I noticed that the noise was gone from my head, that there was now a wonderful stillness.
I wished that we’d stop talking, but I knew that I’d need to speak to keep her there. I must have said something, made some noise.
“Are you talking to yourself?”
I looked at her.
“I thought you said you weren’t a madman,” she said.
I smiled.
“But you are?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible.”
Her eyes were on mine. She wouldn’t look away.
“Are you trying to decide if I’m going to kill you?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
I laughed. She squinted at me.
“Well?”
“No,” she said. “No I don’t think you will.”
“In that case, maybe we can walk somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I just got here. I barely know where I am.”
“Come,” she said and gave me her hand.
Out on the enormous beach the sand was firm from the rain and the sound of the waves was a constant white-noise roar. It felt good to be out in the low wind with her. Even if it had all run out of me, and I was exhausted.
“What’s wrong with you?”
There wasn’t much light, and it was difficult to see her face.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why did you say you could die of me?”
“Just a thing to say to a pretty girl in a bar, I guess.”
“Asshole.”
“Not really,” I said. “And anyway, why would you come out here with me?”
“I don’t know.”
“So neither of us knows anything.”
We went on like that crossing the vast beach toward the waterline. And all I wanted was for her not to leave me. As if without her I might not survive the night. And the thing was that it seemed we were both trying to answer that same question about what was wrong with me. And then as we came to the ocean gliding silent across the sand we stopped and watched for a while. The silhouette of Haystack Rock against the sky, and the wide blue bubbling tongues of foam moving in and out of the water.
“Why would you come out here with me?”
“Because you were very charming for a while,” she said. “Mostly though because you’re so sad.”
“Am I?”
“You were.”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.”
“And you like that?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I told her. “I wouldn’t want you to be anywhere else.”
“Ah, there’s the charm again.”
“No,” I said. “I mean it.”
I looked at her dark shape.
“Are you looking at me?”
“Yes,” I said and reached for her.
My uncanny mind was very quiet then and all I felt was that warm body and the ocean throbbing its gentle pulse in my brain.
Later, we walked back across the beach toward the lights of the little town softened by the blue fog. She returned with me to the motel without either of us making the suggestion and when we stepped inside it was as if we’d entered someone else’s room. Someone I might have known, whose things I recognized, but were nonetheless not my own.
She undressed me and then herself. For a moment we stood together, my chest against her warm breasts, my hands moving over her smooth back.
She was lovely, but I felt no desire, no lust. I wanted only to keep her against me as if to ward off the bird, which I could sense circling. There were brief twinges of that weight, ominous contractions in my chest, but nothing that lasted. I became convinced that she was my protector.
She kissed me and then again with more passion. I picked her up and laid her on the bed. I pulled the blankets over us and then her tight to me. She reached between my legs. I was soft.
“If we could lie here tonight,” I said. “If we could just be still. If we could just be quiet.”
“You’re a strange boy, Joey,” she whispered. “Joe. Joseph. So strange.”
“It’s only recent,” I said.
She sighed and fitted herself to me with all her warmth and I thought she was relieved to give up sex until she said, “So what, baby, you just want me to hold you?”
I laughed and closed my eyes and we lay there falling asleep, while together we battled back the bird, which circled and circled above us looking for an entry point.
13.
I woke early from the kind of black, motionless sleep that no longer comes to me here. Cold air moved through an open window. I drew the covers over us, closed my eyes and matched my breathing to hers. The night was gone. The bar felt a thousand years ago.
She was so warm with her skin cutting the trailing cold, and I wanted nothing else to happen. I wanted nothing else but for nothing to change.
But she will open her eyes soon, and curl against me and kiss my neck and whisper, “Good morning, Joe, Joey, Joseph.” She will climb out of bed and walk naked to the bathroom and close the door. I will listen to her pee and the sound will make me happy. I’ll hear the toilet flush and as it refills, the sound of water running into the sink. She is splashing handfuls of it against her face and then she is reaching for one of those clean towels hanging from the cracked chrome bar.
What I see and what I saw and what I imagined and there is no difference. Not a single difference in the world between those three things. They are equal. In memory. In value. In clarity. Equal.
I love to watch her standing naked at the sink. She is twenty years old. She is unafraid. She is not careful. When she’s finished, the water is everywhere. It is always everywhere when she’s finished and will be forever. Her cheeks will be flushed with color. She will favor her right leg and press it against the porcelain so that when she returns from the bathroom there is a pink line across her thigh. She is fearless and she is sure.
I’d never watched anyone so carefully in my life.
She returned to bed, to her place against my body, and slid her hand between my legs and found me hard.
“So,” she said wrapping her cool fingers around my cock.
I closed my eyes and moved so that my leg was between hers. She pushed against me.
