Glory smoked a joint and ate fruit after. Strawberries. She began to cook eggs even though no one wanted them. Edgar was enjoying the slip into someone else’s life. His existence was momentarily unencumbered. He had locked the door on his own house, leaving on the heels of his wedding-dressed wife—that was a puzzle he still had not solved—whom he knew would be able to care for the children for a few weeks. In order to walk out of his own life, Edgar had driven less than two miles where a beautiful woman had laid out curried chicken salad on a plate. In those two miles, the whole world had changed.
The eggs that Edgar had not wanted needed salt but he let it be. This was a small point, and simple, and it was almost pleasurable to stand beside a bad cook and kiss her without suggesting any changes. Breakfast would be over soon whether he enjoyed it or not. The woman would be warmer if he asked no questions.
The sea, that fathomless beauty, stood waiting for them. They could almost hear the wash of it.
—
Who was this person with whom Edgar was about to sail away? She was all yes, all open door. She seemed less woman than invention.
Glory’s money came from textiles and because she was a girl it never occurred to anyone that she would play any role except to inherit and spend. She was always putting some African through medical school, sending a check to a repressed ethnic minority in the Russian Caucasus, funding the election campaign of a native son who might have won if trees had votes instead of people. Glory had taken peyote in a hogan in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. She had slept in a school bus at a music festival in Santa Cruz beside a lover who was wearing nothing but an Indian headdress and a pair of tube socks. She had nearly died of malaria while counting the last surviving members of a species of miniature bat in Brazil.
The world’s idea for a young woman of a certain class was to show her wealth only in her own form: hair, nails, clothes. Otherwise, modesty was the way. Shush yourself down to the quiet only one man at a time can hear. Become a kind of silence that the man has to get so close to notice, close enough to feel like no one’s ever heard this particular whisper, and probably they haven’t. This violet-scented whisper is your girl, she’s never been anything until now. Watch her bloom before you.
Not Glory.
It was her husband who was the whimper. He was an apology, his entire being begging for forgiveness for the space he occupied on earth. The air he did not deserve to breathe, the soggy elastic of his skin uncomfortable in anything but temperate shade. They were matchmade by their parents who looked only at the numbers. Grades, height, account balances, companies owned by their fathers (rubber, shipping). Love was not discussed at any point. Glory wore the hideous tulle of her ancestors for the ceremony but she snuck out to change into a crocheted dress and flower crown before dinner and once she had been seen, it was too late to force her back into the gown. She got drunk. She told old women that they looked old and young women that they weren’t hiding their flaws as well as they thought they were.
Glory’s mother, at the sight of her daughter’s unraveling, retreated to the bathroom where she ate three skinless chicken breasts while she cried, sure that Glory would ruin both of their lives. Her mother carried, like a beloved pet, a fat slice of cake into the car when the awful night was over. Her husband said, “Is it possible that I’ve never seen you eat dessert before?” He seemed excited. He pinched her thigh. “Get a little meat on those bones.” At a red light, Glory’s mother took a glob of frosting and applied it like lipstick, then kissed him hard with a lot of tongue. A car pulled up behind them and she did not stop when the horn began to blow, did not stop when the other driver screeched around them. She only let up when her husband began to pull over and tried to find his way through the clasps of her dress. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t be crude. We’re on the street, Donald. Get your eyes on the road.” And she sat back in her seat as if she had never sugared her lips, never sugared his. She unrolled the window and threw the cake onto the street where it would be accepted with gratitude by a feral cat drowsy with unborn kittens.
Glory’s mother was never the same. Her only daughter had swiftly managed to undo all the social upkeep of her whole housewifely career. Glory’s mother spoke to her father only when others were around and at those times she feigned a happy marriage so well that Glory’s father went slowly crazy, believing and then disbelieving his own life in intermittent waves that left him seasick. He took up model airplanes, then real airplanes, then ballooning and, since money for him was plentiful, he built a hangar behind the summerhouse on the Vineyard and set to work on a life-size papier-mâché hot air balloon made from dollar bills. He gained a following over the years of similarly lonely men who would come from other cities and other states to discuss the mechanics and weight-bearing principles, the mix of flour and water. He meant to send the balloon up, knowing it would not last long, once the fire was lit. Knowing it would probably land in the sea where the saltwater would work as a solvent until the whole mass sank, soggy, to the bottom.
