Strange Fits of Passion

by Anita Shreve

  He reached up and took the hand away from my mouth and put it on the table. He held my hand on the oilcloth. He didn't say a word. His eyes were gray. He didn't look away from me.

  "I was married to a man who beat me," I said after a time. I let out a long breath of air after I had said it.

  It sounded appalling, unreal, in the cottage.

  "You left him," he said.

  I nodded.

  "Recently. You've run away."

  "Yes."

  "Does he know where you are?"

  I shook my head. "I don't think so," I said. "If he did, he'd come and get me; I'm sure of that."

  "You're afraid of him."

  "Yes."

  "He did that to you?"

  He made a movement with his head to indicate my face. I knew the bruises were healing, were yellowish or light brown rather than purple or blue, but they were still visible.

  I nodded.

  "What do you think the chances are that he'll find you?" he asked.

  I thought for a minute.

  "Fairly good," I said. "It's what he does, in a way. Investigates things. He knows how to find out things."

  "And what do you think will happen to you when he finds you?"

  I looked at the place where he was holding my hand. His hand hadn't moved; it was firm on mine.

  "I think he'll kill me," I said simply. "I think he'll kill me because he won't be able to control himself."

  "Have you gone to the police?" he asked.

  "I don't think I can go to the police," I said.

  "Why not?"

  "Because I've stolen his child."

  "But you had to do that, to save yourself."

  "That's not how it will appear. He's very clever."

  He, too, looked down at where he was holding my hand. He began then to stroke my arm from the wrist to the elbow. I had a sweater on, and the sleeves were pushed up over my elbows, so he was stroking my skin, slowly and softly.

  "You have a wife," I said.

  He nodded. "My wife isn't—" He stopped.

  I waited.

  "She's sick," he said finally. "She has a chronic illness. We're together, but we don't have what you would call..."

  "A marriage."

  "No."

  He was stroking my arm. I might have pulled it away, but I couldn't. I couldn't move. It had been so long since anyone had touched me this gently, this kindly, that I was nearly paralyzed with gratitude.

  "We haven't ... been together," he said, "for years."

  "You haven't even told me your name," I said, "although I know it."

  "It's Jack," he said.

  "My real name is Maureen," I said. "Maureen English. But I've become Mary. I've taken it on. I'll stay Mary."

  "Your daughter's name is Caroline," he said.

  "Yes."

  "That's her real name?"

  "Yes," I said. "I couldn't call her something she wasn't."

  He smiled. He nodded.

  "I can't do this," I said. "I'm no good at this anymore."

  But even though I said this, I did not pull my arm away. The stroking of his fingers was soothing and rhythmical, like a warm wave washing over me, and all I knew was that I didn't want it to stop.

  "I'm afraid," I said.

  "I know."

  "You're old enough to be my father," I said. It was something I'd been thinking—just that minute or for days?—and I thought it ought to be said, soon, to get it over with.

  "Not really," he said. "Well, technically maybe. I'm forty-three."

  "I'm twenty-six."

  He nodded, as if he'd already guessed my age, give or take a year or two.

  Outside, the foghorns were relentless—insistent and scolding.

  He took his hand away and stood up with his teacup. He took his teacup to the sink.

  "I'm going to go now," he said. He walked to the door, where his slicker was hanging. "I've been gone long enough. I can't leave my wife alone too long."

  I stood up. I didn't say anything.

  "But I'll be back," he said. "I can't say when...."

  I nodded.

  "You shouldn't be afraid of this," he said.

  I woke when I heard the motor on the lane. There was just a smear of gray outside the windows, but I could see the tops of the trees. The fog had not come yet. I heard the motor stop, but it was not at the end of the point; it was below my cottage.

  I threw back the covers and ran down the stairs to the kitchen. Harrold can't have found me yet, I was praying. My heart was drumming in my chest.

  Then, through the window on the door, I could see just a glimmer of a yellow slicker.