“Joseph,” she whispered. “Alive again.”
I felt her tongue on my neck and over my nipples and then her teeth biting and her tongue again and I felt her hot cunt sliding over my knee, and down my shin. She drew my legs apart and then she had my cock in her mouth not gradually, but all at once. She didn’t move, just held me there deep. Then bit by bit rose and fell, then the same thing again and again and then with a furious rush she was up and pressing her cunt to my mouth. With one hand she yanked my hair hard. She pressed the other flat against the wall above me, her knees hard against the headboard. She was loud. A low moan and her fingers pulling at me beyond the point of pain and I could taste her. Was swallowing her. She was without shame. She was the most powerful person I’d ever known. I gave everything I could until she slid onto my cock fast and easy. She kissed me and licked my lips clean, my chin, and then her palms were firm on my chest, her sharp nails digging into my skin. She moved with an abandon and violence I’d never known. I came and somewhere in the midst of it she called out and as I softened inside her we fell asleep.
There is so much of me here that wishes my life had stopped there.
For that morning to have gone on and on. The two of us at peace, fitted together, stream of cold air cooling our skin.
But there is no stopping time.
The room brightened. She stirred and the next thing began.
When I opened my eyes she was sitting up with her legs crossed and the sheet gath
ered around her waist watching me. I can see her as I sleep. Her lips slightly parted the way they are when she watches any object intently, as if she might speak to that thing. Animal or mineral.
“Good morning.”
She extended her hand, “Tess.”
Like that, all of the fragments brought together into a single syllable: Tess.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m—”
“Yes, I know. Joe. Joey. Joseph. I know.”
We shook hands.
“Will you always call me by three names?”
“Always?” She smiled. “In our great future?”
“Yes. When we’re old. When you’re watching me die.”
“Even then. Especially then.” She smiled.
What did I learn of her that morning? That she’d just graduated from the University of Oregon. That she was sharing a house on the beach with her friends for the summer. That she was waiting tables at Bill’s Tavern. Other things maybe. It doesn’t much matter. Just that we began then, that I met Tess in this odd way, during that terrible summer.
Maybe some time went by. Maybe there was a night or two of her caution, or mine. A few days of that foolish game, but I don’t remember it that way. We just leapt off the cliff without any hesitation. Or I did, anyway. I didn’t play anything cool. She was all I wanted and pretending otherwise never occurred to me.
So either that very morning or a few days later, I said to her, “Come to London with me. Meet my sister. We’ll go anywhere we want.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll do it. September. Don’t change your mind, Joseph.”
“No,” I told her, “I will not.”
And that was that. The beginning. Out of thin air, the way nothing happens.
I worked out a deal to keep the room and pay by the month. I could have found something else, but I liked the idea of living in a motel. And I liked the idea of keeping our first bed. We knew the housekeepers, and the people who worked the front desk and they all took care of us. They cleaned for us and included breakfast. It made our life simple and I thought there was something romantic about it, something tough, too. I kept a bottle of Jim Beam on top of a Gideon’s bible. I admired the tableau and believed I was something wild. I was an idiot then. What a fool, what a faker, but my God I was happy.
Tess is in one of my work shirts. She is running barefoot down the hall toward the ice machine with a white bucket in her hand, flowers embossed on the sides. She is laughing, growling at me, baring her teeth, ripping wrappers off plastic cups.
And then later, once we’d settled in, the two of us sitting on the floor drinking bourbon out of glass tumblers she’d stolen from the restaurant. Her fingers digging up cubes of ice and dropping them one by one into our drinks.
I found a job tending bar a couple times a week at Driftwood, a steakhouse down by the beach, and she kept on cocktailing at Bill’s. She had her room in the house with her friends, but even still we were making so much more money than we were spending, we both felt rich. She worked out a budget. We paid for rent and gas and insurance for the truck. That was about it. We mostly drank for free and ate for free, so the rest of the money we kept in a pair of folded jeans at the bottom of a drawer and that money was for September. For plane tickets and trains and all the rest.
We had our friends from the bar, from the restaurant, her roommates. There were dinners on the deck of their cottage looking out over the sand. People coming and going. Everyone sleeping with everyone else, everyone separating, everyone changing partners, while Tess and I were inseparable, playing wise, watching it all happen before us as if it were a film, as if we knew better. And while we were taken care of at the motel, we came to take care of all the others—dispensing advice, pretending to know something of the world.
Even then Tess had no patience for girlish silliness.
She is in the living room of the cottage, furious with one of her friends—a person whose name and face I have lost. Tess is standing in front of the open glass doors, which led out to their grey deck above the sand. A dark figure against the daylight. I can’t see her friend, can’t find her in that room.
Tess saying, “Why do you pretend you’re so stupid? Why do you do that? Why play the idiot for these fuckers?”
