Strange Fits of Passion

by Anita Shreve

  ***

  I didn't see Mary for some time after that. I was very busy with whatnot, and after Christmas I always like to rest a bit, so it was nearly two weeks before I was able to get over to the cottage.

  I mention this only because it took me somewhat longer than it might have to realize what was going on.

  Mary Amesbury

  I fainted on the common. I had never fainted before. It happened. It just happened.

  I recognized a man's face over mine. His eyes were old, and his face was weathered. He was telling me that the baby was OK, and asking if I could stand. Then I saw Julia and remembered Caroline. Where was Caroline? I asked, looking frantically around. A woman next to me showed me Caroline but wouldn't give her to me. Caroline was fine, they kept saying.

  I went inside with Julia and the baby. I felt the man's hands at my side, and then he was gone. I drank the brandy Julia gave me, but I had trouble eating the food. I couldn't tell her of what I had seen, of the images that had confused me. I was aware only that I had caused a scene and that people had been buzzing around me. I was aware, too, of how lucky I had been. When I thought of what might have happened to Caroline...

  ***

  I don't remember Christmas Day at all. There is nothing about the day I remember. My mother says that I called her at midday and told her that Harrold and Caroline and I were just sitting down to Christmas dinner, but I don't remember any of it.

  I did not sleep that night or the next.

  I got your letter this morning. Yes, I understand about September and the timing of the article, and I will hurry with the next batch of notes.

  I write all night now. I seldom sleep. My cellmate and I are a perfect pair. The more I am awake, the more she sleeps, as if to redress the deficit.

  I sometimes wonder about your life. I have written you so much about myself, and yet I know almost nothing about you. I think about that imbalance, wonder what you will do with all these pages that I have sent you.

  Several days after Christmas, a thaw, as predicted, warmed the coast. And with the thaw came the fog. One morning I awoke knowing something was amiss. I hadn't heard the motor on the lane. I went to the window but could not see out. I went downstairs and opened the bathroom window and watched the fog spill in over the windowsill.

  I stood in the kitchen. I heard the foghorns then, one to the north, one to the south, slightly out of sync, one a low mournful note, the other slightly higher, speaking to each other across a vast expanse of wet gray air and water. In between the foghorns you could hear a gentle lapping of the water.

  We had six days of fog, off and on. On two or three mornings during the thaw, I woke and there wasn't any fog. And then, in the late morning, while I was feeding the baby or washing the dishes, the fog drifted in with stealth, blotting out the colors, then the shapes, then the sun. First there would be puffs of fog blowing across the bar, and soon the island would be gone. That was it—gone just like that. It didn't exist.

  The green-and-white lobster boat did not go out on the first day of the thaw, or the second, but I heard the truck on the third morning. It was a day on which the fog had not come in yet, and I, not understanding the pattern of the fog, felt buoyant at the sight of the islands becoming visible in the distance at daybreak. When I saw how my own spirits had lifted with the return of the sun—and we had only had two days of continuous fog—I began to understand better the depression Willis had described, the depression that sometimes settled upon the women of the town. I wondered why it was that Willis had mentioned only the women becoming depressed in the winter. Did the men not mind the days of grayness too? Or was it easier for them because they were able to meet the grayness as a challenge when they went out on the water?

  Caroline seemed to catch my mood and was unusually contented and cheerful that morning. She had been practicing balancing on all fours for a couple of weeks now and had learned how to pitch herself forward. Crawling, I could see, as I watched her from the kitchen table, was imminent. But I had no impatience for anything. With Christmas behind me and no need to go anywhere or to do anything, I was becoming more and more content to allow the days to dictate themselves to me.

