You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  I told him about the insomnia, and he wrote me a refill for my sleeping pills. We went through tests and screenings: skin check, prostate, blood sampling. By the end I received congratulations. “Better than good,” he said, and squeezed my arm. “You’re a regular forty-seven-year-old if I’ve seen one.”

  People with Alzheimer’s often saw a reverse process of aging as the disease progressed through its final stages. A terrifying sequence, as though one’s life reel were spinning backward, a person would lose in reverse the skills they’d gained as an infant: intelligibility, language, motor skills, the ability to swallow.

  The next morning, when the rain stopped and the sun broke through, I felt such contentment going outside that it drew my breath short. The diagnosis didn’t say I was going backward toward being spoon-fed, but that I was going forward, I was advancing in advanced age. At the gym I hit the bench press, rolled up my T-shirt sleeves to the shoulders, and swung barbells in front of the mirror. I wanted more life, more breath, more nimble mornings! Around the gym, in the halls on campus, in town, July gave everyone a lift. We were in peak season, and wasn’t this life as it should be? Strawberry fairs, summer chorals, fireworks over Frenchman’s Bay?

  What wonderful smells of cedar!

  Not that I had much time to visit any roadside fairs, pancake breakfasts, “Whittle-a-Warbler” workshops. But I noted the signs on the telephone poles and daydreamed. Every moment since New York had been dedicated to assembling a fail-safe grant application in case our first one fell through. Finally, one Thursday twilight, Lucy and I drove to the Bar Harbor FedEx office just before closing and we watched the courier load our packet into her truck and drive away, and we drove away ourselves, out for burritos to celebrate. The team was exhausted, but triumphant. We’d pulled through right on time and done our best. After three margaritas, I tapped Lucy’s shoulder—she was sitting next to me—and I said, “Lucy, why don’t WASPs attend orgies?”

  She said, “Do you know how many times you’ve told that joke?”

  A minute later I took her hand. I told her how much I’d always appreciated our collaboration, how proud I was to have her by my side. Then, before she could respond, an episode swam up. I felt it in the corners of my eyes. I squeezed my fists and pushed away from the table and excused myself. Lucy rejoined the group conversation. When I returned, she shushed me right away, smiling, patting my hand under the table, and her smile was partially one of forgiveness, but mostly pity, and perhaps a little embarrassment on my behalf.

  On the drive home I parked by Eagle Lake, hiked in through the dark, and pissed standing on a rock sticking out into the black water, the black mountains encircling me and a quarter-moon just rising. I don’t know that I’d ever felt more alive.

  For two weeks I hadn’t heard from Regina or seen her around campus. There weren’t any phone calls to confide poetry or discuss movies. Perhaps, separately, we’d come to the same conclusion. The first Monday after New York, I’d answered the e-mail about her book, citing the conference as why I hadn’t congratulated her sooner, but I didn’t receive a reply.

  Was this how affairs ended in the digital age? The electronic circuit cut in two, the connection severed via BlackBerry at a Starbucks?

  Early the next morning, despite a hangover, I shaved, clipped my hair, and drove to Seal Harbor for a swim. Trees along the road trapped sunlight in their branches, suspending it like pollen. Already the day was hot and the water temperature wasn’t too terrible. I reached Rockefeller Island and I was in such good spirits afterward, I drove down to Bass Harbor and bought two bags of fresh lobsters and handed them out at work. Everyone deserved a day off, and I spent mine working on Sara’s old garden, opening the windows so that Chopin could pour out of the music room: mazurkas hung across the sweet-smelling heat.

  Then it struck me around three, while I massaged my knees, that I wouldn’t be having many more days so peacefully alone.

  Cornelia’s plane was to land at eight-thirty.

