Читать книгу Unravished - Hester Kaplan - Страница 7
ОглавлениеThey pursued me down the jetty one day, through the white cedars and into the pond the next, those bitches, to talk to me about the women in Tillman’s famous paintings, women who gazed out windows, leaned on counters or sat on beds with their knees pulled up. Not beautiful—none of us are beautiful anymore, Alice, they said—but lonely and soulful, don’t you think? What they meant was that I must have been lonely and soulful like those women because I was married to August Weiner, the devil.
“Please, leave me alone,” I told them.
And now another of those pursuers had me cornered in the drugstore, my back against the toothbrushes. The thunderous July afternoon had driven people from the beaches, and the parking lot thrummed with the efficient disappointment of errands. She touched my arm and said she knew how hard it was to be married to a certain kind of man. Those boastful, proud bullies, she meant, know-it-alls, non-apologizers. Her laugh was light and unromantic. I couldn’t remember her name, though I’d known her for years. Aug’s prescriptions were rattling in my bag, and he was waiting in the car, diminished by his failing heart and a long morning with Boston’s doctors, his rosacea rioting in the humidity. Talk to him, the woman urged. Just talk to him about art and beauty and Tillman’s legacy. Get him to change his mind about building that ruinous house of his.
Art and beauty and legacy? What amazing, pompous bullshit these people spouted. I didn’t know how could they stand themselves. “Please, leave me alone,” I told her.
In the car, Aug had slid down in his seat, either from fatigue or persecution, though he’d deny both. He was, at sixty-six, a proud, boastful, know-it-all, sometimes a bully. We’d been married for ten years. He was the most entitled man I’d ever loved and been loved by. He’d saved me from a small life of compromise and disappointments.
“Oh, sweetheart, there you are. I’ve been watching this rain the whole time,” he said, full of awe at its power to make people scatter. “When I was a kid, the water used to come pouring in under the windowsills. The walls would swell for days.” The neck of his white shirt was damp with sweat and uncharacteristic nostalgia. My blouse was soaked, too, and I started to shiver. Aug didn’t talk about his past often, but he’d described his childhood in Worcester as screechingly poor, beyond dirt and into dust. Mine had been not so different, but with some slugging and slapping, and the front door slamming so often it came off its hinges.
Was I lonely married to Aug? Only sometimes, but you hear enough terrible things said about the one you love, as I’d been hearing that summer, and you’re not persuaded, but a kind of puzzlement creeps in. The mind reconsiders even what it first dismissed. It is a wife’s anguish to one day allow herself to see her husband the way others see him—and I was terrified of that day. The woman from the drugstore passed in front of our car and hesitated as she considered haranguing us even there in the downpour, but something made her tug at her slicker and go on. Aug was disappointed. A fight might revive him; it was his best mode then, and what kept his heat pumping juicily. He would never accept that it was his defenseless pallor, that yeasty hue of coronary decline, that made her keep going. He would rather be reviled than have people know he was sick and mortal.
A year and a half earlier, Aug, rich for over a decade by then, had overnight scooped up the piece of land that now so inflamed people, thirteen untouched acres that rested between two hills swaying with beach grass, from a man who’d hit a fatally bad patch of business. At one end, the property slid into Block Island Sound, the other end narrowing into locust trees, rugosa, and an unpaved stretch leading out towards New Town Road. If you stood on the beach with the water at your back, as Aug and I had done from time to time admiring what we owned, you could see the famous Tillman house to the right of our property—small, modest, dusty white like a bone, set back for the widest vista. This was the landscape that had inspired Tillman to paint those bereft, gazing women, and sometimes the soulful water, and it was this landscape and view Aug was accused of destroying with the house he planned to build. What he was doing was immoral, his enemies said, like hitting a child. They called themselves the Shoreline Citizens, and they would fight him and contest his plans at every step. That Aug owned textile mills like some wicked master out of a darker time made perfect sense to those who opposed him. He was the rich industrialist, they were on the side of angels.
August was determined to go to the selectmen’s meeting about the building permit for the house that evening even though he hadn’t been feeling well or energetic since the medical visit in Boston two weeks before. I told him I didn’t want him to go, but he was adamant, and eyed me warily, prepared for a challenge. He called me into the bathroom where he’d dumped my makeup into the sink.
“What the hell am I looking for?”
The new medication sometimes swamped his mind with irritation. His jaw line had become pronounced, the slack of health almost used up. He wanted to paint away the dark swags under his eyes because he couldn’t have people think this house trouble was getting to him, keeping him up at night or making him sick. I smeared on some foundation, but he wanted more color, though he was already too cakey, like an old drag queen. I asked him again not to go; I couldn’t stand the thought of those people seeing him like this. In the mirror, we were alarmingly mismatched; I was taller, twenty years younger, still vigorous. I looked away first.
“The picture of health,” he announced, but who knew which one of us he’d meant.
