At twenty-two he swam exactly one stroke. It wasn’t the crawl or the breaststroke; it was some hybrid in which his arms and legs moved as completely different systems whose only unity was the goal of keeping his head above water. His hands dug for purchase, his legs abruptly sucked together, and his feet landed a firm wallop on the water every few seconds. Maida teased him for it.
She had learned to swim before she could read. Her strokes were beautiful, effortless shearings of the lake’s surface, and she treaded water in that efficient way that barely betrayed any movement beneath the surface. In the summers a floating dock was anchored some twenty yards from the shore and she could pull herself up onto it without using the ladder. When she had sunned herself there a little while, some urge would propel her back into the lake, and she would begin swimming toward the opposite shore, sometimes catching up to a canoe if the paddler was intermittent in his efforts. She always turned back before she lost sight of their little beach.
That day, after they had left Ed and Gayle, he asked her if she wanted company on her swim. “Do what you like,” she said and then plunged beneath the lake’s coppery sheen. But she was not as indifferent as she made herself out to be, and when he paddled haphazardly after her she tried to help him develop his stroke.
It was pure humiliation and torture, striving to succeed at something he knew he would never experience at the level of success other people did. There was simply no getting back those childhood years when the limbs and the brain were on closer terms. When Maida told him he was tiring himself unnecessarily and would never stop being slow unless he put his face in the water, he hated her for having no idea how difficult this would be for him. He inhaled a mouthful of water and it came back out his nose, painfully. He began to cough. She grabbed him and towed him toward the floating dock, deepening his shame.
But once they were sitting on the floating dock together with their splayed knees brushing occasionally against each other’s, he recalled how she had tried to help him. The same words that in the water had seemed to him lacking in sympathy and patience now struck him as generous offerings. Her actions, too, had been generous—she had acted to save him from harm. At any moment she could have swum off by herself, leaving him behind. Instead she had stayed beside him and accepted his limitations as her own.
It was early evening. The lake floated beneath a sky not yet drained of light. Children were dragging rafts out of the water and tying them up to piers. People were heading home. There was a great settling all around them. The water deepened to a mossy darkness as fragrant as soil, and the trees bowed over this darkness, releasing the last of the light from their crowns. The earth’s surrender of its color quieted something that Gene hadn’t realized had previously been loud, making a space in which his own body was more alive to him. He felt the electricity of their two bodies in proximity, an immense feeling born of the tiniest motion, the way his skin leaned toward hers in the gap between their touch and sometimes found nothing but air. There was a physical sensation, a type of pain, associated with not touching. At first it was no more than a minor discomfort, akin to a tickle. But as they sat there the sensation deepened, until it manifested itself as a physical pain in his chest. He saw that his body had become an object of hers and would always be an object of hers as long as she was near. It was then he understood he loved her. He had skipped all of the steps: dates, phone calls, a first kiss. He knew her character, and he was as certain of her good qualities as he was of his own deficits. He was already in love.
In many ways, that period between when he knew he loved Maida and when he told her was the most thrilling, excruciating time in his life. For two weeks, whenever he saw her his whole body entered a harrowing state of wakefulness. Everything she did he interpreted in relation to him, an exalted state of suffering that took the form of a complete disregard for himself except as an extension of her, which also had the strange effect of at once increasing and diminishing his sense of himself. He was everywhere and everything when she acknowledged him with a gesture, and he was nowhere and nothing when she failed to glance in his direction.
He knew he would have to tell her before long—the enormity of the secret was too great. The moment when the secret passed from him to her would transform them both. But love was not the sort of thing you blurted out one day over oatmeal. Whenever he pictured telling her, they were lying side by side on the floating dock. Her mouth would be a few inches from his, and it would take all of his will to speak his part looking into her eyes instead of at her mouth, which he desperately wanted to kiss. Their bodies would be nearly touching, and when the wind picked up and she shuddered, he would pull her into his arms and cover her body with his. They would swim back together feeling that something between them had been decided.
