You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  My hands were shaking.

  I cinched the chain around my waist and clicked the lock closed.

  Then I grabbed the anchor and almost dropped it from shock. It was a decoration. I’d thought it might weigh two hundred pounds, but it was as heavy as a crowbar. As a flute.

  I had to piss.

  I pulled off my trunks and kicked them overboard, opened the cabin door, and pissed down the chute, waving my penis around, urinating everywhere .

  Then it came back to me finally, the name of the movie Sara and I had seen that first night we met in New York: the fucking Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

  Darling, it’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a pleasant little French musical. There’s not much fucking involved.

  Go away.

  You just peed on someone’s boat. You’re naked with a starfish around your neck. Victor, you haven’t had your coffee yet. Allow me to play Poirot: You thought a toy anchor would pin you down?

  Spur-of-the-moment decision.

  Please, you’ve been working on this for weeks. How many sleeping pills did you obtain? And yet you left them in the glove compartment. So you could soberly attempt to drown yourself in a cove that’s twenty feet deep.

  I was going to—

  It’s barely sunrise. You’re standing on private property. You’re trespassing, you’re degenerating, but one thing you’re not is suicidal. Nice belt.

  I wasn’t the one who refused to wear a seat belt.

  Oh, don’t say this is about me. This is melodrama. Except in developing countries, melodrama is never by accident.

  Nice. Tell me about the screenplay.

  What about it? You found it. Congratulations.

  It’s the fifth card, the fifth change in direction.

  What? Says who?

  Not only am I a workaholic, I’m capable of homicide?

  Darling, slow the horses. First, it was a rough draft.

  You and Bruce weren’t able to get it into development in time.

  You really think it’s about you? About us?

  You wrote it, you tell me.

  Well, it’s not autobiographical, I’ll start with that.

  Sara, why couldn’t you pick up the phone?

  Why didn’t you come after me? You bought a ticket.

  I apologized a hundred times.

  You’re constantly apologizing, Victor. After a while, it sounds more wistful than sorry.

  What should I have done?

  Darling, what do I say? You could have flown out, bought me a steak, and made some big macho scene. What do you want me to tell you? Do you remember our marriage at the time?

  I called Mark. I found his number after I got into your computer. He has no idea.

  Trust me, where I’m standing, this is public knowledge. So what?

  I don’t have to give it to anyone. I could delete it tonight.

  Assuming you get off this boat. But fine, who cares? Victor, you’re not listening. Even if I were alive, it wouldn’t mean that much to me.

  Don’t give me that. A scientist in Bar Harbor, married to a writer—

  Did it occur to you I might have had other motivations?

  Try me.

  Frankly, I was just happy to be working again. I went out there with this fantasy of me as David Lynch. You know, writing my art-house opus. Oh, I wrote allegories out the wazoo, but nothing worked. Even I got confused. Each scene was like an extracted dead tooth. Then one morning, when I merely contemplated writing a thriller, something straight Hollywood, suddenly I couldn’t type fast enough. The pages wrote themselves.

  Sara, I need to know.

  What?

  Was there someone else?

  Victor, what do you think?

  Did Russell go out to California?

  Oh, darling, if he had, wouldn’t that fit your reduction so neatly.

  You were never vindictive.

  Among a hundred things you’ve chosen to forget.

  I remember you every day.

  But your memories aren’t true. The more you recall something, the more false it becomes, remember? You taught me that. What are the signs of Alzheimer’s? Memory loss, disorientation, poor judgment, problems with abstract thinking—

  Sara, how could you do it?

  You sided against me. You wiped out an enormous reserve of trust that night. Imagine Cornelia when she wakes up, penned in by antlers. Though I’ll admit that was charming, in a Russell-y sort of way.

  Oh, and that’s a good thing.

  You know, after you introduced us way back when, I always did have a slight crush on Russell.

  I don’t believe it.

