by Gil McNeil
She stood on tiptoes to reach the box, took it down, set the cigars down on the counter. ‘Eight euros,’ she said, in English.
‘Thank you,’ he said, feeling absurdly grateful, not for the cigars, but for her two English words.
She shrugged, smiled a little also, and put two single euros in his palm. She did not touch him: her fingers touched the metal, the metal touched his hand. ‘You are from England?’ she said, and he nodded. ‘They all go home by now, I thought,’ she said. ‘After le weekend.’
‘I’m staying,’ he said. ‘Just for a day or so.’
‘I don’t know why,’ she said bluntly. ‘There is nothing to do around here.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I like to walk by the sea. It’s good to be away.’ To tell the truth to strangers.
‘Even stupid things are interesting when they are not yours,’ the woman said. ‘I guess that’s how it is. You probably think England is not so good. I would like to go.’
The door banged. A teenage girl, dyed black hair, orange lipstick. She tried to buy some cigarettes. The woman behind the counter said something that sounded like chut, tossed her head so her thick plait flipped over her shoulder, and the girl scuttled off. ‘You’ve never been?’ Dan asked.
‘No,’ the woman said. Her eyes were dark brown and there was a fan of lines at their corners where the skin was a little paler, just inside the thin creases. She had a smattering of freckles across the broad bridge of her nose. ‘Only over there,’ she gestured towards where the sea would be, through the back of the shop. ‘Ridiculous.’
Then there was nothing more to say. He could have said something, of course. Anything. Now the possibility of anything was no longer what it had been to him. ‘I need – a lighter,’ he said.
The woman took one from a thicket of them that stood beside the till. She held it up. ‘Le briquet,’ she said. She did not hand it over. He realised he was expected to repeat what she’d said.
‘Le briquet,’ he gave her. ‘Merci.’
She handed it over and he reached in his pocket for some change, but she shook her head. ‘De rien,’ she said. ‘You don’t smoke, do you?’
‘Not for a while.’
She nodded. He wished he had a hat; he would have liked to tip it to her, at least. He put his hand on the smooth brass knob of the door. ‘Attention,’ she said at his back, ‘if you walk at the sea. The tide comes in fast.’
He told Xanthe because Claire had gone. It was, he knew now, he knew at the time, he knew for all eternity, a very foolish thing to have done. Xanthe had trusted him; had suspected nothing, discovered nothing; and now that Claire had left she never would. But the secret – no, worse than the secret, the loss – sat in his heart like some horned beast that had climbed inside him, tearing at him from within, desperate to get out. What he’d swallowed when they’d first kissed, hidden beneath her tongue, an incubus. They’d met for lunch one afternoon in a cheap Indian restaurant near her office, by the Euston Road. She was quiet and reserved. She said it quickly, first thing, something to get over with. I’ve met someone else.
He just stopped himself from saying So? Or: But I live with someone else. He said nothing. He listened, though he did not hear, not really, only the noise his blood seemed to be making, sloshing around pointlessly in his head.
‘I like you,’ she’d said. ‘I like you a lot. But you . . .’
‘Yes.’ There was no case to make. Yet he had begun to feel: what? Entitled. It had nothing to do with Claire, nothing to do with Xanthe. It was his own life, and now it was being spoiled. Some opportunity had passed him by. He was angry. He had not been given a chance. He could have been asked to choose. In that instant, he imagined clearly the life he had never been offered: Stella’s warm little hand in his own, the idea so bright that Claire herself nearly vanished. Yet that had never been part of it. What had happened between them had been meant to be plain. Simple. And then she’d said: ‘It’s just . . .’
He didn’t speak into her pause. He waited.
‘You can’t do that – and not feel something.’ She wasn’t looking at him, she was looking at the table, dragging her finger through a drop of spilt water. It was only later he’d thought to wonder (over and over) of whom she spoke. Of him? Or perhaps she meant this other, that she felt for him now and could not betray him. It galled him, this latter thought, almost beyond repair. She’d kissed him when they’d parted; squeezed his fingers with her own. Keep in touch, she’d said. Yes, he’d said again, wondering if this was only the next lie.
