Ahab's Wife (68 page)

W
HEN
I
AWOKE
in the morning, I ran to the high back edge of my yard. Below me were three narrow bands, one of small trees, one of nodding sea grass, and one of sand, then the ocean. I registered her sheer size—another Giant to live beside. She took my breath and gave it back again. Deliriously happy, I stood and admired her fluid expanse, her great light-reflecting surface, the air above her, the incessant sound of breaking waves, till I had my fill.

When Mary had pointed out my cottage from a distance, I had noted the tall, wall-like hedge between my house and the next. It attracted my curiosity. The privet hedge was perhaps eight feet thick and sixteen feet tall—a virtual fortification composed of small, green, oval leaves
and their twiggy stems. I couldn't begin to see through it. I wondered if I chose to hurl my body into the mass whether I would pass through. I thought not, for I would be caught by the twigs and held suspended in the hedge, like a bug in amber.

So I walked along the hedge, amazed at its bulk, sheared into a perpendicular face and squared off at the high top, until I came to an opening. Something like a pointed Gothic arch had been carved out of the lower five and a half feet of greenery. Above the passageway, the top of the hedge was still perfectly knit together. I entered this hedge's opening, and with no trouble at all walked into my neighbor's yard.

Here was a garden! A world of purple, pink, rose, and white flowers—hydrangea, cosmos, rose of Sharon—and in the middle an enormous green sperm whale. He was fashioned of privet, but not at all angularly. In him all was fluid curve and beveling, from the bulging forehead to narrowing torso to spreading tail and flukes. And from his forehead sprouted a perfect green plume of privet-spray. I could see only six inches or so into the creature before the density and multiplicity of leaves became impenetrable to vision. By no means did the size of this whale rival that of a flesh leviathan; this was a garden whale. Yet in comparison to myself, he was impressive and overwhelming.

He had no expression, though I have never seen a real whale that was not able to project by some facial means and bodily gesture an attitude toward himself, his world, and his assailants. Here all was a green, vegetable blankness.

Around the base of the privet monster, hundreds of white cosmos tossed their airy heads, somewhat resembling the foam of the sea. Then the collar of flowers became a ring of bubbly blue hydrangeas, mixed here and there with a purple rose of Sharon shrub, and the outer ring was dotted with rosebushes and other rose-colored flowers, so that the whole effect was that the green whale swam haloed in a sea reflective of a sunset palette.

I had never seen anything quite so charmingly artificial. The whole yard was walled in by the mighty privet hedge. I felt as though I had entered the labyrinth of Crete, which held in its center not the Minotaur, but a bull whale. Whether he was captive or king, and how he regarded his green self, I could not tell, for as I said there was a blankness about the sculpture. Beginning to feel myself something of a trespasser, I slipped back through the hedge to my own grassy yard.

From the back edge of my own yard, I descended a set of wooden steps lying against the slope down to the beach. From the foot of the stairs, a path passed through some stunted apple trees, bearing misshapen yellow fruit, and led me through scrubby white pine trees. Then the path parted sea grasses for perhaps twenty feet and stopped on a lip of sand where the beach sloped more abruptly to the sea. I stood on the lip of sand before the broad water. And so began my habit each morning, not only to acknowledge the sea from my house and yard but also to go down to her, to commune with her close at hand, intimately.

 

I
SEE IT NOW
: the first morning on the beach at 'Sconset, the waves roll in on long diagonals. The water builds and builds to a steep, high crest and then folds in the middle into a high line of foam which quickly dips in front and spreads on each side in a widening scallop. Rolling in, the wave scampers itself into a flowing, milky apron of white. How densely white this froth, more cream than milk! And behind this turbulent flounce of white, from the backside of the translucent crest, floats a broken net of thin foam, patterned like a mosaic.

The mosaic is lifted by the next long, unbreaking roll, which passes under it without disturbing the netting, only stretching it here and there. The ceaselessness of the whole greeny-gray and startling-white drama of it! The casual constant, unmonitored crashing goes on and on, like the pulse of a body. So it was and so it is.

 

T
HAT RESTLESSNESS
lay open-faced before me. With the sea there was no secret longing for change, for at no moment did it even pretend to hold still. Why did people speak of the
eternal
sea? An unwanted answer rose up from my own depths: perhaps because all her heaving and sighing were endlessly futile.

I decided to waken Justice and to cook him an egg.

I
T IS A SPLASHING
,
spanking surf tonight. Earlier, there were fists in it, and the water pow-pounded the shore.

Sometimes it is pouring, pouring, as though there were two oceans—one continually pouring into the beaker of the other, and back and forth between them a watery juggling. Whose hands hold those beakers?

