The Whore's Child (12 page)

She’d gone for a walk, of course, or a swim. Except that he didn’t see her in the water, and when he looked for the beach bag, he saw it was no longer sitting beside her chair. Surely she wouldn’t have taken the bag if she’d just gone for a walk. And it was unlikely she would’ve taken a walk, now that their stretch of sand was populated, however sporadically, by naked people. The beach was still not crowded; the nudists, mostly young and in couples, had bivouacked at discreet distances. The only person who wasn’t young was a gray-haired man with an enormous belly, standing at the water’s edge and looking out to sea. Apparently he occupied a nearby blanket, and from this Snow was able to see in his mind’s eye what must have happened. As the man, clothed, had come up the beach toward them, June would’ve looked up from her book. She was certain to have put her own suit back on by the time the first stranger appeared around their spot. She’d probably flashed the man a noncommittal smile, an acknowledgment of their similarities in age and attitudes about public nudity. Perhaps the man even smiled back as he disrobed. Lord, Snow thought.

Then an even worse scenario occurred to him. Perhaps June, too, had fallen asleep under the seductive sun, only to awaken suddenly, as he himself had done, naked and surrounded by beautiful young bodies. He imagined her on the verge of tears, feeling humiliated and old, struggling awkwardly into the bathing suit, losing her balance in the sand, convinced that everyone was staring at her. Hastily, she’d have pulled on the mesh cover-up as well. But why hadn’t she woken him up? Because she never did, not even when things were bleakest for her. She’d given him no sign the morning of her breakdown; she simply hadn’t been there when he returned home. And while their physician, an old friend, had claimed that a relapse was highly unlikely, Snow also knew that to battle depression, you must first spot its early warning signals. But what if there weren’t any?

Shading his eyes with his hands, Snow stood and gazed up the beach in the direction they’d come, half expecting to see his wife’s fleeing form. In the glare, the sand stretched on forever.

Hastily drawing his bathing trunks back on, he told himself that the most important thing to do was to find her as quickly as possible. She was probably weeping quietly in their car up by the lighthouse. It
had
been June he’d heard weeping last night in the Captain Clement, he was suddenly, irrationally, certain.

The top of the lighthouse was just visible from where he stood, an impossibly long way off, it seemed to him, since he’d have to retrace his steps up the beach and locate the boardwalk that snaked leisurely up the cliffs. Again he noticed that at their rocky base, maybe a hundred yards down the beach, there was that other concentration of bathers, and he resolved that there had to be another trail to the summit. A shortcut. Steep, perhaps, but more direct. Depending on how much of a head start June had, he might be able to intercept her.

Regardless of which route he took, he would have to leave the chairs. He hadn’t managed to carry them all the way here, so he certainly couldn’t pack them up the side of the cliff on the path those other bathers must have used. Leave the chairs, he decided. He didn’t want the chairs. He wanted June. He thought about how, just a short time ago, they had embraced in the waves, and about his sudden optimism. Had he been foolish to think that all could be made right between them? To imagine their marriage was buoyant as water, their mistakes weightless and inconsequential in the sudden swell of affection?

And so he started down the beach, the hot sand giving beneath his feet with every step. The rocky promontory was farther away than it looked. Much. By the time he’d gone fifty yards, the top of the lighthouse had disappeared, and the cliffs themselves loomed up above him, high and jagged and steep. In some stretches the clay was bright red, in others gray. From a distance these alternating striations appeared to be narrow ribbons, but in actuality they were thirty yards wide. He kept an eye out for a path, but every place that looked promising had a sign forbidding climbing on the fragile cliffs.

What had appeared to be a concentration of bathers at the foot of the cliff turned out to be isolated groups of privacy-seeking nudists. Despite this, Snow continued down the narrowing beach, the bright blue ocean on his left, the cliffs looming ever higher on his right, the hot sun at his back. He’d forgotten what it was like to hurry through sand, and when his calf muscles began to throb, he slowed, fearing he wouldn’t have enough strength left to climb the cliff when he finally found the path.

