The Red Tree
Page 16
“I’ve been reading your new story,” Constance said. “It’s dedicated to her, right?”
“I don’t have a new story,” I said, and the cashier was watching me now.
“You’re a writer?” she asked, smiling a blandly eager sort of smile. “Wow. That’s so interesting. You know, I’ve always wanted to be a writer.”
I glared at her a second or two, then turned back to Constance, who was screwing the cap off her bottle of Dr Pepper. “That’s utterly fucking fascinating,” I said, “because, you know, I’ve always wanted to be a checkout girl.”
Constance laughed, and the girl at the register muttered something angry and offended. I’m not sure what she muttered, because I was already on my way out the door, whatever I’d intended to buy forgotten, my hunger forgotten, the need for cigarettes forgotten, too. Behind me, I could still hear Constance laughing, and all I could figure was that she must have been sneaking downstairs while I was asleep and reading this journal, that she’d begun reading it before I had finally decided to start hiding the pages.
“Sarah, you are totally overreacting to this,” she said, emerging from the market. “I wasn’t trying to pry. I only asked you a question.”
“A pretty goddamn personal question.”
“I wasn’t trying to upset you.”
“Just get in the car,” I told her, turning the key and unlocking the driver’s-side door. “This isn’t a conversation I want to have in a parking lot.”
“Well, don’t you think you were kind of harsh back there?” she asked, nodding towards the store. “I mean, sure, I get that stupid shit, too. Everyone seems to think it must be completely marvelous to be a painter—or a writer—because they’ve never had to try to make a living doing it. But, still—”
“I asked you to please get in the car,” I said, interrupting her, and Constance sighed and rolled her eyes and smirked back at me across the roof.
“No, Sarah, in point of fact, you ordered me to. But I will, just as soon as you unlock my door,” and now her voice had affected an almost singsong rhythm, and that forced and utterly self-satisfied excuse for a smile remained painted on her pretty face.
When we were in the car again, she switched on the radio and tuned it to some noisy college-rock station broadcasting from Providence, then stared out the windshield while I drove. There were plenty of road signs, so at least I didn’t need to ask her for directions. I followed the narrow, curving rind of asphalt laid between Mackerel and Sheffield coves. There was a cobble-strewn beach on my left, Mackerel Cove Beach, speckled with fat sunbathers and fatter children. Through my open window, I could smell the heady sewage stink of low tide, the stench of stranded seaweed baking beneath the July sun, and I was dimly amazed that people were actually swimming in that. Farther out, I could see bobbing plastic buoys marking the positions of sunken lobster pots, and a couple of large rocks jutted up from the steely blue water. And then the coves were behind us, and on either side of the road there was farmland again, fields of hay and tall, rustling corn marked off by low stone walls. We passed a few horses, and the houses of people who could afford to live by the sea.
“I wasn’t trying to piss you off,” Constance whispered, and I only just caught her words above the radio.
“Sure could have fooled me,” I said.
“Sometimes things just come out the wrong way, that’s all. Yeah, I suppose maybe it wasn’t the most appropriate place to ask that question. But why in the world would I have wanted to start a fight with you in public?”
There were about a dozen things I wanted to say to her then, all of them vicious, all of them the scathing sorts of things you can’t take back once they’ve been spoken. But, instead, I only said, “Amanda killed herself, back in February. That’s why I never talk about her. I came up here to try and forget about Amanda.”
Neither of us said anything else then for a while, and there was only the radio, the tires humming against the road, the wind whipping in through my open window. Before much longer, we came to a sign that informed me we’d reached Beavertail State Park, and Constance lit a cigarette and turned the radio off.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know. I honestly had no idea.”
I shrugged, catching a glimpse of the sea through a break in the trees. “How could you have known, Constance? You’re the first person in all Rhode Island that I’ve told. Just don’t fucking apologize, okay?”
