The Seasons Hereafter (21 page)

He wanted her to fix a lunch and go with him. She refused by pretending she had an intestinal upset and wanted to stay close to the house, so that he went off thinking she'd really wanted to go and felt bad to lose the chance. For him that was almost as good as having her along.

It would have been nice far out there today, she thought, but not with Barry in Philip's boat. She did not let her thoughts move toward how it would be with Owen. She didn't even let them go toward the afternoon. In fact, no time existed except now, and the ghost of time— yesterday afternoon and the sound of departure.

The north wind began to blow when the tide turned and put an edge of cold on the day. When she walked along Long Cove the surf was splashing noisily, shifting the stones, swirling with debris and rotten rockweed, while on the land side the field and cranberry marsh were green, and red-winged blackbirds whistled.

Brigport lay across a mile of wind-whitened water. Like yesterday, this day had a blue light that wounded the eye and slashed one cheek with cold while the other took the sun. When she passed the faint track she had made to her place among the spruces, she continued over wide shelves of pinkish granite against which the surf broke, sometimes splashing her face with salt. The spruces here were draped with moss, holding tenaciously to their shallow footing except where four or five had gone down together and turned up their roots to the sky and the sea.

The land climbed upward, and it seemed as if this rough-scalloped shore would go on forever, until she saw a path steeply ascending among the juniper and bay to her right, followed it, and came out above Stephen Bennett's place.

The whole place seemed absolutely deserted, dazzling and unreal in its emptiness. Though she hadn't allowed herself to anticipate anything, she thought at once that she'd been deceived and made a fool of. She shut her eyes against the blazing light, and slowly swallowed the pain in her throat; when she opened her eyes again Owen was coming toward her up a winding track from the house. A long-haired dog ran ahead of him.

After her forlorn anger, she felt an almost unbearable happiness. She wanted to run to him, but held herself here by gripping an old fence post. The dog reached her first, his tail going in circles like a wringer handle. She kept looking at him instead of at Owen, until Owen took her hand and said softly, “What's the matter?” He smiled. “Argo wants to know what the matter is, too.”

The dog's eyes moved from one face to the other. Vanessa put her free hand on his head and said, “Is this another of your nephews? He's got the Bennett coloring.”

Owen laughed. “He's got a better disposition than most of us. Stays home and minds his own business. Of course he might turn out to be a real old rake if there was an attractive bitch on the island.” Argo waved his tail. Owen tightened his grip on Van's hand. “Come on.”

He took her across the lawn past the house and onto a path through the field. With the dog leading, she walked ahead of Owen toward the rising ground to the east. He didn't speak and she wondered if he had asked her to meet him so he could tell her the adventure was over. Probably he never let his adventures go very far. There might have been a look about her, an intensity, that warned him off. Oh well, who wants me? she thought jauntily. It was like the old joke,
If she ain't good enough for her own kinfolk she ain't good enough for us
.

She turned abruptly, as if to run, and collided with him. She had one glimpse of his face before he took her into his arms. For herself, she could hardly stand; the very force of her weakness terrified her, she was no longer herself, proud and whole in isolation, and she felt a dreadful pang like bereavement even while she clung to him. They had never before met like this, she had never felt like this, even lying under the trees the night of the dance. They held each other like survivors on a raft, afraid to look at what lay around them, knowing only that each represented life to the other.

After a few moments they broke apart. Shaking, she sat down on a ledge. He stood looking away from her, down through a narrow opening in the fresh young green growth, his hands in his pockets. The set of his shoulders, and the back of his neck and head, made her eyes swim with tears and this too was something new and appalling. The dog lay on the warm turf, his head on his paws. He seemed to think it was good of them to keep him company. Owen turned around and came and stood over her. “Why in
hell
,” he said, “did Phil have to pick Barry out of all the men in Limerock?”

“I almost didn't come,” she said. “It was only because I didn't have anywhere else to go. They were going to tear down the house.”

He ran his hands through his hair as if the alternative were to seize her by the throat. “But why,
why
? I was safe out here. There was never anyone except for that woman over at Brigport one summer. . . .” He sat down beside her, his elbows on his knees and head in his hands. “I sized you up all right. First look. It takes one to know one, they say. I went home and fought it out with myself. Well, all right. I've been damn steady for seventeen years. They never thought I could do it. So what's the harm? You know the score, I know it, we're both the roving kind and with a hide like tanned leather. Only I haven't been roving.” He turned his face sidewise, showing a one-sided grin, half-sneer. “Like Argo I could stay home and mind my own business as long as there weren't any distractions.”

“You mean I'm the attractive bitch?” Her voice was croaky. “Thank you.”

“You know I don't mean that, goddammit. But dogs have a better arrangement than people. They don't go trying to make it anything different from what it is. What I thought it was between you and me. Where we should have left it.”

She tried to think of something devastating to say, to salvage herself. She could always do it to Barry. She could not now. She kept wanting to cry.

The dog got up and came to them, concerned. She touched his warm coat, more to steady her hand and dry its clamminess than to reassure the dog. Looking into Argo's face she said, “I haven't been roving either. Maybe if I had been I'd be better off now.”

“You could have stopped this.”

“So could you, but neither of us did.” She felt better again. “But there is absolutely nothing to prevent us from stopping here and now. I can get up and walk home, and you can get up and go home, and we'll never meet again by the bonny bonny banks of Loch Lomond.”

“All right.” His smile was deadly. He stood up. “Agreed. Here and now.”