Glory’s mother, in fate’s usual torture, wanted what she did not want. She found a joint in Glory’s underwear drawer and smoked it to punish her daughter, fully expecting the evil drug to require her heroic rescue by a truckful of firemen breathing one after the other into her lungs, begging her to come to. She imagined the phone calls: emergency room to husband, husband to daughter, and what she saw in her mind was not a string of words and information flowing through those wires, but guilt, thirsty and bright as a weed. The surprise: she smoked and she felt good. She wanted to take her clothes off so she did. A bath sounded nice, and she took half an hour to make a peanut butter sandwich first, which she had never before realized was a perfect object, and she brought it upstairs to the bath and ate it and tasted it and ate it and tasted it and when she got thirsty she lowered her head into the bath and drank. Whatever her body was made of was exactly what it was supposed to be made of. On the same night, on the other side of town, Glory was also high in the bathtub only she had wine and slices of cold cantaloupe. It was the closest mother and daughter would ever be and they did not even know the moment had occurred.
After Glory’s wedding, she had to make decisions about the marital contract. She would consummate, because who knew, maybe the pallid skin concealed a workhorse of a lover (it did not); she would do some cooking because she liked to; she would certainly do her own cleaning because she did not believe in hiring poor people to get on their hands and knees for the sake of her hardwood (this decision meant that the house was always covered in a film of grey, as it turned out that Glory, who’d had a maid all her life, did not realize how long it took to dust a five-bedroom house); otherwise, John and Glory were two planets in the same orbit. They slept near but not close, ate the same thing for dinner but only one of them was enjoying the meal at a time. Glory liked the couscous and tabouli, John the sugared ham steaks.
They did both like to travel, so they went places with sand, hot springs, huts, natives in bright clothes, and they smoked weed and liked each other better. It was almost friendly. They ate mangos, they ate fried ants. Glory overpaid for things she did not even like, thinking of it as a donation, where John haggled hard for things he dearly wanted. They wore embroidered shirts and leather sandals, but John always changed into his loafers for the flight home. It felt like waking up from a good dream. She had understood the locals, she felt. She had seen, really seen, their baskets and their beadwork. She imagined disassembling her world and replacing it with something real.
—
By evening the boat was coming down from its dry dock and Edgar had made a list of needed supplies. Provisions, he called them. Water and beans and first aid and vegetables and suchlike. This was happier than Glory had seen him in the few days she had known him, his head over a list, checking. He fogged his glasses with his breath and polished them. Everything was
a blur of faded color until he replaced the lenses over his eyes.
Glory packed layers as instructed but she only took real care with the most underneath of these. Much lace was considered. She packed jean shorts and thin T-shirts and sundresses and a poncho. Mexico, she said to herself, and the word was all X, a spot marked.
Edgar intended to go home for clothes. He drove there, sat in the car out front and looked at the house, so familiar, so un-. He let the engine run, his hand on the key, about to turn it off. He needed a few more shirts and a better sweater, his slicker. He could have used the right pairs of shoes. The trouble, of course, was the wife who lived in that house. He thought of Fern on the bow of his boat, pole and line dangling. Occasionally, she had caught a tiny fish, big-eyed with surprise in the strange air. In the pictures, she was always smiling, her hair in a bandana. Glory was untested, possibly sick on the water, but Edgar wanted the trip enough that he was willing to risk her suffering. Edgar needed a good thing. He needed to go east, away from whatever fate awaited him. He needed the salt.
The lightless windows made him almost, almost sneak inside. Five minutes and he could be out again. It was not that he worried about being caught and stopped—he had already made the decision to wriggle free—but that some residue of the house, of the family, would stick to him and he would be unable to wash it off. He did not want their smell or their tears or their questions to join him on his journey.