Sometimes it's the swish and swirl of it and the whistle of the wind, many pitches at once, like a mouth covering ten pipes on a harmonica, this wind breathing right at the window glass. And now the slight rattle of wood against wood, of the movable window against its frame.

Now I imagine roses in the surf—bushels of roses being emptied headfirst against the shore. In the morning I will find heaps and heaps of them in a long row that stretches for miles along the 'Sconset beach. Their imaginary stems will lie across and over each other weaving their own pattern of stemmy
X
's, and the heads of all the roses will lie sodden and limp as clusters of red rags.

Sometimes I can hear the ocean jumping—I mean there is a discontinuity; it gathers itself and then a leap—silence—and a landing of heavy water. Like an athlete leaping forward, there is a takeoff—the wave pushes off from the other water, lifts its feet entirely into the air where I cannot hear it, and lands. Ha! Water “lands” though water falls back into water.

Here Ahab would say I quibble-fiddle with the language. Oh, where is Ahab tonight? Here at 'Sconset I listen, listen (in the night what good are eyes?), for the sound of wind in canvas far at sea, or the special hissing water makes when parted by a ship's prow, but all I hear is the sound of black ocean wringing its hands over and over.

So I will walk the roof walk and look for Ahab. If the try-pots be burning, I can see him far out in the sable Atlantic. Probably this is what has happened: they were almost to Nantucket, and there was one more whale. The
Pequod
was already rich as an autumn honeycomb, every cell brimful of oil, sealed and stored in the hold. Once I was like a cask of grief storing myself there, just a girl hiding from my mad
young husband, but then the sea sent up its strangest flower, the droplet-bushy exhalation of a whale, and there was calling from the masthead, then excited feet on the deck, lowering of boats, and the chase. Avictorious chase, and there was the chaining-in of the great carcass, snugged beside the ship like a natural, fleshy shadow for the artificed boat (with its delicate, noble construct of masts and lines, of layered decking, of internal staircases and ladders, fitted drawers with china knobs, and closet doors). All this I imagine again to justify the try-pots, surely burning now out in the darkness like two red eyes of a moving sea monster.

Oh, the constant rhythm of the sea in the dark—its patient, long application to shore, like a lover coming into her and into her, ponderous with age and experience, heavy and full of groaning love.

Though it be night, I could see the
Pequod
out at sea, if the try-pots burned.

I'll just arrange the lamps—the whale oil lamps—along a path through the room leading to the stairs. Now one on the bottom stair…now one on the top. I look back and find them pretty, each with the wick turned low, steady-burning glowworms to show Justice the way, if he should wake up and miss me. His logic will follow mine, and he will know I'm on the roof. How strange that he should so urgently miss his father, when he can scarcely remember the father who danced him and told him stories, whose ivory leg Justice smoothed and petted as though it were a sleek white cat. Justice spoke as he stroked—“Nice leg, good leg. You
are
a good leg to serve beneath my father.” Well, here's the lighted way, Little One, if you would follow me.

And here's the creaking hatch to the roof walk.

 

T
O MY PLATFORM
I carry no lamp, for it would ruin vision for distance. There is Mary Starbuck's house. She has a wisp of smoke in the chimney. Probably before the hearth she has made Jimmy's pallet, for he has had a cold in his chest. There's a water-filled iron pot, herbs swimming on the surface, bubbling in the embers, to help open his breathing. I imagine Mary's sweet face in the fireglow too dim to sew by, but she crochets a line of lace to ornament her underdrawers, where it will be safe from the eyes of all the Quakers, save one. Her fingers know the stitches; the hooked needle, like a shining harpoon, darts
down to pluck up the thread. Her fingers know, and she does not need to see. She has learned how to wait better than I have. But then she has never been to sea, cannot begin to imagine the vastness of that ever-shifting bend and bulge of water.

Now I must look beyond Mary Starbuck's faith and patience to the blackness beyond. I hear the roaring of the sea. With my eye, I can discern neither where the sea meets the shore nor where it blends with sky. Perhaps, erroneously, I am looking for a boat in the sky, since sea and sky are indistinguishable. But those beacons are stars, not try-pots burning. No one can calculate the distance to stars, Giles said, with the yardsticks we now have.

In crow's nests, I have been a skilled lookout, and I know how to sector out the world, how to ever so slowly turn my head, how to alert the sides of my eyes, which see motion better than does the direct gaze. Still I gaze and gaze, and the ocean twists and rolls as usual. There's booming always and the sound of spray rushing in the air.

Ahab, my captain, my beloved; Ahab, again, I call out to you. My spirit rushes over the water searching, searching for the
Pequod
. Is there not even a plank of her left floating? Adrenched scrap of sail washing along just under the surface of the water? Remember when I looked for icebergs for you?