  I was reading, and Caroline was napping upstairs, when the fog came back. First there were wisps, ethereal and transitory, and then the fog became a shroud, blanketing everything. The light dimmed so that it seemed like dusk when it was only midday. I had to turn on a light to read. With the fog, the room turned chill as well, or perhaps it only seemed that way, with the sun gone. I went to the window. I could not even see the fish house now, although I could make out the barest hint of the back of a red pickup truck. The end of the point had disappeared entirely.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Willis came in like a figure emerging from the sea. The fog seemed to cling to him in the form of billions of droplets of moisture—on his denim jacket, on his mustache, on his hair. He carried a mug of coffee.

  "Brought my own this time," he said, shutting the door behind him.

  I was glad I had gotten dressed early.

  "Socked in," he said.

  "I thought the fog was over," I said.

  There was a recording of a string quartet playing on the radio. The elegiac music seemed to underscore the view outside my window.

  He made a disparaging sound, the sort of sound you make when the other person has just said something incredibly naive.

  "No way. We'll have fog for days yet. Hey, Red, better get used to it. Bother you?"

  "No," I said, lying. "Not at all."

  "Well, that's good." He took a seat at the kitchen table. He looked at my face.

  "Jack's out," he said.

  "Oh," I said.

  "Probably thought he could beat the fog back."

  "Oh."

  "Wouldn't catch me out on a day like this."

  "No."

  "So what you goin' to do all day?"

  "Same thing I do every day," I said. "Take care of the baby."

  "You don't miss it?"

  "Miss what?"

  "Your old life. Where you come from."

  "No," I said.

  "Musta been pretty bad," he said. "Your old man."

  I said nothing.

  "Syracuse, huh?"

  I nodded.

  "Nice place, Syracuse?"

  I shrugged. "I like it better here," I said.

  "You're lookin' better," he said.

  "Thank you."

  He sighed.

  "So OK, Red, I'll be off now. Goin' home for lunch. I'm supposed to start drivin' for a haulage company next week. I hate doin' it, but we got to have the money. You need anything?"

  He asked me this every day.

  "No," I said.

  Caroline began to cry. I was glad.

  "Hope I didn't wake her," he said.

  I shook my head. He got up to leave. He walked to the door, opened it, and hesitated. The fog blew in around him.

  "Keep your eyes peeled for Jack," he said, and smiled.

  The green-and-white lobster boat did not come back at two o'clock, as was its custom. I thought that probably the fog would delay it some, so I wasn't exactly worried. It was merely that I was alert to the fact that it had not returned. As I have said, it was a kind of punctuation to my day to see the boat emerging from behind the island, and without it the day felt incomplete, like a sentence with no ending.

  I was knitting a second sweater for Caroline, and I was halfway through the back piece. Caroline was in bed for her afternoon nap. I picked up the knitting, with the radio on in the background.

  It's odd, now that I think of it, that I didn't write. Or perhaps not odd at all. To write would have required remembering.

  The boat did not come back by three o'clock or by four. I had become attuned to all sounds emanating from the water or the point, and I went to the window frequently to peer out into the grayness. By four, it had grown dark, and all of the trucks but one were gone. Indeed, when it was foggy
, night fell early on the point. I carried Caroline, or I nursed her. I made myself a cup of tea. I listened to the news on the radio. Eventually I made myself some supper. At six, the darkness outside was impenetrable. I began to wonder if I oughtn't to walk up to the blue Cape and alert someone that the green-and-white lobster boat wasn't back yet. Was this my responsibility? I wondered. Who else would know that he hadn't returned? His wife and his daughter? Would they resent my alarm, my interference? Was this natural, not to come back from time to time? And what if he had decided to moor his boat at the town wharf? He had mentioned that when the weather was bad, he took his boat into town. Perhaps he had done that earlier, knowing of the fog to come, and I had waited all day for the boat's return for nothing. If I raised an alarm then, I would simply look foolish, as naive as Willis had indicated, and I would only draw even more attention to myself.

  At six-thirty, I bundled Caroline into her snowsuit and into the sling and took us both for a walk. I could no longer bear it in the cottage. I didn't care that I wouldn't be able to see much of anything. I had to have some fresh air.

