Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

by Aoibheann Sweeney

  “It’s very chaotic, isn’t it,” he said, tilting the whiskey to admire it, “when you are first in love.”

  “I guess,” I said. He smiled at me sympathetically and it occurred to me that he had had a few other drinks besides the one we were sharing.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t made this a very easy time for you,” he said, leaning back on the couch.

  I shrugged, by way of agreement. “I’m not really that easy myself,” I said.

  “I was there, you know, when your father and Arthur met,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “We used to go this bar together, and your father showed up alone one night. Everyone looked straight in those days but your father looked absolutely hopeless, and I dared Arthur to offer him a drink. Of course it helped that he was ridiculously good-looking, and then he had that accent, but anyway, Arthur just—well he just fell in love.” He looked over at me and I smiled uncomfortably, not sure where this was going.

  “You probably know, of course, that Arthur hired him,” he went on, “and they went around Europe together looking for ancient books. I suppose Arthur was no angel, but in any case we all knew your father—or thought we did. I mean it wasn’t like other men didn’t have families. But anyway, Arthur got sick, and when he died he gave your father that island of his—which was fine—and then suddenly your father just disappeared, with that secretary or whatever, and never said a word to us. Until this summer, when he decided it might be convenient for you to visit.”

  I put down my drink. “I’m sorry if my father hurt your feelings,” I said. A quiet, fierce loyalty had lit up inside me, as if he’d struck a match.

  He blinked at me in surprise, and I stood up, still holding the picture. It seemed right suddenly that I should have it. That secretary was my mother and that heartbroken man was my father. I loved them both so profoundly that it had taken me my life to recognize it.

  “I hope I haven’t offended you,” Robert said, looking up at me disingenuously from his place on the couch.

  “I appreciate your concern,” I said, smiling at him. My father’s sarcasm had rescued me at last. Before he could say another word I turned and walked out the door, flooded with rage.

  It was no wonder my father had disappeared. The whole world seemed full of hurt feelings and apologies, endless selfishness and explanations. Wasn’t there anything that anyone could understand about each other? Weren’t there some hurt feelings that mattered more? Or did it all matter just as much, interminably, wound after wound? I put the picture of my father down on my desk, looking at the sun all over him—his easy invulnerability, his confidence—and started to cry. I got into bed and curled up under the covers, crying for everything we’d lost, crying for everything I’d misunderstood, crying like I could swim in the sound of it, an ocean all around me.

  28

  When I woke in the morning I could smell the aftermath of the storm, the rain and leaves and sooty air, and I could think of nothing but seeing Ana again. My father’s picture was on the desk; his duffel bag was filled with all my clothes. I lay in the bed and listened to the fragile quiet inside, the distant rush and screech of the Sunday morning city, trying to think.

  Her family, of course, would be home on a Sunday morning. They would have breakfast together, I was sure, and she had said something about her mother occasionally dragging them all to church. I could call her, I thought, but her sister might answer, and what if she didn’t want to speak to me? I considered waiting until the next day, when I could catch her in the cart again, but I had no wish to speak to Robert, and eventually Nate would call, if he hadn’t already, or even come back to find me. In the end I decided to call from a pay phone near the institute once I’d left—I would ask if she could meet me somewhere, and if she said no, I would offer to come to her house.

  She told me later that when I walked outside that morning and closed the institute door behind me I looked as if I would stop for no one. She was sitting on a stoop two doors down, smoking, and I didn’t see her until I was right in front of her. She smiled when I stopped.

  “I was just about to call you,” I said, confused.

  “Yeah?” she said, leaning back to have a look at me.

  “Yeah,” I said, suddenly afraid to look back at her. “I’m sorry I was so weird last night.”

  “Me too,” she said. She sat forward and glanced down the street. “I think I was pissed about your stupid boyfriend,” she said. She looked up at me, squinting in the sun. “But I guess he’s pretty well taken care of now.”

  “I guess so,” I said, sheepish.

  She offered me a cigarette and when she lit it I sat down beside her. The sun felt good. “I was thinking maybe we could go for a drive,” she said.

  “I was thinking about going home,” I said.

  “To Maine?” She turned to me and her eyes met mine. “Yeah,” I said. I wanted to kiss her and I could tell she wanted to kiss me. We started to smile again. “I think you should come,” I said.

  “You do?” she said, grinning now.

  “Yeah,” I said, and I kissed her, and she kissed me back, and we were kissing in the sun. Afterward we both sat back. I forgot about my cigarette until she took a drag of hers.

  “How long’s the drive, anyway?” she said.

  When I told her she rolled her eyes. “I’ll take you up there,” she said, “if you promise you’ll come back.”

  “Okay,” I said, even happier.