The road led all the way down to the point and to the tall whitewashed lighthouse. Land’s end, literally, there where the Atlantic had spent however many million years chewing away at the southern tip of the island, and the woods and underbrush and grassy open spaces suddenly gave way to a steep line of cliffs leading down to the sea. It was a breathtaking sight, even through the obscuring haze of my confusion and anger, and I felt like I’d driven out of the world and into a picture postcard.
“That’s the new lighthouse,” Constance said, though it didn’t look very new to me. “It was built sometime in the mid-Nineteenth Century, after the old lighthouse burned down. There’s been a lighthouse at Beavertail since 1753.”
“Burned down?” I asked her, glancing from the sea cliffs back to the stone tower, which, to my eyes, seemed fairly impervious to fire.
“Well, the first one was wood,” she said. “Actually, I think there might have been two wooden lighthouses, before they finally built this one. Anyway, Sarah, you can’t stop here,” and she pointed ahead of us, where the road curved north again. “There’s a parking lot right up there.”
And so nothing else was said about Amanda or the scene at the market or the nonexistent “new story” she claimed I’d let her read. I parked in a paved lot a couple hundred yards northeast of the lighthouse, and for the next couple of hours or so, I followed Constance across the rocks. Turns out, she’s a veritable font of information about the place, and I listened while she rambled on about naval history, shipwrecks, the local geology, how you could find trilobites farther up the coast if you know where to look, and the whale carcass that had washed ashore here when she was a teenager.
The air was filled with the cries of gulls and with cormorants and smaller seabirds that I didn’t recognize. The waves seemed tremendous, rushing in and slamming against the tilted, metamorphosed strata, breaking apart and rushing out again. There was a brisk, cool wind coming off the sea, but I was glad I’d thought to wear sunscreen, because I burn at the drop of a fucking hat. We were not entirely alone, but close enough for comfort. There were a few fishermen here and there, casting their lines into the waves, and they paid us no mind. Finally, winded and sweating, I found a place to sit, a high flat boulder safely out of reach of the salty spray and not too covered with the white splashes of gull shit that dappled almost everything above the high-tide line. Constance sat down next to me. She gave me a cigarette and we sat together smoking (though, later, I learned it’s now illegal to smoke at Rhode Island beaches, beginning this year) and watching the waves.
“I never knew anyone who committed suicide,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it must be like. I really can’t.”
I stared down at my tennis shoes dangling over the edge of the boulder, guessing it was at least twenty feet down to the water.
“And I couldn’t tell you,” I replied. “All these goddamn months later, I still can’t put it into words.”
“Was she sick?”
I laughed and asked her to define “sick.” Instead, she stubbed her cigarette out on the rock and took her ginger Altoids tin from a pocket, depositing the butt inside.
“She wasn’t sick,” I said. “I think she just didn’t want to be here anymore. Half the time, I think I know exactly how she felt. I just don’t have the requisite nerve to act on my convictions.”
“You don’t mean that,” she said, looking at her Altoids tin and not at me.
“Don’t tell me what I do and do not mean, Constance.”
“You’re still mourning, that’s all.”
“You really shouldn’t do that,” she said, scowling, slipping the tin back into her pocket. “Cigarette butts are poisonous to birds and fish. And the cellulose acetate they’re made from isn’t biodegradable. I read somewhere, people throw out four and a half trillion cigarette butts a year. Four and a half trillion.”
“We should head back soon,” I said.
Constance looked over her shoulder, back towards the trail leading through a thicket of beach roses, bayberry, Queen Anne’s lace, and poison ivy and back up to the parking lot. “What’s the hurry?” she asked. “What’s there to get back to?”
“I’m just tired,” I told her. “Tired and on edge.”
“So, sit here and listen to the sea. It’s good for you, Sarah. Even better than Valium,” and she laughed as a giggling gray gull sailed by low overhead. I’m not exactly sure what happened next. I remember the shadow cast by the low-flying gull, and her laughing, and then she was kissing me. And Jesus, it was a fucking good kiss. I don’t know how long it lasted, only that it wasn’t long enough. Still, I’m the one who pulled away, the one who ended it. Then we sat there on the rocks, just staring at each other, and I didn’t even realize that I was crying until she started wiping at my face.