  I unlocked the door.

  Jack came in and put his arms around me.

  For a minute, I couldn't speak.

  Then I said: "You smell like the sea."

  "I think it's permanent," he said.

  Later, before the sun had fully risen, we left my bed and returned to the kitchen. He had carried his clothes with him, and dressed standing on the linoleum floor. He showed no self-consciousness when he dressed, even though he knew I was watching him.

  I had put on my nightgown and my sweater in the bedroom. I made us a breakfast of coffee and cold cereal. We did not speak while he dressed, and he lit a cigarette and smoked at the table while I made the coffee. I brought the bowls of cereal to the table.

  "I usually make a breakfast before I leave the house, but I couldn't eat this morning," he said, putting out his cigarette on an ashtray I'd given him.

  I smiled.

  "Couldn't sleep, either," he said, and smiled back at me.

  I wanted to climb upstairs to the bed and curl up against his chest and go to sleep with him, the blankets pulled up high over our heads.

  "When did you decide to come?" I asked.

  "Sometime in the middle of the night. As soon as I decided it, I wanted to get up right then and there and come, but I couldn't...."

  I nodded. I knew he meant his wife.

  "Do you mind having to get up so early for your work?" I asked.

  "It's all right," he said. "You get used to it. It suits me."

  "Willis said you went to college and had to come back."

  He snorted. "Willis," he said.

  I watched him as he ate his cereal.

  "I did," he said finally. "I was in my junior year; my father broke his arms on his boat. I had to come back to take it over."

  He didn't elaborate further.

  "Were you disappointed?" I asked. "Disappointed you couldn't finish school?"

  At first he didn't answer.

  "I might have been, for a time," he said slowly, not looking at me. "But then you settle in, have your house, your work, your kids. It's hard to regret the things you've done that have led to having your kids."

  I looked at him. I knew what he meant. Even though my own marriage had become unspeakable, I could not now imagine a life without Caroline.

  Just then the sun broke over the horizon line, flooding the room with a bright salmon light. Jack's face, in the sudden fire, was aglow. I thought his face was beautiful then, the most beautiful face I had ever seen, even though I hated the sun, for I knew it meant he would have to leave. I could see it in his gestures, in the sudden tensing of his muscles, in the way he pulled back from the table.

  He stood up, walked to the back door to get his slicker. He put the oilskin under one arm, came to stand behind my chair. With his free hand, he lifted the hair from the back of my neck and kissed me there.

  "I can't give you much," he said.

  I could feel his breath on my skin.

  ***

  He left before the other trucks had come to the point. He drove his own truck down to his dinghy. He went out that day in the green-and-white lobster boat but came back before the fog had settled in. As it happened, when he returned, I was walking on the point with Caroline, and though he waved to us from the truck—a wave that would be construed by the men who were in the fish house a
s merely a friendly gesture—we did not speak. Later he took to parking his truck at his dinghy and walking back to the cottage, staying until the sun had risen. There was an understanding between us, though unspoken, that no one should know about his visits. There were his wife and children to think of.

  He came every morning at daybreak. There would be the motor on the lane and then his footsteps on the stairs. I kept the kitchen door unlocked. I'd be sleeping when he came, and it sometimes seemed to me that he would enter into my dreams. It would be dark in the room, with just a tease of light, and I would see the shape of him standing at the foot of the bed, or sitting on its edge as he bent to remove his shoes. And when I rolled toward him, in the bed that I had warmed all night, it was as if our coming together were already one of the rhythms of the point, as natural and as necessary as the gulls who woke and called and foraged for food, or as the light that would be lavender or pink on the water when he left me.

  After the first morning, I had moved Caroline to the downstairs bedroom. It was hard for me to separate us in that way, but I knew that the time had come for me to do this. The walls were thin in the cottage, and I could hear her easily from my bed when she cried.