  He’s vulnerable. He’s a mess. Girls go for that sort of thing, you know. We like to get our hands dirty.

  I never cheated on you.

  You think I did?

  I don’t know what to think.

  Listen to me: Neither of us cheated. We were loyal to a fault. What a perfect union.

  I always hated your sarcasm.

  Hey, at least I was there. At least I fought for us. What did you do? The fact that you sat on your hands was why we almost did separate.

  You don’t know what it’s like to be left behind.

  Really? Years ago you loved me, I was everything to you, and then what happened?

  You edited me out of my role.

  Or you couldn’t evolve within it.

  I loved you.

  And I you, darling. Now come on, cheer up, wave your penis around the boat again, show it off to the beachcombers. Maybe you can work up an erection for old times’ sake. Though I heard that’s not really your thing these days.

  Go away.

  Let’s talk about Regina.

  Sara, I can’t do this.

  Doctor-client privilege? What, she was your bereavement therapy?

  You don’t know her.

  I know her poetry, at least it’s better than Uncle Bill’s. And you think you’ve got a clue? A dancer and her impotent audience, e-mails and midnight phone calls, that’s a relationship?

  So we should have been more status quo, then you’d approve.

  You called it an affair because you liked sneaking around. Being kinky with no commitment. Deep down, you believed you were cheating on me.

  That’s a lie. The deception was hers, it was her wish from the start.

  But you fell for it. I’m dead, Victor. You think it’s easy being your belly dancer? Poor girl, trying to figure out what you wanted, putting on a tough face—

  She loves dancing.

  She loves you, Victor. Or she did. I think she’s over it by now, post windshield therapy. But imagine, trying to please a man who wants you so badly he won’t sleep with you?

  That’s not fair.

  What have you learned, Victor? What have you learned? For your clever little questions, what answers have you found?

  I’ve done my trials.

  Please, you’ve been dating a Ziegfeld dancer. And when that got too heavy, you imported a little girl as your nurse.

  You left me. You left me here.

  Of course. Me, Ben Lemery. Me, the best of your days, your fugitive, your amorous new body.

  How can you—

  What, darling?

  No one’s perfect.

  Says the man who never grieved.

  That’s insane. I have grieved more than anyone could possibly—

  No, you haven’t. It is the one thing you have not done. You’re like that case study. Me dying was your trauma, I was the hippocampus surgically removed from your life and you’ve refused to deal with the present ever since.

  You have no right.

  Well, tell that to the police.

  What?

  There’s a patrol car in the parking lot. Seriously. He’s saying something over the bullhorn.

  He says I’m trespassing. He says I have to leave.

  Maybe you should put on some shorts.

  What should I do?

  Get dressed? Victor, do what you want!
>
  What if I don’t know what I want?

  Do you remember why we were going to Italy?

  A fresh start.

  A new ending.

  Show me.

  Why did I return home from California?

  I don’t know. I never knew.

  Because I loved you.

  You loved me.

  Because what we’d done to each other wasn’t due to a lack of love. The point, darling, of that screenplay is that you never know what lurks beneath people, even when they’re perfect on paper. Well, we were different. We knew the depths of each other. It wasn’t about us, because I didn’t need it to be. I sat there at my desk thinking, our last act can still be written together.

  How many times have you seen The Perfect Human since I died?

  I don’t know.

  Liar, it’s a fifteen-minute film, you count everything. How many times have you identified with the man in the box?

  Twenty-three.

  And did you kill Ben Lemery?

  I don’t know.

  Again.

  How am I supposed to know? How can I possibly?

  Go back. You were a child, you were watching TV. Why should you have gotten up and gone over to his house?

  But I knew what he was planning. I didn’t tell anyone. I’m r esponsible.