She matched his smile. “As it said in my school poetry book,

She didn't know which of them made the first move. She had to step near enough for him to take her by the nape of the neck and clamp a hand over her mouth. She stared at him over it, knowing that neither of them had intended to win or lose. Everything was in that wildly silent exchange; the survivors on the raft had seen the sharks.

When he took his hand away she said faintly—“
Forever
. That was the last word. I know a lot more good quotations.”

“I'm sure you do,” he said. They began climbing the slope among the trees. It was very warm out of the wind, though she could hear surf booming and swashing, and the wind in the spruces higher up the slope made another kind of surf. At the top of the rise the bay lay before them, the gaudy blue of a child's water-color painting of an ocean. It all but hurt the eyes.

Van looked down and saw the powerful pattern of incoming seas, rearing together in leisurely but deadly conflict, subsiding into separate whirlpools, pouring back out over weedy humps of ledge; then the slow building up for a return assault. She stared down at it, feeling as if either she or the rock under her feet were moving. Suddenly Owen pulled her roughly away, back among the trees. She saw then two boats coming home in company from the direction of Matinicus Rock on the southeast horizon.

“Could they see us?” she said.

“They're too far away yet to know who it is. Sit down.”

“It's funny,” she said. “I never thought anything until now about being seen.”

“It's because everything's changed now.” He lit a cigarette for her. “We think it sticks out all over us.”

“Until I saw those boats I thought we were on some other island where nobody else had ever been but us.”

He nodded. “It's what's scared the hell out of me. Losing track. Forgetting who I am.”

“Or remembering. I don't know where that piece of wisdom came from, but maybe the way we've been—the way we
are
—the rest of the time is false. I feel different from any other way I've ever felt in my life, but it seems exactly right.” She watched to see if he knew what she meant, and went on. “For instance, I've never talked like this in my life. I haven't had the words or the inclination. And now I don't even feel self-conscious.”

His eyebrow went up. “Never to Barry?”

“We weren't going to mention them. Tell me how you feel different.” She took the flawed hand between her own.

“Mostly I beat my brains out wondering why this had to happen to me, at my age. It makes me sick with the kind of guts-ache I could do without. It keeps me awake nights and it makes me growl at my kids.” He got up, not seeming to notice how he'd pulled his hand away from her as if from a pocket, and went and stood in the opening, looking out at the bay. The dog went with him. She imagined the three of them on an island alone, a far island, one of those blue clouds lying lightly on the sea as if they were not made of earth and granite. She had never wanted a dog, but now Argo belonged in the picture because he was in it today. She enjoyed watching the man and dog together, and if the man were full of bewildered anger and self-reproach as he stood there, he would soon forget them. The thing was that she was causing the ferment and yet she was stronger than it and could supersede it. She got up and went up behind him and put her arms around his waist, rested her cheek against his back.

He said irritably, without looking around, “Don't you feel anything about Barry? Can you look him straight in the eye when you go home to him from me?”

“I'm nicer to him these days than I ever was,” she said candidly. “Maybe because I'm glad to be alive. It's easy to be kind to him, for once. Usually it's easier to be mean. He invites it.”

“Jesus, you're cold-blooded.” He unclasped her hands and turned around to face her. “I can't make you out. I can't make
me
out, going down to bottom like this about you. I swear it's not just because you're a good—”

“Lay?” she suggested.

“That's not the right word but I'll be damned if I know what it is. As far as that goes you're what every man dreams of having but never gets. But it's more than that. And what in hell is it?” He scowled at her. “What are you, what do you think behind those yellow eyes?”

“If I told you,” she said, “you'd be shocked.” She walked away from him, superbly sure of being followed. “But I can tell you that I've known all my life about you. I didn't know what you'd look like, where you'd be, I didn't even think of The Day in terms like . . .” She laughed, and sat down on the turf, and put her arm around Argo's neck.

Owen stood over her, an inquisitioner. “What day?”

“With a capital D. It's been the continuity of my life. Not Christmas, not Thanksgiving or July Fourth, those were everybody else's days. I had my own.” She was suddenly assailed again by that icy bereavement. Telling these things was like dripping out blood. “You were it. The birthday of my life, I suppose.”

He knelt down beside her and took her chin hard in his hand. “Maybe this is part of it. You don't think like anybody else, let alone move like them. I dunno. . . . I don't get it about Barry. You're married to him, and you're absolutely free of him. And he worships you. He never stops talking, he's so proud of you.”

“It's easy for Barry to worship. He worships the Bennetts, for instance. And he talks about them so much that I could have strangled him, but all I could do was despise him for crawling.”

He let go of her, sat back and took out his cigarettes. Watching his closed expression she wondered if she had repelled him There was no help for that; if he suffered one way in this business, she suffered in another. She wanted to shriek at him, Can't you see that to talk about myself like this is destroying me, shred by shred, but I have to do it for
you
?

“Why'd you ever marry him?” he asked finally.

“You asked me that before. Why'd you ever marry Laurie?”

He put the cigarettes back in his shirt pocket. “Well, there's always one way to shut your mouth.”

T
o stop in at Liza Bennett's was a test of some sort; doing it of her own accord, instead of being trapped into it, gave it a chance of success.
We think it sticks out all over us
, Owen had said, and that was the challenge. She considered that Liza, because of her background, was more astute about people than the islanders. To Vanessa their classifications were laughably simple; islanders, non-islanders. All quirks of behavior could be explained according to this specification.