After This (4 page)

 

“Lucky that you play,” she said. She would have put her gloved
hand to his cheek, patted it gently to temper his sweet and sudden
enthusiasm, were it not for the way the thumping doors were sending
rebukes from the poor souls waiting downstairs. She put out her
hand again, the bakery box rocking against her wrist. “That would
have been something to see,” meaning getting a baby grand piano
from Long Island City to the tiny sixthfloor bedroom just above
theirs.

 

Little wonder, then, that the next morning when she woke to the
heavy run of scales that began his three hours of practice, she saw in
her mind’s eye Laurel and Hardy waving their hats beneath a dangling
baby grand, saw them catching their fingers in piano lids or pressing
their cheeks against the broad rump of a Steinway as they carried it,
nimbly wavering, up a long flight of stairs. Saw in her mind’s eye that
delicious moment when Stan—a version of the piano player himself,
when you thought about it—smiled the sweet self-satisfied smile that
always preceded the double take, the panic, the inevitable disaster.
(Down, down, down the keyboard he went and down, down, down in
her mind’s eye went the poor piano.)

 

Images that stayed with her even as John woke and sighed and
cursed a little under his breath before he lifted the hand she had
already placed on his belly and took her into his arms.

 

And there was comedy in this too, in the musical
accompaniment—the scales that drew them to their first, stalemouthed kiss followed by the inept and repetitious beginnings of
some vaguely familiar but as yet unrecognizable piece as they shyly
(still) got out of their pajamas. And then ineptitude giving way, on all
their parts, to a certain confidence, even grace.

 

Did he hear it, she wondered as she glimpsed her husband’s face
through half-closed eyes and saw what was quickly becoming a
familiar look: a kind of determined concentration, a grimace to the
lips, and a far-off gaze to his eyes that marked a consummation that
she was beginning to suspect turned him in on himself far more than
it would ever turn him out toward her. She imagined it was akin to the
look the piano player upstairs wore as he worked the keys, that kind of
crazy-eyed focus on the task that could obliterate

 

all distractions, even the very instrument under his hands. Does he
even hear the music, she thought, arching toward him as he labored
above her. Does he even see my face?

 

This was something she had never anticipated before she was
married, the painful, physical struggle he seemed to wage with himself
in the course of their joining. She had thought it would all be
whispered endearments, only pleasantly breathless. She was surprised
to learn that there was labor in it, pain and struggle as well as
sweetness.

 

There was still more music to listen to after they had fallen apart.
She thought she was beginning to recognize some refrain, or maybe he
was just going over the same notes. With her eyes to the ceiling she
said, “It’s a baby grand.”

 

Her husband turned his head on the pillow. He might have been
startled to find her there. He frowned, and then hesitated, and then
whispered, disbelieving, “You can tell already?”

 

There was one window in the corner of the bedroom, its sill worn
to velvet, looking like velvet even in the weak, winter morning sun
that came from beneath the wooden blinds and marked the new day.
Another day. She grew giddy with laughter, convinced as she was, and
would remain, that there was portent in his misunderstanding, that
their child’s life had indeed begun at that hour. Their baby grand, first
of four.
II

 

E
thinned and ebbed at the edge of the beach that was just beyond the
trees.
ITHER THE WIND
kept them all away or the entire population took
to heart the notion that the beaches were closed after Labor Day.
In the deserted parking lot, on a Sunday morning that was only, after
all, in mid-September, the wind moved a thin scrim of sand across the
bleached asphalt, brushed it along the ground in wide, crossing arcs
that thinned and ebbed in much the same way the beige sea foam

The wind took the sound of the slammed car doors, the slammed
trunk, and sailed it off like a black scrap, over their heads, back toward
the long highway and the crowded towns and the churches on shaded
avenues choked with parked cars. It took their voices, too, but more
gently. The parking lot was empty and so there was no need to cry out
after the children as they ran ahead.