My eyes have swept all the way to the south. Now I retrace, but lift my gaze the breadth of a thumb, closer to those constellations that hang low over the water.

When I stand here in the day, there are friendly clouds to tease me, but this night is moonless, cloudless—only black and stars. That liquid black, the sea, runs in to me, sighs and retreats. His roar has become a groan. Oh, the effort of heaving himself! Does the human, heart-driven pulse sometimes wonder if it will ever get to stop? So much more must the mind of the sea suffer from travail.

I look again. My eyes burn with blackness. Oh, I would penetrate it. Let my vision encircle the globe till I find one old, ivory-clad whaling ship. And there my lover, white-haired, ivory-legged, but a true lover. Let his brain not be boiling with revenge on that dumb beast. May all the embers be under try-pots, and none in Ahab's breast or mind. When he pivots on the ivory leg, even at this great distance, my spirit circles round like a falcon on a tether.

What was that snap? What is this centerless flight? I'm hurled
through space! I fly tangent, away, out from my center. Now I look frantically.

Back and forth I swing my head. No boats at sea. None. Nothing but blackness. The harness of discipline is cast away; all unsystematic, all impulse, I cast lances-of-gazing hither and yon, left and right, near in, as though the
Pequod
were beached, and out far into the domain of stars. Why have I chosen this unyielding night to look?

 

I
AM STILL
. For the first time, I know. If I were a lighthouse whose beam could bend to embrace the curve of the earth, I know I would not find him. There is no use to look out.

I feel it in my face. My mouth has settled at the corners. Resignation. There is no use to look out.

But I will stand here awhile. I could be wrong.

My bones are weighing me down. Here, my fingertips feel the splintery top of the railing, the rough grain of the wood. Ahab is gone.

But is he gone? I only know that I can no longer wait, looking out for him. Still I stand and face the dark.

What is this force that tilts up my chin? Why does my gaze climb up a ladder of stars? Why do I no longer look out, but up? Up! And there the heavens blaze and twinkle. In this moonless night sky, the endless stars declare ascendancy.

With my face up, I drink and drink the black goblet, the universe.

Like funeral cloves are these stars, spiky and spicy. Like cloves in an orange, they are the preservers of the skin and of the black flesh of space.

Oh, Starry Sky, can you hear this moaning of the earth? Let the sea be our voice, our loudest voice. It speaks to every dark corner of you, Star-studded Sky, as we spin and turn through space. The sea is moaning to your blackness and to your bright fires. Might some warmth, some comfort, from you kiss the cheek of earth, light if not warmth sent unerringly over distances too great to measure.

And yet when I blink, I seem to collect configurations of stars—perhaps it is to know them. My eyelids slide down, followed by a smooth, lubricated lifting, and there you are, Starry Sky, no longer out there, but through the lens of my eye brought home into my head. Into the brains of all and any beings who lift their faces and open their eyes.

The Roof Walk and the Starry Sky

There is the great journey yet to be taken. Let my mind be a ship that sails from starry point to starry point. In my brain, I feel those cold black spaces containing nothing. I approach a pinprick of light closer and closer till it is a conflagration of such magnitude that I am nothing. And yet with my mind I caliper it with contemplation.

Where is my place before this swirling ball of star mass, edgeless and expansive, without horizon? Where is my place, when I know that this is but one of ten billion? Here the categories crack.
Beauty
—that gilt frame—burns at its edges and falls to ash.
Love?
It's no more than a blade of grass. Perhaps there is
music
here, for in all that swirling perhaps harmony fixes the giants in their turning, marches them always outward in their fiery parade.

That I can see their glory, that is my place. That I have these moments to be alive—and surely
they
are alive in some other way. Perhaps it is only
being
that we share. But something
is
shared between me on this rooftop and them flung wide and myriad up there. What was the golden motto embroidered on the hem of my baby's silk dress?
We are kin to stars
.

I reach my hands toward them, spread my fingers and see those diamonds in the black
V
's between my fanning fingers. To think that I could gather them into my hands, stuff them in my pockets, is folly. But I can reach. It is I myself, alive now, who reach into the night toward stars. Their light is on my hands.

Their light is
in
my hands. I gasp in the crisp air of earth and know that I am made of what makes stars! Those atoms burning bright—I lower my hands—why, they are here within me. I am as old as they and will continue as long as they, and after our demise, we will all be born again, eons from now. What atoms they have I cannot know. I cannot call their names, but they are not strangers to me. I know them in my being, and they know me.

Little scrap, little morsel,
the stars sing to me,
we are the same
.