In the town hall, the windows were open in the second floor hearing room. The night was a thick blue-black, bugs tapping out their code against the screens, and in that airless space, we were all floating above the contested ground, those selectmen and the so-called Shoreline Citizens, my husband and me. Someone had enlisted an expert from New York to talk about Tillman’s place in American art, and the man spoke deliberately, as if everyone—but especially Aug—was an idiot. When the lights were turned off, he showed slides of Tillman’s work. It was hard not to be moved, but who hadn’t seen those paintings of women a million times on calendars and kitchen towels and mouse pads? People anonymously dropped off books of the art on our doorstep, like turds in a brown paper bag. They sent us postcards of Tillman’s work. One, unsigned, read, “I was in the National Gallery, saw this and thought of you.” Tillman’s view, the one that would be disturbed by our house if it was built, was a national treasure, and if left unravished—that was the expert’s word that tried to untangle itself in my head—would continue to inspire others. Aug grunted and pulled at his last tuft of gray hair; inspire how, exactly? He didn’t deal in abstractions or potentials, just hard work and endurance and final decisions. The house, with its sight of the water from every room, was what he’d wanted since he was a kid tossing on a filthy mattress. It was his due now, and why not?
“Let people find their own fucking inspiration,” he said, loud enough for others to hear.
“Let’s be civil,” one of the selectmen said. The art expert adopted a vacant look.
When the lights went on, Diana, a former friend of ours, spoke about environmental concerns—the broom crowberry, the eastern spade-footed toad, the north harrier hawk, as if those things existed on Aug’s piece of land and no where else on earth. He yawned ostentatiously. Finally, the uneasy, middle-aged son of the dead painter’s dead friend spoke to the room. He owned the Tillman place—it had been left to him to see to its preservation—but he didn’t live there. No one had since Tillman himself. He had an uneasy manner and a sunburned nose he kept touching. A few times his ambivalent eye fell on me. He never said which side of the fight he was on, and it was this aftertaste of uncertainty he left when he sped away from the meeting that re-energized the crowd.
But this was only a hearing, there wouldn’t be a decision tonight, or likely for a long while, maybe a year or more, which meant our plans were on hold indefinitely. The room buzzed with victorious whispers, while Aug’s cool pose only further hardened people against him. The whole thing had begun to seem like a race of biblical concerns; which would come first, the kingdom or the king’s death?
Aug stayed to talk to one of the selectmen, while I went downstairs and outside to wait for him. Just beyond the town hall steps, a woman called my name and waved me over to her group.
“We’re wondering how you feel about all this, Alice,” she said. The others looked at me expectantly. “You’ve been notably quiet on the subject. You’re his wife, but that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to have an opinion of your own.” The men laughed moronically.
These people had known August and me from the days when we were still invited to their parties, before all this grief about a house that didn’t even exist yet. Aug had watched their sacred sunsets dip behind the horizon and he’d swirled his drink covetously; he didn’t hide the fact that this was exactly what he wanted for himself. I suspected that they disliked him even then because they thought he was crude and avaricious. But to me, their faded clothes, old station wagons, frayed sneakers, damp summer houses, long, academic vacations—their hidden affluence in a world of desperation—was the crudest and falsest of all. They already had what they wanted.
“Yes, tell us how you feel about this,” another woman urged.
As a second, younger wife, I knew they’d always suspected me of marrying Aug for his money. I was blond, strong shouldered, a mystery they thought they understood, and they’d assumed that I could be their instrument of persuasion. These women, these almost but never friends of mine, these pursuers.
“How do I feel?” I asked, smiling and pressing a hand to my chest where my heart stomped with rage at them. “I’m really looking forward to our new house. It’s going to be beautiful, the sight of water from every window.”
Their heads tilted like dogs; was I fucking with them? I lifted the hair from my neck and let it fall again as though nothing bothered me except a little summer night’s heat. The men kicked at the dirt. I was not like their wives; I knew I was still beautiful. I turned to see Aug making his way down from the second floor, his hand grasping the railing. Maybe these Shoreline Citizens thought they would beat him down eventually, believed that no man could withstand public opinion that shunned him and called him a heartless, selfish prick, but they didn’t know Aug and didn’t understand that if you’re hated and you’re facing the end of your life, none of that mattered. Or that it only produced the opposite effect. He would fight forever.
His depth perception was newly shaky from the Aldactone, and his sneakered foot hovered over each riser. His reading glasses, perched on the top of his head, reflected the moonlight. Every step, compromised as it was, seemed to say screw you to the others, I’ll build my big house and outlive all of you. I was frozen with worry for him and the way his wide mouth was open as if a breath of health might blow in and cure him. Near the bottom, he gazed out and something like dread crossed his face and clouded his eyes. I like to think it was that he knew what was about to happen, and not about the way the people looked at him with such contempt. His legs folded, his head dropped in resignation, and he rolled over himself and down the last seven wooden stairs. His forehead hit the bottom granite stoop, his glasses went flying into the thick groundcover, and he curled into their tiny leaves, and then into himself.
There was a sickening inhale of the crowd as I rushed to Aug. No one else moved. He blinked like a baby while the two-inch gash on his forehead filled with blood, flooded his eyes and mixed with the pasty make-up. I tried to shield him and hold his twitching hands in mine. When he looked up at me, I knew he could see that I was alone with him, that behind me were not people to help, but just the white, indifferent clapboards of the town hall, and beyond that, the starless sky. I was a mourning bride without a train of concern. Aug began to shake and so did I. His head fell heavy in my hands. I was by myself, the ground soft under me, the cold heat of other bodies at a distance. Was this the end? Blood twined through his hair and my fingers.
