Rubicon Beach (37 page)

The old man fell in and out of delirium, muttering. Sometimes he spoke of her. The girl had a senseless resiliency; by the second day she was sitting up awake. Lake watched her many hours during the time she slept; and afterward, when he spoke to her, he made himself meet her eyes. She did not answer. She gave no indication of understanding him though he was convinced she did. He asked who she was, and she made no reply. He asked if she knew the old man, and she only looked at the corner where the old man lay. After a while she went to sit by the old man’s bed, and as more time passed she came to touch the old man’s head and hold his hand. Of course Lake understood there was no way this could be the girl of whom the old man had spoken: that girl, if she had ever existed in any place other than his derangement, had lived over thirty years before. This girl wasn’t twenty. Yet the old man had known someone was in that lighthouse, marked by a light Lake couldn’t determine; and this girl was nothing if not the image of what the old man had described, tied by raven hair to a tower as though bound to the highest tree of a woods that sailed as its passengers slept. That night Lake had many dreams. He woke amidst them, trying for the life of him to remember the name and face of a blonde he had once loved, and why in the world he had loved her.

Then it seemed all he saw was her, black-haired manifestation of an old man’s invention. He became dismayed at the pathos of it, a man nearly middle-aged who in his life had known one woman half a lifetime before, and who by choice had known no other, who by choice had committed himself to bury his passion deep in the heartland of his years. Now he was ignited by a girl born the moment of the previous passion’s interment. There wasn’t much chance he would approach her. He had buried faith with passion. There was moreover the old man; Lake could not take from him the last dream that fired him, in either his frantic sleep or waking dementia.

Sometimes, when Lake looked at her, she looked back.

The old man slipped. He filled the room with his rattle till it quavered the flame of the candle on the sill by his bed. He was wide-eyed and thrashing toward death. The interludes of slumber became brief. The girl watched without expression, staying by his bed constantly, holding him and wiping his face. The old man burned when he looked at her; when he touched her face he saw the old white flesh of his hand against the pastless red glow of her brow. His eyes did not deny their confusion. With no conversation between them, Lake and the girl came to take shifts watching him, one sitting as the other slept.

Mrs. Easton brought some food at the beginning of the third day, when the old man rested better than he had the previous two; Lake slept in the afternoon. He woke just after dark as another spring rain scattered across the roof; he woke in the way dogs wake to a tremor in the earth that hasn’t happened yet. He lay there less than a minute on his side, facing the girl who sat dozing in a chair by the bed. Her eyes were closed. Then the old man began to wheeze. She opened her eyes and looked at the old man and then at Lake with the first sign of alarm he’d seen in her. He leaped from where he slept to the side of the bed.

The old man dug his lingers into his arm as another old man had done only the year before, though it seemed in an utterly different life. “You made a mistake once,” he croaked to the young American.

“I know,” said Lake.

“Should have crossed that river,” the old man said.

“I know.” He looked at the old man who was beseeching him for an answer, and tried to explain: “I had never gone so far before. Sometimes you come to a road or a ridge or a river and it seems as far as you can go.” The old man moaned and shook his head. He slowly turned to the girl, holding his other hand, and then stared between them a moment at the ceiling as though into a tunnel that ran to the sky. Was it for the sake of the dying man or the living witness that Lake cried desperately, “That beach was as far as I could go.”

“No,” the dead man said, “there is one farther.”

She did not cry. But he knew she mourned the old man, as the dream that finds itself left full-blown and stranded and subject to the antibodies of mundane dawns mourns the dreamer that dreamed it. She helped Lake dig a place in the moors. That morning the smell of the rain lashed the air. When they had moved the dirt into the grave, the two of them looked up at each other, there together on their knees hidden by the high grass, and it was as though the rain smell would choke them; the color of her eyes dropped out altogether. With the death of the old man something in her face seemed to spin; the long-stunned inner clock of her finally began to tick again. Clasping his hands, he reached back to pull the last of the soil into the spot, and his heavy glasses fell from the bridge of his nose onto his lap; when he had picked them up and wiped them against his shirt and put them on again, she was gone.

She was gone. He thought for a moment he saw her, there in the grass against that bottomless sky; but what he’d taken to be her hair was a once white wind gone mad in a caged place, gathering the smudge of the place’s darkness; what he’d taken to be her mouth was the clotted snarl of the pale plains. What he took to be her eyes were only recollections, psychic mementos, talismans of distance: tones across the bank, a red moon of aspirations, small footsteps that lead to the water and vanish forever. “Hello,” he called, as though she would step into view. But she had never answered before in all the times he watched her. “Hello,” he said again, without hope.

He went to town to look for her. She wasn’t in town. He went down to the docks to see if anyone matching her description had booked passage. They had seen no one like her. He asked about her everywhere; he was driven back to the moors by their reproach. He partly walked, partly hitched out to Land’s End so as to be there when the sun fell; he sat all night on the cliffs watching the lighthouse for the sight of her telltale eyes. The lighthouse was dark. He went back to the cottage and now turned the place upside down, what there was to turn upside down: a chair here and there, a deathbed. She was not to be found beneath chairs or beds. She was not to be found behind the walls or beneath the floors. He scoured the moors for the next week, and then a month, and then many months. He didn’t find her, and no one knew of her. He went back to the stone cottage again and waited there in the nights, foolishly trying to blot her from his sleep; sometimes he believed that if he slept long enough he would wake to her. Sometimes he believed that if he stayed awake long enough, he would tumble into her unconsciousness, wherever she had taken it. Those footsteps that once led to a river’s edge haunted him; he loved, as does every man who is born to a vision, that unseen future that his courage once failed. He hated, as does every man who is born in America, that irrevocable failure that his heart won’t forget. 

On the stone walls of the cottage he added things, he subtracted them. He divided things and multiplied them. Sometimes he used chalk, sometimes coal, scrawling the equations the length of the room. After a couple of weeks the entire inside of the cottage was filled with additions and subtractions, multiplications and divisions; he then moved to the outside of the house. When the outside of the house was covered, he began writing equations in the earth. When he went to work at the shipping company, he began filling the company books with this arithmetic and then the top of his desk. Soon the moors where he lived were filled with arithmetic; he then  took to adding and subtracting on the roads leaving Penzance, down on his knees with his back to the end of the island, adding and subtracting himself into a corner of Cornwall. The townspeople noted this behavior. They consuIted among themselves and wondered what it was about this part of their country that attracted such preposterous Americans, one more preposterous than the other. Months passed, and when the spring gave way to summer, and the summer to autumn and winter, and when the year gave way to the next, Lake was still writing equations, new ones in the spaces between the old.