“Not a soul,” Mary Keane said to her husband, the wind lifting
her words, tossing them gently back over her shoulder, the way it
moved the colorful tails of the scarf she had tied under her chin. In her
arms she had bundled a wool blanket and a tufted pillow and a stuffed
bear, and her husband stepped in front of her to take everything from
her arms at once, leaving only the bulge of her belly under the green
canvas car coat.

“They’re all in church,” he said and saw the
flush of guilt, or of
wind, on her broad cheeks. The wind lifted his own thinning hair—
those long strands he combed back over his crown—made it stand,
briefly, on end.

Something done right—at least so far—this suggestion of his,
whispered to the ceiling this morning, his hand on her thigh. That
they skip Mass just this once and head to the beach.

Some weeks ago, a tropical wave had slipped o
ff the African coast,
as if (he’d thought, reading the account) the continent itself had
shuddered, and moved into the waters of the south seas, stirring the
ocean and the air and the various inhabitants of small islands and
southern shorelines, until finally it woke him this morning at dawn
with the sound of the wind in the eaves, with some memory or dream
of the Ardennes, and a hankering to see what the shudder of a
continent did to the waters off Jones Beach.

Across the ceiling of his bedroom, the dawn had appeared to be
made up of reflected light, light that moved with the rise and fall of
the wind as if it were light reflecting off water—although the house
was ten miles from any shore, smack in the substantial heart of his
own spit of island, and even the neighborhood backyard pools had
been drained and dismantled.

Beneath this watery light the room itself was in steady shadow.
His wife was beside him, buried in pillows. He was fifty-one and
would be a new father again by the end of the year. This morning,
woken by the wind, he had put his thumb to each fingertip, counting
decades.

The children ran ahead. A white trail of sand cut through the
scrub pine and the yellowing beach grass, rising across the dunes and
then dropping down again to the wide white beach that then itself
dropped down again, sharply, a kind of cliff, a kind of collapse—the
way the children felt their breaths collapse, coming to its edge, to the
terrific thunderclap of the ocean.

The sand here, at their feet as they looked down from the dry
cliff, was dark gray, the color of a thundercloud. The children bowed,
putting down their toys (plastic machine guns, a football, a shoe box
filled with green army men and small, camouflaged jeeps), unlaced
their sneakers, and jumped down, arms raised, heels digging into the
falling sand of the seawall.

Not a soul.

 

At the foot of the dunes, John Keane dropped the wool blanket
and the tufted pillow and the teddy bear, unhooked the quilted
hamper from his shoulder and his wife’s hand from the crook of his
arm. He felt the wind raise the sand and fling it, stinging, into his
cheek, saw his wife pull the folded edge of her scarf over the side of
her face, turning away from him and the blowing sand.

 

He picked up the wool blanket and moved it farther inside the
dunes, to a shallow valley where even the sound of the moving air
seemed suddenly to retreat. He spread the blanket, walked out again
to lift the tufted pillow and the bear and the plaid quilted hamper,
then returned a third time to give her his arm.

 

She stood, holding the edge of her colorful scarf over her cheek,
shading her eyes with the other. Her face made harsh and unlovely by
the sand and the wind and the deep line between her eyes.

 

“Sit back here,” he said. “You’ll be out of the wind.”

 

Under her chin, the bright red-and-blue tails of her scarf rose,
writhed, paddled the air. “I can’t see them,” she said.

 

He looked toward the ocean, the forlorn image of the abandoned
sneakers and toys—the shoe box had already lost its lid—at the edge
of the known world where the sand disappeared and there was only
water and sky.

 

“I’ll tell them to come up,” he said and knew she would not
move—some vestigial habit of her race or of her sex, this frowning
vigil at the edge of the sea—until he had returned them to her sight.

 

He crossed the wide breadth of beach, hearing their voices coming
to him on the wind before he saw them at the shoreline. The two boys
were stamping at the creamy edges of the waves—making small
explosions of water and wet sand—his daughter down on her
haunches, examining something, a mussel or a crab or just the
mysterious, bubbling holes that opened and closed like mouths under
the retreating waves.