It was the first time I’d seen her angry. Arms high, fingers gripping the doorframe, leaning forward. She was mesmerizing. That kind of fire. That kind of intelligence. Her absolute intolerance for bullshit. Her friend had no chance. Tess saying, “You are not a little girl. What kind of man wants that shit anyway? Put your tits away and speak for fuck’s sake.”
God, I can see her there. Coming off that frame with its peeling white paint, pacing the room. As if at any moment she would throw a punch.
Tess just seemed impossible. Her confidence appeared so true. Her constant and absolute belief in what was valuable and what was not. There was no tar in her, no bird, and nothing would stop her, whatever she was to do, whatever she would become.
Being near her made me happy. It was very simple. She made me believe I might too be constant. I thought perhaps she was an antidote. That I had been cured of whatever this strange thing was within me.
There may have been moments in those days when the weight would return, when some mornings I’d wake to find that bastard bird with its claws in my heart, but I don’t remember them. In memory, we remove pain. I know this and I want to be truthful. I will try, but of those days, I recall only joy. All our friends were revolving around and around us. The beach and the fog at night and someone’s dog running after a tennis ball and fires on the sand and the occasional storms coming in and Tess and her eyes and her naked body and the way she smelled and how everything I ate and drank tasted in some way of her. And how little else I wanted of my life. Just that. Just what we had. Our summer idyll.
14.
My parents would call on the motel phone, whose clanging bell always terrified Tess.
She is falling over laughing and clutching her heart. She’s on the floor, spread out against the dirty blue carpet smiling up at me. I hand the receiver to her and she speaks so easily with them.
“I can’t wait to meet you too, Mrs. March. It’s beautiful here. Is it beautiful there? He’s taking very good care of me, yes. He can be quite selfish, yes. You’re right about that.”
She is nodding. Grinning at me. She is so clear.
“What are you building, Mr. March? It sounds beautiful. Yes, I’d love to see your workshop one day.”
We talked to Claire. We’d see her in London. Plenty of space in their flat. A guest room just for us. She was living with the banker now. Henry. She’d sent us a photograph care of the motel. We kept it propped against the flaking mirror frame. My smiling, radiant sister, our mother’s blue eyes, our father’s sandy hair, arms around a man in suit and tie. He is unremarkably handsome, balding, a tired, serious face.
“In their flat,” Tess says jumping up and down on the bed. “A room just for us, darling,” she sings in a terrible English accent.
And I watched her then, as I watch her now.
“September,” she sang, her brown hair floating and falling.
15.
It turned very cold here in the night and when I woke this morning I could see my breath. I always sleep with the windows open. It’s a habit I learned from Tess. She loves a warm bed in a cool room.
I found the pair of thick green socks she gave me for my forty-first birthday. They’re made of cashmere. The kind of thing I’d have never bought for myself. She left them on my bedside table with a note that read, “For our winters.”
It doesn’t matter. They’re just socks, but on a day like this they’re a great luxury. I wear them with the ancient 501s she loves. The faded blue sweatshirt, once my father’s. My uniform.
In the mornings after I get dressed, I like to look down on the cleari
ng from our bedroom window. Today I watched a fox cut a neat black path through the frost.
These things still bring me some pleasure. Our warm bed, socks, my father’s old sweatshirt, our animal neighbors.
I still open my eyes in the morning. I have not gone completely numb. I guess that’s what I want to tell you. I wake up. I get out of bed. I get dressed. I look outside. I come downstairs and grind the coffee, and boil the water, and unfold the filter. I still make toast, cut up an apple. I still light the fire. Somehow it feels necessary to say it, to make clear to you that I also exist here in my present world.
16.
At the beginning of August my mother called the motel in the evening.
Tess was reading a book in a chair with her feet on the windowsill.
She is watching me, head turned to the side, light from the street crossing her face.
“Joey Boy,” my mother said.
There was something wrong with her voice. I don’t remember the conversation. Just the strangeness of it. I wanted to say, swallow, take a breath. She sounded thin. Incomplete. We talked for a while and then at the end:
“Are you all right?”
“Sure I am, sweetheart,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No reason,” I said looking at Tess, who had closed her book. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
That was the end of it. I put the phone back on the cradle. Tess sat across from me on the bed and raised her eyebrows.
“She sounded strange.”
“Strange how?”
I shook my head. I let it stop there. I’d never told her about the bird. Never told her that I imagined sharing it with my mother. She knew sometimes I came up fast. And others I fell. In whatever way one person can know something like that about another.
“Like a lot of people,” I’d told her. “Good days, bad days.”
Maybe she believed it was that simple. Probably not. But we never talked about it then. And in those months we didn’t need to.
“Maybe she wasn’t feeling well.”
Shelter in Place Page 3
