The Fisherman (2 page)

Again, though, I’m running ahead of myself. There will be a time and a place for everything, including the story of Lottie Schmidt, her father, Rainer, and the man he called
Der Fischer.
Let’s back it all up. Let’s begin with a few words about my life’s great passion—well, what I used to think of as my life’s great passion: a few words about fishing.

It wasn’t something I’d learned as a child. My pa took me once or twice, but he wasn’t much good at it himself, so he concentrated on teaching me the things he knew, like baseball, and the guitar. One day, it must have been twenty-five, thirty years after pa and I had spent our final Saturday morning subjecting a bucketful of worms to protracted drowning, I woke up and thought,
I’d like to go fishing.
Scratch that. I woke up and thought,
I need to go fishing.
I needed it the deep-down way you need that tall glass of water with the ice cubes clinking around in it at three o’clock on a blistering July afternoon. Why I needed fishing, of all things, I don’t know and can’t say. Granted, I was at a bit of a rough patch. My wife had just died, and us married not two years, and I was living the clichés you watch in made-for-TV movies and listen to in country songs. Mostly, this meant drinking too much, and since pa wasn’t much with the liquor, either, this meant drinking badly, half a bottle of Scotch followed by half a bottle of wine, followed by extended sessions of holding onto the toilet as the bathroom did a merry dance around me. My job had gone all to hell, too—I was a systems analyst over at IBM in Poughkeepsie—although I was fortunate in having a manager who put me in for extended sick leave, instead of firing my ass, which is what I deserved. This was back when IBM was a decent place to work. The company approved three months with pay, if you can believe it. Almost the entire first month I spent looking up out of the bottoms of more bottles than I could count. I ate when I thought about it, which wasn’t too often, and my meals were basically a steady stream of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches interrupted by the occasional burger and fries. The second month was pretty much the same as the first, except for visits from my brother and my late wife’s parents, none of which went well enough to bother relating. All of us were suffering. Marie had been something else, like no other girl. We felt her loss the way you’d feel it if someone reached into the back of your mouth with a pair of pliers and tore out one of your molars; it was an open wound that ached all the way through you. The same way you couldn’t stop testing that spot where your tooth used to be, probing it with your tongue until you felt the jolt of pain, none of us could help poking around our memories until we made everything start hurting all over again. By the time the third month was half done, I was sitting in my underwear on the couch with the TV on, sipping from whatever was closest to hand. I had learned a little, you see.

I had these shoeboxes full of photos I’d never gotten around to placing in albums, and when the alcohol in my blood hit the right level, I would fetch those boxes from the bedroom closet and surround myself with the archive of my marriage. Here was Marie when I’d first met her—when I first talked to her, I should say, since we’d been introduced at work at the beginning of the summer, when she’d joined the company right out of college. We were connected to two of the same projects, so we saw each other in passing throughout July and August, though we didn’t pass more than a couple of pleasantries back and forth at any one time. That September, there was a Labor Day party at someone’s house—I want to say Tim Stoffel’s—and we wound up sitting next to one another at one of the card tables set up around the yard. Marie had come with Jenny Barnett, but Jenny had disappeared with Steve Collins, and of the remaining party goers, I was the one she knew the best. She always denied it, but I’m reasonably sure that, when she asked me how I was doing, she was just killing time until she could finish her plate and make for home. You’d expect that conversation would be burned into my brain, but damned if I can remember much more than the pleasure of learning she was a fan of Hank Williams, Sr., too. Truth to tell, I was too busy trying not to pay too close attention to the bikini top she was wearing with a pair of cut-off shorts and tennis shoes. Typical guy, I know. We sat there talking until Tim was standing on the opposite side of the card table from us, telling us we didn’t have to go home, but we couldn’t stay here. We did go home—I mean, each of us went to our own home—but our time together had left me with a feeling—once we’d gone our separate ways, everything seemed a bit less bright than it had while we were sitting together.