  I made my way gingerly along the spit. I felt I knew the way well enough to walk without any danger to myself or the baby. I would feel the gravel underfoot, or the grasses, or the sand, and would be able to navigate with my feet.

  The air was drenching. You felt it soak you through almost at once. I kept Caroline close to me. I could feel the pebbled beach under my sneakers. I hadn't walked fifty feet when I turned to look back at where I had come from. Already the cottage was gone. The lights burning in the living room were extinguished. I could see only about two or three feet ahead of my feet along the ground. That was it. The sensation was eerie and otherworldly. I don't think I was frightened, exactly, but it was a feeling I shall never forget. The world had disappeared entirely. There was only my baby and myself. I could hear, from time to time, sounds from the world I had come from—the foghorns, an occasional car along the road at the end of the lane, and a strange squealing overhead, like that of bats—but in that darkness you could not really believe in the world. Perhaps I was frightened, but I was also exhilarated. The anonymity, the privacy, the safety—it was perfect. No one, no one, could ever get to us now: not Harrold, not Willis, not even Julia or my mother, well-meaning though they might be. It was as I had imagined it in my dreams: my baby and myself, protected and enshrouded.

  I heard the motor then. I knew its idiosyncrasies by heart. It grew louder; louder still; then it stopped. I wondered how he had found the mooring. I heard the slap of the dinghy, the sounds of the return ritual. Perhaps I walked in the direction of those sounds. Perhaps my feet knew the way better than I had imagined.

  I wonder now, and I have often wondered this: whether things would have developed as they did if we had not come upon each other in the fog, if we had not had that perfect sense of isolation, of the world around us vanished.

  He appeared out of the dark mist, as if emerging in a dream, and I must have too. It occurred to me that he'd be more startled to come upon me than I him, and so I spoke at once.

  "You're back," I said.

  I thought my voice sounded casual, cheerful.

  He was startled. He'd been walking from the dinghy to the truck, but he stopped. He had two buckets, one in each hand. I could hear the lobsters inside those buckets more than I could see them.

  He put the buckets down.

  "Are you all right?" he asked.

  "Yes," I said. "I'm fine."

  "What are you doing out here?"

  "I was just taking a walk. I'd been feeling cooped up."

  He looked at my face, then at the baby in the sling.

  "You shouldn't be out here," he said. "This fog is nasty today. You could lose your way."

  "I don't see how," I said, but my voice lacked conviction.

  "I've lived here all my life. I know the coastline and the water as well as I know my own kids. But in the fog, I'm a stranger. You don't trust anything in the fog. Nothing."

  "Why did you go out, then?" I asked.

  He looked out toward the water. "I don't know. I thought I'd beat it back. But I got caught the other side of Swale's. Took me all day to creep back in. Foolish. It was a foolish thing to do."

  His voice was low, and he spoke matter-of-factly, without much emotion, but I understood that he sometimes took risks too. That he had been foolish was merely a statement of fact, not cause for much remorse. Beyond his voice, you could hear the foghorns.

  "Your wife will be worried," I said.

  "I've been on to her on the CB. She knows I'm in."

  He looked at me as if he was thinking.

  "You come with me to the truck, let me put these in, and then I'll walk you to the cottage."

  "I'll be—" I started to say.

  "I couldn't leave you out here without seeing you were safely back," he said, and picked up the two buckets as if there were nothing more to discuss.

  I walked a little ways behind him. He had long sloping shoulders beneath the yellow slicker. His hair was covered with mist, and his slicker was wet. He wore tall waders that came up high over his knees, over his jeans. He had large hands with long fingers. I was looking at his hands gripping the handles of the buckets.

  At the truck, he slid the buckets onto the bed.

  "Well, then," he said.