But within three hundred yards or so—his lower back pulsating, his breathing labored—he saw the error of his reasoning. At the promontory the beach turned north, and before him lay another stretch of sand as long as the one he’d just traversed, this one entirely devoid of people. Staring up at the cliffs, he realized there
was
no shortcut. The top of the lighthouse had come back into view, behind him now, and his heart plunged at the sight of it. How far he’d come! He’d be lucky to make it back to the beach chairs, much less to the boardwalk that led toward whatever remained of his marriage.

And what did remain? Even in his exhaustion Snow could clearly recall the litany of anguish and accusation that June had laid before him years ago in the hospital. By marrying her, he had stolen her own bright career, made her a dinner-party hostess to people who would’ve been her colleagues. Had he any idea how badly she’d wanted children? And did he realize that she knew, had known for years, about the long affair he’d had with one of his graduate students? When he told her that no words could express how ashamed he was, how bitterly he regretted this infidelity, June had said, with genuine ran-cor, that she was sorry to hear it, because she’d had an affair of her own that she didn’t regret in the least. Snow had not believed this, concluding that she simply wanted to wound him; and later, when she asked him to forget everything she’d said, to write it off as menopause, he found to his surprise that he was able—no, eager—to.

It was almost out of reach now, he thought, staring up the beach and into the immediate future. There would be the drive back to the ridiculous Captain Clement and, a day later, the complicated journey to Manhattan, which seemed more confusing each time he visited, where he sometimes got lost and no longer possessed the knack of knowing where he and June would be safe. Then the return to Ithaca, a place far too familiar and claustrophobic ever to get lost in, no matter how much one might wish to.

As he started back, knees jellied and back throbbing, Snow discovered that even now he felt lost, despite knowing that all he had to do was retrace his steps. With the cliffs on one side and the sea on the other, there was no possibility of a wrong turn, but the sun was in his eyes now—doubly, it seemed, because of the glare off the water—and if he wasn’t careful he’d walk right past the beach chairs in their secluded alcove. And how would he know when he’d arrived at the place where the boardwalk joined that beach? The huge beach was impossible to miss from the boardwalk, but the boardwalk might be virtually imperceptible among the dunes. He imagined himself marching doggedly, stupidly, up this beach forever.

Still, there was nothing to do but keep moving. Because of the blinding glare and the sting of sweat in his eyes, he sometimes didn’t see the sunbathers until he was almost on top of them, and one startled young woman quickly rolled onto her stomach and glared at him angrily over her shoulder. When she nudged the sleeping boy next to her, Snow mumbled an apology and hurried on, staggering in the sand. How could he have been so foolish as to assume the existence of a second path? He plunged forward, blindly now, on the verge of panic. His sunburn—he suddenly was aware of it—was making him lightheaded. He was inhabiting a nightmare where everything was inverted: instead of discovering himself naked in a crowd of friendly, well-dressed strangers—wasn’t this how such dreams usually worked?—here he was, an old man in baggy swimming trunks, adrift in a sea of angry, naked strangers. And what phantasm, dear God, was this, coming languidly but directly toward him down the beach?

He stopped, transfixed, certain he had lost his mind. Was it a young woman or a hag? Incredibly, she was both. Her skin, from head to toe, was a dry, cracking, lifeless gray. The figure resembled, frighteningly, a photographic negative. Its naked breasts were large and full, the dry seaweed between her legs the color of pale ash. Only her eyes were white until her smile—lewd, he thought— revealed rows of sharp, perfect white teeth.

“Dear God,” he said, dropping heavily to his knees, far too exhausted even to try to flee.

Perhaps because the dry hand on his shoulder was both warm and gentle, he found the courage to look up at the gray skull, which was fearful still, though no longer grinning. Its expression seemed almost apprehensive, the last thing he would have expected, now that he’d recognized the figure.

Not now,
he thought, pleading. He could feel his heart thudding dangerously in his chest.
Please, dear God, not
now.

The trip back down-island took almost an hour—an eternity, it seemed. If the world had finally righted itself, it was at his expense. Snow felt like a man with very little time left.