  She told her mother that Maria was leaving town and had asked her to stay in her apartment; she called the garage and told them her mother was sick; we bought a map of the East Coast and two big cups of coffee and an hour later we were headed up I-95. We whizzed past all the signs for the towns I’d seen from the train on the way to Nate’s house; we went through Providence and then Boston, playing our music and smoking cigarettes in the anxious local traffic. The sun had set by the time we finally crossed the state line into Maine, and as we got farther from Portland the dark stretch of trees on either side of the highway grew deeper, the air cooler.

  “What do you do all day,” she asked, “when you live at the end of the earth?”

  I’d never been able to sustain much of a conversation about my father’s work—interest usually flagged the minute I explained that he was translating a book already written by a poet who had died two thousand years ago. But something about the dark, evergreen air reminded me of the year after Mr. Blackwell had left us, when my father and I were caught in Ovid’s spell. I told her how my father used to read to me; I told her how for a while I had lived in a world in which trees spoke and gods flew, and how I thought that if I waited long enough things would get marvelous like they did in the stories Ovid told, and become something else.

  “But the thing is they’re not really happy stories,” I said. “I mean when I think of them now I realize they’re really about people who can’t change, like my father, because they are too overwhelmed by the way they feel, and that’s why all the magic happens, because they can’t change, and something just explodes.”

  “But then aren’t they happier?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “I used to think so, but now I think maybe they stay the same. Or anyway, Ovid’s stories aren’t really about what it’s like to be changed. They’re about how hard it is before you change, when everything feels like it’s going to explode, or it has exploded, and you can’t put together any of the pieces.”

  “But isn’t that kind of like being in love?” Ana said.

  I looked over at her, startled, and she smiled at me, like she was watching me learn.

  I got us all the way into town though I’d never driven it, and straight to the dock, as if I’d meant to jump in the water. She stopped the van and we got out and stumbled into the predawn darkness. I walked to the end of the pier, the boats on the dock moving gently around us, alive like they are in the dark. The island was barely visible, a small, dark mass against the bigger islands.

&n
bsp; “It’s freezing,” she said, coming to stand beside me.

  I pulled her in, wrapping my arms around her with my chest against her back. “If you look,” I said, “you can see the island, a little darker against the sky.”

  “Are you going to swim?” she said, leaning back against me as I wrapped her tight again.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t really think that far ahead.”

  I kissed her on the cheek and she turned around and kissed me on the mouth. “Let’s go back to the van and think about it,” she said, taking my hand and turning me around.

  It was cold outside, I realized, as soon as we got back to the van, which was still warm from the heat we’d had on for the last few hours of the trip. I went into the back to get my sweaters out of my duffel bag and by the time I’d found them she had dozed off in the front seat. I tucked the sweaters on top of her and gave her a kiss and then put on my old jacket and sat in my own seat to watch the sky lighten. Before long the fishermen pulled into the parking lot at the breakwater. I watched them getting out of their trucks, carrying cups of coffee, coolers of food, talking as they pulled their boots from the front seats of their trucks, some of them already in their coveralls. They went down to the dock in twos and threes and before long they were motoring out into the channel in the half-dark, the water shimmering under their mast lights and shaking apart in their glittering wakes.

  Mr. Blackwell and some of the other fishermen kept old dinghies tied up on a slip at the gas dock, and once most of the boats were out I went down to see if Mr. Blackwell’s was there. It was the only one without a touch of rainwater in the bilge, the oars stowed neatly. One summer everyone had kept their oars stowed in their trucks, because a tourist had taken Bob Haskin’s boat and tipped it. But they’d put them back. It occurred to me that was the way people in Yvesport always were—stubbornly trusting, like they were daring you to change. And Mr. Blackwell wasn’t any different, I thought, as I went back up the metal ramp, gripping the cold, familiar railing. That was half the reason I loved him.

  Ana was still asleep, her face buried in the brown wool sweater I’d tucked around her shoulders. I kissed her and told her I would pick her up on the dock in an hour, and she looked confused.

  “I have to go over to the island to get the boat,” I explained.

  She looked at me, her face still soft with childish puzzlement, and I felt a surge of love sweeping through me like sadness. I kissed her again on her warm forehead, my eyes suddenly full of tears.

  “I’ll come back and get you,” I whispered, overwhelmed, but she was already hunkering back into her own warmth, mumbling assent.

  I had never rowed across, but Mr. Blackwell had done it as if it was nothing whenever he couldn’t use the Sylvia B. I could see the island now; already the sunrise had begun to pink through the trees around the cove, the sky above it opaque, a cloudy white, like the inside of an old quahog shell.

  I pushed myself away from the dock and the oarlocks rattled as I took my first awkward strokes, my shoulders stretching stiffly as the boat lurched forward and the water grasped at the oars. It was choppy once I got out of the harbor into the channel, and little waves slapped and shook the fragile old hull. My hands had begun to burn a little from the cold, but soon I’d passed the channel marker and knew I was more than halfway. I looked over my shoulder to mind the rocks as I rowed into the cove.