  Fine, but you’ve never taken responsibility, have you? You’ve held on to this virtue of being unsure, unable to trust your memories when instead of grieving and getting over it, you’ve squatted in the middle, clutching your precious relativity, and now you’ve cracked. Real life isn’t relative, Victor, a chair is a fucking chair, we do things or we don’t, and either way there’s a cause. Did you kill him? Did you kill Ben?

  No.

  But when Cornelia brought her boyfriend home, weren’t you jealous? When Russell called, weren’t you afraid he’d reclaim your private chef, the daughter we never had?

  You left me.

  Like a dog, darling, you smelled her boyfriend off that tissue, the other male in your domain. And Russell, whom you despise—

  What?

  You hate everything about him, and still you’re full of envy, for Russell’s sins, for Cornelia’s whimsy, for Regina’s daring, for Lucy’s awareness, for Betsy’s tongue and Joel’s addictions. For life, you hate them, yet you wish more than anything to be right there alongside.

  Fine, it’s true.

  What you wanted from Regina and Cornelia, Victor, you wanted from spite. Against me for dying, just when you were being drawn back into life. So to drown, this would be your revenge against me, whom you hated, whom you hate.

  Yes.

  Then grieve, Victor. Grieve now.

  Sara, everything I regret—

  Grieve, Victor, for yourself.

  But I don’t know how.

  five

  Betsy’ s funeral was scheduled for a Wednesday morning, followed by a lunch buffet reception at Jordan Pond. The sunlight was white on the rocks, yellow on the water. Joel and I took the early ferry in together from Little Cranberry to Northeast Harbor, though we drove in separate cars from the parking lot: me in the Audi, Joel in Betsy’s Cutlass Ciera because he’d recently bent the front axle of his Explorer on public property.

  In the week before she died, when she overheard death making plans, Betsy told Joel and me exactly what she wanted for her memorial. More precisely, she let us know what she did not want: no obituary in the newspaper, no program announcement at a church.

  “If any of the snobs want to miss me, they can put a plaque up at the polo club: Betsy Gardner was not a member.”

  To be cremated and have her ashes buried next to Bill’s in the plot in Bar Harbor was Betsy’s wish, and at graveside to have a short testimonial read by Joel, followed by a reception at Jordan Pond, with floral arrangements of mountain laurel and red sweet peas. Only family would be invited, and only the members she liked: Joel, me, Sara’s sister, Miriam, and a few relatives from Bill’s side I’d never met.

  Miriam, who lived in Kansas City, sent us a foam cooler of frozen brisket. She said that she and her husband would come right away. She said she was glad to hear from me and hoped I was well, and that I might find a way to talk to God about my grief.

  For the funeral I wore a green tie Betsy had once given me for Christmas, with a pattern of whales having sex. Already a small crowd of people was milling around the entrance. The cemetery was small, overlooking Bar Harbor, surrounded by a pine forest and wild ferns. Joel was nowhere to be seen, though we’d left the ferry parking lot at the same time.

  The air was absolutely still. I was a little breathless when I arrived, my throat constricting. I couldn’t get out of the car. My blood seemed to get slower by the second. I avoided looking through the windshield and turned up the radio, some man yelling at me about immigration.

  I felt a hundred things flowing through me, with no sieve to catch them.

  Miriam stepped away from a stout pair of old women in hats and came over, opened the car door, and hugged me around the waist once I was standing. She looked like Sara only in the nose and eyes, the rest of her was petite and round, but still it was Sara who was standing in front of me.

  “I always run into you at funerals,” Miriam said, and patted my chest with both hands.

  I saw not Sara but Betsy in her face, I realized, which cheered me up, oddly. Miriam introduced me to her husband, a recent acquisition, Gary, the potbellied music instructor, a jazz saxophonist my age with a mustache, who nodded more than he spoke. Miriam was recounting a favorite story about Betsy when Joel arrived, parking Betsy’s car at the bottom of the cemetery.

  The fluorescent orange stripe on the driver’s-side door was brightly visible in the sun.