The date of their departure from White Pine Camp grew near and still he was waiting for the right time, the right moment. Something had changed between Ed and Gayle—they were more droll and affectionate with each other—and this development, while generally improving the atmosphere in the cabin, limited Gene’s opportunity to be alone with Maida. Soon there was only one day left. That settled it—their last day would have to be the day. Except that on that day Maida developed a heat rash on her arms and her legs. She scratched at it and complained about it, declaring it repellent and ugly, in addition to itchy. When Ed told her she was being silly, she snapped, “I’m being silly?” Gayle offered to go into town for some ointment but Maida refused, appearing to draw strength from her crankiness, as if to be justified in her misery was better than experiencing relief. Then whatever magic her obstinacy had worked for her dissipated, and she was left as despondent as before. When Gene offered to bring her a glass of orange juice she pantomimed retching, and when he lay down next to her to rub her back she grew silent and morose.
Ed said they should leave her alone. It was their last day and if she wanted to spend it in agony that was her choice, but the rest of them didn’t have to go along with it. He, for one, was going for a swim.
“Leave me,” Maida said to Gene, after Ed and Gayle were gone. “I’d do the same.” But he stayed with her, and she slept fitfully on the couch. Once it sounded like she was crying. He lay on the floor next to her, eye level with a box of Scrabble taped at the corners and a thick book called Trees of the Northeast tabbed like a dictionary, and as he listened to her sad little whimpering, he was filled with an unfamiliar fear. It was the fear that whatever ailed her wasn’t in his capacity to heal. It was the fear that as long as she suffered from some unnamable pain, her unhappiness would be his.
He pushed aside the thought, recognizing it as yet another form of delay. He was looking for a reason not to tell her, for a way to make the things he felt seem less real than the things other people felt. So say it, he told himself. First thing when she opens her eyes—just say it.
Maida sat up, groggy and rubbing her eyes. Gene blurted the words, and for a moment, her hands stopped moving. She held her fists over her eyes, then lowered them. “Really?” she said.
They didn’t talk about it, because just then Ed and Gayle, hair damp from the lake, returned.
“Everything all right in here?” said Ed, adopting the stern but loving manner of a father who hoped to find that his cantankerous children had made peace in his absence. “Good, good,” he said, without waiting for a response. He bent over and kissed each of them on the head, Gene first, surprisingly, and then Maida.
They left White Pine Camp the next day and for Gene a period of interminable uncertainty ensued. He didn’t see Maida for days and yet she was more present in his mind than if she was chained to his wrist. All day long his body did certain things, while his mind lived an independent life: Will she or won’t she? In his dreams at night, he didn’t have a body. He was just an awareness flying over the entire Earth, a watery expanse of blues and greens so gorgeous it would make you weep. But wherever he looked there was no place to land, nothing solid, so he had no choice but to continue to fly.
In the morning, he felt more tired than before he’d gone to bed.
At first it seemed she had to give him an answer, that he had left her with a question. But as the days passed and he didn’t hear from her, it occurred to him that maybe she didn’t know she was supposed to answer him. Maybe she thought that if he desired her enough, he would present himself again. He didn’t know how it worked.
He went to Ed’s and found the apartment in a sad state of barrenness. The reams of books had been culled. One small box had been sent on to Michigan and the rest were going to Ed’s younger brother, who was starting at Bowdoin in the fall. The large-format camera had been traded in for something smaller, the flash umbrella put out on the street. Most of the paintings had been given away and the lone remaining chair had a broken spindle. He and Ed stood in front of the small table in the kitchen. In its center sat a cracked clay bowl containing a handful of pistachios.
“I told Maida I love her.”
“Pistachio?” Ed held out the bowl.
“No, thanks. I told Maida I love her,” he said again.
Ed took a pistachio for himself and set the bowl back down. “How did that go?”
“She didn’t say much.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Really?’”
“Better that than nothing at all.”
There was a silence in which all that could be heard was the nut cracking between Ed’s teeth.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Gene said.