 

Beyond them, the ocean was high, whitecapped, agitated. There
were disks of black and gray as well as gold among the rushing swells.
In the panhandle, in the Carolinas, metal blinds had been drawn, iron
awnings brought down on the white houses that were bunkers now,
among the palm trees and the flamingos. But here the sky was mostly
blue and clear, except for a few white, rushing clouds just above the
horizon.

 

Some vestige of his race or of his sex made him think, whenever
he looked out across the ocean: As it was before me and as it will be
long after I’m gone. For the second time today, he touched his thumb
to his fingertips. He could make it to the 1980s or 1990s, perhaps even
to the next century, when the new baby would be grown, maybe with
children of his or her own. But even with the best of luck, it would not
be equal to the time he’d already spent.

 

He called to them. “Come up,” he said against the wind. “Your
mother wants you up.”

 

The wall of sand the sea had made, the cliff, the collapse, seemed
smaller now with their father standing on top of it, his hair raised in
the wind. They scaled it quickly, in wide strides, their arms pumping.

 

He put his hand out to his daughter, pulled her up easily over the
edge. And then bent to gather the shoes and toys, swinging the canvas
straps of the two toy machine guns over his shoulder (surprised to
find that some mistaken memory had caused him—momentarily—to
be surprised to find they had no weight). Jacob,

 

the oldest, ran to retrieve the cardboard lid while Michael, his brother,
lifted the shoe box, shifting the contents—green army men, toy
bayonets, machine gun, camouflaged jeeps—taking roll.

 

With his thumbs hooked over the lid, the boy carried the box up
the beach, behind his father and brother and sister, feeling the drag of
sand but feeling, too, that with a small effort he could overtake them.

 

Their mother stood at the base of the dunes, her hands seeming
to cup her broad face as she waited for them.

 

“Back here,” their father said. “We’ll be out of the wind.” And
once more gave his wife his arm. The children ran before them, the
boys running up and down the sides of the dunes, sand slipping, as if
they had no choice in the matter, as if the world itself were tilting, the
little girl imagining shipwrecked and island-lost, and only her father’s
cleverness (there were guns slung over his shoulder) to keep them
safe and warm.

 

The plaid blanket was already spread in a gap between the dunes,
the tufted pillow on it, the lunch hamper, and the teddy bear who had
not been lost, not drowned in the wreck, after all. She threw her arms
around it, an extravagant reunion. “If it weren’t for me,” her mother
said dryly, smiling, “you would have left him behind in the car.”

 

Too soon to eat, they agreed, and her husband gallantly gave her
his hand again as she lowered herself to the blanket, first onto her
knees and then, carefully, onto the pillow. Straightening himself, he
palmed the football like a younger man and called the boys to follow
him out to the beach.

 

She leaned back on her palms, the wool prickly against her skin
and already dusted with sand.

 

There was the now oddly distant knock of the waves against
themselves and the softer yet similar sound of the football meeting
their hands. There was her husband’s voice, Go out, now, Keep
your eye on it, Good, and the voices of the boys, mostly complaining:
My turn, Hey, Interference. The ball a kind of shadow passing before
her, between them, across the sun itself or so it seemed.

 

Annie, her daughter, had claimed the corner of the blanket, sitting
perversely, her mother thought, with her back to the ocean and to her
father and the boys on the windy beach. The worn bear (cherished
now that she had recalled its existence) on her lap. She was not
speaking, but her lips moved and her eyes were clearly engaged in a
conversation of some sort—she frowned, she shook her head—and
despite the echo of the ocean falling down on itself, the slap of the
football in their hands, and their voices, carried on the wind, it was
this conversation as it played like light across her daughter’s features
(she raised her eyes, made them smile) that absorbed the mother’s
attention.

 

Mary Keane watched her daughter and felt as well the punch and
turn of the baby not yet born and saw the similarity of the mystery of
them both—the baby unseen, moving an elbow or a foot, the means to
an end all its own, unfathomable; her daughter with the unseen life
playing like reflected light over her face, her lips moving in a
conversation forever unheard.