Nell (25 page)

Nell felt a thump and shudder pass through the long boat as it pulled away from the dock and began its trip across the water. The ship’s motion was actually very slight and pleasant. She knew that she should be on deck, because today was a beautiful day, bright and clear and warm. But still she sat in the relative gloom of the car deck, huddled in the safety of her car. She did not want to be exposed to the beauty of the voyage. She especially did not want to watch the ferry pull away from shore. It would move her too much. She was afraid of beauty, afraid of change, afraid of leaving the security of her known life for this Nantucket summer. She was afraid for herself, because she thought it very likely that she was falling in love.

Falling
in love: an apt phrase, Nell thought, for she did feel like Alice in Wonderland, falling down the rabbit’s hole, with the entire world whirling and revolving around her with no place ever to catch hold. This was really more frightening than fun, she thought. This was not just infatuation or lust or the silly smug pleasure of being admired by some good-looking man. No. She was afraid this was it, the Real Thing, the dreaded falling in love.

After Nell returned from her first trip to Nantucket, Andy had called her almost every other night, and when she flew over for the second time in May, he met her at the airport. Nell worked at Elizabeth’s—worked hard, worked well, flying about with a giddy manic energy that let her accomplish twice as much as usual. When she wasn’t working at Elizabeth’s that weekend, she was with Andy.

Friday and Saturday evenings when she closed the boutique, he drove her around the island, showing her the different beaches and moors, which shimmered under the clear sunlight, full of the promise of spring. He knew a lot about Nantucket and told her what he knew in the same earnest, slightly amazed way that Hannah and Jeremy told Nell about all the discoveries they were making about the world. He stood on a large flat rock at Jetties Beach and said, “You know, when I was a boy, this
very
rock was surrounded by water.
Surrounded
. Now the water doesn’t touch it even when the tide comes in. Think of how the sea is endlessly, silently, constantly depositing sand. How it builds up. Such
persistence
.”

With his hands jammed into the windbreaker pockets and his head and shoulders hunched forward, Andy perched on the rock, pondering the ways of the natural world. Nell stood away from him, admiring him because he loved what could not love him back. It seemed the quality of a superior man. She was not particularly impressed that the ocean deposited sand on the beach—she was much more impressed with the storky length of Andy’s legs—but she liked him for his thoughts.

Friday he took her out to dinner, and Saturday he cooked another gourmet meal for her at his home. Both times he continued to regale her with Nantucket tales. She liked the ones about the wives of sea captains who, missing their husbands so desperately, turned to the use of laudanum. She liked hearing stories of passion and desire on this island. More often than not, however, Andy would wander off from such tales onto his pet topic, the environment. Sometimes Nell was interested, sometimes bored—and once they got into an argument.

They had been in his kitchen. It was dark, they were seated at his long table, and he had just served Nell Nantucket scallops sautéed in wine. She was eating them slowly, savoring the delicate sweet white flesh.

“You know,” Andy said, “you must
never
buy tuna in cans.”

Nell grinned at him; she couldn’t help it. He spoke so very seriously. “Why not?” she asked. “God, Andy, we live on tuna at our house.”

“I know. It’s not the tuna. Tuna’s good for you, and there’s enough of the fish so that it’s not endangered. No, it’s the dolphins. They swim along just over the tuna, you see, and the fishermen who catch the tuna do it in such a way that they also bring up the dolphins, which are then killed and thrown back into the sea. Useless deaths of intelligent creatures. Horrible. Fortunately, there’s been a national organization formed to lobby and protest, to try to stop the companies from using that method to catch the tuna. They have other ways.”

“But would the other ways be more expensive?” Nell asked.

“That doesn’t matter,” Andy said.

“Oh, but it does,” Nell replied. “I mean, Andy, I think dolphins are nice, they’re cute, the pictures I’ve seen of them, I mean. They seem endearing enough. But I also find eating an endearing thing. I mean, tuna is something that I can afford to feed my children,
and it’s nutritious and non-fattening. I’d hate it if the price went up. It would really make a major difference in my life.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Andy said.

“But it’s true!” Nell protested. “Andy, it’s true. You’re living alone, but believe me, if you’ve got two children to support … and it’s not just me. There are lots of families who would be hurt if the price of tuna went up.”