  I went inside and listened to a news program on the radio without changing out of my gardening shorts. Someone in the Middle East was shelling someone else. A senator had been caught with his hand in the till. My mood caught a fever. What had I been thinking, inviting Cornelia to come stay? How would I benefit from a loudmouth vegan around the house? Cornelia was wonderful in small doses, but she could also be intolerable: self-righteous, coarse, selfish, pampered her entire life. Once, back when Sara was alive, she’d stayed with us for a week and Sara almost murdered her, just for leaving the bathroom a mess.

  I showered and read a little from Betsy’s genealogy book, a section on one of the Gardner ancestors participating in the Civil War, part of Joshua Chamberlain’s fighting volunteers. Driving over to Betsy’s an hour later for dinner, I passed the Asticou Inn, an old hotel the Gardners had originally founded. I stopped and picked up a rate card and studied the numbers while the bellhop eyed me from his post near the pay-phone cabinet. It wouldn’t be an inexpensive folly, I thought, if things with Cornelia didn’t work out.

  “I’m on the phone with Joel!” Aunt Betsy shouted when I pulled up. Somehow she’d stretched the cord outside from the dining room, so that she could converse from the swing. The light framed Betsy as though from Hollywood’s best kliegs: for one thing, she was dressed up, wearing a blue skirt and a heather-yellow sweater. Her lips were a dark prune color, matching the scarf she wore in lieu of her hat. For another, she was smiling ear to ear. “And take off that tie, you’re not eating,” she snarled as I walked inside, and she went back to her conversation, laughing like a girl.

  I waited in the living room under a Japanese painting of farmers, bordered in white birch. I wondered what Joel was saying that was so funny. Five minutes later, I was ordered upstairs, where I spent half an hour folding khaki trousers and faded cotton underwear.

  On Sunday, she explained, Joel would escort her to Little Cranberry, where she’d decided to repair for the rest of the season. I lugged a battered trunk down the stairs and went back for several hampers and two sacks of linens. So Joel chauffeurs while I play butler, I thought. It wasn’t much of a scenario for competition. I’d called Joel that afternoon, in fact, reaching him at the restaurant.

  “Joel, hi, it’s Victor. Victor Aaron.”

  “Victor, hey. How are things?”

  “Good, you?”

  “You know. So how’s Mother?”

  “Much the same. Smoking with her snorkel in.”

  “So, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Actually, I’m calling for a favor.”

  I explained about Cornelia, about her interests in cooking, the discussions she’d had with Russell, about looking to get her feet wet in the business.

  “She’s watched too much Food Network.”

  “Well, I think it’s a genuine case,” I said. “She’s passionate. She’s just a nice kid who loves to cook.”

  “Well, honestly, the trouble is, it’s a cutthroat business. Even when we’re booming, times are tough. Not that passion doesn’t count, of course.”

  “Of course. I was thinking, maybe, if you needed some help.”

  “What’s her résumé like?”

  “In a restaurant setting?”

  Joel turned away from the phone and shouted at someone in the background. A second later: “All right, hello? Tell you what, Victor, send her by and we’ll chat, maybe I can talk her out of it. It’s a pretty ugly business, for women, especially.”

  “Even if you just meet her, I think you’ll be impressed.”

  “Have her come by lunch tomorrow. We’ll see if she can pass a fiddlehead test.”

  “Joel, I appreciate it.”

  He laughed after a moment. “The question is, Does my mother know you’ve got a new girlfriend?”

  With Betsy’s last bag stowed, I slammed down the garage door. The sun was setting behind Cape Near, shooting light through a few rooms where the curtains weren’t drawn. One of which, I knew from stories,
was where Sara had written The Hook-Up, the yellow room with the slanted roof and the view of the bay.

  I hadn’t known exactly which room until Sara showed me, the last time we visited Betsy’s together for Christmas, the December before the accident, when Sara had returned from California. A snowstorm enclosed the island. After the turkey, Betsy said she needed to put her feet up, and passed out on the couch. Sara took my hand and led me upstairs. The wind off the ocean beat against the house. It was the first time we’d made love in months, it was intimate and playful and slow, until we lay holding each other under an old orange quilt.

