The Summer Guest (25 page)

The next day, a Saturday, I rose early, did a load of laundry in the basement, swam my usual mile. It was just before five when I arrived at the Lobster Tank. Only a few customers were eating, mostly older folks in for the early bird four-dollar special. I took a clean apron and a tray from the pile by the dishwasher and got to work. By six the place was packed. I was putting up an order on the clips when I turned and saw Deck watching me.

“What? Is there something in my teeth?”

“Somebody’s in a good mood.”

The bell rang behind me: my order. I dressed the plates up with little custard cups of tartar sauce, a piece of lettuce, and lemon wedges, then hoisted the tray onto my shoulder.

“Deck, what?”

“You. Smiling like that.”

I laughed, embarrassed. But it was true. “Okay, I’ll cut it out.”

“No need. One thing I know, a woman only smiles like that when she’s in love. Or so May tells me.”

May was Deck’s wife. She always picked Deck up at the end of the night, waiting outside in her little orange Pinto while we reset the tables; I’d met her in the parking lot my first week on the job. Twice they’d had me out to their house for dinner, the first time with some of the other girls from the restaurant, the second just me alone. May was a secretary at the high school, a big woman but not soft, and when she hugged me, as she now did whenever I saw her, I felt the wind come out of me a little. Their kids were grown and gone: their daughter, Peg, a girl about my age, lived in Nashua, and was married to a fireman; their son, George, had been through some rough patches but had eventually settled down, played semipro hockey for a while, and now taught high school phys-ed someplace down south-Memphis, or Mobile. Their house was out in the country, a post-and-beam thing that looked big from the road but felt snug inside. The second time I’d gone out for dinner, and the hour had gotten late, I’d slept the night in Peg’s old room, using one of her old T-shirts as a nightgown.

“We smile for lots of reasons, Deck. We’re a mysterious species.”

“Well, whatever it is,” he said, nodding, “it’s nice to see.” I thought the conversation was over but then he reached into his back pocket. “Also, and I don’t want to kill your mood, but I’m guessing this might be for you.”

I put my tray down on the garnish counter and took the letter from his hand. The envelope was small, and thick with folded notebook paper. It was addressed to me, care of my parents, with a big X across the address and, written beside it, The Lobster Tank, Commercial Street Wharf, Portland, ME. The second handwriting was my mother’s.

“Lucy, huh?”

It took me a moment to gather myself. I suppose I felt the way all liars did, when they were finally found out: guilty, but a little relieved, too. I also realized, holding Joe’s letter, that whatever was inside didn’t matter to me anywhere near as much as it might have even a few weeks before.

“I’m sorry, Deck. I don’t know what to say.”

He frowned in a way that struck me as reassuring, though I could also tell I’d hurt his feelings. I’d eaten at his table and slept in his house, and not even told him who I really was.

“It’s all right,” Deck said finally. “I don’t mean to pry.”

“Could we maybe keep this between us for now? Just you and me and May.”

“If that’s how you want it, sure.” He stopped, his face a little flustered. “Lucy. Alice. Listen, I know it’s not my business. But if there’s anything I can help you with, any sort of problem at all…”

I looked him in the eye. “It’s okay, Deck. Really, I’m all right.”

“Well, the offer’s open. You ever need someplace to go, Peg’s room is yours for the asking. May says so too.”

I could have kissed him right then, that sweet man. Over the counter, the bell rang again; I was now stacked up two orders, and could see, through the little window separating the prep area from the dining room, more folks coming in. I hoisted the first tray to my shoulder. “Trust me,” I said. “I’ve got it all under control.”

I planned to open the letter when I got home, but in the end I couldn’t make myself wait. When my shift was done, and once we’d broken everything down for the night, I got a glass of water and took a stool at the bar. Dear Lucy Joe wrote:

Not knowing where to send this, I’m mailing it to your parents. When I didn’t hear from you I phoned the house and they told me that you were in Portland, but wouldn’t say where. It’s funny to think that you never left, after that morning on the dock. I hope you’re all right.

Lucy, I’m sorry. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it now. I know how hard this is for you, my being stuck here, and I know you’ve probably had it with me, with the whole situation. I wish it were different, but it is what it is. There’s more talk of an amnesty, but we’ve heard this before up here, and I’m not sure I’d qualify anyway. The rumor is it will only go to people with dependents. No one really knows. That asshole Nixon is probably going to be reelected, which would deep-six the whole thing.