  Joel and I had spent a lot of time together in the preceding weeks. He was red faced and sweating, grizzled on the chin and jowls, wearing a wool blue blazer that didn’t fit him, carrying a bouquet of lilacs. I met him halfway to the gate and he squeezed my biceps but wouldn’t meet my eyes. He hitched up his khakis, passed me the flowers, and strode off to speak with the grave diggers, an old Mainer and a young Hispanic guy both wearing neckties tucked into their overalls.

  We slowly gathered around the burial site. Joel greeted everyone. He started by reading from a piece of notepaper, “My mother was not a religious person. She did not believe in God. She did not believe in a lot of things. She’d be laughing at us right now. My mother was an idea woman. A political person. My mother loved conversation, though she was not much of a ‘people person,’ either.”

  Joel stopped and his head jerked, as if he’d just woken up. The woods were full of buzzing cicadas. Miriam reached out to take Joel’s hand and began reciting the Lord’s Prayer. A number of us joined in. When we finished, Miriam looked around warmly, her small eyes twinkling as though she did this every weekend, and made a brief speech about Betsy meeting Saint Peter, seeing the “No Smoking” sign, and attempting to turn her walker around, but God needed a bridge partner and hauled her back.

  A woman to be remembered, said Miriam. A modern woman who knew the satisfaction of mental combat. A woman who loved Mount Desert Island. Loved people untrammeled by the fashions of the day, who were unafraid to appear foolish, and she let us know in her own particular way, never to be repeated, that she loved us.

  Back at the cars, Miriam told her husband that she’d be driving me and Joel to the reception. We slid into the backseat. “You boys look terrible,” Miriam said, staring in the rearview mirror. “You’d think somebody croaked.”

  It was the day after my boat incident that I’d moved out to Little Cranberry for what remained of the summer. I was lucky the Rockefellers decided not to press charges, had been Betsy’s opinion, and the Bar Harbor police captain agreed. “You’re luckier than most of them,” he told me when I was released, and I assumed he was referring to the island’s other flashers. “Family doesn’t like the newspapers. Now, if it was up to me—”

  He was the same officer w
ho’d been called out to the scene, the one who responded after a grandfather Rockefeller reported a nudist on his sailboat. He and his grandchildren had been looking for hawks through a telescope, and spotted me instead.

  The captain followed me out to my taxi. “Must be pretty high standards up there on campus.” He was squinting at me, though it was dark outside.

  Back at the beach, I got the pills out of the car and chucked them in a dumpster, along with the starfish. It was nine p.m. by the time I returned home. I found my front door locked and Sara’s BMW gone. Inside, the living room was tidy, as if the maid had come through. I went up to Cornelia’s room, expecting it to be empty, but her purple backpack was still in the corner.

  I sat on her bed and massaged my legs. I was sweating through my clothes. I had no idea what the right thing was to do, just probably the opposite of whatever my gut said, considering how well it had guided me recently.

  A rock roach crawled in from under the door.

  I packed a bag and drove straight to the Cranberry ferry. The lot was deserted. I parked and cut the engine and prepared to wait for the next boat, a seven-hour wait. A motel up the road was open, the occasional minivan buzzing around; otherwise the area was dark and empty.

  I rolled down the windows. The air was cold and salty. My scalp tingled.

  And what Sara said came back to me slowly. There in jail, there sitting on Cornelia’s bed, it had been with me all day, but I couldn’t see her. I tried to see her and closed my eyes, but my memories were whitewashed. I tried to sleep with the driver’s seat cranked flat, but mostly I cried. I called her under my breath and remembered her shoe size. Her long fingers. I remembered when I held the box with Sara’s ashes over a stream near the house, how long the moment lasted until I tipped it over and then how quickly it was done. I remembered how happiness on her face was a look of sharing. How much I loved her. I remembered with painful clarity, with the words piped into the car, the moment when I’d asked Sara what she knew about writing screenplays.