  “Where did you go?” I remembered saying.

  Betsy appeared on the porch. Or she could have been standing there a full minute, staring at me, shading her eyes. We walked through to the terrace.

  “So when does the girl arrive?”

  “Tonight.”

  “It’s a bad idea. Are you sure?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I’m just asking, have you thought about it, Victor?”

  “Thought about what?”

  “About her. You haven’t had a woman in your house in ages. Trust me, I’d know.”

  “Well, don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

  “You listen to me, Dr. Aaron,” she said, laying her cane across her knees. The flagstones radiated heat. “You’ve never had children, and this one’s practically a teenager. These days they’re feral. You’ve seen the television.”

  “She’s an adult. She just graduated from college.”

  “She’s a woman and you’re a man.” Betsy slapped her cane with both hands. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Pass me the goddamn cigarettes.”

  “She’s my goddaughter.”

  “I don’t care if she’s Shirley Temple. You’ll want to observe yourself, Victor.”

  “Well, you don’t know her,” I snapped. The wind came into me suddenly. “Now I’m a dirty old man? What have I done every weekend except attend to your needs?”

  “Then tell me, why should I get to know her?”

  “Maybe you are jealous,” I said. I stood up and walked a little way down the lawn.

  “Horse crap,” Betsy shouted. “You’re a fool. You watch she doesn’t run you and that house in a week. I’ll be a hundred if she doesn’t.”

  The sunset was a B-movie star—cheap, pink, and gold. Over the hedge, Betsy’s closest neighbors were visible through their living room windows, parents and three children facing a television. I heard the sounds of a voluble spokesman trying to sell them a car.

  I had to hand it to Betsy, she could always get my mood back on track. So what if Cornelia was opinionated, if she was still forming her opinions? I’d spent too much time recently growing old.

  “For the good, though, Victor, at least now I’ll die knowing you’ll have some companionship when I’m gone.”

  “You’re not dying.”

  “We’re all dying, you can take that to the bank. Now, I’m famished. See how I dressed up? And not one compliment. I bought steamers. Least you could’ve done was wear a tie.”

  “You’re gorgeous,” I said.

  But Betsy was already clomping inside.

  I must have stayed too long at dinner because the airport parking lot was empty when I arrived. The employees inside were going home. My interrogator, the federal marshal who’d confiscated my gift for Russell, was putting on her coat, still wearing her sunglasses.

  Cornelia sat on the curb, her elbows between her knees, next to a tall purple backpack. She wore the same clothes as in New York: flip-flops, a billowing skirt, a silk tank top, and lots of necklaces and bracelets and glitter. When I parked, she didn’t look up from her book. On the cover were four women in tight jeans and high heels, giggling over cocktails.

  “Is that what they call chick lit?” I said.

  Cornelia jumped up and launched herself into my arms. My back ached when we embraced. A woman, I thought, not a girl.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said.

  “Hey, it’s hard out there for a cook. You should have seen me explain why I needed to pack so many knives. You’ve got glitter on your face,” Cornelia said, laughing, and brushed my cheeks with her fingers.

  We joined a stream of cars and RVs heading over to the island through the dark. Cornelia lowered her window. Steam was rolling off big kettles set up outside the fish shacks serving dinner. The tide was out and the mud flats were exposed, so the air smelled of seaweed, muck, and salt water. Satisfied, Cornelia fell back in her seat, propped up her bare feet on the dashboard and retied a silver ribbon, threaded with cowry shells, that kept her dreadlocks off her neck.

  I noticed she hadn’t buckled her seat belt. She looked at me at the same moment and twisted around to pull it across her chest.

  “Uncle Victor, I can’t tell you, thank you so much.”

  “So I called my friend Joel,” I said. “He says he’d be happy to talk to you tomorrow. If you can pass a fiddlehead test, maybe there’s a job in the kitchen.”

  “Get the fuck out.”

  “I’m driving.”