Instead, Edgar went to the department store to buy everything new. The whole place was sweet with perfume and women reaching out to him with flowered bottles they swore his love would love. They had pale pink lips and sprayed-stiff hairdos. They could not know what journey he was preparing for but he resisted looking them in the eye anyway. Shoes, jacket, slicker, sweater, shirts, he kept repeating to himself as he navigated the sea of pretties.
“Think how good she will smell,” they said to him. “Later and so very, very close.”
—
They drove through Boston to the harbor and found the boat, one of several Edgar’s father kept there (they didn’t want to go all the way to the Vineyard where Edgar’s own boat was dry-docked for the winter). Edgar was fast with the lines. Glory had no place to stand, in the way no matter where she went. Eventually, she sat down cross-legged on the dock and watched her new man thread and pull. Glory read the boat’s name in dark blue: Ever Land. “So you’re not the only one in your family who doesn’t want to grow up,” she said. Edgar reached high and then ducked under the boom. He found himself a little angry with her for looking so right in the fancy harbor.
“You should know that I don’t really believe in money,” Edgar said. The yacht, the freshly bought clothes, the southerly escape, counted as evidence against his argument and Edgar knew this.
“You don’t believe that it exists or you don’t believe that it matters?” She said this like he was a highschooler in his first Philosophy class. He was quiet. He thought about his father, who was probably also standing on a dock, half-wet ropes in his hands. He would be dressed in whatever you were supposed to be dressed in that season, linens probably, and crisp white canvas shoes, while back inside the yacht club, Edgar’s mother would be midway through a story she was good at telling about the time the sleigh-horses lost the road in the snow and they spent Christmas Eve out in the woods while the maids waited, worried sick, the shine of a roast goose cooling on the table.
“In Chicago? A horse-drawn sleigh?” the astonished listener would ask.
“It’s an antique. From Lapland. We have a lot of land,” she would say, aiming for maximum jealousy. The people might have been all right, but the lives were deplorable. The spending, the charity events, the art collection, the jewelry. He thought of his future, the twin possibilities of struggle and riches.
“I don’t believe it matters,” he said. He had always wanted this to be true; now his life had offered him a chance to test it.
“That’s the most obvious thing in the world, sweetheart. But I don’t know anyone dumb or brave enough to give it up.” She stood to kiss him but they both remembered in time that they were in public and nothing was safe yet. They had to wait for the open ocean to touch in daylight.
Even though Edgar’s family had once been poor, poverty for Edgar was impossible to imagine. Money was both disgusting and ever-present. He hated it but he did not know how to live without it. The puritanical New Englanders around him in Cambridge were just as rich but spent very little, watched the accumulating numbers in the bank account. They saved, drove older cars, wore their clothes for twenty years, the children only seeing the spoils of their family’s wealth when someone died. To them, Edgar probably looked frivolous, garish, but Edgar would have explained his purchases differently—he thought of spending as getting rid of money. The things he acquired had been secondary. He had an expensive English car, but look at those thousands of dollars he had spread out into the winds. He had managed to turn his money back into metal, back into mineral. And anyway, he hated expensive things so owning them was a kind of punishment. To him, his parents were the frivolous ones—not only owning but enjoying their spoils. He disbelieved in everything they loved. Edgar’s intentions were entirely different from his parents’, though to someone on the outside, his life was nearly indistinguishable from theirs.
Like many of Edgar’s things, the sailboat that he and Glory would run away in had been custom-built by his father. It was wooden and her hull was painted bright red. She was built exactly like the boat of a famous seaman and family hero who had sailed alone around the world. She was thirty-six feet long, fourteen feet wide, four feet deep in the hold and weighed nine tons. These dimensions were known by everyone in the family, as important as everyone’s own height and weight. The deck was Georgia pine and the mast New Hampshire spruce.