So he went home. He continued. He cooked the dinner and kept himself a smooth surface, as if Xanthe could skate over him, happily. And she had not asked. She had not guessed. But one night she put her hand on the back of his neck, just for an instant, her palm just above the collar of his shirt, and he had said: ‘I’m sorry.’
She laughed. ‘Sorry for what?’
He had told her.
Did he think this would make it go away, kill it, the thing inside him, the beast? He must have. There were, he recalled, at least several seconds at the beginning of his narration when he felt a certain relief. It did not last.
Xanthe did not shout or weep. ‘You know,’ she said a few nights later, sitting again in the kitchen, each of them in front of a plate of untouched risotto which he had cooked like a machine, stirring and stirring as if some solution were hidden at the bottom of a cast-iron pan, ‘I don’t mind that you fucked her. I mind that you love her. And you know why I mind that?’ She looked straight at him. Her eyes were green with flecks of amber at the edges of the pupils; her brows were straight and thick. All of her was in there, he’d always thought, in the emphatic strokes of her eyebrows, clean as water in their darkness, certain and true. She had been twenty-four when they met, full of the fugitive swiftness of youth, like quicksilver; but there was more than that, there was the elemental solidity of her too, a mercurial density and strength. Eight years, they had been together; six years married. He wouldn’t have thought it was so long. Time had gone quickly. Time flies when you’re having fun. ‘I mind because you don’t know her. How could you love someone you don’t know? You have a crush on her, you fancy her, you want to—’ She stopped. ‘But love? And so I think, what does that say about you? Who are you, who can love what he doesn’t even know? Not anyone I want. Maybe no one I ever knew.’
He hadn’t thought that she wouldn’t care, or, indeed, that she might offer to heal him. But he could not forgive her (because he knew he could not forgive himself) the weight of her old-fashioned scorn. He had not told her about Stella. He was afraid to. After her rage, he knew what she might say: I could have a baby. We could have a baby now. But he did not want that baby. Some baby as yet unmade, previously unconsidered (they had their lives, their work, they were still young, or at least, Xanthe was), only now made present in the world to which he no longer belonged. Claire was not his secret now. Stella, the unknown Stella, he would keep.
After that first, great alteration of the pressure between them there was no dramatic split or fracture. His treasure dropped out of his grasp and he did not bend to catch it, perceiving it to be tarnished and changed. Even when Xanthe talked about moving out – she could go to her sister’s, to her big house in Clapham with its tenantless attic flat – the image of Claire, liquid, translucent, would float in front of his eyes. The dip at her collarbone, a mauve shadow, her head turned to the side on a cheap foam pillow, her eyes closed. The sole of her foot against the palm of his hand. The small of her back raised in yellow light from the street outside, her shoulders thrown forward, dark threads of hair at the nape of her neck, her soft belly with its faint dark line, Stella’s mark, and the silver streaks at her hips that made him think of a mermaid. He thought he tried to push these pictures away, but when they began to fade he realised he would rehearse them, over and over, trying to make them sharp again, trying to make them clear. But they dropped away, drowned in the water of time, blurring; and then Xanthe
began to drop away too. And so, he was alone.
*
When he awoke, it was dark. Was it the middle of the night? He must have fallen asleep in his clothes, then. The clock on the mirror-topped vanity across from him flashed its red eye: 5:30. In the morning? It couldn’t be. He had not slept for fifteen hours. No: he had slept for three hours, and it was 5:30 in the afternoon, pitch black because it was the middle of winter.
His back hurt, his legs hurt when he got out of the bed. He took his bones to the bathroom and leaned his head on the cool tiles while he pissed, the waterfall noise echoing in the tiny box of the room. Washed his hands, brushed his teeth again. Coat on again. Dinner: he should eat, he should eat something. Out the door again. It was amazing how life was like that, this series of repetitions, like it was all practice for something.
