by J T Kalnay
My mother and my brother-in-law are on the beach where I am going to run with Joe. They know something about Joe, that he runs the coffee shop and that I go see him for coffee and that we run on the beach. But unless my sister has shared my secret, and I know she hasn’t, then they don’t know about January, and they don’t know about Costa Rica. So I am wearing my regular running clothes, not the outfit that I picked out just for running with Joe.
He will recognize this outfit as the same outfit I have worn to run with him on many Atlantic mornings. He notices what I am wearing. I like that about him. He notices, but doesn’t dwell on it, or read anything into the outfit. Except when there is a certain something to be read in, like in my outfits in Costa Rica. Those outfits are an open book, and an invitation, and he reads them and accepts them.
I see him coming up the beach. He really is more fit. More defined in his shoulders, and with a smaller waist. Maybe he stopped drinking beer too. Although I have never seen him drink a beer. Maybe that is leftover from his Fundamentalist days.
I rise from the step and meet him on the firm sand near the water.
“Morning,” I say.
“Morning,” he answers.
He is moving more easily, more fluidly.
“Your stride looks good,” I say. “And your shoulders look good too...”
“Thanks,” he says.
We fall into stride and head towards the pier. His pace is better than the last time we ran. Has he been training so he can keep up with me? Should I set off at my pace and leave him on the beach just to prove I can? Why would I do that? Why did that thought even enter my mind? I am running with Joe this morning. It is not a competition. He is more fit, and I am happy for him. He will turn fifty one soon and he is more fit now than when he was fifty. I am a lucky woman to have a friend and a lover like this who is looking after himself.
We reach the pier and I begin to slow so I can turn around.
“Can we go a little further? Up to the condos?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say. I am liking his fitness. His voice is calm and even, not labored like it would have been last year. Yes I am liking his fitness, and an erotic thought enters my mind about what other benefits this fitness may yield.
“My sister is taking the entire family to Wilmington on Thursday, to see the battleship, and then to lunch. They will be gone from about nine until after noon,” I say.
“I know. She’s going to stop at UNCW and meet with some of the doctors to demonstrate her handheld scanner.”
“She is? Are you going to be there too?”
“No. Just her and the doctors and the family of one our former patients.”
“So you’re still free?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Because it will be Thursday…”
He turns and leers at me. He understands what I am saying.
“Thursday? Your place or mine?” he asks in a leisure-suit-Larry voice.
“Mine,” I answer.
I feel his pace increase the tiniest bit on this longer run. I feel mine match his and my body begins to anticipate Thursday, still two days away.
“You always said you were a Thursday,” he says.
Joe
It is Thursday. I am on my way to see Shannon, to have Shannon in her beach house while her family is away. We are beginning to understand what our Julys will be. Running on the beach in the morning, walking on the beach in the evenings, and a few stolen moments here and there. It is July and she is here and I am here and we are going to be together.
Shannon
It is Thursday. Joe is coming to see me. My entire family is gone for the morning, thanks to my sister. No-one suspects anything because I have fabricated some “important work” that I have to do as an excuse for not going to the battleship. I promise to build a sand castle with the kids this afternoon to make up for it. Maybe we can make a battleship sand castle. But then that wouldn’t be a castle…
Joe is coming to see me. We are going to be together. For the first time since Costa Rica. I have no other lover. For a moment I wonder whether Joe does. Whether maybe Danny slips between his sheets while I am up north. I decide I do not care, because we have made our bargain and he has kept up his end and so I will keep up mine. I will not wonder what he does when we are not together. I will only revel in what we have when we are together. I decide I do not care because from what I know of Joe there is no other lover. There is his business and the Foundation and there is me. I know this.
Joe
I see her sitting on her back porch. She waves to me, waves me in. If the family had not yet left I was supposed to walk past and then return a half hour later. If there had been a change in plans she would have been waiting for me at the end of her steps. It was all arranged. A secret love affair with all the hidden codes and intrigue and excitement of an illicit liaison.
She is wearing the bathing suit that she was wearing the day we met. With the breezy gauzy white wrap draped on her slender shoulders. She is lovely and I am practically panting for her. Costa Rica was so many months ago. And while I do not think about her in that way every single hour when we are apart, I do think about her in that way every single night.
I climb her back steps, walk across her boardwalk, and remove my shoes on her back porch. She takes my hand and leads me into her master suite where we made love in January and where we will make love in July, while her family is away.
Our first time is nearly frantic, with so much hurrying to overcome the months without this. We both see that crazed coupling for what it was. We lie in each other’s arms and wait for the second time, when we can take our time and give each other the things we know we crave and in the way we have learned to share. We wait for the third time when we can completely surrender and embrace each caress, each plunge and fall and grasp and the final deliverance. We know who we are, and we know how we are, and we have learned each other’s bodies and what we need and want.