Even so, an hour or two of pleasant talk does not guarantee anything, and I might never have come into possession of that photograph Jenny had taken of Marie, her hair done up in a single ponytail, her eyes and a good portion of the rest of her face concealed by a pair of enormous sunglasses, the yellow and white straps of that swimsuit top making her summer’s tan look darker still. I had a good fifteen years on her, and that was sufficient distance to keep me cautious about what I thought I’d felt between us. I’d like to say my hesitation owed itself to not wanting to harass a woman young enough to be my niece, if not my daughter, but it had as much to do with my fear of looking the fool. “No fool worse’n’ an old fool,” my pa used to say, and although I hardly considered myself old, set next to Marie, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call fresh off the rack.

Another photo, and I leapt ahead to the following spring. Marie and I were standing knee-deep in a stream—well, it was knee-deep for me; for her, it was more like thigh-high. One of her friends had invited us to spend the day in the Catskills, where said friend’s brother had a weekend place that turned out to be nicer than I was expecting. It was located halfway up a tall, rolling hill, along a gravel road you had to ease your car over if you didn’t want to tear out the undercarriage. From the outside, the place resembled an abbreviated barn, taller than it was long. Inside, new wooden surfaces, stainless steel appliances, and a stone fireplace gathered under a cathedral ceiling and a loft. Apparently, the place had been built by a Manhattan lawyer who’d had to divest himself of it shortly after its completion; whereupon Marie’s friend’s brother, who worked for the Post Office, had picked it up for the proverbial song, and not a terribly long one, at that. We arrived at lunchtime, and passed one of the more pleasant afternoons of my life wandering further up the gravel road with Marie’s friend, whose name, I’m reasonably sure, was Karen. They had grown up beside one another. After maybe a mile, the road crossed a wide meadow, at the far side of which, a line of trees marked the course of a stream. It was a hot day, the air heavy with the sun, and the shade of the trees, the surprising cold of the water, were too much to resist. We tied our sneakers around our necks, and waded in. The stream bed was rocky, so you had to step carefully. Karen walked with both hands held up, as if she were expecting to fall at any moment. Marie stayed close enough to me that she could reach out to steady herself if necessary. I can’t recall what we talked about. What I remember is staring at the water’s surface, at those little bugs that skate across it—water-skimmers? Funny, I don’t know their proper name. There were dozens of them, sliding over the stream in a way that made its top seem more solid than my legs pushing through it told me it was. In the murk beneath them, trout whose size would have beggared their insect imaginations flitted amongst the rocks. Every now and again, a plop and a spreading ripple of rings would show where a water-skimmer had found himself swallowed by a great black cavern. I don’t suppose we waded more than a hundred yards downstream until we came in sight of a small dam. What we could see of it through the skin of water pouring over it showed it old, but there was nothing on the banks on either side of it to explain how or why it had come to be placed there. It seemed a reasonable spot to turn around, head back to the cookout Karen’s brother was preparing, but before we did, Karen snapped a picture of Marie and me in the stream. Her hair’s down in this one, and she’s wearing an oversized tie-dye that she’d found in one of my drawers and that had struck her as about the funniest thing ever. (“Mr. George Jones and Merle Haggard in a tie-dye?” she’d said, laughing over my protest that I listened to the Grateful Dead, too.) In her hands, she’s cradling the green bottle of Heineken that had accompanied us on our trek and would remain in her possession until we were ready to leave. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she’d learned that if she carried an open bottle of beer with her, she could appear social. To our right in the picture, sunlight streams down, lighting the water. To our left, darkness gathers in the trees.

Between that photo and the one before it, there was the better part of a better year—one of the best years. If I had searched the shoeboxes around me, I could have put my hands on pictures of most of its highlights, from the Christmas dinner I’d eaten with Marie’s family to the Halloween party that had been our third date—and that we’d attended dressed as Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton—to the early spring weekend we’d taken up in Burlington. I don’t know if, deep down, all stories of falling in love are the same. Some days, it seems to me that, once you duck your head beneath the surface details, you find yourself in pretty much the same sequence of events. Other days, I think,
No, it’s those details that are the point.
Either way—or both, even—that was what happened to us in the space between those pictures. We’d fallen in love, and shortly after that second photo was taken, I was down on one knee, asking her if she’d marry me.

