You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

“The first poem I’m going to read is actually something new. It’s called ‘Dive’:

  Someone drops a hat at a funeral

  And someone laughs. Two lovers, laughing,

  Invite four more to bed, a raft for diving,

  But I’m not there and neither are you.

  No, we’re at my place

  Where I’m the play, you see, or so I hoped

  The footlights showed

  How love became ordinary

  When it was not love, was rather

  Applause we gave each other

  For playing our parts at dusk,

  And knowing the right films to see.

  Whether you saw me, who knows,

  You left behind your ticket stub.

  See, I misplace my keys all the time.

  I wonder how we forgot about love,

  Yet I’m still brokenhearted

  About the Friday matinées.

  Take back your platform, diver.

  Your swimming raft from which

  To plummet solo, snorkel-less.

  I’ll find the lovers returned from the funeral,

  Ready to mourn, and I’ll be there

  Without you, too busy diving.”

  Out I slipped, past the scrum, less than a minute to the road and ten minutes to the ocean, in floral shorts from my trunk, plucked from an antler. The water was surprisingly warm. I enjoyed a meditative pace out to Rockefeller Island, then swam farther, pushing myself, locked in a rhythm despite the waves.

  I swam for twenty minutes, chopping my way toward Cranberry, before realizing how far I’d gone. I was somewhere halfway between Sutton and East Bunker Ledge, but I knew that from the map in my head, not the green blobs on the horizon, each alike.

  The water was freezing. I realized I was mostly numb. I floated on the chop, a white dot in a vast black pool.

  And I’ll be there

  Without you, too busy diving.

  Something brushed past my leg. I gasped and started to crawl back toward the beach.

  Then I panicked. Part of me as witness, part the swimmer. As if I were able to watch a home movie of myself panicking: breakers crashing over the swimmer’s head, swamping his mouth. I watched while he tried a side crawl, but after a few minutes his triceps ached. The water was so cold, his limbs were heavy. His teeth ached from clacking. The scissor-kick motion made no effective difference.

  This was how his mother used to swim, the swimmer remembered, her head kept above water to avoid mussing her hair.

  The swimmer couldn’t tell if he was any closer to shore. He crawled and forced himself to go slowly. The internal propulsion that had brought him out was no longer in his body. He counted to three hundred Mississippi. He promised he would do three hundred more.

  I’m closer, the swimmer thought, but by how much?

  He started up again, stopped, lowered his head, and treaded water, now numb inside his lungs, his lungs like metal-mesh bags. Center of a rimless sea, center of everything. This is an emergency now, the swimmer told himself, thinking it would give him confidence, but it made things worse. He could die. He could die. He crawled another three hundred seconds, backstroked three hundred seconds, and stopped again, the panic sweeping through him in cold arresting surges.

  Odd thoughts suggested shock settling in: that, true, Lucy’s antioxidants could thrash some serious axonal curling, but it was a dreadful wasting of precious reserves, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there also a tragic demise to consider, of the world’s most cultured, Chopin-listening, bow-tie-wearing neurons in those deli-thin hippocampal slices?

  See how the perfect human rests.

  How the perfect human lies down.

  See how he falls.

  The swimmer floated on his back. Floated like a dead man. He thought about Betsy Gardner, his dead wife’s aunt, discovering his body rolled up onto her cottage lawn, a corpse in the herbaceous border shrubs—oh, it made him laugh, a high-pitched hysterical laugh! How he found himself hilarious! And Regina, what ridiculous things she’d said. We forgot about love, yet I’m still brokenhearted about the Friday matinees. He never claimed to understand poetry, but was that what people nowadays called a poem?

  The ocean is black

  On the surface. Weird.

  Normally it’s see-through.

  But so cold. Arctic. Glacial.

  Victor suspects his vision

  Is creeping in.