He turned left out of the hotel – the clerk now back at his place before the glowing rows of bottles – and down towards the sea. He would eat at the hotel, yes, but it was too early to eat. He could see the promenade at the end of the straight street: just a slice of it, but he could tell it was empty now, early on a Sunday evening; between the façades of two tall houses no one passed, no cyclists or rollerskaters. Even the sea was quieter: the tide must be out. He remembered the cigars in his pocket. He hadn’t smoked one yet. He pulled out the wooden box, flicked open the catch, pulled out the narrow brown cylinder and set it between his lips. Le briquet. Cupping his hands around the flame, his back curved, the bitter smoke dark in his mouth. He blew it out into the wind, and on the wind that blew back at him was the music of an organ.
He walked slowly, listening. It was easy to follow, the sound: just down the block, halfway between the hotel and the sea. One house with lit windows, and as he approached he slowed and then stood still, not in front, not directly, but just to the side of the big sash window, wide plates of glass with watery edges.
Panels of dark wood. A wooden table, also dark, and set, he saw, if he stood just on his toes, for two, with silver and pale linen mats. An arrangement of flowers on the table in a plain glass vase shaped like a pear. On one wall, a dark portrait, of a woman in black with a white kerchief or headdress on her head, her small stiff hands folded in her lap, her mouth a straight line. The frame gilt against the dark wood. And, against the far wall, the organ and a man with a straight back and silver hair before it, his body moving slightly as his hands, which Dan couldn’t see, passed over the keyboard. The little organ played lightly, sweetly, almost as if it were singing: it was not like a church organ. The notes passed through the glass and out to the street, out to Dan, who stood, not minding the cold, listening.
Then the man playing the organ stopped, turned his head: he had heard something, perhaps, that Dan had not. And then – Dan almost laughed – there was the woman, the woman from the newsagent’s, with her straightforward face and long red hair, carrying a tray into the panelled room. He could see a bottle of wine, two covered china dishes; she set them down on the table and the man at the organ looked at her. Dan could see his face now. He was older than the woman: old enough to be her father, and he might have been, or he might not. She had put the tray down now, both of them in profile to him, and he could see those little fans at the corners of her eyes, the web of lines spreading as she looked at the man, as they looked at each other. What passed between them made him take a step forward, as if it could be his too, as if there were no glass between this warm room and where he stood.
For a moment he wondered if he might have knocked. There was the door, painted black, a fat brass ring. What would the expression on her face have been? He stood in front of it and thought of it opened, his foot over the threshold, a quick embrace, as if he were visiting old friends, an entire life he did not know he had until he’d stood in this night, in this street, the wind from the sea down his collar, his feet at the edge of the thrown glow of sodium light.
Dan stepped away from the window and down towards the water. The little cigar was dead in his stiff hand; he threw it down into the gutter. At the promenade he did not turn, did not walk along it, but went down the steps that led to the beach because he could see that the tide was indeed out, the sea so far away he could have believed it had receded entirely, off the edge of the world. The sand was hard under the soles of his shoes, with hardly any give at all, though occasionally his step would splash in an eddy of water than had carved a hard-edged canyon through it.
It was then that he saw it again, or felt it. The same thing he’d felt this morning, sitting at the breakfast table in the hotel with croissant crumbs in his lap and cold coffee in front of him. The same sink in his belly, the drop, when he’d caught sight of – he stopped dead. He looked out. The moon was a sliver, a blink of light, giving nothing away. But out there, where there was water, shallow water, lapping against rock or wood or a wreck, some change in its shape and then this gaze that reached him. He would have to call it that. No eyes, but the sense of eyes. A dark shape, a head, not a shadow on the water, but something he could see and touch if he could reach it, if he could walk in the dark and leave behind what had gone before. This was the threshold, the door. He heard music again: the organ, of course, the faint thread of it reaching him. He put one foot in front of the other and kept walking on the hard sand, through the salt pools, out towards the rocks and the distant sea.
THE CALLING
ALLAN WEISBECKER
The Springs, Long Island, New York, 1922
MALCOLM STEWART HAD lost account of how long he’d been curled up under the seine net but it sure seemed like forever. His legs’d cramped up on him and no matter which way he adjusted himself, something – a cork float or a lead or a knot or something – would poke him in a way that hurt, especially when the wagon hit a rut in the road and the dory shifted in about five directions at once.