June, at the wheel, looked less old than shattered. She’d been able to explain her part in what had transpired in a few terrible, clipped sentences. When he’d awakened, she’d been swimming. The current had borne her down the beach, from where she’d seen him stand to look around for her. She’d waved, unsure whether he’d seen her or not when he pulled on his bathing trunks and set off walking, she’d assumed, to look at all the pretty naked girls. She’d felt self-conscious about her own nakedness at first, but the sensation had quickly vanished, replaced by an odd, pleasant sense of liberation. Before going into the water, she’d stuffed the beach bag under the chair he was sleeping in. He’d have seen it there if he’d looked.

Their arrival back at the Captain Clement had been the final humiliation. June had to lead him like a blind man under the trellised arch, and halfway to the French doors he’d slumped onto a wrought-iron bench, the garden path swimming before him. It was several minutes before he was able to stand. June had remained there with him, though she refused to sit or speak, the two of them in a dense cloud of bees, in full view of the library where Mrs. Childress had gathered the Newport people for tea.

Shortly afterward, June went out in search of first aid cream, leaving him in their room at the top of the inn. For the second time, they would be cutting short their stay on the island, and Snow was certain his wife would call David Loudener and cancel their visit to the city. What excuse she would offer, he neither knew nor cared. June had been gone only a few minutes when there was a knock at the door, and Snow, who at the moment couldn’t think of a single person he wanted to see, was rewarded for his misanthropy by the sight of the one person who in all the world he wanted to see least.

“We’ll be checkin’ out early,” Major Robbins explained. “I don’t think we could take another night in this place,” he said, glancing around the room contemptuously. When it became clear that the professor hadn’t gotten this, he said, “You didn’t hear that caterwauling last night?”

Snow, even more confused, wondered how this half-deaf major could possibly have heard June’s grief.

“You’re lucky you’re up here on the third floor,” the man said, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know what’s wrong with our hostess, but she bawled the night away. The wife and I are right over her bedroom.”

“The poor woman,” Snow said.

“Well, yeah. Sure, but Christ Almighty.”

“Would you like to come in? My wife just—”

“Yeah, I saw her go,” Robbins interrupted. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay. That’s some sunburn you got.”

“I’m feeling better now,” Snow said, though in truth he was still feverish, and when he touched the tender skin along his forearm, his fingerprint shone white as a scar.

“I’m glad,” Major Robbins smiled skeptically. “Anyway, I came up to tell you I saw that book of yours. Down in the library? It looked interesting.”

“I’m told it’s passé,” Snow said.

The major dismissed this with a wave. “I always thought it would be really satisfying to write a book. Leave something behind for people to remember you by. Like history, almost.”

The two men shook hands then, and Snow closed the door and listened to the major lumber down the two flights of stairs, a kinder man than he’d imagined. Instead of lying back down on the bed and risking a feverish sleep, he went over to the window and looked down in time to see the Robbins foursome dart through the trellised arch and head down toward the harbor, carrying their canvas duffel bags. They were dressed in shorts and white cotton sweaters and deck shoes, spry, all of them, for their age.

It was still difficult for Snow to credit the events of the afternoon. He couldn’t decide whether what had transpired was sudden, or if for years it had been approaching in increments so slow as to be undetectable as motion to the human eye. How long the world had remained tilted! How slowly his rationality had returned, and how little comfort trailed in its wake. The figure on the beach had intuited his blind confusion before he himself could understand it. “You wait right here,” it had instructed him—unnecessarily, since he lacked both the strength and the equilibrium to do otherwise. He’d watched the figure spring into a breaking, thigh-high wave, and when the water receded—taking with it much of the dried clay—he’d stared, uncomprehending, at the miracle. Even after the next, larger wave completed the transformation and the young woman emerged glistening from the sea, he still couldn’t make it work.

She had a name—already forgotten—as well as a boy-friend, and once clothed, they’d taken him by the elbow and guided him up the beach. They pointed to each woman they passed who conceivably could’ve been his wife, careful to ask if he was sure, because he remained confused and disoriented. “I don’t think so,” he answered after examining one woman with heavy, sagging breasts, another with round, fleshy hips, a third with the wrong color hair. In truth, he was terrified of not recognizing the woman he’d been married to for thirty years, telling them no, and then being wrong. The sun made him feel faint and distant from his own body, and after each new woman proved to be someone else, he’d lost interest in the search, certain that June herself was gone.