Don't Make Me Stop Now (8 page)

Peering back on his island, Henry saw sudden movement behind the smudgy glass of the windows in the post office, a commotion he understood to be his big old secret come to him after all these years to let him know he knew something after all about this life. He fiddled with the locks on the windows, opened them right up and stuck his hand inside and wiggled his fingers around in that secret inside. It felt like something familiar, warm, his toes in wet sand or the slick of bait as he hooked a line. This life ain't blowed away right yet. I can sit right here in the sound and let the wind take me wherever and still make a change. He could lie back and eat a bologna biscuit and talk to Sarah and let the change come on ahead, let the skiff drift right across the sound to Morehead where he'd call Crawl and tell him, Crawl, you ain't won, don't think you changed me, I'm just here because the wind brung me over here and I let it. He could sit outside Crawl's yard and mend nets for the boys who still pulled things out of the sea, and he could think while he mended about the sisters and
about how he'd saved them. Made them change. He could sit outside on Crawl's porch and smoke on a Sweet and close his eyes and know he'd go before the sisters but that he would not leave them on that island because here he was taking the island with him, right across the water, him and the wind. He could close his eyes and see the sisters sitting right up front at his funeral, sea-salty tears raining down on the Sunday dresses they had not worn for years. Hoarse preacher shouting out some Bible and Sarah whispering right over him how she could surely forgive Henry for not taking her off island before it was time for him to change. All eleven of his children and their children and the babies of his grandbabies looking up at the casket where Henry had laid down one day halfway through his crab pots, let the wind take him off island. Inside that casket Henry was sipping peach syrup and wishing he had one last Sweet. The sun was high and it was a mean sun. The church was crowded and so hot the air-conditioning was sweating and coughing like some sick somebody. Preacher called out a hymn. Let it be Sarah's smooth-as-liver singer sending me off sweetly. The sun and the water blended in brightness, the casket drifted, the wind picked up, the whole church rose up in song. Then came a lady in white passing out fans only to the ones who were moaning: sisters, hurting like Henry hurt, but thankful to be spared the wind.

T
HE BRUNETTE SAID
, “I prefer a man who can hold his liquor,” so I turned my attention to the dirty blonde. She was big-hipped and slightly breasted, but her eyes were the blue-green of bottle glass and I liked the slinky way she swayed on her barstool.

“Hey, slobberpuss,” she said to me.

“Oh, so you mind also that I've had a couple?”

“Do we feel discriminated against?” She was patting me on the head with her voice. “Are we just about to file a lawsuit?”

“We
are
in a bar. It's not like Quaker meeting.”

“Oh, so like what did I expect? Do I understand that to be your point?” Her tone rose, shrilly.

“I'd say you and me are about even,” I told her.

The brunette rolled her eyes and chewed her straw, searching the bar for me a few drinks ago. Hannibal could have just as easily come up against those Alps, said to his elephants, Fuck
it, boys, let's don't and say we did. Would that Hitler had only found a little encouragement for his mediocre watercolors. All I'm saying is, history is nothing but a record of near misses, of last-minute left turns. Wars and religious intolerance and a source of potable water might have led people to settle in a cesspool like Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is where — in a happy-hour hotel lounge — I met my green-eyed Jessica, but I would wager large that the majority of settlers ran out of gas, steam, or money going north, south, east, or west.

“In what sense are we equals?” asked Jessica.

“
Now
who's toasted? I said
even,
not equals.”

“Only slightly less offensive,” said the brunette. Her name was Annie. Over the years she became a ghostly presence in a casually snapped photograph of Our First Night, sometimes a tourist passing blurry in the background, caught unaware in a frame of our nascent courtship, other times Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon, the attraction that drew us together. I suppose Jessica took the former view and I, mostly, the latter, as it was Annie, lithe and tall and wet-lipped, who drew me to that corner of the bar in the first place. Less of a head start at McCool's Public House down the street and my Jessica might be the one whose last name, thirty years down the rocky road, we might sit around the dinner table struggling to remember.

