You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  I phoned Cornelia at the restaurant the next afternoon.

  “So what’s today’s special?”

  “Oh my God,” she said, “this grilled halibut for the past three days. It’s easy, but people are going nuts. I’m subbing on the grill station, so it’s like ‘Ordering two “buts,”’ ‘Ordering four “buts,”’ all night long. I’ve been in the weeds all week.”

  “You still like it?”

  “You know, kind of. There are complicating factors, as they say.”

  “As who says?”

  “Forget it. What’s up?”

  I took a deep breath. “I wanted to apologize, Cornelia.”

  “Over the phone. Okay.”

  “For what I did. For how I behaved.”

  “So it’s, like, you’re the kid, I’m the parent.”

  I laughed. “Sort of.”

  “Well, all right, but—”

  She stopped. I tried to hear what I should say next. Mostly there were restaurant sounds, men yelling in Spanish.

  “But what?”

  “Well, seriously, what were you thinking?”

  “I’m sorry, Cornelia.”

  “I know, but why do all that?”

  “I don’t know. The important thing is that it had nothing to do with you. It was my own fault, my own issues.”

  “Well, I mean that’s reassuring, or completely not. Honestly, Victor? It was fucked-up. Dan and me were totally freaked out. He said you took his necklace?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he doesn’t want it back. We’re actually not talking right now so much, but whatever, that’s like a whole other subject.”

  “I’m sorry, Cornelia. I was pretty messed up. I’ve been messed up, I think. I’d like to say I don’t remember what happened, but I do.”

  “Yeah, well, I saw the newspaper. Everyone’s seen it. Joel has it framed above the bar. It’s like the only thing anyone’s talking about around here. You’re totally famous now, you know.”

  She told me Joel had offered her a full-time position at Blue Sea through the fall, and she would probably accept. I congratulated her. I said I thought I’d be living on Cranberry for the foreseeable future, at least through my sabbatical, so she could stay in the house as long as she wanted. I told her Dan could live there, too, if she liked, assuming it was okay with her parents.

  She asked me if I’d heard her when she said they weren’t talking anymore.

  She said she was worried about me. She said she’d asked Joel to look out for me, and that Joel had told her I was fine, that Betsy would kick my ass if I stepped out of line.

  On CNN one evening, a woman in small-town New Mexico was interviewed about seeing a “ghost car” rip through town. Numerous residents had seen it, an old maroon Charger running on horses loud enough to wake the dead, drag-racing the main strip and through subdivisions, knocking over mailboxes, killing a dog. And never with a driver behind the wheel. There was video from a bank’s outdoor camera, but when the news segment zoomed in on the footage, the pixels showed no driver. Police twice had set up roadblocks, but hadn’t caught the beast. “The Headless Hoodlum,” the local media called it, and eyewitnesses had every possible theory: Navajo witchcraft; a remote-controlled vehicle from Area 51; teenagers crouching down with jury-rigged mirrors; an immigration scheme piloted by Mexican dwarves. People wanted the mystery solved. They wanted the truth. Mainly, they worried their dogs could be run over.

  I turned off the television and thought about Regina, as though the TV’s glow were a catalyst, and my on-switch responded: Regina projected into my thoughts and around the room, and me breathing quickly.

  I couldn’t contact her. I couldn’t picture contacting her. Knowing she must have seen the police report, my humiliation was too specific. Regina believing that whoever this lunatic had become, this monster, he’d been in her bed for months, preparing for his big day.

  So she’d wonder, Was I involved in that degeneration? Was I responsible somehow?

  They were selfish thoughts.

  Much worse, she’d think, what does it say about me that here’s the man I brought home, being arrested for such behavior?

  I brushed my teeth and remembered Regina’s brother, her fifteen other lovers, her professional accomplishments, and her age. My ego was still exaggerating. The true chagrin was more depressing: that she’d picked a bad apple. She’d pick a better one next time, and when Regina remembered me years later it would be for pissing in public.