“Will someone help me?” I yelled. “Please?”
Some of these Shoreline Citizens might be falling down stairs themselves soon, or clutching their heart on a benign summer evening, and now they were caught in their own dilemma of helping a man they’d sworn not to help. But they weren’t terrible people, and they finally began to stir and move towards us. Someone grabbed a blanket from a car, someone put a hand on my back. If they didn’t know Aug was sick before, they knew it now. But they were unsure of the outcome, like a group of kids that suspects it has gone too far.
Diana bent down and said something to me, but I blocked her self-righteous gawking. The EMTs came, and at the hospital, August’s head was scanned and stitched, and I explained his condition and medications so many times, I wondered if the doctors were trying to break me down like a criminal. I drove us home just as it was getting light out, and Aug kept his hand on my leg not only out of affection, I thought, but out of a need to hold on to something that wouldn’t escape his grasp. He was humiliated and silent. I told him he looked like a hero in a war photo, his face bruised and puffy and a startling white bandage around his head at a jaunty angle, but he didn’t react. I was ridiculously jocular and scared. I stopped at the town hall to dig around for Aug’s glasses, but couldn’t find them. My hands came up wet and empty. Back at the small house Aug had lived in for only one summer with his first wife and their daughter, and now me, he went up to bed. I pulled the shades down against the promised heat and unfolded a cool sheet over his legs. During that long day, I was captive in the house, surrounded by a forest of scrub pines brushing against each other and the watery feeling of having been spared something terrible.
Years before we were married, I had tutored Aug’s eight-year-old daughter, Molly, in reading. Her school might have given her the help she needed, but I saw that her father wanted to protect his only child from whatever label might be pinned on her—slow or dumb or worse. I wondered what had been pinned on him as a kid—Jew, shrimp, kike (all that and shit poor too, it turned out). Molly had eczema on the inside of her arms, and a thin, nervous mother. There was clearly little money; the house was flaking and bruised, the stove spattered, the wife wide-eyed. Once I heard August battling with her in another room while Molly pretended not to notice and raked her skin. The child was distracted and dense as sludge. We took the summer off, and when we started again in September, August had moved out and a divorce was in the works. The wife was oddly solicitous of me then, but she was more than I wanted to take on, and I ended the tutoring. I couldn’t take their money anymore, and couldn’t stomach the unhappiness that hung in the air like the smell of a bad meal. From time to time, I thought about that family and what might have happened to them, and how I’d come into and out of their lives like a painting brought in to distract from a room with crumbling walls.
I saw August a couple of years later in a diner where I was having breakfast with my boyfriend. He and Molly sat at the counter. Her legs had grown long and improbably smooth in the way of pubescent girls and she was wearing pink shorts even in October. She swiveled on her stool and chattered on while August was silent, elbows ground into the formica, his back hunched, hands around a cup of coffee. An asshole, I decided. After breakfast, my boyfriend and I went apple picking at a place just beyond the diner. We were forcing a last good time on each other until we could end what we had going, and then, there was August and his daughter again at another line of trees, and I thought, what are the chances of this happening? Not for years, and then twice in a morning? August stayed in one place and held a bag open while Molly ran around collecting fruit and dropping it in. But he wasn’t disengaged or bored as I’d thought he’d been back at the diner, but rather some emotion he had no idea how to express had overcome and frozen him.
He turned to me and waved me over—he would not come to me, that wasn’t the way it worked with him—and we talked. My boyfriend had wandered off and Molly flitted between the trees. When August looked at me, I could tell he was trying to remember something, maybe his earlier impressions and if they matched up with what he saw now. I was vibrant and talkative, my cheeks rouged with the morning and his attention. It was the only time I’d ever felt more powerful than August. I looked over my shoulder at Molly who we’d been talking about.
“Is she having any more reading issues?” I asked.
“Issues?” he laughed. “Jesus, is that how you people really talk?” He glanced at my boyfriend and measured his own want against the other man’s. “I’d like to go out with you sometime. Give me your number.” It was only after we were married that he told me he’d followed me to the orchard that morning.
Now the fall down the town hall steps had set him back—or forward—and he rarely got out of bed anymore. One late afternoon, Molly, who’d moved to Houston with her mother soon after I’d seen her apple picking thirteen years earlier, finally phoned her father. This was after I’d emailed too many times to tell her how sick he was, and how she should think about coming to see him, and to remind her that she hadn’t responded, not even once. She’d grown brooding and unforgiving of Aug after the divorce, and they rarely saw each other or spoke. She was Aug’s deepest regret, one he kept to himself, as if to let it run in the open space might kill him. He’d asked me to shut the door when she called, and when it was over, he began to not so much cry as bleat. It was a shocking, hollow sound—an animal on the edge of a cliff. When I went in, he was sitting on the edge of the bed in his boxers, his sunken stomach pulsing in and out, his hands behind his neck.
“What did she say?” I asked. I had to look away from his glass of water that had grown too cloudy on the nightstand. There was nothing benign to focus on anymore. The television was on to a baseball game without the sound. “Tell me, Aug.”