Lucy, I know I have nothing to offer you. This sounds a little stupid as I write it, sort of old-fashioned, but the truth is you deserve a real life. Abby and Marcel are nice people, and they’re looking after me-all of us, really-but there’s only so much they can do. It’s taken me a while to admit this, but I see it now. I think I figured it out that night in Harvard Square, when we had dinner. You think I didn’t see you watching that girl, but I did. I knew you were thinking it should have been you. I wished it for you, Lucy, I really did, and I was sorrier than I’d ever been in my life. This sounds dumb, but maybe it’s not too late. I don’t know what you’re doing now, but I hope it’s what you want, and that it will take you where you want to go.

You know the funniest thing? I still wish I’d gone to Vietnam. I read about the war, I see shit on the news, but I still wish I hadn’t let my father talk me into leaving. But there I go, blaming him, when it was really something I did, nobody else. A lot of us feel that way, even the die-hard antiwar types. It’s hard to stay political when you’re standing in the pens surrounded by forty tons of ice and fish, so cold your hands freeze to the pitchfork, and some jerk yelling at you to hurry the hell up before it all rots and turns to cat food, and it looks pretty much as if your life is just fucking over. If I’d gone, by now it would be done with, at least for me. Whatever was supposed to happen would have happened by now.

The other thing I want to tell you is that my father isn’t well. A few days after Christmas he had a small stroke. I don’t know all the details, and as usual he’s pretending it’s nothing, but the truth is it’s a bad turn. He was shoveling out the truck when it happened and I guess he was outside for a while in the snow before he managed to get into the house and call someone. He had some pretty bad frostbite too, on his hands and feet, which is probably worse than it would otherwise be, without the diabetes. He’s out of the hospital now and staying in town for the winter at the Rogues’. I think you know them-Hank Rogue, Rogue Drillers? They have a daughter who was a couple years ahead of us at Regional. Anyway, Hank and my father have always gotten on, probably because they’re the two crankiest men in northwest Maine.

The real upshot is, between the stroke and all the rest of it, it doesn’t look as if he can hold on to the camp much longer. My guess is he may try to get through next season, but if somebody showed up tomorrow with the money to buy the place he might not say no. It’s been a hard run for him the last couple of years, and I think he may be ready to throw in the towel. When I heard about the stroke, I called him and offered to come home, just take my chances, but he flat-out refused. He actually got pretty pissed off and the whole thing dissolved into one more shouting match. I think knowing that I’m up here is the one thing that keeps him going. And I wouldn’t be all that much help to him in jail, either.

It’s weird to think of the camp, gone just like that. I think I’d gotten to hate the place. Maybe getting away was the reason I came up here to begin with. Now I’ve spent the last two years missing it. Remember how we used to talk about someday when we’d take it over? It seems like years since we talked like that, and I guess maybe it really has been years.

I know my father has always thought the world of you, Luce, and from what your parents said I get the feeling you may not be able to do this, but if you get the chance to visit him, even just to say hello, I know it would be some help. Though he’d never say as much, I know he’s pretty lonely. He doesn’t even have a lot of friends left in town, and seeing you would brighten him up. I know it may not be in the cards, and I understand if it isn’t, but I just thought I’d ask you.

Lucy, I hope you’re happy wherever you are, and try not to worry about me, as I will try not to worry about you, though I’m sure I always will, every day as long as I live. I guess this is something like good-bye. I can barely write the word. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Love,

Joe

I finished the letter and returned it to its envelope. All along I had thought I’d be the one to end it, not the other way around. I was crying a little, though what I felt was not exactly like sadness. Just this: I was alone. I had fallen half in love with my solitude, and now I’d gotten exactly what I’d asked for, and it wasn’t what I’d expected at all.

A shot glass appeared on the bar in front of me.

“Here.” Deck pulled a bottle of tequila off the shelf and poured. “Drink up.”

The glass was heavy in my hand; I took a tiny sip. My mouth bloomed with the heat and sharpness of it, making me swallow, and I felt the liquor burning all the way down to my stomach.

“Go on now, knock it back. Deck’s orders.”

“I’m not much of a drinker.”

“And tomorrow is another day. But I never met a broken heart yet wasn’t made a little better by just the right amount of tequila. Go on.”

I did as he said, tipping my face to the ceiling and taking the rest of it in a single gulp. My eyes and nose were running, and I wiped them with the back of my hand. “Oh, shit, Deck. Shit, shit, shit.”

“We’re assholes, we are. Men are worthless. There’s no denying it. You want another?”

“What would May say?”

“This was May’s idea, actually.” He tipped his head toward the front windows and the parking lot, where the Pinto was waiting, chuffing smoke into the air. “Ask her yourself.”