  “But I am, like, a fiddlehead guru.”

  “I told him you were, like, a fiddlehead guru.”

  “Oh my God!” she squealed.

  Right before my road, we passed a white tent set up in a church parking lot. In the summer months, the island supported dozens of stands selling berries, corn, and firewood, sometimes manure. (The manure stands always had signs saying “You Buy It, You Haul It.”) The guy manning the tent wore an orange hunting cap and a New England Patriots jacket and was reading a newspaper, a night owl burning a halogen lamp off his truck battery to snare the day’s last tourists. His table was cluttered with bones. The sign hanging off his tent said “ANTLERS, FRESH, 50 CLAMS.”

  I was reminded of the living room in Regina’s house where a similar rack mounted over the fireplace wore a Michigan cap.

  Cornelia stuck her hand out the window and gave him the finger.

  I laughed. “Are you still wearing your PETA button?”

  “Dude, whatever. But who wants to buy antlers anyway? It’s, like, so fucking arrogant. Whoever is paying for that doesn’t have the balls to hunt, they just get to hand over fifty bucks.”

  I drove slowly down the road past my neighbors: couples outside, gardening at twilight or grilling dinner, waving as we rolled past. At a neighborhood meeting the previous winter, we’d decided on a maximum speed limit of ten miles per hour. The breeze smelled of wood and charcoal smoke.

  “Do you remember,” I said, chuckling, “when you tried to set our neighbor’s dog free?”

  “It was chained to a tree!”

  Cornelia pulled herself up and sat on her knees, facing me with an elbow propped on the headrest. She was smiling. “Okay, this from someone who actually tortures animals for a living?”

  “Hold on. That’s not true.”

  “I mean, maybe I could respect a hunter. But you breed mice just to kill them,” she said, staring screws through my head. “You want to talk about man’s arrogance?”

  In high school, Cornelia had been a suffragist for lab rats. One of thousands, she participated in a letter-writing campaign that targeted prominent research scientists, including me. It ended up making headlines after one wacko, admittedly operating on his own, sent a letter bomb to a colleague of mine at Oregon State. Fortunately, the bomb didn’t explode, but Cornelia and I didn’t speak much that year.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” she said a moment later. “You’re being so generous, I’m totally grateful. But you know me, if you’re asking me to forsake my convictions—”

  “Cornelia, let’s get this straight.” I paused to reinforce my authority. I couldn’t let this go on all summer. “I don’t torture animals. I never have. As an institution, in fact, we take extraordinary measures not to harm them.”

  “Like not setting them free?”

  “We didn’t trap them on the savannah, Cornelia. These are mice that were
bred for this purpose. Simply by living, they save lives.”

  “Save human lives, you mean, which are more important than mice lives. A value we’re entitled to impose?”

  “Listen, Cornelia,” I said, my voice rising, “this issue is a lot more complicated than we have time for right now.”

  “Yeah, complicated, deeper than I’d understand, okay, fine,” she said, and that was that. She stared out the window. I sighed and parked in the driveway.

  Back when Sara was having a bad day, and I’d ask how she was, she’d always say, “Fine. I’m fine. How are things? Oh, things are nice, they’re fine, oh, thank you for asking.”

  Surely the Comfort Inn would be cheaper than the Asticou, I thought.

  “Look, Cornelia, for the sake of the summer, why don’t we just agree there are certain issues where we don’t see eye-to-eye—”

  “Okay, just stop. I’m totally low blood sugar, I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I just need to snack on something, I promise, and I’ll stop being a bitch.”

  Then I remembered my plan to grill steaks to celebrate her arrival. I’d neglected to remember Cornelia was a vegan. I didn’t even have salad supplies.

  There had to be a vegetarian restaurant open somewhere. This was Mount Desert Island, after all. The food would probably turn out to be made from hemp.

  To get us back on easier ground, backing out of the driveway, I asked if I could touch her dreadlocks. Apparently this was a hilarious question.