He shook his head; he wouldn’t talk about it. Tears pooled in his defeated cheeks and he touched my face. “Why aren’t I feeling better? It was just a fall, a missed step,” he said. “This isn’t right. It’s not supposed to be like this.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said.
But I wanted to say, it’s because you’re dying, Aug, and because you’re never going to feel better than this, and because it wasn’t just a fall or a single step; it was a plummet. I wanted to say how awful it was that his only child had deserted him, that she could make him cry when nothing else could, and how we should have had a child of our own when we’d had the chance. Our union was simple math; what he loved about me was that I loved him back. Neither of us had had much of that in our lives, and we knew its worth. I saw him again as that dust-poor child, the picked-on, the neglected. His daughter’s grabbed-up love had been the deepest deprivation of all.
“They’re doing this to me, Alice,” he said, after a few minutes. “They’re going to kill me with this.”
I rested my head on his rocky knee and smelled his body in foul decline. For the first time, I didn’t want to breathe him in; I was afraid now it would kill me, too, and I sat back, ashamed. I replayed his fall down the town hall stairs, but this time I pictured myself going back there a hundred times in the dark, kneeling in the spot where he’d curled up, looking for a dead man’s glasses. No one was there to help me, and no one would come, but they’d watch from a distance, or stay hidden in the trees. I was my own cautionary tale.
I didn’t want to live like that. I might have a house on the water, a victory of sorts, but Aug would be gone by then and I’d be alone in the place, with all that scorn burning at my back. If he and I had shared during our marriage, a notion that it was us against them, I couldn’t sustain that alone. I’d seen that fearsome isolation the night he’d fallen and didn’t want to see it again. It was my life I was protecting now.
“This fight is poisonous,” I said, and sat back on my heels. “Let’s not build the house. We’ll stay right here, in this one. This is perfect, it always has been. This is where we live. I don’t want another house.”
His mouth moved as if he were working at a hard candy. “I wasn’t talking about the house,” he said, with strange calm. “I was talking about the doctors.” He lay down on the bed and pulled the sheet up. “But now I see. I understand.”
“I only want you. I don’t care where we live.”
“There’s no ‘we,’ sweetheart, don’t you see? I’m doing this for you so you’ll have it later on. So I can picture you someplace when I’m dead. But it’s okay, Alice, it really is. It’s okay.” He closed his eyes as if I’d left the room already. “It’s okay,” he said again, this time soothing himself. “We’ll stop.”
If desire was life, then I’d just killed his.
I watched the sheet rise and fall on his fading form. I asked him to open his eyes, but he wasn’t stirred when I undressed, or when I lay next to him, careful to keep my weight off him. He was pale bones, and while the scar on his forehead reddened like a traitor, his penis remained motionless, a betrayed, lilac curl, even when I put my mouth to it. He sighed and pushed me away. Aug slept most days until midday, then woke restless and uncomfortable, trying to stretch his joints back into place. In the afternoons, he often trawled the house in his sagging boxers as though he’d lost something—which he had in giving up the fight. And if he came upon me, he’d ask what I was doing, or what I’d done earlier, what I’d eaten, who I’d seen, as if I’d gone away and seen the sights. But I hadn’t gone anywhere, and was captive everywhere, pursued by him if I stayed home, pursued by neighbors if I left. Women approached me at the pond and the post office. They said Aug hadn’t been seen around town; had he finally changed his mind? They forced me to hold my breath too long in the water to avoid them, until I saw the mulchy bottom and the white blooms of underwater flowers, and in the post office until my hand went numb clutching the inconsequential mail.
One afternoon, a man Aug used to play backgammon with on summer afternoons, wept as he talked to me about how Aug was going to destroy his favorite place on earth. What about me? I stood there, unmoving, but stirred to the core, until he was too embarrassed to go on. I got some absurd satisfaction out of not telling him that we were giving up the fight. I understood that for him, what remained untouched remained ageless. Everyone was just trying to hold on forever, including Aug, including me.
When I got home, Aug was waiting for me in the front room. I told him about running into his former friend.
“Old crybaby,” Aug said, fondly.
I sat next to him and put my head on his shoulder. “Forgive me,” I said.
“Forgive you for what? There’s nothing to forgive, Alice.” He pushed my head off. “You were honest. I can’t be angry at that, but I can be sad that you don’t want what I’m giving you, what I’ve worked a lifetime for.” With effort, he rose from the couch and went upstairs.
The next morning, I called his doctor and got something to help Aug sleep through those dismal hours of each dwindling day when he wandered or ambushed. Not his dismal hours, but mine. The house of a dying man is a museum of intentions, and I couldn’t bear to be in it. By 5:00, he was out for the night, his breathing raspy, the cat sleeping loyally between his skinny legs.