  I began kicking, heading for land, feeling the cold encasing my legs. I added strokes, counting to one hundred this time, and then rolled onto my stomach and paddled before rolling onto my back again, back and forth so as not to wear myself out, for what felt like an hour until I was close to shore and I could half crawl, half surf up a break of slimy rocks. I tried standing, fell, and slammed my forearms, and I was too weak to resist when the black water swept me out and I was funneled a dozen feet back into the surf.

  The waves like they’re

  Winter preparing to laugh,

  Breathing me in.

  I flung myself forward, staggering, then another wave knocked me over and raked my shin against a boulder. I tried twice more to make land. It seemed ridiculous that there it was in front of me, just twenty-five feet away, but I couldn’t reach it, the break was too large and there were wooden towers to avoid. I vomited into the water. Another wave pushed me over. I tried to take a step but couldn’t get traction. I crouched low underwater and clawed for rocks and began to pull myself to shore, hunched over, scratching my stomach on barnacles.

  It wasn’t my position to walk, the ocean instructed, mine was to crawl.

  The swimmer vomited again when he was ashore. The shoreline was mainly rocks mottled with pink and black. Like Hunter’s Beach, was his last thought before he passed out.

  The sun was setting behind bluffs dotted with beach grass. A green lawn led up to a cedar-sided mansion with two wings. There was a flagpole, a children’s play set, and a dock big enough for a yacht.

  I swore I’d never swim again.

  The wind rapped metal grommets against the flagpole. The mansion was dark and empty, with the patio furniture under canvas wraps. I unlatched a gate and limped up the road. Two driveways farther on was an Episcopal church whose hanging sign I recognized. It seemed a miracle that I’d come ashore only a half-mile from the beach where my car was parked.

  Legs and hands and stomach and forearms were bleeding. I zombie-staggered down the road to the parking lot. Halfway home, I thought I was going to black out. When I arrived, a rusting green Saab was just leaving, driven by a shaggy-haired boy. It took me a moment to place him: the bartender from Blue Sea, the one with the necklace. He passed, deliberately not meeting my eyes.

  Cornelia was watching television. The living room smelled of marijuana. I collapsed by the picture window and Cornelia shrieked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Oh my God, you’re bleeding.”

  “Cornelia—”

  “I’ll call nine-one-one. You’re covered in blood!”

  “Cornelia, stop,” I shouted, and stood up, grabbing the window frame for support. “Go to the bathroom. There’s a first-aid kit under the sink. Bring that and a towel and the quilt from the bed. And get a cloth and some hot water.”

  Half an hour later, all was on the mend. My injuries were cleaned and dressed, I wore five layers of fleece, and Cornelia had turned on the gas fireplace and made me coffee. She left for the grocery store. Two hours later, I was awakened from a nap for dinner straight from Blue Sea’s menu: fried oysters, a blue-cheese-and-pear salad, and risotto with bacon, asparagus, and mushrooms. Cornelia watched me eat and brought me coffee when I finished. We didn’t talk. I felt her eyeing me. I guarded myself against giving any sign that she could open a line of questioning.

  “So who was the young man I saw pulling out?”

  Cornelia sighed. “That’s Dan. He’s the guy I was telling Betsy about.” She added a second later, “I meant to tell you, Betsy called.”

  “
What did she want?”

  “She said she wanted you to call her back ASAP.”

  I laughed and noticed my voice was weirdly high-pitched.

  “I’m sure she did.”

  “There’s another thing.” Cornelia sat down next to me with a plate of sliced apples and more coffee. “A woman stopped by for you.”

  “A woman?”

  “Like my age or so. A gray Civic. She had dark hair. Pretty. Said to let you know that Ramona stopped by—”

  “Regina?”

  “Whatever. She asked where you were and then who I was—”

  “What did you say?”

  “What? I said I was your goddaughter. Why?”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I mean, where did you say I was?”

  Cornelia started cleaning the kitchen. “I said I didn’t know. I said I’d give you the message. I mean, so there’s the message. Look, do you need anything else? If not, I need to go to work soon.”

  The bedroom was incredibly hot. I opened the windows and stripped off my sweaters. I had to change my bandages but couldn’t get the new ones to stick properly, so I left them on the floor. I thought about calling for Cornelia, then remembered she was gone. I took two Ambien, lay naked on top of the comforter, and fell asleep.

