Sourland (9 page)

“The way I got here.”

“Ms. Erdley—how is that?”

“I think that's my business.”

“Just tell me—how? You're not walking home, are you?”

“And what if I am?”

“Well—are you?”

“No. I am not walking home.”

“Then—where are you going?”

“I'm taking the bus.”

“The bus! No—I'll drive you.”

“How do you know where I live?”

“I'll drive you.”

 

How we meet, people like us.

 

He tells me his name:
Tyrell Beckmann.

He knows my name:
Jane Erdley.

He was born in Barnegat Sound, thirty-seven years ago this month. Moved away for all of his adult life & just recently moved back for “family & business reasons.”

He has a wife, two young daughters.

Matter-of-factly enunciating
Wife, two young daughters
in the stoic way of one acknowledging an act of God.

A miracle. Or a natural disaster.

Solemnly he confides in me: “After my father died last fall the family put pressure on me to return to Barnegat—to work with my brothers in the family business—‘Beckmann & Sons'—I'd rather not discuss it, Jane! In February I enrolled in a computer course at the community college—anything that's unknown to me, I'm drawn to like a magnet. Also it's a good excuse for getting out of the house in the evening. Until I came into the library. Until I saw you.”

His breath is steaming in the cold air. Shrewdly he has shifted the heavy shoulder bag to his right side so that I can't tug it away from him, & he can walk close beside me unimpeded.

Here is a surprise: the man's long-legged stride is a match for me on my crutches. Despite my so-called
disability
I normally walk a little too fast for other people especially women in impractical footwear—it makes me smile to hear them plead laughingly
Jane! For heaven's sake wait
—but Tyrell Beckmann keeps pace with me, easily. Though he doesn't seem very coordinated—as if one of his legs were shorter than the other, or one of his knees pained him. His head bobs as he walks, like the head of a large predator bird. His forehead is creased with the intensity of his thoughts & the corners of his mouth have a downward turn except when something surprises him & he smiles a quick startled boyish smile.

Already I take pride in thinking
I will make this man smile! I have the power.

As we walk, Tyrell does most of the talking. Like a man long deprived of speech he tells me how as a boy he took out books from the Barnegat library—how he loved the children's room, & read virtually every book on the shelves. He tells me about the writers he'd read since boyhood & most admired—Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Jack
London (
The Call of the Wild
), Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick—then in high school Henry David Thoreau, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Dostoyevsky—the Dostoyevsky of
Notes from the Underground
& not the massive sprawling novels. As a “mystic-minded” adolescent he fell under the spell of the Upanishads & the Vedantists—the belief that the individual is one with the universe. As a young man in his twenties he read Søren Kierkegaard & Edmund Husserl & at Union Theological Seminary—where he'd enrolled with the vague intention of becoming some sort of Protestant-existentialist minister—he fell under the spell of the theologian Paul Tillich who'd once been on the faculty there & whose influence prevailed decades later.

Tillich was a Christian, he says, for whom Christianity wasn't an
encoded
religion but
living, vital
. So too Tyrell is a Christian in principle though he finds it difficult to believe in either Jesus Christ or in God.

“‘By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots.'”

These beautiful words! I wonder if they are from the Bible—the Old Testament, or the New.

I ask Tyrell do these words mean it's what people
do
that matters, & not what people
are
, or in what state they are
born
; & Tyrell squeezes my hand, awkwardly & eagerly as my fingers grip the crutch—“Yes, Jane. That is exactly what that means.”

He has called me
Jane
. His hand lingers on mine, as if to steady me, or himself.

By this time it's beyond dusk—nearly nighttime. We didn't walk to the bus stop but as if by mutual consent we made our way behind the library parking lot along a path through tall rushes & dune grass & spindly wild rose & descended to the wide hard-crusted beach where a harsh wet wind whips at our faces & clothing. Here is the Atlantic Ocean—moving walls of jagged slate-colored waves—exactly the waves painted by Winslow Homer so precisely & obsessively, farther north along the Maine shore—in these waves a ferocious wish to sweep over us, to devour us.

Tyrell sees that I am shivering. Tyrell leans close to me, his arm around my shoulders. How clumsy we are, walking together! A man, a girl, a pair of crutches.

I ask him why he'd dropped out of the seminary & he says he was in despair, badly he'd wanted to be a “man of God”—to help others—while believing neither in God nor in others—& at last he realized that his desperation was to help himself—& so he quit. Living alone then in a single room on 113th Street, New York City—he'd broken off with his family in Barnegat Sound—went for days sometimes without speaking to anyone—took night courses at Columbia—found solace in his secular courses, psychology & linguistics—did research into the “secret language of twins”—the “social construction of twinness” & the “psychic ontology of twins”—its reception in the world.

“In some primitive cultures, twins are sacred. In others, twins are demonic and must be destroyed.”

“Why is that?”

“Why? No one knows why.”

From the subject of twins Tyrell shifts to the subject of the Hebrew Bible he'd studied—“deconstructed”—in the seminary; the compendium of writings—crude, inspired, primitive, surpassingly beautiful & terrifying—of an ancient people possessed by the idea that they are the chosen of God & hence their fate is God's fate for them & never mere accident lacking in meaning.

“Essentially there are two ontologies: the accidental & the necessary. In the one, we are free. In the other, we are fated.”

“Are we! You sound very sure of yourself.”

“Don't laugh at me, Jane! Please.”

“But why are you telling me these things? I don't even know you.”

“Of course you know me, Jane.”

“No!”

“And you know why I'm telling you these things, Jane.”

“Why?”

“Because we are twins, Jane.”

“Twins! Don't be ridiculous.”

The man's calmness frightens me. His matter-of-fact speech. Though the wind is whipping at our faces, making our eyes tear. I want to think
He's mad. This is madness.

