All That Is

18


AS I DO NOW



Tim Wille was a furniture designer, a little nervous and wild-eyed. When he talked to you he looked elsewhere, often at the wall. He no longer drank. He had been arrested while driving with a blood alcohol level that was .17 above the maximum limit. He’d spent the night in jail and thousands of dollars in lawyer’s fees over the following year. It was the best thing that ever happened to him—he gave up drinking, he said. He still had the look of it, though, along the edges.

Someone was singing at his house, it was hard to make out what. It was a party. The sound drifted over in a loose, romantic way. She liked Bowman’s house, Christine said. Although she had lived in New York, she had never been out here.

“It’s like the cane fields or something.”

They could hear the sea, the continuous, low sound of waves that lay beneath the wind.

He took her to a restaurant on the highway, a farmhouse set back from the road and run by a Greek family, a mother and two sons who were both in their fifties. The older one, George, was in the kitchen. Steve, who was less taciturn, handled the front, and the mother was cashier and ran the bar. The restaurant was known for steak, grilled over coals, and various Greek dishes like moussaka. When Steve came to the table, Christine said to him in Greek,

“So, what do you have to eat?”

He looked at her and nodded slightly.

“What do you like?” he said in Greek.

“Skorthalia,” she said. “Toasted kesari. Lamb and rice. Metrio afterwards.”

He responded with a smile. She was wearing a silk, apricot-colored shirt. Her teeth were white as calling cards. Later, the older brother came to the door of the kitchen to look.

“I’m very impressed,” Bowman said. “How long did it take you to learn Greek?”

“How long did it take me? One marriage,” she said.

The restaurant was crowded, almost every table was filled. A dwarf girl came in with her mother. She was barely four feet tall and had a stunted leg. She was wearing a kind of sweatshirt and her fingernails were painted blue. It was painful to see her twisting walk, but her face was serene.

“It’s like Greece,” Christine said. “Everyone comes, the whole town.”

There was a rather heavy woman, heavy but confident and definitely attractive in a flowered dress at a table near the door. Her name was Grace Clark. She was with another woman and a man, Gin Lane from the look of them. She had murdered her husband, Bowman said.

“Really?”

“I don’t know if she murdered him, but he was shot five times. She was in the city at the time, she claimed. She’d gone in to see the dentist but had gotten the day wrong. The police couldn’t shake her story. Her husband was a closet homosexual, he used to bring Puerto Rican boys to the house when she was gone. Very few people knew. She must have known. She had three witnesses to the fact that she didn’t kill him, she said. She was one, her husband was one, and God was the third.”

“She could prove she was in the city?”

“I don’t think so. That’s the point. No one was ever charged. The case has never been solved.”

They were drinking a second bottle of retsina.

“She was married two or three times before. I mean, what does it take to shoot your husband five times and claim you were away when it happened? I’ve met her, she’s actually an interesting woman.”

“I’ve never known a murderer, at least I don’t think I have. I do know some thieves.”

He was intensely aware of being there with her, the pleasure of it. He could see himself sitting across from her, the two of them. That was part of the pleasure.

The ocean that night could be heard from some way off. The sound of the waves was even and unending. They went to look. It was after eleven and the beach was completely empty, not even a light in any of the houses near it. The water was black, rising and then with a roar showing its teeth. They stood watching. He was a little drunk. Christine was hugging herself.

“Do you want to go for a swim?” he asked half-seriously.

“No. Not me.”

He felt a sudden desire, a wild recklessness, the image of the sea in Tahiti with the fervent sailors diving from their ships, the sea off Oahu or the California coast with a storm beginning to blow. Leander had swum the Hellespont.

“It would be wonderful,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

“Are you crazy?”

He was elated, also boasting. He had gone swimming at night though not in the breakers. The big waves were rhythmically swelling, peaking, and then crashing down. He stooped to take off his shoes.

“You’re not really going in?”

“Just for a minute.”

He was taking off his shirt and pants. She stood in disbelief.