Some evenings, when Aug was in his narcotized sleep, I drove up and down Route 6, not sure what I was looking for. I wondered if I wasn’t waiting to see an accident, a sharp disaster that would define the day. One airless evening, I found myself turning off New Town Road and driving towards our property. I parked at the end of the dirt road and trudged through the beach grass and the rugosa and the dip between the hills and onto the dunes. I didn’t know if it was the view or the walk or the smell of salt and roses that left me breathless. There was a party down on the beach, and a bonfire that was pale against the sky. I knew nothing about it, but I missed being part of it anyway. The tide had pulled out and water skimmed the sandbars. Behind me, the Tillman house was yellowing in the lowering sun, and I walked over to it. I peered in the waterside windows and saw a day bed covered with a faded Indian print bedspread, a couple of canvas chairs, a table bleached by the relentless light, a closed door. Empty of people, but full of the suggestion that you could live there and feel something every day. Maybe this was the house I was meant to live in. I lay down on the splintery deck, my hands over my chest. I was content, even, thrilled to be illicit and undetected, to have found this place where no one would find me. They’d never look for me there. The bugs tuned up, testing their wings. Then there were footsteps inside the house, a light went on, a door opened, and a man came out, stretched his arms up and let out a long, low fart.
“Holy shit,” he said, looking at me. He was Ray, the owner of the place who’d spoken at the selectmen’s meeting. He backed towards the door. It was absurd to think I could scare anyone, and I laughed, first from my own fear and embarrassment, and then because I didn’t know what else to do. He looked at me on his porch like I was an animal or a drunk.
“I am so sorry,” I said. “Obviously, I didn’t know anyone was here. I’m mortified.”
“I know you. You’re the wife of the guy who wants to build the house. You were at the town hall meeting.” He was clearly amused and still puzzled.
“I’m Alice and I don’t know what I was thinking.” Ray had the soft, sleepy look of someone who’s fallen headfirst into relaxation. “Actually, I was thinking no one was here or I wouldn’t have come. Didn’t you say the house was empty?”
“Was empty.” He turned his face at a slight angle. “Then you’re not here to get me on your side?”
“Of course not.”
“You’d be amazed. People do this all the time, just walk up here and stand on the deck like the place is open to the public. Then they try to talk to me.” He made a gesture like he was swatting at a fly. “And I don’t want to talk to them.”
“It is the famous Tillman view, after all, a national treasure. The source of all inspiration.”
“So people keep reminding me,” he said, shrugging.
The fire at the beach party flared. “I should go. I’m sorry again.”
“It’s okay. Stay—I mean now that you’re here, you might as well. I know it happens every night, but at least watch the sunset.”
I smiled, a public joke that felt almost private. Ray seemed as glad for the company as I was to have found it. We sat on the deck drinking beer, our legs over the side. He said that he hadn’t planned on staying after the selectmen’s meeting, but had changed his mind after his first night in the house, which he’d found compelling but confusing. He wasn’t used to the light, the colors, or the absence of urban noise, the smell of moonlight cooling the water. He’d visited a few times as a kid when his father was there with Tillman and while his mother, not his father’s wife anymore, waited out on the road in the car doing a crossword puzzle. There was more to the story, it practically pounded to be let out, but he stopped there. He had a kind of halting manner about him that felt in part like resignation, in part sadness. He averted his eyes too often, ran one hand over the other, and occasionally looked at the place on his wrist where his watch usually was.
“How’s your husband?” he asked. “Actually, forget it, you don’t have to tell me. It’s just I heard—people have told me—that he fell after the meeting.”
“Do you see? They’ll say anything. He’s fine. Going ahead with the plans.”
“Pissing people off.”
I told him how I was pursued during the day, and how I’d started only going out evenings because of it. I did not tell him about how I blacked Aug out until morning with something strong—for my own good.
“Same with me,” he said. “I can’t go anywhere without being ambushed, cornered, followed. What a funny town this is. Looks nice from the outside, but inside, it’s all this grinding self-righteousness and privilege. Personally, I don’t give a shit one way or the other about how this works out.” He nodded towards Aug’s land. “But I can definitely see why you’d want to put a house there. For the view. If you like that sort of thing.”
He seemed pleased that he could make me laugh. But a view was nothing you could hold or take to bed with you or trace the borders of. A view wasn’t what you saw, but what you felt when you saw it—and what could I feel when it was about the end of my husband? I pictured him, lips caught on dry teeth, drugged for the night. Who knew what Ray felt? I said I had to go, but it was fully dark, and I couldn’t see my way back. He found a flashlight and stood on the deck with it, providing me with a beam of light to follow through the grass until it became too faint to see, but by then, I’d found my way back to the road.
The late July air sucked up the last drops of moisture, and when I came back from a walk one morning, I was covered with dust and Aug was downstairs looking over a set of architect’s plans FedEx had just delivered. He’d spread them across the table and in the hazy morning sun, his body was as shocking as his strange new energy. His hair was a wild frizz, and he was all dip and slack tendon, his limbs held together by loose string. It was alarming enough to stop me in the doorway. He waved me over to the drawings, and traced the geometry of windows, doors, roof peaks, corners. He was punishing me with every lovely detail, reminding me of what I’d said I didn’t want, but to me, these plans were stamped with his absence. I tried to leave, but he caught me by the wrist.
“And this,” he said, pressing two fingers against the violet paper, “is the bedroom and here’s the window facing the water.” He swept a hand over where the water would be. “What do you think?” He smiled patiently, but I could see the anger behind it. He brushed the dust off my face.