  Our house, up on the hill, looked smaller and quieter than I remembered. I had always thought of the path from the shore as a long uphill, with tall trees backing it in a dense protective wall. They were tall but scrappy with fall undergrowth, and the house hid shyly amongst them. The smoke of a newly lit fire puffed out of the crooked chimney. The porch my father and Mr. Blackwell had built was actually in tender proximity to the drop of the rocky beach and our modest pier, where the two boats were kept.

  I tied up the dinghy, feeling strangely exposed on the dock. I thought I saw my father’s shadow passing by a window as I started up the path, and I told myself it was just the sunlight moving with me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was intruding, and that somehow I didn’t belong. Maybe he is the one who has changed, I thought. Maybe he will be like this house, unexpectedly worn and small.

  But when he opened the door there he was: tall and stooped, his sweet white hair uncombed, the bottom of his sweater just coming unraveled.

  “I saw you rowing in,” he said, his eyes shining.

  I felt in a strange panic that he should close the door to keep the warmth from going out, and then suddenly I felt my own throat close with tears. I had had this feeling, from the day I left, that somehow he knew where I was, but of course he hadn’t—he hadn’t known where I was at all.

  I sort of rushed at him, and kissed the skin of his bare neck, pressed my face into his shoulder. All along I had been imagining him here, making himself dinner, writing at his desk, and here he was, just as I thought. He put his arms around me and held me tight, and I thought how very much I loved him, how maybe I had never loved him so much.

  When we finally let go, he blinked and cleared his throat. “I was just—making some coffee,” he said unsteadily, stepping back in his slippers to let me in.

  The house was full of everything I remembered, the ragged wall of manuscripts, the sea lavender I’d hung to dry two years earlier, the kettle I had scrubbed to shining before I left. I felt the creak of the floorboards under my feet, looked out the window at the water, as if it too was part of the house, part of us.

  He filled two mugs with coffee in the kitchen and took them out to the table with the sugar bowl, like I was a guest. “You’re drinking it black?” I asked him nervously, noticing he hadn’t added any cream to his.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, smiling. “There’ve been some big changes around here.” He pushed the sugar at me. “I’m out of milk, actually,” he said, wincing at his first sip.

  I laughed and touched the chips around the edge of my mug with my finger. We were both quiet.

  “You should have written,” he said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “I didn’t really plan—anything,” I said.

  He looked at me, and I tried to smile, but I was afraid I would cry again. “How are you liking the city?” he asked gently.

  I swallowed. “I like it,” I said, as if the fact that I would return was already a given. How had it come to seem so complicated?

  “I liked it myself,” he said. He was looking at me the way he always did, with perfect seriousness.

  I smiled at his certainty, not sure why it surprised me. I think I had always known he had loved New York, just as I had always known that there were times in his life when he had been happier. I felt as if I no longer knew what it was that I felt he had hidden from me—what I meant to ask him, what I didn’t already know.

  “I’m thinking of going to art school,” I announced, as if I’d suddenly grown up.

  He nodded. “I would imagine you’d have quite a few choices in the city.”

  “There are a few public ones, if you live there.”

  “You may have to find a way to earn a living,” he said, a little apologetically. “But it’s not a bad city for that, is it?”

  “No,” I said smiling. “I’m a pretty good typist, anyway.”

  “Were Walter and Robert kind enough?”

  I hesitated. “They were pretty busy.” I took a sip of my coffee. “I guess Robert was pretty jealous of you and Arthur,” I added boldly.

  My father looked up at me. I wished instantly that I could take it back, but he was already stung. It seemed as if I had simply dropped out of his vision. He looked down at the table, like he was searching through a fog.

  “I love you,” I said, suddenly.

  He looked back at me. “I know you do,” he said with a weary smile. “I love you too.”

  It is astonishing, in the end, how difficult it is to know the things you know. What I mean is that all I had discovered was everything
I knew all along. I don’t know when we’d ever told each other how much we loved each other, but suddenly I couldn’t see why I had ever doubted it. He took a sip of his coffee and for a minute—only a minute—I saw how astonishingly handsome he was. It was just long enough to take in his wide, dark eyes, the stone smoothness of his cheeks, his gently curved mouth—the man he had been all his life: that superior kind of beauty that never belongs. And then he was my father again, sitting across from me, holding on to his coffee mug as if it might slip off the table.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the MacDowell Colony, where this book started, and Yaddo, where it sputtered along. This book would never have been written without the support of many loyal friends and readers, including, among many others: Sydney Blair, Julie Crawford, Liza Darnton, Deborah Draving, Nell Eisenberg and Deborah Eisenberg, Matthew Engelke, Leslie Falk, Sophie Fels, Jane Fleming, Christina Kiely, Heather Love, David McCormick, Ana Moran, Brenna Munro, Rebecca Nash, Andrea Schaefer, Lara Shapiro, Hilary Steinetz, Maria Striar, Sarah Sze, Amy Williams, and finally, Inez Murray, who keeps me steady.