“I’ll just see how cold it is.”

He was aware of the unreality of it, the bravado, but he was standing in his shorts, at night, at the sea’s edge. Turning back had become impossible.

“Philip,” she said. “Don’t.”

“It’s all right. I’ll be all right.”

“No!”

The first rush of water around his ankles was not as cold as he’d expected. As he moved forward, a surge swept in and the water rose up to his waist. Suddenly there was a wave rising before him and he dove into it, the steep black water, and came up in the face of another one about to break. He dove again, coming up this time farther out. The outer line of waves was rising here. It was deeper. The bottom was gone, his feet could no longer touch it. He fought against panic. He was rising and falling in the swells, the waves thundering. He tried to sense their rhythm. A swell lifted him and he looked towards shore. He couldn’t see her. The waves were coming in sets of five or six, he couldn’t tell. He had to wait until it was calmer, which he was afraid it would not be. Swimming he tried to control his breath. Suddenly his heart jumped. Something was there in the darkness! It was a swimmer’s head. Christine.

“What are you doing?” he cried.

He was frightened at seeing her. He was having enough difficulty himself.

“Can you touch bottom here?” she said.

“No,” he said. “Do you know how to get back?”

“No.”

“Stay with me! Watch out! Here’s one! Dive!”

They came up together. Her face looked white, fearful.

“When you’re lifted up, when it’s about to break, swim with it hard, stretch out, like a knife.”

They were rising steeply.

“Now!” he called.

They began swimming together but it broke past them. Then came another. They were too late, it collapsed beneath them. They both disappeared in the surf but came up in time to dive beneath a breaking wave. They were closer in.

“Now!” he cried again. “Go!”

She tried to run in the waist-high water but was pulled back and fell in the rush of a wave. She managed to get back on her feet and stumbled out. He followed her.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

She stood with her arms around herself, shaking.

“That was something,” he said.

“Yes.” It was hard for her to speak.

A surge of water came in around their feet. He took her in his arms. He could feel her chest heaving as she breathed. He admired her immensely.

“What made you do it?”

“I don’t know. Love madness.”

“You’ve never done it before?”

“Not in water like that.”

They went back to the house shaken but exultant. She sat with a robe pulled up around her.

“Are you cold?”

“A little.”

“Do you want something to drink?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m getting warmer.”

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw you out there. Weren’t you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I had to.”

He lay in bed while she showered. He had bought two extra pillows and was lying amid them as he waited. The feeling beforehand was like no other. He heard the shower being turned off and finally she came out, her hair hastily dried, and taking off the robe, slipped into bed beside him. No one was ever more desired. He pulled her to him to be able to hold her more fully. Her hand was between his legs.

“Oh, my,” she whispered.

“That’s right.”

He felt like a god. They were only beginning.


He woke in the early light. It was strangely quiet, the waves had stopped breaking. A long vein of green lay in the sea. On the window was a pale moth waiting for morning.

“Christine,” he said softly in her ear. “Don’t wake up. Can you do it while you’re sleeping?”

Afterward, they lay as if dismembered. One leg, clad in a white pajama, was up among the pillows near her head. She stroked the bare foot. The sheets, which had been of an incredible softness, were kicked out of place. Far down the beach, unseen, an American flag flew from a single tall pole like a signal of decency and goodness.

“This is the way you fall in love,” he said.

“Is this the way you did?”

“Oh, God no.”

He was silent then.

“I was stricken,” he said. “I was blinded by it. I didn’t know anything. Of course, neither did she. That was a long time ago. Then we got divorced. We were simply different kinds of people. She had the courage to say it. She wrote me a letter.”

“It was that easy?”

“Oh, not at the time. Things are never that easy at the time.”

“I know,” she said. “I married for sex.”

“I hoped that was what I was marrying for.”

“Women are very weak.”

“That’s funny. I haven’t found that to be so.”

“They’re weak. A bracelet, a trinket, a ring.”

“I notice you’re still wearing one.”