  When I awoke, the morning sun was hot, blazing through the bedroom windows. I must have slept fourteen hours. Somehow I’d gotten under the sheets. I felt jet-lagged. Cornelia was tanning in the backyard, wearing a white bikini and sunglasses, listening to her iPod. She was reading something.

  “The phone’s been ringing,” Cornelia shouted, compensating for the music in her ears. I was standing in the doorway, shielding my eyes.

  “What are you reading?”

  “I found this inside. It’s like the lost screenplay or something?”

  She was only a few pages in. She held up the cover page.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “What?” she shouted. She removed her headphones.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Upstairs?”

  “In my bedroom,” I said.

  She took off her sunglasses. “Dan checked on you last night. He said it was all over the floor, flung around the room. With your bandages. You were lying on the floor naked?”

  “Okay,” I said. I remained standing there in my underwear. Cornelia put her sunglasses back on.

  “Look, I’ll be honest, you’re weirding me out, Victor. I think you should get dressed. You got a little tweaked yesterday. Like, see a doctor, maybe?”

  “Cornelia,” I said. I stood there another few seconds.

  I went inside and watched her through the living room window. I made sandwiches and set them out on the kitchen island. An hour later, I was skimming through a magazine when Cornelia ran upstairs to her room. I called after her. She returned in her sweatshirt, jeans, and clogs, saying she’d forgotten she needed to be at work early.

  I found Sara’s screenplay in the grass. I ate my lunch beside it, still in my underwear, then went inside and brought out a bottle of wine. This would probably be the fourth time I’d read it in three days. But I didn’t remember reading it or flinging it about the night before.

  It takes an hour to read a screenplay.

  Now someone else knows, I thought.

  Cornelia returned home at midnight. From the floor in my music room I could hear her and the bartender laughing in the breezeway. They sounded stoned. It was funny, Dan had a high-pitched voice, especially as opposed to Cornelia’s tenor. They were speaking Dutch for all I understood. The music was lovely Eroica, eternity’s music.

  Cornelia appeared and turned down the volume.

  “Why are you on the floor? Are you drunk?”

  I held out the scotch bottle to make peace.

  “How was work?”

  “Uncle Victor, this is Dan.”

  “What’s up,” I said.

  “What’s up,” he said.

  “Tomorrow will work,” I said. “Look, I found pants.”

  I got to a squatting position and went upstairs. Someone turned off Beethoven. I swallowed some Ambien and squatted over the toilet. My scalp needed buzzing, it was starting to prickle around the crown, so I got out the clippers. Then my eyelids clamped shut.

  I undressed for bed and barely made it under the covers.

  Later—a few hours, maybe—I woke up to noises from downstairs that sounded like someone smashing cymbals.

  My eyelids felt like metal shutters as a result of the sleeping pills. I went out to the landing overlooking the living room. The house was dark, the walls were concave. I figured out the cymbals: the children were playing techno music loud enough to destroy my stereo. The bass was rattling the pottery. It made my organs vibrate.

  “Will someone please turn it down,” I screeched, with an old man’s voice, and grasped my head. I cried again just as uselessly. I was too tired to stand. I tried kneeling by the railing, but on the way down I banged my knee and crumpled over, pain bursting through my head. I shouted this time without words, a guttural sound invoking the invisibles, an ululation.

  The music stopped. Cornelia appeared in the living room, squinting up at the landing. I couldn’t get my legs to work, but managed to haul myself to a sitting position. I grabbed the railing to keep from falling over backward.

  “Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”

  They both wore hooded sweatshirts, Cornelia and her giant, like two druids peering up with metal-shutter faces.

  Kneel to the victor, I thought, then I blacked out.

  There was hardly any sunrise, just instant sun. Someone had tucked me in. The clock read seven-fifteen. After I yawned, I smelled rot off the back of my hand.