  As would many around the island, I thought. People who knew my name or face would feel that they’d uncovered the truth, that the ghost car’s driver was merely defective.

  Lucy informed me over the phone that the news hadn’t spread very far. Turned out the Bar Harbor Times didn’t publish its police reports online. My indiscretion would be fodder for puppy cages for a few more weeks, and then would be gone.

  But still alive in memories, I thought. Ones people wouldn’t be quick to let go.

  I needed more to do than read science journals and watch television. Being away from work was making my skin crawl. If I was going to rot, at least I could be productive.

  In youth, you’re judged for talent. In middle age, for how much you’ve produced. Later years, for endurance, for stick-to-itiveness when the sky’s darkening. That, at least, was a quality I’d never lacked.

  I sat Betsy in the living room for an hour after lunch, switched on an old tape recorder, and got her running. She didn’t ask what it was for. Perhaps she’d been hoping someone would do this, finally her date with Charlie Rose. Over two days, I arranged twice more for interviews, going slowly so as not to tire her out. We talked about the Bar Harbor debutante season, her coed years, her travel to Japan and Chile after the war for Bill’s engineering projects. When Betsy finally asked what it was all for (“You’re not blackmailing me, are you, Victor?”), I declined to say much, excused myself, and snuck away to the study upstairs, and opened the admiral’s book.

  The final chapter, I decided, would be recorded if not artfully, at least accurately, and slid in on loose-leaf.

  But it was Joel, not Betsy, whom I spoke with most, and not about genealogy. We were constantly in touch about Betsy’s health, her insurance coverage, her preferred doctors, her radiology appointments. We’d talk late at night once Betsy was asleep and the last dinner service at Blue Sea was finished, and after a few conversations we started to talk less about Betsy and more about ourselves. Joel must have started it. Perhaps he had no one else to confide in, or he figured that with my recent scandal, I wasn’t one to judge. There were problems at the restaurant, new menus to nail down, staffing issues to fix, tax headaches that never eased. The burden of his addictions and trying to get to AA meetings on a steady basis. A proposal from well-heeled regulars to open a second Blue Sea in Bar Harbor kept him awake at night out of fear that his headaches would double. His girlfriend had recently dumped him.

  “I told her, ‘I’ve been straight with you from the beginning, I’m not the marrying kind.’ Jill said, if that restaurant’s not a wife, I’ve never seen one.”

  Our conversations weren’t unlike talks I’d had with Russell, but I found myself saying more, thinking or holding back less. I told Joel the whole story of what had happened on the boat. Eventually I told him about the antlers and Cornelia and Dan. “You are one perverted old man,” he said, but he laughed as he said it.

  I told him about Sara’s visitation and my efforts to resummon her, and he didn’t laugh. He didn’t say anything at all.

  One night Joel called with bad news: his sponsor in AA, the man who had gotten him sober in the first place, a surrogate father figure named Michael who was a retired pilot for Colgan Air, had gone into the hospital with a malignant glioma, a brain tumor.

  “Lucky me, he had the sense to go up to Bangor for evaluation. So I see Mom in the morning, Mike afternoons. Small miracles, right?”

  But Betsy remained our primary topic, our central concern. She’d s
tarted to slur her speech. In the span of two weeks, between me and Joel, we drove her to Eastern Maine Medical five times because she refused to stay overnight for observation. Several opinions we sought out concurred: the prognosis was grim. Betsy took it, though, as if someone were giving her a repair estimate on her car, one she could whittle down with negotiations. The small summer library on Cranberry had an Internet terminal, and once I’d shown Betsy how to use it, she began printing off reams of white papers for her appointments, equipping herself so that she could grandstand the doctors and expose their ignorance when it showed.

  “Honestly, she’s grinding me down,” Joel said over the phone. “You know what? I’m losing the will to compete with her. I wouldn’t bet on ten Marines against Mom right now.”

  Betsy made a show of trying to smoke in the hospital waiting room.