“Are you really going ahead with this?” I asked. “I thought we were done with this.”
“No, dear, you were done with it. Did you really expect I would stop fighting now?”
I retreated to the kitchen. “What would you like for lunch?” I called out. My chest ached, my hands were freezing. I thought about sitting on the floor for a few hundred days.
“I want,” he said. “I want. What I want is,” but he was unable to finish the sentence. He’d exhausted himself. I heard in his want all the disappointments in his life, which included me now, but I didn’t help him finish his thought or make his way back to bed as I once might have. I rolled up the plans and put them behind the couch.
What I wanted, for an instant, was for him to be dead already, for all this to be over. I could leave then and never come back.
At the end of the week, Diana, defender of endangered species at the selectmen’s meeting, showed up at our house. She carried a clear plastic cage the size of a small purse. There was something she wanted to show August, she said.
“He’s sleeping,” I told her. “This isn’t a good time.”
Aug must have heard her car pull up because he stood at the top of the stairs. “Sure it’s a good time. What do you have there, old girl?” he boomed.
“Two Eastern Spadefoot Toads,” she called up. “Found on your land, actually.”
“My land? So you were trespassing.” He started down the stairs, the cat bounding past him and out the door. “Maybe I should call the police and report you. Have you arrested.”
Diana gave his smirk a disapproving look, then noted his bare chest with its wisps of hair, the ways his bones protruded, his nose arcing out from his face like a challenge. Aug peered into the container she’d put on the table. Two toads in a corner stared at twigs and moss.
“I used to like these things when I was a kid,” Aug said, tapping the side. “You could pick them up by the dozens in the alleys. Come on boys, let’s see a little action in there. Hop to it.”
“Don’t do that,” Diana said. “You’ll scare them.”
“Alice, come look at these things.” Aug waved me over, but I stayed in the kitchen doorway. He was playing with Diana, his disgust in that single finger which continued to bang on the plastic.
“They’re on the watch list, you know,” she said. “If you build that house you’re planning, you’ll destroy their habitat. I just wanted to make sure you understand that.”
Aug began to take off the top of the cage. Diana said she’d prefer he didn’t do that. “Keeping them in this Tupperware thing doesn’t seem so environmentally friendly. Shouldn’t we let them go?” he asked, all false benevolence. “Let them be free-range toads again?”
He picked up the container and went to the door. It looked like he was going to fling the toads in their plastic UFO to their death, and I thought, he’s capable of anything now, even acts of cruelty. But then he kneeled and let the toads out with the gentlest push. They were like tourists, unsure which way to go, but he coaxed and assured them it was okay to move forward.
Diana squeezed my arm too hard and I yanked away. “Can’t you do something?” she pleaded. “He’s your husband.”
“Go away,” I whispered. “Please, just go away. Leave us alone.”
The three of us spotted the cat lurking under the day lilies, waiting for gifts—birds, mice—to kill and bring to Aug, her lover. Diana’s toads would be next. She handed me Aug’s lost glasses and left.
“I don’t think,” Aug said as he went back upstairs, “that woman knows I’m on the watch list, too.” He looked down at me with a blank expression. “I woke up the other night and you weren’t here. Where were you, Alice?”
“Here. I’m always here,” I said. “It was a dream.”
“Maybe I dreamed that when I called for you, you didn’t answer, and when I came downstairs and looked for you, you were gone, the car was gone.”
“You were asleep all night.”
“Possible, but I don’t think so.” His accusatory tone was corrupted by a sudden bout of coughing. He waved me away, but said, “Don’t leave me, Alice. I get scared when you’re not here. I think I’m already dead then. Do you know what that feels like? Please don’t leave me.”
“I won’t leave you,” I said. “I promise.”
The night I’d come back from the Tillman house and slipped into bed next to Aug, he hadn’t moved. I wondered what he’d detected on me even in his sleep—the beer, the bug spray, the scratches on my legs from the blackberry thorns. When Aug was back upstairs, I called Molly and left another message. Come see your father, I said. She didn’t call back.
Aug’s cat killed one of Diana’s toads, and its battered body lay by the door, untouched for two weeks, a kind of desiccating trophy I stepped over. One evening, I went again to the Tillman house. I was sure Ray had gone back to Chicago by then, but he stormed out of the house when I pulled up.
“Go away. This is private property,” he yelled even before I’d gotten out of the car. He was furious and looked ready to grab something menacing. “You’re trespassing.”
I hesitated. Did he know it was me? I leaned out the window, but it took him too long to consider who I was. “Okay, going,” I yelled back.
“Jesus. Alice? Is that you?” he said. “Sorry, I don’t have my glasses on, and these assholes keep showing up. I’m going crazy.”
He asked me inside and showed me a jar of beach plum jelly one of the Shoreline Citizens had dropped off that morning. Yesterday, there’d been a van full of German tourists stopping to see the site before heading into Boston for the weekend. Someone else had brought him steamers that he’d made for dinner and which I’d clearly interrupted. Bribes, he called the booty, offering me a seat and a clam. Ray seemed different, more comfortable in the house, as though he’d finally realized he had something others wanted.
“The trouble is that these people still don’t get that it doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. “I have no power, no say over what happens. It’s your land, not mine.”