We are lovers who have made love in this bed before and who will make love in this bed again. I am hers for these hours in her bed and she is mine for these hours while her family is away.
“It’s nearly noon,” she says.
I know what she is telling me.
“I’ll see you tonight,” I say.
“At nine, on the steps, for a walk,” she says.
My heart and brain scream for me to tell her that I love her. I will tell her tonight, in the moonlight, on the beach, and she will not answer me in words, but she will hold my hand just so and walk just so and she will tell me in a hundred other ways. I do not need her words. I have her time and her body and her hand in mine while we walk on the beach and I have her running footsteps beside me each morning and it is more than enough. I do not need her words. But I will tell her anyway, and I will not expect her to reply.
UNCW
“Thank you for coming to visit us on your vacation Dr. Patrick.”
“It’s the least I can do,” Cara answers.
“We’re looking forward to the clinical trial of the scanner.”
“Me too. Every bit of early detection we can achieve is a good thing.”
“Hi Dr. Patrick,” the boy says. He walks over to Dr. Patrick and extends his hand to shake. “Do you remember me? I visited you in Cleveland. We scanned that mouse together.”
“Of course I remember you.”
“Thanks for coming here to show these doctors how to use the scanner.”
Cara is touched by his maturity and his thoughtfulness.
“Can you be my assistant today?” she asks.
“Yes,” the boy answers.
He demonstrates the use of the handheld scanner, first on a mouse, and then on the doctor’s arms. While the mouse is clearly symptomatic, the doctors are all ‘clear’ as the boy tells them.
“Thanks again doctor Patrick,” he says.
After the boy and his father have left, Cara and the doctors from the Foundation make their way to the rooms of patients who
have agreed to participate in the clinical trial. The scanner detects the cancer in five of the six patients.
“There must be a depth of penetration issue,” Cara says. “Still, five out of six is promising.”
Shannon
There is moonlight and a warm breeze and midsize rolling waves that tumble yards off shore making the beach as beautiful as I have ever experienced it. Joe’s hand is in mine and we have walked past the pier and have only now just turned around. Families are out with flashlights to look for ghost crabs and lovers are out just walking like us.
I am so lucky to have this place and this man and everything that I have.
He will tell me that he loves me tonight. Here, on the beach, under the moonlight, with the waves lapping at the shore in the gentlest of breezes. It is nearly indescribably romantic.
I will kiss him when he tells me, and hug him gently, hold his hand and walk close to him.
I hope it will be enough.
Or perhaps I will slip and respond in kind.
Perhaps I will lose myself in the moonlight and in the afterglow of our morning together? Perhaps I will guide him to my cottage and spend all night making love to him, crossing two boundaries at the same time.
No. I will not. Even though it is one of the most beautiful nights on the beach that I can ever remember I will not destroy the magic of this man and this place and us together by breaking my own rules. My cottage is my cottage, my love is my love, and my lover is my lover. These are different things. It is a bargain he has accepted, a bargain that has given us this year together, with the promise of many more. I will not risk losing all those years to come by saying or doing anything that will change the deal.
Joe
She leaves tomorrow. With her family. There will be no extra week in August this year. She leaves tomorrow with her family. But she leaves me with a promise of a lighthouse long weekend this October, and a date for January 4, at 8 a.m., at her back steps.
She leaves tomorrow, as I know each time that we are together that she will leave. But if she did not leave, then she could not return, and I could not be alone.
Shannon
It is Thursday and I am waiting for Joe at the top of the lighthouse on Oak Island for our first lighthouse long weekend. I see him pull up in the parking lot and look around. I will him to look up at the lighthouse and when he does I wave, blow him a kiss, and wave him up.
He arrives at the top of the lighthouse out of breath from climbing the 180 steps.
I hug him and then stand looking out over the ocean with him. My mind races back to the hour after the first surf lesson when we climbed the lighthouse and kissed above the ocean.
I turn him to me, I kiss him. This is a passionate kiss. Not the warm friendly kiss like our first kiss in July. This kiss is electric, sending shock waves through us both. I gently push him back towards the door. I reach around him and close the door then back him all the way against the door. We are alone in the top of the lighthouse. I have planned this, paid for a “private viewing” on a day when the lighthouse is normally closed.
I kiss him and press hard against him with his back against the door. I feel that he feels the same way as I do. I cannot wait to release him, to satisfy him, and then to take him to the condo and have him satisfy me.
Before he can protest I have his pants around his ankles and I have him in my mouth and in my hands. He flares, shivers, then ruptures in the rapture at the top of the lighthouse.
“Every time you see a lighthouse I want you to feel that,” I say. “Now let’s go to the condo, because there’s something you can do for me...”