“Have you talked to her?”
“When would I have talked to her? I only see her when she’s with you.”
“You call her, Gene. You call her. She probably needs some time to sort things out in her head.”
“But if she loves me she would have said it when I said it,” Gene said.
“Look, you don’t want a parrot,” Ed said. He tossed a pistachio into the air and caught it in his mouth. “Don’t expect her to say it back right away, unless all you’re looking for is a girl who’s going to affirm everything you say.”
“But Gayle affirms.”
“That’s different. I don’t need the affirmation, so I can ignore it.” He patted Gene on the arm. “Don’t worry, Maida will show up sooner or later. They usually come back, even when they don’t intend to.”
“If you know something,” Gene said, “you’ve got to tell me. You’ve got to. If I knew something about Gayle I would never keep it from you. Like if Gayle was crazy about another guy I would tell you right away.”
“That would certainly be an interesting twist. If Gayle was crazy about someone else but engaged to me—”
“Of course she isn’t! Wait—are you…?”
“We’re getting married,” Ed said, with no particular inflection.
For a second, Gene felt that something had been stolen from him.
“It was brewing all summer,” Ed said. “You knew that.”
Gene wasn’t sure that he did. “But how did it happen…?” he said. “What did you say to her? What did she say?”
“It started off the same way as usual,” Ed said. “With a fight. And I was getting so bored of fighting—I really didn’t have the passion for it anymore—that one day I turned to her and said, ‘If you like me so much why don’t you come live with me in Michigan.’ And she says, ‘Are you asking me to marry you, Ed Donnelly?’ And I say, ‘I think we both know what I said.’ And she starts to cry and says, ‘But I can’t live with you unless we’re married! You know that!’ And I say, ‘Nothing in the world is preventing you from moving to Michigan. The Germans have been doing it for years.’ And she says, ‘You know I can’t. If it was up to me I would do it tomorrow, but you know my family—you know they need a piece of paper.’ ‘All you need is a piece of paper and you’ll do it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Fine?’ ‘Yes, we’ll get a piece of paper.’ ‘Really?’ ‘We’ll get ten pieces of paper if you like.’ ‘Oh, don’t make a joke of it, not now, not when no one has ever asked me to marry them before!’ Then she jumps on me and throws her arms around my neck and heaves once like she’s going to sob, and just as I begin to think What have I done? she perks up and then it’s over and we’re not arguing anymore.” He explained they would have the ceremony at City Hall that week, then a proper wedding the next summer. “You know,” he said wryly, “for the families.” He and Gayle would leave for Michigan the day after the ceremony. “Oh, come on,” Ed said. “Don’t be so morose. We’re coming back, just as soon as I collect that other piece of paper.”
“You don’t know that,” said Gene, who was experiencing a foretaste of loss for this defining era of his life. “You don’t know what it will be like there.”
“Sure I do,” Ed said. “There’ll be college football and snow and nice leafy trees. But I don’t like football and we have the rest of that stuff here. Anyway, you’re acting like I’m going off to China. Don’t forget I’ll still have some time off in the summer, at least until residency. We’ll go to the lake—you’ll see.”
“But it won’t be the same.”
“I hope not. God, that would be tedious. Maybe you’ll even have a girlfriend by then.”
At the time, Gene thought this would be the end of the four-way friendship. And while the memory of it would never be lost, he pictured his life progressing on a different, smaller register after that, unable to compete with this time when their freedoms were greater than their responsibilities. In the future that he imagined, he would be aware of the absent others living out their own lives, and some part of him would feel sad that such a rich confluence of friendships had come apart just as it was beginning to flourish.