There was another year and a half from that picture to the next one. In that time, the darkness that had thickened the spaces among the trees in that second photo had gathered about us, swallowed us the way those trout had consumed the water-skimmers. The week after we returned from our honeymoon in Bermuda, Marie found a lump in her left breast. From the start, things were bad. The cancer was pretty well-advanced, already storming her lymph nodes, and it resisted the radiation and the chemo like some kind of unstoppable beast in a low-grade horror film. I’m not sure when we knew that Marie wasn’t going to survive this, or when we accepted it. Maybe a month before the end, a change came over her. In a way it’s hard for me to describe, she became calm; I don’t know if I’d say peaceful so much as
still
. It was as if she’d moved into the lobby of the long, dark house she was heading towards. She wasn’t morbid, or listless—if anything, she relaxed, laughed more than she had in months. I didn’t see what was happening. I thought the difference in her might be a sign that things were turning around, that she was finally getting the upper hand on the creature that had rampaged through her system. I went so far as to float this idea past her, one Saturday afternoon. I’d driven her down to the Hudson, to a little park she liked a few miles south of Wiltwyck. We’d found it one of our first weekends together, when we’d gone for a drive just to have another way to spend time together. This day, there was a breeze off the river, which made it too cold for her to leave the car, so we sat watching the water and I ventured that maybe her recent improvement was an indication that things were looking up. Did I sound as desperate as I fear I must have? Marie didn’t answer; instead, she took my right hand in her left, lifted it to her lips, and kissed it. I told myself she was too overcome with emotion to reply, which I guess she was, just not the one I thought.

The third picture was taken right around that time. In it, Marie’s leaning forward on the kitchen table, looking up and to her right, where I’m standing with the camera, telling her to smile, which she is, but there’s a year and half’s struggle behind that smile, a deep weariness eighteen months in the making. She’s wearing a kerchief around her head, dark blue with white flecks. She was never happy with the wigs they provided her. Her skin has pulled tight against the bones of her face, her arms; it’s as if she’s aged at an accelerated pace, as if I’m getting to see what she would have looked like had we seen our thirtieth anniversary. Behind her, the morning sun is spilling through the windows over the sink, outlining her in gold.

Two weeks after that photo, she was gone. In a matter of two days, the bottom fell out from beneath us; there was barely enough time to rush her to the hospital bed she died in. What followed: the endless phone calls to tell people she’d passed, the visit to the funeral home (which we’d both put off), the wake, the funeral, the reception at the house afterwards, all of it was like some strange play I’d been cast in, but for which no one had provided me the script. I guess I did all right; however you judge such things. And when everything was over, the door shut on the last guest’s departure, there was the liquor cabinet, freshly stocked by a number of the friends and family who’d come to see Marie off. That cabinet, with its rows of bottles, and more shoeboxes full of more pictures than I’d expected.

So there I was, in, I don’t mind saying, a bad place, my wife gone and me doing what I could to join her. It was, you might say, a cold February in my soul. And then one morning my eyes pop open and waiting for me is this thought,
I need to go fishing
. I wish I could make you understand how powerful it was. I lay there for a while, waiting for it to go away. I lay there for a good long while, and when it was still there, glaring in my mind like a big neon sign, I decided I would give in to it. What the hell, right? I found a shirt and pants that weren’t too dirty, fished my car keys out of the toilet (don’t ask), and set off in search of fishing gear.

As you may have guessed, I had no idea what I was doing. From my house out towards Frenchman’s Mountain, I drove into town, to Huguenot Hardware, because I had this notion that a hardware store would be the place to go for your fishing tackle. I’d like to blame it on the booze, but it was just ignorance. Fortunately for me, the sales clerk there was kind enough not to send me on a wild goose chase, and pointed me across Main Street to what was then Caldor’s. For less than twenty dollars (I can’t remember exactly how much I spent; I want to say twelve fifty, but I’m not sure that’s right—wasn’t a lot, anyway), I was able to set myself up with a rod, reel, line, tacklebox, and net. Hat, too. When I told her I was planning a day of fishing, the checkout girl insisted I run back to men’s clothing and fetch a hat. She didn’t specify what kind of hat, just said that after having grown up with a father who was a fisherman, and an older brother who was a fisherman, and knowing a bit about fishing herself, she could say with confidence that if there was one thing I didn’t want to be caught without, it was a hat. Her advice sounded good, so I hurried to the men’s department and grabbed a Yankees cap that I still wear.