Edgar’s father had thought of himself as a counterpart to the famous captain, the same spirit, only he had to stay home and have a job. The ship was a lien on his future, a holding place for the yearlong voyages he planned once he could pass the business on. Edgar’s mother was a fine sailor herself, kept pretty even in a gale, always found a way to have a proper supper on the table, and when they came into port, she was always the one to tell the tale so that the men with their cold gin laughed hardest. They were different from the other rich people in this way. They showed up at resorts, but they did so on their own airplane, flown the long way around, or by sea on their own vessel with no crew, or they rode horses for six days over the mountains first. The privilege of money, as Edgar’s parents saw it, was that you could get yourself into the great wild beauty—the thousand-meter-deep sea, the wide open West, an island inhabited mostly by dangerous animals, and feel alive and real—and then come over the crest of the hill and have someone meet you with a silver tray containing fresh fruit, aged scotch, a cold towel for your hands, and show you to a seat with a perfect view from which to tell the story of your adventure.
Edgar’s father would have been proud of his son and happy enough about the voyage to keep the affair a secret. Edgar had not told his father that he was sailing south exactly because his father would have slapped him on the back and offered advice about whether to take the Intracoastal or stay farther offshore for speed. But Edgar wanted to believe that this was a different kind of trip. He wanted to believe that this was not a holiday, though in fact he had made every decision exactly the way his parents would have. It made Edgar feel better that he would be very dirty soon, that his hair would be crisp, his clothes thick with salt with little freshwater to spare for cleaning.
—
For Glory, Cuba would have been ideal, revolution-wise. The island was shorthand for everything she believed in and she could almost picture Edgar wearing black, a beard coming along nicely, all worldly possessions relinquished. Glory would be tougher than most of the men and more serious. But she could tell Edgar was not as brave as she and so had eased down to Mexico. She did not reali
ze that even this was too much to ask. To Glory, Edgar had said, “When we get there, we’ll drink tequila and dance on a deserted beach and be so far away from home,” though the story was a lie. He expected that Glory really could live without anything except good lingerie, and she would have happily died for a cause. Edgar believed in the same things, he did. He shared the fantasy about being tan and possessionless, though he had never lived without.
The thought of possessions brought the thought of Fern, sitting alone at the table, hating and worrying about Edgar. She did not know where he was. No one did. He decided that he would go up to the harbormaster and call the house one more time before he sailed so that his family did not think he was dead. Only in the dimmest, smallest corner of himself did Edgar realize that Fern might not be there when he came back. Guilt snaked through him again, a hot zag. But he thought about his book, the life he had lived while writing it. The person he had grown into. His mind. No, he thought. I should be worth more to my wife than the house and the furniture. She is the unfaithful one.
The actual course Edgar had charted was to Bermuda. Bermuda, where he had been six times with his parents. Alluring and easy and safe Bermuda. Famous for powder sand and crisp shorts, every lawn ready for a game of croquet. Bermuda, where he had sat at the waves’ edge at age ten, memorized the feel of the warm wash and the pale pink sand in his leg hair and the sound of his mother’s voice in the distance, pausing when she took a sip of cold wine. Edgar wanted that again for the same reason everyone did—it was beautiful and comfortable. He would order freshly grilled lobster. He imagined a little hotel that looked like nothing on the outside, looked local and regular but inside someone had thought about comforts and there would be a wedge of balcony with a view of the sea, and a good place for Glory to stretch out her fine legs. This was not the journey the pair had discussed. Glory’s ending included a darker-skinned overthrow of an unjust government, nothing to eat but beans and plantains, maybe a beer when it was earned. She would learn to sleep in a hammock with a gun across her belly. Glory could not sail, though, and Edgar was the one with the charts. It would occur to him only later that the woman who would have loved this trip most in the world was Fern. She would have loved the small quarters of the boat, the length of the day with nothing to do but talk and fish and eat and swim, the way it would feel to spot land finally, to come ashore, to shower and eat, their bodies still tossing in remembered waves.
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 14