  Do you want the details? There are moments I will never give away for any purpose—memories, words, and visions that I hoard and savor. But I can tell you this much. He never asked from me more than I could give, and he was careful, as though I hurt all over. Sometimes he would hold me; that would be enough. At other times, I offered what I had.

  On the third day, or the fourth, I waited until the sun had almost risen, so that there was light in the room. I got out of the bed and stood in front of him. I let him look at me. I made him look at me. I knew that I was damaged in some places, ugly in others, but I didn't mind his eyes. I felt no shame in myself, nor any sense of judgment from him. I didn't want him to say that I was beautiful; that wasn't what I hoped for. I think I wanted only to have it behind me, to have it done. But then he did a funny thing. He got out of his side of the bed. There was a line across his abdomen from a ruptured appendix, which he pointed out. He stood on one foot and showed me a dent from a rope burn on his shin. His hands had many nicks, he said, displaying them, and I saw a mark, like something made with jagged scissors, on his upper arm. He'd been a boy, he said, pegging lobsters for his father, and he'd gotten stung by a bee, lost control of the lobster, and it had clawed him. I began to laugh.

  "All right," I said, and crawled back into bed.

  "They're battle scars, that's all," he said, touching this one and then that one and then that one on my body.

  We were intimate but not possessive. Oddly, we never said we loved each other, although I was certain that this was a form of love, one I had never thought to have. I think it was simply that although we trusted each other, we no longer trusted the word. I imagined that he, like myself, had once told his wife that he loved her—and had been perplexed and dismayed when certainty had become uncertain, then had turned to disappointment.

  There was so much about each other that we didn't know, could never know. His life on the water had shaped him, formed him, as had my life in the city and with my mother. He would never know about deadlines and the pressure of putting words and sentences together in offices, just as I would never know what it was to be lost on the water in the fog and to have to rely on wits and instinct to make it back to shore alive. I did not know much about his marriage, either. By tacit agreement, he did not talk about his wife, and I asked few, if any, questions. It was an area of old sadness for him, around which I trod carefully, just as he was reticent to probe too deeply into the madness that had been my marriage. Although once he did speak up. I had said to him that I thought I had brought the abuse upon myself because I had been a catalyst for my husband's anger. Jack held me by the wrist and made me look at him. I was not responsible for the beatings, he said clearly. Only the man who hit me was responsible. Did I understand that?

  One morning when we were in the bed together, I thought I heard a cry. I stiffened, to listen, and I felt Jack pull away from me, listening too.

  It was Caroline, who seemed to be crying in pain. I thought to myself: I must go to her—but I was strangely paralyzed, thrust backward in time to another bed, another set of cries. For a minute, I almost couldn't breathe, and there must have been on my face an expression of alarm, for Jack said, pulling even farther back and looking quickly at my face, "What's wrong? Are you OK?"

  "It's Caroline," I whispered.

  "I know," he said. "Go to her. Or do you want me to?"

  The question snapped me back to the present moment. I flung back the covers and threw on my nightgown. I ran down the stairs to her bedroom. She was on her back, in her crib, her knees raised. She was indeed crying in pain. I picked her up and began to walk with her around the well-worn path through the kitchen, the living room, and her bedroom, but even the walking this time could not quiet her. Jack came down the stairs in his shorts. His hair was mussed, and he was barefoot—the floorboards were freezing.

  "Give her to me a minute," he said on my second pass.

  I handed her to him, and she looked at him curiously before she started again to cry. He walked with her to the sofa under the window and placed her, stomach down, on his knees, which were slightly apart. Then he began to make an up-and-down motion with his knees—in effect massaging her under her stomach. Almost immediately, she stopped crying.

  "I don't know why it works," he said, looking pleased with himself, "but it does. I had to do this with my daughter all the time when she was a baby. It moves the gas bubbles up, I guess, or down. I can't remember now who taught it to me."