  The children were naked, asleep on the pullout couch. Dan’s mouth hung open and dripped saliva on a cushion. Cornelia lay on her back, her dreadlocks coiled under her head like a boat’s docking line. Her breasts were petite, her nipples very dark, almost purple. A tattooed butterfly fluttered next to the left aureole.

  I saw Sara’s screenplay through the music room door.

  Saw Sara arriving at LAX, saw her standing at the Hertz counter, saw her driving to West Hollywood, to the bungalow she’d found at the last minute. I saw the car dealerships on every corner and their huddles of repossessed Porsches. Saw the walled-off fortresses and the street-level billboards hawking stars. Saw Sara writing at someone else’s desk, in someone else’s house, harking back to Maine.

  Twice I lost her, three times she left me: to California, to death, and now to this.

  Dan’s starfish necklace lay on the coffee table. I hung it around my neck. It was a real starfish, with a piece of hemp cord cinched around the middle. On the table was a wadded-up piece of Kleenex. I held it to my nose, smelling the used condom inside. Dan rustled in his sleep and adjusted his arm, like an oar reaching out over water. Cornelia responded, turning to spoon against him. One of them farted.

  I dressed for work, grabbed my briefcase off the dining table, and tossed it in the trunk.

  It clattered against the antlers.

  Cornelia was snoring when I tiptoed back inside and delicately placed the rack above their heads. I collected the screenplay, drove down to the beach, and read the first thirty pages in my car.

  The movie was a thriller that began with a dinner date: a single, childless writer in her forties living in Bar Harbor is set up by her best friend with a widowed doctor newly arrived to the island. He’s perfect husband material, says the friend. Must be some reason he’s still on the shelf, the writer says. Still, she shows up for dinner, and waiting at the bar is an older Bruce Willis type: handsome, tall, and quietly projecting confidence. He tells her about his work as an infectious disease specialist. He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s self-deprecating. She can sense he’s good in bed, and her research that evening proves her out. They fall in love and marry three months later at Otter Cliffs. In her toast, the writer thanks her friend for tracking down the perfect husband, and in coas
tal Maine, no less.

  Unfortunately, the honeymoon’s cut short a few weeks later when an oddball cousin the writer met at the wedding, the one her husband referred to as his family’s black sheep, urges her to investigate the previous wife’s death. Wasn’t it odd, the cousin says, that she died from the same disease the doctor made his specialty?

  I left the car unlocked.

  The sky was pale. Down on the beach, the air was warm and tinged with wood smoke. The surface of the bay was perfectly flat out to the ocean. I swam at an even chop past Rockefeller Island, went another five minutes, stopped, and doggie-paddled. The clarity was exceptional. I took a deep breath, took another, and dived, striking the water, and released the air slowly as I pulled myself down, kicking for probably twenty feet until my lungs were empty and I stopped. I touched seaweed on the bottom, and the wildfire started. I focused my attention on listing the alphabet backward, though by the time I reached K, I couldn’t continue. I thrust my hands into the seaweed to find rocks. I tried holding on to whatever my hands could grasp, pulling up plant stalks and fistfuls of muck, but I needed air—the inferno was burning my body inside out.

  See the perfect human enter a park. He finds a peak to climb. He climbs for two years through winter blizzards, across rushing creeks in spring, an alpinist on an island full of humpbacked mountains, the summits mostly bare. A deserted island, but he prefers it that way, to be alone and unobserved. Mourning as the best way to meet nature, dust to dust. Perpetual mourning. Occasionally he hears sounds from town, the hum of cars like animals prowling around the base of a canyon, but he sees no one, not a single person on the trails.

  The perfect human climbs. He never tires. He is ceaseless in his state, where it never occurs to him that it should be any different.

  Why should it?

  The bay was full of sailboats. The closest to me was a sixty-foot cruiser with a kelly-green hull. A ladder hung off the stern near a small American flag with thirteen stars. I pulled myself aboard. Near the bow was an anchor and some loose chain. On a cabin door was a padlock someone had forgotten to latch. I laughed and quickly made myself a belt.