  He turned, and we walked in the direction of the house. He seemed to know better where to walk than I, and so I followed his lead, again a few steps behind him. He'd been right; I realized it at once. The fog was disorienting. I'd have gone in a different direction, south along the coast. I'd have missed the house at first, but I did think I would probably have found it after a few tries.

  The cottage loomed out of the mist. First there was the glow of light from the living room, then the outline of the house itself. The light inside the rooms looked warm, inviting.

  He walked me up the slope to the door. I had my hand on the latch. I felt like a schoolgirl who'd been seen home by a teacher who was too shy for conversation.

  "Thank you," I said.

  He looked at me. "I wouldn't say no to a cup of tea," he said.

  His voice was so low I wasn't sure I had heard him right. "Would you like a cup of tea?" I asked.

  "Thank you," he said. "I've got a chill on from the damp."

  "Will your family...?"

  "They know I'm in. They won't be worried now."

  I opened the door, and we both walked into the cottage. I went directly to the stove and got the kettle, filled it, and lit the burner.

  "Keep your eye on the kettle," I said. "I have to go upstairs and put Caroline to bed."

  In the living room, I wriggled out of my coat and removed Caroline from the sling. I carried her upstairs, put her into her pajamas, and nursed her on the bed. After a time, I could hear the kettle whistling, then the sounds of cups and saucers being fetched from the cupboard. I heard him at the sink, washing his hands. The refrigerator was opened and closed. I heard him rummaging through the silverware drawer.

  When I came downstairs, he was sitting at the table. The slicker was on a hook on the back of the door and was dripping water onto the linoleum. He had removed his waders and was in his stocking feet. I could smell the sea in the room, from the slicker or the waders. I watched him for a minute from behind, and if he knew I was standing there, he gave no indication. His back was very long, so long that his sweater rode up over the waist of his jeans. But his back was broad, and he was not as slope-shouldered as he'd appeared in the slicker. He sipped his tea and did not turn around. At the place at right angles to his own there was a cup of tea for me. He'd let it steep, taken out the tea bag. He'd put milk and sugar on the table.

  I sat down. I looked up at him. I had never seen his face in bright light. He was still, and his eyes moved slowly. I was again struck by the deep grooves at the sides of his mouth. His face had color, was permanently weathered. He looked at me, but we didn't speak.

  "It's some warmth
," he said finally.

  "Did you get many lobsters today?" I asked.

  "I was having some luck before the fog," he said. "But all told, it wasn't much. Doesn't matter, though."

  "Why?"

  "Whatever you get this time of year you're grateful for."

  "Why do you do it? Go out when no one else does?"

  He made a self-deprecating sound. "Because no one else does, I suppose. No, I like it out there. I get restless...."

  "It seems dangerous to me," I said. "It seems I'm always hearing about men drowning."

  "Well, you could...."

  "If you're not careful?"

  "Well, even if you're careful. There's things you can't control. Not like today. I should have been smarter today. But you can't always control a sudden blow, or engine failure...."

  "What do you do then?"

  "You try to get back the best way you can. You try not to make any mistakes." He leaned his weight on one elbow, turned slightly toward me.

  "You've been all right, then," he said. "Since Christmas Eve, I mean."

  "Oh. Yes. Thank you. It was awful, fainting like that. I've never fainted. I don't know what came over me."

  "Just a bunch of kids protesting the war," he said. "My son probably would have been in it too, except he was home with ... my wife. You looked shocky. Like you were in shock."

  "Oh," I said, looking down. "Did I?"

  "What happened to you?" he asked quietly. "Why are you here?"

  The question was so sudden, I felt I had been stung. Perhaps it was the quiet of his voice, or the way I had come upon him in the fog, or the way the simplicity of his question required a truthful answer. I put a hand up to my mouth. My lips were pressed together. To my horror, my eyes filled, as if I had indeed been stung. I couldn't speak. I was afraid to blink. I was afraid to move. In all of the days since I had left the apartment in New York City, I had not cried. Not once. I had been too numb to cry, or too careful.