The second week of March 1972. For the first time in my life I had no idea what would happen next. Deck pulled an extra glass from under the bar, set it up next to mine, and filled both of them to the lip. He raised his in a little toast.

“To you, Alice,” he said.

It seems now as if there was no time before-before Kate, before the camp, before Harry Wainwright and his last day of fishing-but naturally there was, and that is part of the story too. There was being a child, of course, not all that interesting-the fact that I had no father made me less different from other children than you might suppose-and after we had moved to Maine and my mother remarried, my years in high school and college: again, ordinary in every way, chock-full of minor triumphs and failures and bad experiments that pulled me in no direction in particular. I might have become anyone, chosen any kind of life. Out of college, I floated down to Boston with a couple of friends-hard-drinking jokesters with even less on their minds than I had-waited tables in a ferny restaurant in Back Bay while I looked for something better, and ended up, of all things, as a sales representative for a drug company out on Route 128-a job that entailed crisscrossing the city in a big leased Pontiac with a sample bag crammed with capsules and pills to stop your heart and start it again, thin your blood or thicken it, adjust the body’s metronome in a hundred different ways. These were boom times, when everyone was making money quick as could be, and I was too-not getting rich exactly, but certainly making more money than I knew how to spend, and under the spell of my success, I actually began to see myself as someone who might prosper in this world. My job, after all, seemed easy as pie, requiring little more than the ability to read a map and recite memorized data to overtired general practitioners who’d try anything once. (The truth was, I didn’t really need to understand what I was saying, though my courses in forestry were more help than you’d think.) I had friends, I had money, I had a closet full of suits. It wasn’t a cure for cancer or even the common cold, but it was something, and it was mine.

And yet. When I tell people about those two years of my life, and they see how differently I do things now, they assume my decision to walk away was just that: a surrender. And they’re absolutely right. I did, in fact, give up. But it didn’t have anything to do with the money (which was fine), or the long hours (what else would I be doing?), or the feeling that I was wasting my life on trivia (nothing wrong with prescription drugs; just ask the guy who’s crawling across the kitchen floor to get to his stash of nitroglycerin in the breadbox). I didn’t get fed up, burn out in increments, find myself in some desperate tailspin drinking away the lunch hour and boring the barroom with some cockamamie philosophy I’d cooked up as to why the world was the way it was-i.e., depraved, ruinous, and totally out of control. (This is exactly what happened to a guy I knew, a story that ended badly, though most of the salesmen in my group were happy as hamsters to kill their quotas and skeedaddle on home to drive their daughters to ballet lessons and prowl the classifieds with their wives after dinner for a time-share in Stowe or Fort Meyers.) No. What happened was, one sunny April afternoon, fresh from one successful sale and on to the next, and looking forward to a dinner date with friends at a seafood joint near Faneuil Hall-that is to say, with a song in my heart and my life charging downfield like a running back with the game-winning ball-I turned off Storrow Drive into Beacon Hill, and found myself slowed, then slowed some more, then finally stopped in traffic.

It was just three o’clock, too early for the rush. A line of two dozen cars waited ahead of me, and as I leaned my head out the window to see what the problem was, first one and then another began to honk, the noise piling up with a feverish intensity that was, of course, contagious. I was too far back in line to see anything; my bet was an accident, though there were no lights or sirens yet; and as the minutes ticked off, making me later and later, all for no apparent reason, the whole thing ballooned into a crisis. What I mean is, I couldn’t go anywhere-couldn’t fucking go-and I found myself pounding the wheel and then the ceiling of the Pontiac with my fist, pounding and pounding until my knuckles shrieked, my heart hammering in my chest, the blare of the horns smothering my head like a plastic bag, so that I thought I might actually burst. People had begun to climb out of their cars, and I took this as a sign; I threw the door open and marched ahead, toward the intersection where the problem, literally, lay.

It was a man, an older man, and at first I thought he was dead-that he had stepped into the intersection and been hit by a car. I bullied my way into the small crowd that had gathered around him. He lay on his back in the middle of the southbound lane with his arms draped loosely at his sides, and I saw that he was conscious. His eyes were open, almost too open, giving an unblinking blue-eyed gaze to the sky above, and a policeman was crouched on one knee, asking him in a South Boston accent the kind of questions you’d expect: could he stand (not sure), what was his name (Fred something), did he know where he was (Boston? Near the Ritz?). His clothing was neat and clean-khakis, a madras shirt, shiny black loafers: the uniform of a semiretired accountant or a bank loan officer on vacation. Though some in the crowd were saying he was drunk, I didn’t think he was. He was just there, lying in the street as if he didn’t have a care in the world, apparently comfortable and totally uninterested in anything the cop was saying to him or where he was and why it was worth a fuss. I craned my neck upward to see what he was seeing: the crowns of the buildings, an airy gauze of clouds, a blue dome of April sky. Nothing, really, to account for his look. A second policeman arrived, and then a third, barking into the radio clipped to his shoulder; an ambulance appeared in the oncoming lane, shoving itself up onto the curb with a tart bleep of its siren. Two of the cops helped the man up onto the ambulance’s tailgate, and while the EMTs were checking him out, waving a tiny flashlight over his eyeballs and taking his pulse, the third cop told us all to get back into our cars, there was nothing to see, and so on. Which, I guess, there wasn’t.