But he was wrong. With Ed and Gayle gone to Michigan, he and Maida now had something new in common, which was the gloomy loss of their friends. Maida never directly acknowledged the conversation they’d had on their last day at White Pine Camp, but she began to invite Gene to be her companion at social gatherings where her father was present. Mr. Halloran had many business acquaintances throughout New Hampshire in the construction industry, and Maida was often called upon to make an appearance at their gatherings, though there was rarely anyone in the room she wanted to talk to and her father had an embarrassing tendency to remark to his colleagues that he’d found his daughter a job to save her reputation, which she had almost succeeded in ruining at college. There was nothing Maida liked about attending these parties except that it kept her father sending her a check every month to supplement her wages.
The first time Gene met Maida’s father, Mr. Halloran shook his hand and said, “You’re not very tall, are you?” He then proceeded to hand Gene a beer, which he drank gratefully in silence. “You’re haven’t grown much since the last time, have you?” Mr. Halloran said the next time Gene saw him, and in private Maida explained that relatively speaking, this was a compliment, because it indicated her father could find no other obvious objectionable feature in Gene. “You’re quiet, you’re pleasant-looking, and you’re kind to me,” Maida said, and Gene wasn’t sure if she meant that as a good thing. But since it seemed he had been brought along to play the part of her boyfriend, he took liberties with the role, draping his arm around her shoulders and calling her back to him when she had traveled across the room. Far from discouraging him, she teased him, beckoning him with a tilt of her hips or a sultry pout. Yet whenever they stepped outside, the bright, ordinary light of day would shrink his ambitions, and he would fall back on making small talk, the easiest form of which was speculating about how Ed and Gayle were doing in Michigan.
On one such day, when they were sitting together on a bench outside a tavern, Maida sighed and said, “We exist without them, you know.” Then without any warning she unceremoniously placed her hand on his groin.
That was, he supposed, their official beginning, but in truth once he had become her actual boyfriend instead of the convenient stand-in, it seemed that they had already been together for a very long time. When they wrote to tell Ed and Gayle, they receive
d in return a letter with a single word written in the middle of the page:
FINALLY!!!
They didn’t bother to explain the nuances to Maida’s father. It only would have introduced confusion—for all he knew, they had been together all along. Though perhaps her father did sense some deepening in their affections, because Mr. Halloran’s attitude toward Gene shifted from one of mere tolerance to restless paternalistic concern. He began taking Gene aside to lecture him about the special combination of qualities necessary to succeed in the world of business, qualities he himself had been naturally blessed with, and which Gene would have to work uncommonly hard to develop if he hoped to see any success at the leather-importing company where he’d gotten a job after graduation.
Then, just when it began to seem his life had become almost respectfully dull, Ed and Gayle returned to New Hampshire for the wedding party they owed their families. The celebration was held on a private estate, and while Ed and Gayle were cutting the cake, Gene rowed Maida to the middle of the pond and asked her to marry him. Saying nothing, she began stripping off her finery, and he wondered if this was her way of saying yes, rewarding him with what he desired. But as soon as she was wearing only her bra and underwear, she climbed over the side of the boat and dropped into the water. He found her behavior puzzling, possibly even insulting, and he waited for what seemed like an eternity for her to resurface. When she finally popped up, he helped her back into the boat and wiped the slimy vegetal scum off her face with his tie. He thought for certain she would reject him. But then she said yes, she would marry him, and she was sorry about ruining his tie.
That summer the four friends went to the lake just as Ed said they would. Everyone was in a celebratory mood, and they drank to one another’s good fortune, and then they drank a little bit extra. Ed and Gayle returned to Ann Arbor, and Gene began to think seriously about how he was going to support his bride-to-be and the family they hoped to have. He was convinced that the key to making good money was running one’s own company. When he learned that the owner of the shoe store in Colton was looking for someone to buy it so that he could retire, Gene sent his future father-in-law a business proposal appended to a request for a loan. Mr. Halloran wouldn’t even consider it until Gene and Maida were married, so although they had originally hoped to be wed at the height of summer, they rushed ahead with a church ceremony and a small backyard reception in the chilly spring of 1955. At the end of the reception, just before he and Maida departed for the Sandpiper Inn, Mr. Halloran handed him an envelope containing a signed check.
The Dependents Page 4