“It’s sentimental,” she said. “I can’t wait to take it off.”

“Let me,” he said but did not move.

“You certainly deserve to.”

He didn’t want to say anything further but to let that remain like a last chord. Then he said,

“I was very impressed when you were speaking Greek. He was impressed, too.”

“I don’t really know that much.”

“You seemed to have no problem.”

“My problem is that I need to find a place to live. I need to earn money, and I need a place to live.”

“I’ll help you.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Absolutely. A woman like you can have anything she wants.”

“A woman like me,” she said.

Yes, like her. The thought of traveling with her, the two of them together in Greece—he ignored the fact of her husband there—the Greece she had told him about. He imagined it, Salonica, Kythira, the women in black, the white boats that linked the islands. He’d never been there. He’d read The Colossus of Maroussi, wild and exaggerated, he’d read Homer, he’d seen Antigone and Medea and listened to the fabulous voice of Nana Mouskouri filled with life. Not all at once but somehow together he thought of Aleksei Paros who had more or less disappeared, Maria Callas, the shipping magnates, the white wine that tasted of pine sap, the Aegean, white teeth and dark hair. It was all a brilliant dream, Greece was in one’s blood, they wailed at the grave there, they washed the bodies of the dead. But it was not death that drew him, it was the opposite. With Christine it would be unimaginably rich, living in the sunlight, on the water, on terraces hidden by vines, in the bare rooms of hotels. She would shake it flat and read some of the Greek newspaper to him, perhaps she would, he imagined her able to do anything. He wanted the Greek words for morning, night, thank you, love. He wanted some dirty Greek words so he could whisper them. Nude, he remembered, was the same in every language but probably not in Greek. He loved her nude, he loved thinking of it. He was for the moment emptied of desire but not in the broader sense.

Outside, the day was made up of various silences. The hours had come to a stop. She was quiet, thinking of something, perhaps of nothing. She could not possibly know her allure. He was lying with a smooth-limbed woman who had been stolen from her husband. She was now his, they were in life together. He was thrilled by it. It fit his character, the daring lover, something he knew he was not.


The train that Dena and her son, Leon, were taking to Texas to see her parents went to Dallas and they lived near Austin but would come with their car. Dena wanted to see the country, and Leon was excited by the idea. In the dark lower level of Penn Station where the trains arrived and left, overlapping voices announcing departures filled the air, godlike and final. Eddins stopped to ask a porter for directions to the right car, and they came to it a few moments later and the three of them carried the luggage down the corridor to their compartment where Eddins helped them stow it and stayed talking to them. There hadn’t been time to take them to lunch as he’d intended. Leon was becoming nervous, the train was about to leave, he said. He was as tall as Dena, taller.

Eddins looked at his watch.

“There’s still three or four minutes,” he said.

“Your watch may not be right.”

“Tell them I’m really sorry I couldn’t come,” he said to Dena. “Next time, all right?”

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

He hugged each of them,

“Have a good trip.”

Out on the platform he stood by the window, waiting. Perhaps he heard it, but in the compartment there was a kind of low sound and electric trembling just as, exactly on time, the train began to move. He waved and they waved back. He blew a kiss and walked along beside them for five or ten feet until he began to fall behind as the train picked up speed. Face pressed to the glass, Dena waved good-bye. It was three forty-five in the afternoon. They would be in Chicago in the morning and from there take the Texas Eagle to Dallas. It was their first trip to Texas on a train. They had always flown there.

They were in darkness at first, beneath the streets, but then broke out into daylight, deep in a series of concrete cuts that took them to the Hudson, the train smooth and swaying slightly as the speed increased. They could hear the low, familiar sound of the whistle far ahead. As if exhilarated by it, they continued to go faster, They went along the river. On the opposite side were dark granite cliffs covered in green. It was a bluish day with the clouds shaped like smoke. The stations, all strangely vacant late in the day, sped by, Hastings, Dobbs Ferry. Soon after, in the distance was their own town, Piermont, almost completely hidden in trees.