“There have to be some things more important than money—” Andy began.

“That’s easy to say if you’ve got plenty of it,” Nell interrupted.

“—and man’s the only creature on earth who puts acquisition first in his set of values.”

“Man’s the only creature on earth that
has
a set of values,” Nell said. She was so upset, she stopped eating her scallops and took a big drink of wine. “Do you think the sharks, or whatever it is that eats dolphins, something out there in the ocean must, do you think they feel any guilt about it? No, they just go up and take a bite out of whatever neighboring fish looks tasty to them at the moment. Human beings at least don’t do that.”

“No, what we do is worse,” Andy replied. He, too, had stopped eating and was leaning forward now, speaking quietly but determinedly. “We kill what we can’t eat, as in the case of the dolphins and the tuna. We kill and waste. We litter the seas of the world with unnecessary death.”

“Perhaps. But not on purpose. It’s accidental, it’s a consequence of necessary actions. Man has always had to plot to eat, and we can’t foresee everything.”

“Man is evil,” Andy said. “Wasting lives is evil, wasting the world, using it up greedily, is evil. It’s not just the dolphins, Nell. Everywhere you look you’ll find man wasting the natural world. Just look at Nantucket sometime. Drive out into the moors and see how that fragile landscape is being trashed up, its natural beauty becoming ruined forever. People build houses and drive their cars and Jeeps and mopeds on the beautiful moors. They scar the land; they waste it forever. It’s terrible what man does to nature.”

“Yes, Andy, I think you’re partly right, but what is the world for? Isn’t it for men to use and love and enjoy?” Nell asked.

Andy leaned back in his chair, pondering Nell’s question. He ate a scallop as he thought, and as Nell watched, a strange, worried expression came across his face.

“What’s wrong?” Nell asked, slightly alarmed.

“We’ve let the scallops get cold,” Andy replied, his voice funereal.

Nell burst out laughing. She let Andy take her plate and quickly reheat her scallops in a pan of wine. They finished their meal before resuming their discussion; after dinner, over coffee and brandy, they argued again. Andy was on the side of nature. Nell championed the needs of people. Their argument grew heated, but Nell didn’t mind this difference of opinion. Rather, she was secretly euphoric—
at last
she was having an affair with a well-read, thoughtful, intelligent man. And he actually treated Nell as an
equal
in their discussion, which Marlow had never done. She found their argument more romantic than a dozen red roses, more seductive than poetry and champagne.

And they were very good in bed together. They were so very good in bed together, and it was so intense for Nell that she was afraid. It was as if in their making love together, Andy had somehow opened a Pandora’s box within Nell and out had come all sorts of violent and imperious emotions that Nell had never known she possessed: addictive lust, irrational jealousy, desperate appetites. Every emotion in her had been switched to high. When she was with Andy that weekend, it had been heaven to feel this way, with the sex and the simple pleasure of his presence filling her with joy. But when she went back to Arlington for three weeks and was without him, she missed him terribly, more than she should have. It really was
uncomfortable
, being in love this way.

Nell sat in her car feeling as wild as a junkie craving a fix, and almost as ashamed. How could she let herself get into such a state? She hardly knew Andy Martindale; how could she let herself feel that the meaning of her entire life revolved around his presence? She felt as if she’d been strapped in a spaceship and was just now taking off for the moon. You’re only going to Nantucket, she told herself. You’ll be fine, she muttered to herself:
Nell, you’ll be fine
.

The dog in the car next to her whined. She looked at it. It was looking at her. Perhaps she had been talking aloud. Perhaps her presence was worrying the dog. Poor dog, she thought. Poor me. She undid her seat belt and got out of the car, locked it, and went to the upper deck of the ferry to buy herself a sandwich and a beer.

The ferry was packed with vacationers, and every one of them looked calm and happy. College and high school boys sprawled shirtless across chairs, trying to get an
early tan. Here and there boys and girls sat in shorts, looking out at the ocean, heads bobbing in rhythm to the beat coming from the Walkman plugged into their ears. Everywhere people sat smiling, talking with one another, their faces turned up to the sun.