The twine was damp and frosty from overnight dew and its cold weight made Malcolm shiver. He wished he’d thought to wear his heavier sweater, but when you’re all warm in bed you tend to forget what it’s like outside before dawn in late October. He’d other things to think about, too, like the beating he was going to get when Papa found him. Malcolm hoped that’d be after they’d gone off and were outside the sand bar and Papa wouldn’t go back to the beach just to put him ashore.
Malcolm wanted to stretch his legs, maybe work the cramps loose, but Scun Bennett was sitting up in the bow chewing tobacco and Malcolm didn’t want to take the chance at being found, especially by Scun. Malcolm’d had a fight with Danny Boy Bennett, Scun’s nephew, the week before and’d kicked Danny Boy all over the schoolyard, making him cry in front of everybody, so Malcolm’d taken to avoiding the Bennett men, which wasn’t easy since there was about a million of them between Southampton and Montauk.
The Stewarts and Bennetts had never gotten along, never even married one another, not in over two hundred years, going on three hundred, of being neighbours, and Malcolm figured if Scun happened to find him he’d probably give Malcolm a kick in the head and claim it was an accident. (Malcolm also figured Scun was feeling the gaff about having to ride in the dory instead of up in the wagon, but it was Papa’s rig and Scun didn’t have a choice in the matter.) But Malcolm wished Scun’d quit farting every time they bounced, making Malcolm clinch his teeth so he wouldn’t laugh.
Malcolm heard Papa say Hoooo! and old Left Eye whinnied and pulled up; they must be at the Lester place. Through a fold in the seine Malcolm could see Scun sitting up on the bow thwart and even in the dim starlight made out the knot of chew in his cheek as he looked for the Lester brothers to come out of the house.
Malcolm heard hinges creak and a door slam, then the crunch of boots on the sand and broken clam and scallop shells on the Lesters’ front lawn. Old Left Eye snorted and Papa called out, ‘If you boys don’t pick ’em up and lay ’em down a little faster, the Edwards boys’ll catch all the fish in the damn ocean and then where will we be?’
Malcolm felt the dory shift and groan on the trailer as one of th
e brothers, probably Ted – he was younger than Bill by a good bit and’d have to ride in the back with Scun – climbed on up and when he threw his legs over the gunwale and down into the dory his left boot came down no more’n a foot from Malcolm’s face.
‘Mornin’, Scun.’ It was Ted all right.
Please don’t sit on the net, sit on the thwart, Malcolm thought, but it didn’t work. Ted sat right down on the seine and Malcolm thought he’d cry out from Ted’s weight. Ted shifted around and tried to make himself comfortable, and Malcolm’s breath slowly leaked out of him. Then Ted commenced bouncing up and down with his rear end, trying to make an indentation that would fit it. Each time Ted bounced Malcolm felt more air going out and a little moan along with it, which he couldn’t help, but neither Ted nor Scun heard him.
Finally Ted got up and sat back down on the midships thwart where he should have sat to start with. He said something about the twine being too damp and lumpy to sit on while Malcolm breathed in shallow gasps; he wondered if this was the way a striped bass felt, lying in the bottom of the dory with his mouth and gills moving as he drowned in the air.
Meanwhile, Papa’d said Yooo! and the wagon was moving again. It’d soon turn onto the highway, which was a lot smoother and’d someday be paved like it was up in Southampton, or at least that’s what everyone said, though Papa doubted it and so did Malcolm.
Malcolm’s breath was coming easier now but the cramps in his legs were even worse and the cold felt deeper, down in his bones. Then, suddenly, his teeth started chattering.
‘What in ’ell is that?’ It was Ted, who was only maybe four feet away, and his voice sounded like it was coming from inside Malcolm’s head, it was that loud and clear in the cool, windless morning.
‘What was what?’ Scun was further away, working his chew and spitting about every two seconds. He was a noisy fella in general and didn’t tend to pick up on things. But Ted, Ted paid attention to the goings-on around him.