  None of us was strong enough, Betsy least of all. After the fifth trip to Bangor, she informed Joel she would never leave Little Cranberry again. Chemo would be too painful to redo. It was indescribable, she said, an inhuman procedure. Joel replied, in that case he’d move out to Cranberry, too, at least come out during the day and take the ferry back for the dinner service. I told him I thought this was a terrific idea.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, “I wasn’t looking for your okay.”

  “Joel, I realize that,” I said.

  The first day he came out, he showed up on Jake’s golf cart, Jake the owner of the harbor grill, affable but haughty. We’d never become friendly despite how many grilled cheese sandwiches I’d ordered, but Jake and Joel were laughing like brothers. When Betsy went out, the three of them may as well have been a family posing by the mailbox for a Christmas card.

  “Victor, what’s up,” Joel said, going by me through the doorway.

  He spent his days at the house helping Betsy plant a vegetable garden, the two of them hoeing and smoking side by side.

  “You’re raking all wrong. Who taught you how to garden?”

  “Mom, I do this for a living.”

  “You do what for a living? You cook dirt?”

  “You remember when I was out in California?”

  “You were out of it in California. Drugging, whoring, what have you.”

  “Actually, I was in charge of the restaurant garden. That was four times this size, easy. Dozens of tomatoes, fruit trees, good soil, too, none of this rocky shit—”

  “Joel, watch your mouth.”

  The more time we spent together, though, the better we got along, both me and Joel and us as a threesome: preparing lunch, arguing about Iraq. Joel was a studied neoconservative, an Internet addict in his free time. Betsy would attack his positions while he tried to explain to us what a blog was. After the first week, though, Joel withdrew: ignoring the garden, arguing with either of us over nothing as important as politics, shouting in Spanish over the phone at his cooks, disappearing for a day or two with no word to me or Betsy as to where he’d gone.

  One Wednesday afternoon, driving Joel down to the dock in the golf cart, I told him it was silly that he ride the ferry back each time.

  “Sure, look at the two of you, like you need company.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What?” He wiped his hand down his face. “You’re the son here, we both know it. Excuse me, the favored son.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Joel laughed bitterly. “Hey, listen, not that I don’t appreciate it. Trust me.”

  I asked Betsy that night if she thought Joel was drinking again. She said she assumed so, there’d been liquor in the air one morning but she hadn’t mentioned it, fearing she was just smelling her own breath.

  Our suspicions were confirmed by a phone call a few days later from the police, after Joel had parked his Explorer on top of a bench in Northeast Harbor. The police captain there was an old friend of Betsy’s and he’d let Joel off with a warning, presuming he spent the night at Betsy’s house and also replaced the bench.

  I took the ferry over in the morning. Joel got in the car, fetid and blotchy. He slammed the door and fixed his sunglasses on his nose, a pair of gold Gucci wraparounds some customer had left behind at Blue Sea. “So Mike died, if you’re curious,” he said, flipping down the visor for the mirror.

  “Your sponsor?”

  He stared straight ahead down the street.

  “Can we just go?”

  “Joel, I’m sorry,” I said.

  When we reached the house, Betsy was standing in the doorway.

  “Ooh, pretty glasses. Some girlfriend buy you those?”

  Joel didn’t reply, just went inside and around the corner.

  “Well, you look like a girl,” Betsy yelled. “Maybe you can pick up one of these lesbians around here.”

  That night I moved out of the guest bedroom and went down to the basement cot.

  Incorporating Betsy’s history into the family genealogy didn’t begin well. Grant proposals I knew, not family stories. But I wouldn’t give up. One morning while I was at my laptop, Joel and Betsy were outside arguing over repairs to the storm doors, and I picked up the phone. I didn’t hesitate. I called Regina’s lab, her director picked up, and I asked to be patched through. The conversation lasted thirty seconds. We made a date to meet a few days later.

  “So it’s true what I saw in the paper?”

  “Yes. Regrettably.”