“It’s okay,” she said, and her red-brown eyes sparkled in the sunlight like polished agate, and she said it again, “It’s okay.” I think I hate her for that.
I don’t want to write any more about this shit, not now, not tomorrow, not ever. I want to burn what I have written and then never write any more. It doesn’t matter how much there is left to be said, all the things that happened next. If you keep going, there’s always something that happens next. Always something more, if you lack the courage to type THE END at the bottom of the page. I want to take up Dr. Harvey’s goddamn 1941 Royal typewriter and fling it out the back door into the darkness. Let the grasshoppers and skunks and deer have it. Let it rust away to nothing. But I’m a coward, and I’m no more capable of getting rid of this typewriter than I am of taking my own life.
July 15, 2008 (1:27 p.m.)
Constance has borrowed my car to drive into Foster for groceries and some things she needed, art supplies, and so I have a little time alone to try to set this down before she returns. I don’t believe that I could ever manage to write it with her here in the house with me. Hell, I’m not sure that I can write it with her out of the house.
It was almost two a.m. before I was finished at the typewriter last night—this morning—and so much has happened since then that I suspect I’m never going to get back around to writing about that part of yesterday after the kiss on the rocks. Maybe it all follows from that kiss, or maybe these events were set in motion the day we got lost trying to find the tree, or the day she arrived here. Maybe it all began with Amanda’s death. It’s a losing proposition, a futile game of infinite regression, trying to guess at the particulars of cause and effect that led to my waking up this morning in the attic on Constance Hopkins’ futon.
And, of course, there’s the problem of the “new story” I am supposed to have written, the one that she brought up yesterday in the market in Jamestown. It’s lying here on the table, right next to the box with Dr. Harvey’s unfinished manuscript. Seventeen typed, double-spaced pages, apparently composed on this machine, using the same onionskin paper I’ve been using for these journal entries. It is titled simply “Pony.” I’ve read all the way through the thing five or six times now, and if it wasn’t written by me, then someone’s done a damn fine job of forgery. There are numerous corrections on the pages in what I cannot possibly deny is my own hand. That is, I cannot deny these things, unless I am willing to suggest the perpetration by Constance of an elaborate hoax or practical joke, and unless I am also to assume that she possesses the skills required to actually pull the hoax off successfully. That she could perfectly ape my voice and forge my handwriting, and that she could have managed it on this noisy fucking typewriter without my knowledge, when I hardly ever leave the house. And then, with these assumptions in mind, I must try to conceive some motive for the hoax, what she might possibly have to gain by gaslighting me. Of course, here I may be falling prey to the assumption that she needed anything like a rational motive. And, somehow, I’ve already gotten ahead of myself. I’ll clip the seventeen pages of the story to the end of this entry, though it’s another thing I know I’d be better off simply destroying.
Last night, after I made the entry, and immediately after I’d put those pages with all the others, in that hiding place I will not name here, I went to check the front door before brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed. I found it open, the porch light burning and swathed in a swooping, fluttering halo of moths and nocturnal beetles. And Constance was standing just a few yards from the steps, dressed only in a T-shirt and her panties, staring up at the night sky.
“What are you doing out there?” I asked, and she didn’t answer right away. In fact, a couple of minutes probably went by, and so I asked, “Constance, are you okay? Is something wrong?”
She turned around then, and she was smiling. “I’m fine,” she said. “I just wanted to look at the stars, that’s all. Sometimes, I need to look at the stars. To get my bearings, to remember where I am.”
I squinted at the lightbulb again, at all those bugs, a few of which had managed to get inside, what with me standing there holding the front door open.
“Well,” I told her, swatting at a beetle, “I’m going to bed now. I’m exhausted. I think I got much too much sun today.”
