pointedly ignoring her wish that he “help Guy.” She gleamed as though burnished, and I wondered as much at her reaction as I did at Conrad’s generosity.

  He was, now that I thought of it, unfailingly courteous, almost courtly, with Hilda. It seemed to come naturally. I don’t think he liked her, and he wasn’t capable of pity. If he had any designs on her, they must have involved emancipating her from the prat she was married to. “We had a terrible flight,” she called to me. “There was a baby in first class, and Guy couldn’t sleep a wink.”

  Guy gleamed with sweat, as though mere existence on the material plane were physically exhausting; which I think it was. The cabin of a commercial jet, first class or no, must be almost as real as the Great Swamp. “They should have special flights for children,” he said to me. Hilda had run off to get him something. “Really. Or soundproof compartments.” He looked, as always, like a big fussy baby himself.

  “Welcome back, Guy,” I said, relieving him of a carry-on, just to occupy my arms, in case either of them expected some sort of hug. They weren’t, as Abigail said, physical people, but you can never be too cautious.

  Guy beamed at me momentarily, and then at something in back of me, which apparently disappeared, or failed to materialize, curdling his smile. “Where are the others?” he wondered. “Where are Tansy and Pilar and Tim?�
�

  “They’re at work, Guy.” How did he expect us to fit everybody into the Plymouth? Another real world glitch. “Where I should be, as a matter of fact—”

  “There’s Abigail!” Guy toddled past me toward the curb, trailed by Hilda, who had acquired and now flourished a bottle of club soda and a pack of antacids. Conrad and I followed behind, and ended up with Hilda in the back seat. He sat in the middle, with an arm stretched out behind each of our necks, and quickly dozed off.

  I was by now used to this proximity. True to my word, if not to myself, I had moved in with them two days before, for an open-ended stay. Anna was home alone, and fine—I was commuting to the library every weekday, and had just popped in on her the day before. She barely looked up from her reading. Anna likes to check out the new books, and there was a two-foot-tall pile of them on her desk. “Give my love,” she told me, “to the H. C.”

  Happy Couple.

  After two days alone with the H. C. it should have been something of a relief to have the DeVilbisses around. Yet as I watched them settling in, commandeering the phones and fussing with the parlor furniture, I found myself alarmingly discommoded. Apparently I had settled already into a routine comforting enough to be jarred askew. Conrad and I (Conrad and I!) had been using the round oak dining table as our office, and I was genuinely annoyed when, within a half hour of our arrival, Hilda swept the table clean of our papers and ashtrays and began to massage it with linseed oil.

  I had agreed to help him write his new book. Initially I pretended to think he wanted help with grammar and syntax, but of course he was after what he called deep background. What, you mean like “Deep Throat,” I asked, and he said no, he’d leave that sort of thing to the Little Woman. Still, I agreed.

  Now we had to regroup in Guy’s small den, from which we were immediately chased, in case Guy were suddenly mugged by his muse, and by the end of a long day we had set up shop in what had obviously once been a children’s nursery, and was used by the childless DeVilbisses as a catch-all. The whitewashed pine table and chairs were undersized, yet Conrad was not diminished in using them.