  “Well, that’s insane,” Regina said. Her voice sounded shaky. “I know what crazy looks like, either this is a good facsimile—”

  “I will explain everything. As much as I can.”

  She was quiet. “Fine. But you don’t get to call me again afterward.”

  The next day, I had an accident in church. I’d started going, partly to see Ken for conversation, mainly because it was a quiet place to think. One moment I was kneeling fine, but when I tried to stand up, I fell over.

  Afterward, when I was forced to call out for help, I had a fight with Ken about going to see a doctor.

  “I’m a regular forty-seven-year-old.”

  “You’re a pain in the ass.”

  “I thought you were a man of God.”

  “Take up swimming, how about,” he said. “Works wonders for the elderly. Get yourself some water wings.”

  Regina met me, as scheduled, at the ferry landing Thursday afternoon. The dock in Northeast Harbor was full of people squinting from the sunlight, waiting to go out to the smaller islands with cardboard grocery boxes between their feet.

  Regina was sitting in her car with the engine running. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, hidden under a baseball cap. She wore blue jeans and a ribbed yellow tank top and flip-flops, the backs of which were caught in the cuffs of her pants.

  She smiled without pleasure as I got in the car.

  “So, status report. Catch me up. Do we go to the beach?”

  “How about just a drive,” I said.

  “Look, let’s get this out of the way. I am here to satisfy my curiosity. I will not be dragged back.”

  The light turned green. She focused on driving.

  “Regina,” I said, “I am ashamed about my behavior. About a lot of things. This isn’t easy.”

  “Like it is for me?”

  It was a sunny summer morning. We were just another couple out for a weekend drive, going to check out a yard sale with our coffee tumblers in the cup holders.

  “I’m not sorry about the antlers,” Regina said.

  I added hastily, “I would not expect you to be.”

  She laughed. I noticed that her hair was wet, as if she’d just gotten out of the shower.

  “I mean that you don’t have cause to be sorry. I’m sorry that I hurt you.”

  “You’re sorry you hurt me how? By fleeing my reading? The time you ripped a poster off my wall?”

  “None of it was your fault.”

  The wind died down as she turned off the main road onto Sargent Drive. We drove through the woods, coming out into sunshine.

  “
Well, that wasn’t something I was considering. I’m just shocked to see you. Driving with a public nuisance. I mean, I just want to be filled in, then I’ll drop you off.”

  “You saw the newspaper.”

  “I told you on the phone.”

  “Well,” I said, “the story’s pretty much all there.”

  “And now you’re out on Cranberry, lying low.”

  I was sweating through my undershirt. Her car was too small for me, forcing me to bend my legs so that my knees rested on the door, but I didn’t want to reach down and adjust the seat. We quickly went around a turn and I put a hand on Regina’s shoulder for balance and she jolted away.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sorry—”

  “Look, I’m pulling over.”

  Regina got out, but left the engine running. The inlet the road overlooked, Somes Sound, was supposedly the East Coast’s only fjord. Sara had told me that, adding it could be just a rumor, some island lore. A local legend. The road there was meandering and narrow, hugging the sea cliff like an Italian route for testing Ferraris.

  The day we got our new cars, Sara and I had raced from one end of the road to the other, at one point driving side by side, death defying. Sara won, not wearing her seat belt.

  “I heard about your swim, you know. The one after my reading.”

  “How?”

  “Your goddaughter. The girl who works at Blue Sea. The other night I was eating there, she remembered me from the time I stopped by your house. She told me all about it. The day a poem almost drowned you.” Regina laughed. “She said she thought I’d want to know since we were colleagues, that you were staying out on Cranberry until the coast was clear. Since we were colleagues.”

  There was a long silence. Regina took off her the cap and threw it into the car through the window. My embarrassment forced me to stare at Regina’s face. She was dignified, I was a mess. I leaned against a wooden barrier, and she sat looking up at me from a large, flat rock, blinking while she redid her ponytail with two hands, her elbows fanned out.