“Twins: in our souls. You know that.”

“I don't know any such thing.”

“Yes. You know that, Jane. It's clearer to me than any mystic identity of oneness in the universe. Just—us. We are oneness.”

“Oneness! That's so—”

I want to say
ridiculous, mad
. Instead, my voice trails off. I'm overcome by a fit of shivering & Tyrell grips my arm at the elbow, his fingers strong through the fabric of my coat.

Oblivious of our surroundings we've been hiking on the winter beach—a mile? Two miles? We turn back & retrace our steps in the hard-crusted sand.

The man's heavy footprints, my smaller footprints & the slash-like prints made by my crutches.

No one could identify us, studying these prints. No one could guess at us.

The winter beach is littered with storm debris. Python-sized strips of brine, swaths of frozen & crusted ocean froth resembling spittle, or semen. Through a tear in the cloud-mass is a pale glaring moon like a mad eye winking.

 

The next time he asks, I will say
Yes. You may carry me.

 

No one can understand how we are perfect together.

My stumps, fitted into the shallows at the base of his thighs.

My pale-pink skin, the most secret skin of my stumps, so soft, a man touching this skin exclaims as if he has been scalded. Oh! My God.

 

How do such things happen you ask & the answer is
Quickly!

 

Those weeks of late-winter, early spring at the Jersey shore at Barnegat. Those weeks when Tyrell Beckmann entered my life. For there was no way to prevent him.

Saying
Jane you are perfect. I adore you.

Saying
I was born imperfect—“damaged.” There is something wrong with my body, no one can see except me.

It was so: Tyrell inhabited his body as if at an awkward distance from it. As if he had difficulty coordinating the motions of his legs as he walked & his arms that hung stiffly at his sides. Almost you might think
Here is a man in the wrong body
.

Confiding in me as I lay in his arms fitted into his body like a key in a lock.

So often in those weeks Tyrell came to me at the library, once I asked him where was his wife? & he said his wife was at home & in the mildest way of taunting I asked didn't she wonder where he was on those evenings he was with me & he said she would suppose he was at the community college & I said oh but not every night!—& not so late on those nights—& it was then he said in a voice of male smugness: “She doesn't want to know.”

Hearing this I felt a small stab of pleasure. Resenting as always the very syllable
wife
& certainly any thought of Tyrell's wife until seeing now that this man was the prince of his household, very likely—the marriage, the family life, was centered upon
him
.

In any love-relationship there is the stronger person, & there is the weaker. There is the one who loves, & the one who is loved.

Loved, & therefore feared.

As often as he could come to me, he came. Arriving a half hour before the library closed. Or breathless & flush-faced arriving a scant five minutes before closing time. Sometimes Tyrell came directly from
work
—as he called it, without wishing to elaborate—as if the subject of his
work
in a family-owned local business was painful to him—& wore a sport coat or a suit, white shirt & necktie & black dress shoes like any professional man; at other times he wore corduroy trousers, the
herringbone-tweed coat with leather elbow-patches, salt-stained running shoes.

Never did I look for the man. Never did I betray surprise or even (evident) pleasure glancing up & seeing the man looming over me with his tense tight smile, at the circulation desk.

There is the
hunter
, and there is the
hunted
.

Power resides not in the
hunter
—as you might think—but in the
hunted
.

In his hand a book as a prop. A book as a pretext. A book to be checked out of the Barnegat Public Library by the librarian at the circulation desk.

“Jane! Hello.”

It was not forbidden that Tyrell call me
Jane
. Many of the library patrons knew me & called me
Jane
.

It was not forbidden that Tyrell smile at me. Every patron known to me at the library was likely to smile at me.

It was forbidden that Tyrell touch me in public. Not even a handshake. Not even a brushing of his fingers against mine when I handed him back his plastic library card. Nor did I allow Tyrell to stare at me, in that way of his that was raw, ravenous. I had a horror of others knowing of us, or guessing. I had a horror of being
talked-of, whispered-about
.

Though it gave me a childish pleasure to lie in my bed in the early morning—amid my bedclothes tousled & rumpled from the man's perspiring body of the previous night—& languidly to think yes probably others had noticed Tyrell lingering in my vicinity, or waiting for me when the library closed; very likely, some had seen us walking together on the deserted winter beach.
Jane Erdley & that man—that tall man who comes into the library so much & is always hovering over her.
The other librarians on the staff who are so sharp-eyed & our supervisor Mr. McCarren whose particular project
Jane Erdley
has been.

We are committed to hiring the disabled here, Ms. Erdley. This was the Barnegat mandate long before it was a directive of the State of New Jersey.

Oh thank you! Mr. McCarren that is so—kind.

I did not like it that others might wonder of us & gossip but I did like it that Tyrell revealed so plainly in his face the desire he felt for me. I liked it that the older, married man should be so reckless, desperate.

It pleased me perversely to think that he was the prince of his household. He was a man of thirty-seven who retained the youth & cruel naivete of a man a decade younger, or more—& so his maleness, his sexuality, withheld from the woman who was his wife, would aggrieve her. Not a syllable of reproach would pass the wife's lips—so I imagined!—yet her hurt, her woundedness, her anxiety would be considerable. It is natural that a husband hold his wife in disdain, for she is his possession, available to him & known to him utterly as
Jane Erdley
would never be fully known.

 

Oh God! So beautiful.

Beneath the red plaid flannel skirt flared & short as a schoolgirl's—beneath the schoolgirl white-woolen stockings worn with shiny red ankle-high boots—the (expensive, clumsy) prosthetic limbs: pink-plastic, with aluminum trim, lewd & ludicrous & to remove these, to unbuckle these, the man's fingers trembling & the man's face heated with desire, or dread—the first stage of the act of love—the act of sex-love—that will bind us, close as twins.