“In what sense are we even?” Jess asked me.

I thought of the old Churchill anecdote, about the woman at the dinner party who, disgusted by Churchill's inebriation, said, “Mr. Churchill, you're drunk,” to whom he reputedly replied, “Yes, madam, but in the morning I will be sober, while you will still be ugly.” I am not proud to report that this was what I was thinking, nor do I now believe it. Jessica is not ugly at all, I never would have married her if I'd thought so, though next to Annie and in the unreliable light of a couple whiskys and more than a couple Natural Lights, she did, I have to admit (and this is a record of honesty, as you will see I spare nothing here, especially as relates to my own failings) pale considerably.

I did not say what I was thinking that first night, of course. Nor did I answer her question, really. What I meant by it was, you seem as lonely and desperate as me, sweet thing. I meant, let's skip the sparring and call the round.

“Even Steven,” I said with much drunken swagger.

Annie looked around me to catch Jess's eye, and they shared a laugh, which I recognized to be squarely at my expense.

“He's so articulate,” said Annie, as if glibness were what she and Jess had come there to find. Of course I disliked her for rejecting me. I was about to suggest she adopt a strategy employed by some of my then friends: “Go ugly early, beat
the rush” was their motto when they ventured, as we often did back then, to the dive bars and discos of DC and environs, in search of some short-lived companionship. Holding out for perfection would wrinkle and embitter her, not only that night back in 1977 but for the rest of her days. Sure, she was beautiful, but like most aloof beauties, she had an aura of detachment that made her seem not only unattainable but unpleasant.

Jess was more my style, though I can't say I was 100 percent certain that Jess was the one I wanted to spend my life with. To know beyond doubt — especially something that calls upon the notoriously fickle faculties of emotion — is more than highly suspect to me. I confessed to her my reservations — I could not have gone through with it had I not at least alerted her to the question in my mind — but I don't really think she heard me, and if she had similar doubts she did not admit to them. Something must have occurred to allow me to move forward. I remember thinking, Well, how could you be sure? We're talking life sentence here. Anyone who tells you they're completely sure is either of limited intelligence or lying.

We settled in Gaithersburg, Jess and I. I found a job writing press releases for the EPA and Jessica starting teaching eighth-grade science. We had two boys. They're both in col
lege now. I don't watch them too closely when they're home on break, for frankly I don't want to know what they're up to nights. I know how we were, how
I
was, and it makes me glad I have sons instead of daughters. Sean and Frankie are good kids, we raised them to take responsibility for their own actions, and neither of them to my knowledge has ever been arrested, a claim I could not myself make at that tender age, but it really doesn't matter how well rounded and polite and self-assured they seem, does it? No doubt they pile into cars and cruise the dance clubs in search of willing females. No doubt they have their own slogans along the lines of “Go ugly early.” (Perhaps that phrase is still in circulation.) Sometimes I grow despondent when I consider the great divide between thought and action, between word and intent. The way boys think of girls, the way we treat them before we accept the fact that we need them hugely: I do not like to think of my sons in that light.

We need them hugely.
This is what I tell myself when I wonder, as I occasionally (if guiltily) do, how I managed to end up with Jess. The twelve-steppers are entirely right to suggest that we take one day at a time. Love, too, seems to survive best if parceled out in manageable increments. Of course it is not advisable to say to Jess, Baby I love you right now, in the car on the way to the grocery store, but as for what happens
when we arrive at Safeway, well, we're better off not speculating. Though I confess if Jess said to me, David, I love you today, but tomorrow isn't here yet, I would fully understand. I am trying to talk now about the nature of love. Most men just accept its mysteries in the way that they accept without question the mystical properties of religion, jazz, baseball. But I am trying to talk honestly about it. It is enough for Jess to love me in the baking goods and school supplies aisle. It would, I'm sure, be a comfort to know that you had enough love to say, retire on, like money salted away in the bank. But circumstances crop up to drain away your savings. Same, I suppose, with love. You may have deep pockets, love left over and lying idly around, and then something happens to siphon it off.