Nell took her turkey sandwich and beer and sat down in one of the orange chairs on the deck of the bow. She could swallow the beer, but she was having trouble with the sandwich. This had happened since she first met Andy, this problem with swallowing solid foods. When she was with him, she could do it, but when she was not with him, her body went into a kind of shock, a sort of paralysis, as if in its extreme need to sort out the emotions that had hit her like a hurricane, it was incapable of dealing with anything else, as if it did not want one more piece of anything put into it. She had lost almost ten pounds in the past three weeks. This was fine—she looked great in her bikini now—but she didn’t want to lose any more weight. And she didn’t want to make herself sick. She swallowed some beer to make her mouth wet and took a small bite of food. Perhaps, she thought, if she could think of something else, something other than the children or Andy and this summer she was facing …

“That’s a nice dog you have there,” someone said from behind her.

Nell turned slightly and looked. A nice elderly man in whale pants and a patchwork cap was sitting down next to a young man who had a huge black and white husky at his feet.

“Yes, she is nice, isn’t she,” the man said. “Her name is Guinevere. I’m taking her to Nantucket for the week to teach her to swim.”

“Really,” the old man said. “Well, what do you know about that? That’s interesting. That’s something. Now, she’s a husky, isn’t she? She’s not a natural swimming dog, is she?”

“No, she’s not a natural swimmer,” the man said. “In fact she’s afraid of the water. I’ve had her for five years now and I’ve never been able to get her in the water. So this year I just decided this is it. This is the time. So I’m taking time off from work, and I’m going to teach her to swim. I’ve got it all planned.”

“Well now, maybe she doesn’t
want
to swim,” the old man said. “Some dogs don’t.”

“No, no, Guinevere wants to swim. I know. Whenever I go in, she always sits
there looking at me with this pleading expression. She’s just about
saying
, ‘Henry, why won’t you teach me to swim?’ I know she wants to learn. So I’ve got this plan. I’ve got ten days. I’ll keep her on a leash. The first day I’ll just take her walking in the surf, right at the edge. She’ll just get her feet wet. The next day we’ll go walking a little further in. And so on and on. I expect about the sixth day I’ll have her swimming.”

“Well, Henry, I think that’s real nice,” the old man said.

Well, Henry, I think you’re crazier than I am, Nell thought, but it gave her great comfort to sit there listening to Henry talk about Guinevere. Guinevere was clever; she could fetch and pull sleds. She was loyal, she was brilliant. Henry thought if they lived on the West Coast she would probably be in the movies. But he was glad they didn’t live on the West Coast, because he didn’t think Guinevere would like that kind of lifestyle.

Henry talked about Guinevere until Nell couldn’t stand to listen to any more. She got up and walked around the ferry, only slightly calmer from her beer. Maybe
I
need a dog named Guinevere, she thought, maybe then I’d be more serene. She had left her own dog and cats with the college student she had hired to take care of the house while she was gone; Elizabeth and Colin didn’t want animals in their house. Nell thought she would miss the animals, especially Medusa, but she didn’t think their presence would help her that much in this situation. At least they hadn’t made her any calmer in the past few days. Medusa’s gorgeous arrogance and Fred’s amiable stupidity did not for one second relieve Nell of her burden of infatuation.

A lot of people were in love on this ferry. In fact everyone on the ferry seemed in love except Henry, and he had his dog. There were young couples in love all over the boat, and especially there were the families. Nell strolled past these families casually, but she felt her soul looking in at them like a starving child watching through the window of a restaurant. Dads and moms and children clumped together everywhere, at tables, down below on benches, up at decks by the railings. Short lean kids leaned against tall lean mothers, who leaned in turn against tall lean fathers, in tableaux of family perfection. Or sometimes the kids ran off and back to ask their parents for money, and the parents handed it to them, then went back to reading companionably together, side by side.

Nell watched one family who sat inside at a table eating. There were four in the family, and they were all very handsome and healthy looking, all wearing white shorts
and running shoes and pastel cotton shirts. Nell couldn’t hear what the children said, but she saw the mother smile and nod and reach over with a napkin to wipe the little boy’s mouth. The children pushed back their chairs and ran off. The mother turned and looked at her husband. They smiled at each other. He ran his hand across her shoulder and up and down her neck as they talked, stroking her lightly. She inclined toward him. Imagine, Nell thought, just imagine: Imagine loving the father of your children! She thought these people must be the luckiest people on earth.