“I’m still hers,” he says. “I want to be hers.”
“Even if she doesn’t want you? You’re pathetic.” The All-American goes to his trunk, the hatched back of his little red car, and takes out a small box. He dumps its contents onto the road, by their father’s feet. Stones, gray and speckled, frosted nubs of sea glass, and one knotted bit of rope lie scattered in the grass of the track. He recognizes the lump of red glass, like a gnarled raw ruby found deep underground, given on their second trip in honor of their first time. There was a stone, black and polished, from their sail to Brimstone. They had talked about sailing away, down the coast, to the Vineyard, Provincetown, farther to Fire Island, where they could be just a bear and his cub. But they always stayed close to shore, close to their summer islands. They always came home again. The All-American stands with the empty box in his hands. Their last four summers now mixing into the gravel of the road.
“This is your chance to get out, and you are too weak, too fucking cowardly to do it. You love your safety, Bob, you love your children, you love your 1950s sitcom life,” says the All-American. “That’s not the same as loving your wife.”
Her husband is receding, like a tide leaving, exposing the sad collection of rocks at his feet, leaving crabs to scuttle for shade, for forgotten pools that grow too hot in the sun. But this tide keeps going, keeps leaving, out and out. And now boats are beached, tilting on their sides, and lobster pots snake their lines through the caked sand out to cages. Everything in him is emptying out: the house, the children, their love, his wife, her love, their twenty-four years of marriage, his dignity, this young man, his love, and the sweet relief of being with someone who wants to be with him.
Her husband grabs the young man by the shoulders, hugs him too hard, and says, “I’m weak. I’m a coward. I’ve brought us here. I’ve ruined things for all of us. I’m so sorry.”
He cries into that thin T-shirt. He cries into those ringlets. He says his name over and over. Jeremy. The young man smells of deodorant and chlorine. I will never swim in a pool again, her husband thinks.
“How can I let you go?” their father asks.
“You’re the one going,” says the All-American. The young man’s nose is red, and red flecks have appeared around his eyes too. Their father picks up the sea glass and puts it in the young man’s hand.
“You’re right. I’m going.” He says this knowing there is nowhere for him to stay. Their father takes a deep breath; this is the last time he will have to pull himself together for anyone. Soon he will be able to let it all unravel.
“Time and tide, and all that.” He tries to look bright, to look ready, but he feels cracked, worn. Again, he is a liar.
The All-American gets into his car; he reaches out the open window and pulls at the hem of their father’s sweater.
“You are making a mistake,” he says. “I won’t be alone for long.”
He imagines the young man swimming with a school of porpoises; the alternative is too much for him to even consider. The car throws up dust as it backs up the driveway. He hopes it can’t be seen from the house.
Their father is drowning in the dust, in the air, in the sunrise that is coming up too fast now. She will be up soon to make coffee. He will have to sneak around the side of the house to go down to the dock, to get back on the boat, to find the sea that is disappearing. He will sail away. He will let this tide go out, and her love go out, though maybe he never had it to begin with. This thought makes him wretch, doubles him over, spitting into the ferns. He wants to walk into the kitchen; he wants her to see him, to stop him, to tell him. But then he’d have to say why he is still here, why he was out in the drive, and then she wouldn’t say anything he wants to hear. He knows that once he is out on the boat, out past the thoroughfare and into Penobscot Bay, then he will let the weight of what is gone return, and what is now too exposed and dried up will be destroyed in the churning flood. There is a tsunami coming. He will go aboard his boat and drown.
EIGHTEEN
TOM
July 9
Tom had started the morning out on the south porch with everyone, drinking coffee and eating honey toast. First, the women went off to start their day, and then Danny, leaving Tom to finish his lukewarm coffee, squinting at the cove and thinking of how much he wanted sunglasses but refused to wear them. Sunglasses, he felt, on anyone over thirty were the first signs of a midlife crisis. From the small precarious base of sunglasses, he knew, a house of cards could be built that included sports cars, affairs with younger women, and, worst of all, nostalgia for one’s youth. Youth, he was sure, had been horrible for everyone and just seemed wonderful in hindsight. He figured many middle-aged people, in the face of sagging skin and stamina, longed for seventeen. He did not.
The smell of raspberry bushes growing around the south porch, with their serrated leaves and bristled stems, was strong at high tide when the smell of the ocean drowned itself. The lichen, too, was strong now. It grew not just on the rocks but on the tree trunks and tangled in the branches of a fallen pine, clogging the fine mesh of its limbs. With the tide high the seaweed, light brown, plumed on the surface of the water. It was windless, the fog having just burned off. So the seaweed rose and fell on the glassy surface like the gentle sleeping breath of the sea, still calm in the late-morning sun. But all that softness hid the rocks below. There was menace in those plumes, given what they were anchored to. They were scattered, an archipelago. As you glided over them in a small craft, the waving forests of corpuscled weed looked softer, strangely less wet when underwater, more graceful and serene. The sharp points of their rock base could be much deeper or just below their fronds. In the silly look of seaweed, all bumps and shaggy locks, Tom saw the shadow of death at sea, broken hulls and misjudged dives and dark storms and misread charts. The seaweed didn’t soften the sharp edge of death among the rocks, but hid it.
He followed the sun to the front porch. From here, facing the water, the fog had gone completely and the Camden hills showed blue over the treetops of Crabtree Point.