  I stood across the room watching him with Caroline. They were a funny sight—Jack in his shorts, his eyes puffy, his hair flattened, Caroline stretched out on the tops of his long legs, looking up at me as if to say, Now what. It was so cold in the room, I'd begun to shiver. I went to him and picked up Caroline. She burrowed into my shoulder as if she wanted to go back to sleep.

  "You're good with children," I said. "I saw you with your daughter at the bonfire."

  "Good with children, lousy with wives," he said, getting up from the couch.

  "You've had more than one?"

  "One's enough." He crossed his arms over his chest and rubbed them to warm them.

  "Is your marriage really so bad?" I asked, swaying lightly from side to side with Caroline.

  He shrugged. "You make a mistake, you lie with it," he said.

  It was an interesting choice of words.

  "Why don't you leave?" I asked.

  "I can't leave," he said. "It's not a possibility."

  There was an air of finality to this pronouncement, and as if to underscore that finality he turned to look out the window, out to the horizon, where he saw the same thing I did—a crimson sliver of sun breaking over the water.

  I was afraid that he had misunderstood me, and so I said, "I don't want you to leave; that's not what I meant."

  He turned back to me.

  "I know," he said.

  We stood there looking at each other, and it seems to me now, remembering that moment, we spoke volumes to each other.

  "I'd better go now," he said finally.

  I went over to him and touched him lightly on the side of his arm, stroking his arm, as he had once stroked mine. It was all I could think of to do.

  I did not know much about his life on the water, although one day near the end, on a Sunday, when the men did not come to the point, he took me out on his boat. When he first suggested the trip, I immediately thought of Caroline, but he said we would take her with us, in the sling if I liked. He used to take his own babies out onto the water, he said. Babies almost always fell asleep at once, from the rocking of the boat or from the vibrations of the motor. Indeed, when the men's wives had babies that were colicky, he said, the women would often beg to come aboard the boats with their babies for a day's fishing, just to get some rest.

  I woke Car
oline early, and we were ready for him when he came. The air was cold but still, and I could see all the way out to the lighthouse. The water's surface was unruffled, but I knew that by midmorning, the breezes would make it rougher. He untied the dinghy from the ring, slid it down to the water's edge.

  "Get in the punt," he said, "at the bow."

  The dinghy was pretty beat; even I could see that. He said that he'd been meaning to replace it all year, but somehow he hadn't gotten to it yet.

  "We'll go slowly," he said.

  I sat in the bow with the baby, as he had told me to do. He knelt in the stern rather than stand, so that he would not inadvertently tip us. When he got in, our combined weight seemed almost too much for the dinghy, and when I looked over the side, I could see we were riding pretty low to the water. I didn't move as he sculled us out to the channel and the boat, a distance of perhaps a hundred and fifty feet. Despite the short distance, the journey made me anxious. I wished I had a life vest, although I was remembering how Julia had said her husband went from the cold before he went from the drowning. I was, in fact, so frightened at one point that I surreptitiously dipped my hand into the icy water and made the sign of the cross on Caroline's forehead—a gesture that astonishes me now, when I think of it. I had not had Caroline baptized, and I could not bear the thought of being separated from her for all eternity—even though, if you were to ask me now, in this room, I would have to tell you that I don't believe in eternity.

  As Jack sculled, I had a clear view of the point, seen from the eastern end, and of my cottage. From the water, the cottage had even more of a sense of isolation than it did when you were on land. Surrounding it, in both directions for as far as the eye could see, there was only low-lying brush and coastline.

  Jack managed somehow to get us all into the larger boat, though I was ungainly with the baby strapped to my middle and in the end had to be hoisted over. He told me to sit on a box in the cockpit while he got us under way. I watched him open the pilothouse, lift the lid off an engine box, and start the engine. He foraged forward and handed a life vest back to me. It was a regulation Coast Guard type, but I could see that it hadn't been used much. I put it on, over my coat, and when he looked back at me, he shook his head, raised his eyebrows, and smiled. Then we were off.