“There it is,” Dena said. “That’s Piermont.”

“I’m trying to see our house.”

“I think I see it.”

“Where?”

They tried to pick it out but there was too much foliage that hid even their street, and moments later they were passing beneath the shadowy steel of the bridge at Tappan Zee.

For a long while they followed the idling river. They went by Ossining and the great prison there, Sing Sing, that she pointed out. Leon had heard of it but never seen it. It was where they had executions, he knew.

As the tracks drifted inland, away from the river, there were marshes and trees. Peekskill, a station flashing past. Then, with the sun still high above the hills, there came the steep, silent walls of West Point, part of the cliffs it seemed. They went by the empty ruins of an old castle on a small island. Then two kids pressing themselves against a rock embankment as the train sliced the air from their chests. The river narrowed and became blue. Geese were flying along it, powerful, free, almost skimming the surface. A radiant light was spilling through the clouds and at the heart of it, the sun. From far off came the sharp sound of the train’s whistle.

Leon was by the window and Dena looked past him as the country unrolled and the day began to pass into evening. She wished that Neil had decided to come. It was so beautiful. He would have some ice brought and they would have a drink. She could hear the tinkle of ice in the glasses. Perhaps they would go to Chicago another time and see the city, almost as great as New York, people said. Somehow the river had begun to go beneath them and disappear as they slowly entered Albany with its somber state buildings and ancient streets. There were the solitary spires of churches, reassuring, silhouetted in the last light.

Sometime after seven, they walked forward to the dining car for dinner.

“This is going to be great,” Dena said.

She began to sing happily, nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina, even though the Limited went up along Lake Erie and the Texas Eagle went nowhere near the Carolinas.

The train was lurching. They almost lost their balance. She was right, the dining car was like the stage in a theater, brightly lit, with waiters in white jackets moving smoothly past the tables as the train jerked and swayed beneath their feet.

“This is like shooting the rapids,” Leon called.

The head waiter showed them to a table by themselves. The menu listed broiled sirloin steak and oven fries. Past the wide, black window yellow lights that looked like lanterns floated along in the rural dark, then sudden, surprising clusters of red lights or a single white one going by like a comet. They ordered a glass of wine.

The porter had made up their berths while they were at dinner, fresh white sheets and taut blanket. Leon took the upper bunk and at about nine-thirty he climbed up into it. He took off his shoes and put them in a kind of hammock that hung along the side, then his shirt and pants, slipping out of them while lying down. The train meanwhile had stopped and didn’t move for what seemed a long time.

“Why are we stopped?” he called. “Where are we?”

“We’re in Syracuse,” Dena told him. “We’re still in New York. Way up.”

They could hear voices, people who were coming aboard late and some of them passing along the corridor.

“Where will we be in the morning?” he asked.

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

Finally the train began to move again. The country went past like a somber painting, trees in the darkness lit by the windows of the train. Lone, sleeping houses, black and silent. The lights of a town with vacant streets. Dena felt a strange happiness in the quiet of the compartment.

After a while, she said,

“Are you asleep?”

There was no answer. She saw the window becoming flecked with rain and slowly fell asleep herself, opening her eyes again as they began to join a wide expanse of other tracks curving in on theirs. It was Buffalo. Afterwards they crossed a river and traveled along Lake Erie passing forlorn stations, not a soul.

Sometime around one in the morning, its cause unknown, an electrical fire broke out at the end of the car, and the corridor filled with smoke. Dena woke from the acrid smell. Something was coming under the door of the compartment. She was half-asleep but got up quickly to see what it was. Smoke was coming in along the doorjamb, and when she opened the door it poured in on her. She closed it, coughing and crying out to Leon. No one had pulled the emergency brake or spread the alarm. The train had not slowed. A porter in the next car finally noticed. They jammed the doors open but could not get in because of the smoke. By the time the train was stopped and windows broken open, seven passengers, those in compartments closest to the fire, were dead, asphyxiated. They included Dena and Leon, her son.