What happened: We were in the Safeway, in the baking goods and school supplies aisle, when someone — a woman — said Jess's name. She was tall and striking and vaguely familiar. I assumed she was someone Jess knew from school. It was early April, finally warm out, and she wore linen pants in the manner of elegant but slightly down-to-earth middle-aged women and a blue tank top. I moved a little farther down the aisle, pretended to search for something as Jess often gets into interminable chin-wags in public, and though I routinely accompany her when she shops (she claims to hate to do it alone and it seems the least I can do), I don't relish
spending hours socializing in stores or parking lots. I was far enough away to comfortably sneak looks at this woman and not have my vision of her bare shoulders — toned and improbably tanned — ruined by the things that might have come out of her mouth. (Mundane conversation is such a turnoff. I can be attracted to a woman in passing for her physique alone, but a connection requires above-the-neck skills.) She was facing me and was a good four inches taller than my wife, and at one point she looked my way and caught me staring at her, and the way she looked at me without smiling, half appraisal and half dismissal, and the way her eyes shifted back to Jess and her face lit up at something Jess was telling her, took me back twenty-eight years to that hotel lounge. I was swamped by a wave equal parts lust and anger, a kind of combination I had not felt in years, the sort of emotion I did not want to think about my boys entertaining as they made their forays into the skirmish between the sexes. Still, I felt it in the Safeway. I was fifty-three years old, gray-templed and twenty pounds heavier than when I'd seen her last. My chest felt tight, my stomach roiled, my forehead grew hot. I allowed myself to acknowledge what I had so long denied: Annie and I were meant to be.

I grabbed a bag of flour and studied its ingredients when Jess brought Annie over.

“Guess who this is, David.”

I held the box against my chest and gave Annie what I'm sure was a forced grin. The more you try to appear casual, the stiffer you become. See any posed photo for proof. Yet I needed to transmit to her the extent of my suppressed but still-vibrant desire.

I said, playing dumb, “Hi, I'm David.”

She said hi, then added, “Ann.”

Jess said, “Don't you remember Annie? She was with me the night we met.”

“Oh,” I said, and I tried, as I'm wont to do when nervous, to make a joke. “You mean in that sleazy meat market?”

Jess laughed her short, harsh, that's-not-funny-David laugh. I recognized it the way you hear a car alarm bleating in a blocks-away parking lot and know it's yours.

“Not too sleazy for me, of course,” I said, trying to regain my footing.

“Too sleazy for us, obviously,” said Jess. Annie smiled at this, and I remembered the way, that night, Annie and Jess had shared these conspiratorial smiles, and I realized that my life was a sham, that I had only taken Jess home to make Annie jealous, that Annie really wanted me that night, and her aloofness was proof that she wanted me still.

“Have you been living here the whole time?” I asked Annie. Jess had lost touch with her during that first year we dated.
I'd pushed her to stay in touch, but she gave up almost all her old friends when she met me. She did end up inviting Annie to the wedding, and Annie RSVPed that she'd love to come, but now her no-show made perfect sense.

“I just moved back here to take care of my mom.”

“She's been in New York all this time,” said Jess.

She wasn't wearing a ring. Jess would know her story. I wouldn't even have to ask; she'd spill it as soon as we said good-bye.

Which she did, after getting Annie's number, promising to have her over for dinner. She told me that Annie was divorced, had no children, had worked for many years as the office manager of an antiques broker, was widely traveled, had moved back to the area to take care of her ailing mother, was living in a town house down in Silver Spring.

“You found all that out while we were standing there?”

“I'm very efficient.”

“So how many times has she been divorced?”

“She just said she was divorced. So once, I guess.”

“She could have been divorced more than once, though.”

“You never liked her, did you?”

It sometimes seems that life — or all our human interrelationships — can boil down to single questions, which the careless answer recklessly. I was driving, and I stalled as long
as I could by studying the rear and side view mirrors as if our safety were suddenly imperiled. It was, of course, but not by anything outside of Jess's minivan.