Joe
It is the first of our lighthouse visits and she has planned it meticulously, building in time for runs on the beach and visiting the lighthouse and spending afternoons in bed. We have run and showered and made love. Made love for hours like we were not able to during July when there was family everywhere, and when we only had the few hours when her sister would shepherd the entire family to one place or another.
There is just the two of us. No family, no surfers. But it is different than January on Topsail, or spring in Costa Rica. It is different from January when we spend our days on the winter time beach and in her empty house. We are alone in a new place, in a rented condo, with the belongings, including bicycles, of some other family. We have gone for our first bike ride together. She is chatty on the bike, unlike when we walk or run. Maybe she used to “ride bikes” with her sister or friends when she was a young and chatty girl.
Shannon
It is the last day of our first lighthouse weekend and we stand just beneath the black, white, and grey lighthouse on Oak Island. The lighthouse guards the mouth of the Cape Fear River and warns ships about the perils of Frying Pan Shoals. The Shoals are so dangerous that the lighthouse has the second most powerful beacon in the world. The lighthouse towers nearly one hundred and seventy feet above Oak Island. The beacon is so strong, so powerful, and generates so much heat that anyone approaching it has to wear protective clothing or risk being burnt instantly.
The lighthouse is divided into three parts. A bottom portion that is grey, a middle portion that is white, and a top portion that is black. The wind and the blowing sand and foam are so nearly constant that the colors were mixed into the concrete from which the lighthouse was constructed rather than being painted on.
It sits on the inland side of the coastal road, with a single strand of houses on the ocean front and a single strand on the inland side that is tidal marsh filled with birds and snakes and fish.
“It’s surplus,” I say.
“Surplus?”
“Yes. They don’t need it anymore. So the coast guard is giving it to the town.”
“They don’t need it?”
“That’s what they say. But they’re going to keep running the beacon.”
“They’re just giving it to the town?” Joe asks.
“Yes.”
“How come you know more about this than I do? I only live about 30 miles from here,” Joe says.
“I planned this trip, not you. So I did some research. The Coast Guard is giving them the tower and the town is going to keep it open and keep up the little park around it.”
“How can the town afford that?” Joe asks.
“I made a donation,” I say.
“Is that how you arranged the private tour?” Joe asks.
“Maybe,” I answer.
“Will people be able to climb it?” Joe asks.
“If they have a reservation,” I answer.
“Do we have a reservation?” Joe asks.
“Did you even need to ask?” I say.
I take his hand and lead him towards the tower. He carries a small backpack in which I have placed a blanket, a self-inflating air mattress, and a bottle of wine.
From one hundred and eighty feet up the ocean is a different thing. We are not so high that we have the God-like view from a plane, and we are not on the shore, so we are not part of the ocean, not at its interface. We are in a privileged place, where we can see to a far horizon, and yet know that we are still tiny in the face of this power.
We spend hours at the top. Hours when we make long slow love and then sit looking out over the water. We mark the time as the shadow of the lighthouse crosses from one side of the park, which I have named SJ Park, for Shannon and Joe, to the other side of the park.
When the shadow begins to fade because evening is upon us I dress slowly and deliberately. I savor the feeling of the clothes as they slide onto me. Our long weekend at the lighthouse is over and I am ready to return to my books and rocks and lab. To my home and to my family. I am ready to go.
“I will see you in January, at 8 a.m., on January 4, on my ocean side porch, rain or shine. Please bring coffee,” I say.
“I will see you then, and I will bring coffee,” he says.
I kiss him on the lips, on the cheek, and on the forehead, and then drive away.
Joe
&nbs
p; He accepts her leaving. Like he has accepted so many things in their first year. Her boundaries, her moods, her quietness, her need sometimes to control him, everything about her that makes her who she is. And everything about her that makes them what they are. He has made the deal, struck the bargain, and has received what he considers more than fair consideration. He understands the contract, understands that he loves her and that she does not love him. He begins to suspect that she will never love him, or that if she ever realizes that she does, that she will leave him. Even though she gives every appearance of love, acts like a woman in love, and reacts like a woman in love, she is pathologically opposed to the idea of being in love.
He accepts this.
As she drives away Joe pours a cup of coffee onto the black pavement in the now deserted parking lot. He follows her car with his eyes until it is out of sight.
Shannon
I am waiting on my back porch at 8 a.m. on January 4. I have been here since 7:30 because it is a perfectly calm and blessedly warm day here on the beach and I did not want to miss one second. Winter came early and hard to Ohio, and I am happy to escape it. Though, as always, I am sad to leave my family behind, sad to leave my books and rocks and data behind. I have brought a few books and data printouts with me this trip. To read on the dark nights, to catalogue, to research, to plot.