“Not mine, either,” I said. “My husband’s.” The steamer was sweet and messy and left the scent of the ocean on my upper lip.
“Isn’t it that the same thing though? Yours and his?” he asked. When I gave a pained shrug, Ray consoled me by dabbing a drop of butter off my chin.
“I want to explain,” I said.
“Please, don’t. No need. Eat up. There’s fudge next.”
Ray struck me as a man who was alone a lot, though not by choice. I knew almost nothing about him, but you cannot put a man and a woman in a room—not with a bowl of steamers, not with the bay looking on and slapping the sand—and not have it occur to the woman, at least, that sex might be possible. The calculation is primal, essential. Attraction has almost nothing to do with it; sometimes it’s about survival and possibility. Ray dangled a steamer above his mouth.
“Why do you hate this place?” I asked.
“You know, I’m supposed to be back in Chicago by now. I have work.” He stroked his upper lip in evasion and looked down at an evening shadow playing on the table. “My father and Tillman used to sit on the deck and drink gin and send me down to the beach to swim. I was scared to swim alone. They were lovers and they wanted their time together. I didn’t figure it out until I was about fourteen,” he said, shaking his head at how dense he’d been. It was a sad story.
“And all those paintings of women,” I said. “Maybe not making love to them was what it took for Tillman to get them right.”
“That’s a scary thought. I’d like to get a woman right one of these days.” Ray smirked.
“You must have been surprised when your father left you the house.”
“Yes, surprised. It would have been nice to know why, when we were about as distant as a father and son can be, but it’s hard to make a corpse explain itself.” He sat back in his chair and wiped his hands on his shorts. “If you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.” We laughed. “I came by because I thought I’d take you to a pond for a swim, if you’re interested. It’s the only time I can go without being hassled—and it’s beautiful at this hour.”
We left the house, the steamers and the shells still scattered across the table, and when we got to the pond, the last car was just pulling out. It slowed to get a look at us gathering our towels from the trunk. The water was brassy, the surface broken by dipping dragonflies. Ray was a slow and graceless swimmer, breathing too hard and following me too far out. I turned around, worried about him getting back to shore.
When the water was at his waist, and he’d caught his breath, he said, “They tell me your husband’s not doing so well. They say he’s going to die before anything’s decided.”
The trees ringing the pond were still. A current wound around my ankles. Diana must have reported back about Aug’s bones, his dry lips, his vigilant shuffle, the stink of illness in the house.
“They think you’ll never go ahead with the house,” Ray said. “That you don’t have the stomach for it, that you’re not like him.”
There is a kind of anger that turns you cold and rigid, and as soon as I dove away from Ray, I knew I was in trouble. The water was too heavy, my fingers were sieves, and my heart had no rhythm. So this is drowning, I thought, as I saw roots tangled like nerve endings. My feet touched the bottom and pushed me up.
Ray handed me a towel when I got out. “Why didn’t you tell me, Alice? Why did you tell me he’s fine if he isn’t?”
“He’s dying,” I said, my throat straining. “He almost never gets out of bed. He’s lost so much weight I can see his skull under his skin. He can’t sit on a chair because it’s too hard on his tailbone. I drug him in the afternoon so he sleeps until the morning, just so I can get a break. He’s building the house for me to live in when he’s dead and I don’t want it. How’s that? Is that what I should have told you?”
Ray didn’t know what to say, and I plodded back through the woods to the car. Ray followed and we didn’t speak again until I’d pulled up to his house. I turned off the engine and stared ahead.
“There’s really no place for you to go, is there,” he said.
I nodded. “Anywhere I am, I’ve made the wrong decision.”
Ray put his arm around my shoulder, an awkward move in the car, both of us still damp and mostly strangers to each other. But the way he rested his face against mine, I thought we’d found in the other, for just a moment, some familiar and tender ache.
When I got home, August was downstairs on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, despite the unrelenting heat. He looked at me in my suit, my clothes in one hand, my wet towel. “Nice swim?” he asked. “See anyone?”
“I had the pond to myself. Why are you down here? Are you okay?”
“Did you swim alone?” His voice was weak, but sharply edged.
“I told you—I had the place to myself. I want to get out of my suit.” I turned to leave the room.
“No, don’t go. Take it off here,” he said. “Let me see you.”
“No,” I said, and went upstairs to the bedroom where I knew he couldn’t reach me. My fingers were stiff and inept pulling at my suit, which stuck to my skin. Nausea pressed under my tongue. I smelled steamers and pond water. But August had managed the stairs and stood in the doorway. He stared at my body. I was all health and exertion, while his chest rose too quickly. I saw how illness was scooping him out. He sat on the bed and motioned for me to come close so he could press his face against my belly. He told me I was beautiful. I thought I would cry when he reached for my breast.
“You smell like sex.” He pushed me away. I looked down at his pale, babyish head. “I didn’t take my pill before, Alice. I don’t want to sleep anymore. Why should I be asleep for the rest of my life and see nothing more? I want to see everything.” He looked up at me. “No man will ever love you again,” he said. “I’m your last. You know that, don’t you?”
“How can you say that to me?”
“How can I not?”