She nodded, turning away from me again, looking back to the sky. “But it was good for you,” she said. “It was good for both of us, to be away from here. To be there, at the sea. To talk.”
There was an instant pang, then. Disappointment, mostly, that there had only been the one kiss, and perhaps embarrassment that there had been any kiss at all. But she was right, it had been good, as had the conversation that followed. And we both knew, and had openly acknowledged, that we never would have been able to talk as freely as we did, to find that level of intimacy, if there had not first been the kiss. It had broken down something inside us both. Or so it seemed. Unless, of course, it was only another part of the hoax. Right now, I don’t know what’s true and what’s a lie. This morning, I awoke in the cool of Constance’s attic, in her arms, thinking that, just maybe, I’d stumbled ass-backwards into a goddamn glimmer of hope, that maybe I was finding my bearings. I’m getting ahead of myself again.
“I saw a shooting star,” she said. “Just before you opened the door,” and she pointed at the sky.
“Only one?” I asked.
“Only one,” she answered. “I’ve never been very good at spotting them, even during meteor showers.”
“Maybe you just try too hard,” I said, and she shrugged and lowered her arm to her side again. “Did you make a wish?” I asked.
“I saw a comet once,” she said, as if she had either not heard my question or had chosen to ignore it. “Back in 1997. I was nineteen, I think. Eighteen or nineteen. But that’s not at all like seeing a falling star.”
I batted away a huge brown moth, then asked her what the difference was, between seeing a falling star and seeing a comet. She looked at me again, and I had the impression that it was only with considerable reluctance that she took her eyes off the eastern sky.
“Comets have often been considered harbingers of doom,” she said. “But you’d know that, I suspect.” And while I continued my struggle to keep Mothra and all her flitting companions out of the house, Constance slowly walked back to the porch. Her bare feet were damp from the heavy dew, and a few blades of grass stuck to her skin.
“1997,” I said. “So, that would have been Comet Hale-Bopp. Yeah, I saw that one myself. Lots of people did. Probably anyone in the Northern Hemisphere who bothered to look.”
“See?” Const
ance laughed, picking some of the grass out from between her toes. “Nothing special.”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” I sighed, and Mothra flapped triumphantly past me and vanished into the house. “Constance, I’m letting bugs in. Really big bugs.”
“I’m not afraid of bugs,” she said. “Well, except for centipedes. I was stung by a centipede once. Hurt like fuck. Do spiders count as bugs?”
“Bugs are insects. Spiders are arachnids. Anyway, centipedes aren’t spiders.”
And it went on like that for a time, five or ten more minutes—the comfortable, meandering talk of comets and bugs. She mentioned the Heaven’s Gate Cult suicides, their connection to the comet she’d seen, and I told her that I’d also seen Comet West, way back in 1976, two years before she was born. Then Constance finally came inside, and I shut off the porch light and locked the door behind her. She asked if I wanted a cup of chamomile tea. I didn’t, but I lied and said that I did. She filled the kettle and put it on the stove, then took a couple of tea bags from a green box of Sleepy Time. And fuck it, at this rate, she’s going to be back from Foster long before I get to the point, supposing there is a point to any of this, that any fraction of it’s more or less important than any other.
She made us tea. And then she asked me if I’d like to fuck her. And there it is, no more beating about the bush (ha-ha fucking ha, ba-da-pa-pa), and she really wasn’t much more subtle than that. She sat down at the table with the two steaming mugs of tea, and asked, “Sarah, how long’s it been since you’ve had sex?”
“Jesus,” I said, and I must have forced a nervous laugh or twiddled my thumbs or done something equally inane. “You do have a delicate way with words.”
“Do you want to sleep with me tonight?” she asked, sipping at her tea, and watching me intently over the rim of the mug. “No strings attached,” she added. “Right now, I think we’re both pretty lonely people. I think it might do us both good. Like the sea.”
“Sort of like that kiss at the beach,” I said, staring at my own cup of tea.