I saw that when he’d gotten out of bed earlier, he’d pulled up his side of the sheets to show me that he was not coming back, that I’d sleep alone. He went downstairs again where he would stay until he died, getting more horizontal on the couch every day. I lay down, but couldn’t sleep. Around midnight, I went downstairs for a glass of water.
“I know you’ve left me already,” August said, out of the dark. “I’ve made everyone hate me, even you. A bad habit of mine—to get them before they get me. Not a way to live, but not a bad way to die.”
I was a room apart but I could have already been talking to Aug’s ghost when I asked, “Did you know you were sick when you bought the land? Did you know I’d always be alone there?” He didn’t answer. “Was that your plan?”
I went to see Ray the next evening, walking past Aug who was still on the couch, but now sunken into it, a fossil in the making. He hadn’t eaten all day and he didn’t ask me where I was going. When I got to the Tillman house, Ray’s car was there, but he wasn’t. I went around to the deck and saw him down on the beach, walking the sandbars. As I waited for him, what I wished for was a hurricane to flatten the Tillman house and Aug’s land, uproot the dunes until they slid into the water and disappeared. Or a fire. But the air was motionless, and the sky a beautiful, late summer boast.
“I’m going home tomorrow,” Ray said, stepping onto the deck. It was amazing how quickly I’d gotten used to his awkward delivery. One cheek was covered with sand, as though he’d been sleeping on beach.
“Do you think you’ll come back?”
“Not for a long time, probably not unless I have to.” He sat next to me. “One time when I was here as a kid, when my father and Tillman sent me down to the beach to swim, I nearly drowned. When I looked up for my father to help me, he and Tillman had gone inside. They were fucking when I came in, scared and wet.” He let out a thin, unhappy laugh. “Funny now—not so funny then.”
Is that the memory his father had wanted to leave him with when he’d left him the house? That while one is drowning, another is making love? That life is full of such fateful contrasts? When I leaned over to kiss Ray, he pulled away and looked alarmed, but I tilted at him, pressed my lips against his closed, resistant mouth. I put his hand on my breast, but he was inert, and his hand dropped.
“Sorry,” Ray said. “It’s nothing personal, Alice. I just have to leave this place. I’m sorry.” He stood and walked to another part of the deck.
I wasn’t humiliated by what had just happened, but instead felt as though I’d emerged from a perfect swim, my body celebrating its vitality. Aug was dying, but I wasn’t, and it seemed to me then in that singular moment of solitude, this was what he’d been trying to do with the house. He’d wanted me to hear this last yell of his, see his last desire spread out in front of me, so I’d know the difference every day between living and concession. I hadn’t wanted the house before because I thought it would kill me—with grief and loneliness—but now I did. I wanted the house. I don’t know how long I sat there, or how long Ray was inside packing up his things, but at some point, I watched headlights sweep over the beach grass on Aug’s property. A car had come down the road as far as it could and parked.
“An inspiration seeker,” I called to Ray. “Even in the dark, they’re looking for something.”
The driver’s side opened and a woman got out. She took a few steps towards the water and lit a cigarette. Soon, someone else got out of the car, a hunched figure with movement that was only a memory of movement. It was August. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, what he was doing, who he was with. He rested a hand on the woman’s shoulders and turned on a flashlight. Its beam roamed over the grass, then the Tillman house, then my frozen face.
“It’s my husband,” I told Ray who’d come outside. Aug had come looking for me, and he had always known where I was.
Aug drew a path to him with the flashlight and I left the deck and Ray. I was anxious to explain everything now. Closer, I saw that the woman was Molly. Even in the poor light, I could see that she had a bitter mouth and that it was set against me.
“Look who showed up,” Aug said to me. “Isn’t it wonderful? My darling Molly, my daughter.”
She said hello with the same cold tenor I’d heard over the phone in the early summer. It seemed impossible that I’d once sat at a table with her while she’d sounded out consonants, or that I’d watched her pick apples. She’d driven from Boston, she explained, in a rental car. She and Aug had been making plans for weeks.
“You didn’t tell me,” I said to Aug.
“This is a surprise then, isn’t it?” He shined his beam on Ray on the deck, and in the slow lowering of the light, Aug dismissed him. “I was showing Molly the land. I wanted to show her where her bedroom is going to be, where the window is, the deck onto the water. At night, she can walk out and see the stars. I showed her the plans. You like them, don’t you, sweetheart?”
“Sure. I mean, who wouldn’t?”
“Alice doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve done this for you,” he said, clutching her elbow in an ancient way. “All my life I’ve worked for you, Molly.” He said her name, but he was looking at me. I hadn’t wanted what he was determined to give me and this was my punishment and his retribution.
“This is your house,” he told Molly again.
He’d gotten his daughter back; whether she loved him or not didn’t matter. He could pretend, and he could picture her here when he was dead. She was not looking for inspiration, but maybe what she felt was owed her. I looked back at Ray’s, but he’d gone inside. In the morning, he’d lock the windows and pull the shades, and the Tillman place would be empty again, and anyone who wanted to sit on the deck and search the view for something they’d never find was welcome to come. I’d do it a couple of time myself most likely, but now August was ready to go home, and he said his daughter would take him.