It took me only a month after that to quit, though not why you might think, which is one more reason I don’t tell the story all that often. It wasn’t my father’s body I saw there, as my college shrink would have claimed, or even, in some theoretical way, my own, although the poor sap might have been a drug rep as anyone else. I didn’t conclude, as a person might in the face of something so desperately mortal, that life was short, do what you want, make every second count-the easy stuff, all of which I knew in the first place. What I saw instead, in a heartbreaking flash, was the absolute arbitrariness of most things. Before I’d walked back to my car, I approached the first cop and asked him what it was all about. He was scribbling in a notebook and looked up at me with a scowl. “Beats me.” He barked a nasty laugh. “The guy said he was tired and wanted to lie down!”

And as he said it, I thought: Well, why not? Why not lie down in the middle of the road? Driving away, I suddenly couldn’t think of a single reason, hard as I tried. Traffic would stop, the cops would come; they’d haul you off somewhere for observation, maybe a little “treatment”-reuptake inhibitors by the fistful, bad food on metal trays, serious conversations with some joker in a white coat with a blackjack stashed in his sock-while, meanwhile, the world would turn without a stutter. In a crazy way, it actually made sense to lie down, to drop your guard and let the truth come out. I thought: who cares?

Which, of course, was absolutely no way to live. There’s more to the story, but before I knew it I had second-guessed myself into the worst kind of box. I went back to my mother’s house in Bangor, loafed the summer away under the charade of “getting some thinking done” and “looking for a new direction,” and in September answered a want ad in the Maine Sunday Telegram that turned out to be Joe’s. I drove up to Sagonick and looked the place over; it seemed, then as now, as far away from everything as I could get without actually hauling myself to some dope-smoking Oregon commune or an ashram in India (both of which I actually considered for at least ten minutes), and when Joe put the ring of keys in my hand, I felt in their solid, singing weight the answer to my problems, and knew that I was cured.

End of story; or the beginning, if you like.

All of which is just to say that these were the things on my mind that morning, as much a part of the feel of the day as Kate’s kiss, Joe’s drunk lawyers, and Harry Wainwright. For two hours I went out with a party from cabin two-a couple of guys who just wanted somebody to show them a good spot and then beat it-then into town for some screws and other things I needed to repair a set of steps by the dock. Lucy had made it clear that I was supposed to stay close to camp, to keep myself available for whenever Harry wanted to go, but I thought a short errand wouldn’t hurt, since Harry, even if he experienced some kind of miraculous recovery, would need a while to get ready. I would have asked Kate to come along for the ride, but she was off somewhere, shuttling the moose-canoers, and probably wouldn’t be back till nearly noon.

What happened next I can’t explain. I was driving into town, mulling over what size screws I wanted and that maybe I should pick up a case of engine oil while I was at it, when I caught myself thinking about my father, and the day I learned he’d died. This in itself was odd, as right till then, driving the Jeep up the long hill into town, the wind and sun roiling around my face, I would have sworn I had no conscious recollections of that day at all. Standing by the canoes, I’d told Kate all that I remembered of him, or thought I had; so maybe finally talking about these things had cleared a space in my mind for other memories to flow in behind them. In any case, the things I suddenly remembered hit me so hard I actually tapped the brake, then found myself pulling the Jeep to a stop by the side of the road.

We were living on base then, the three of us in a small, prefabricated house built of nothing much better than cardboard. It was summer, the air of the tidewater thick as clam chowder. I don’t think we had an air conditioner, because the house was always full of whirling fans-table fans, ceiling fans, fans on tall stands that rocked to and fro like the heads of robots-and that was where my memory began: with the feel of fan-pushed air on my face. I was in the kitchen, which was really just a kind of galley with a small extra space for a table and chairs. The fan, an old-fashioned model with metal blades and a cloth-covered cord, was positioned on a chair so that it pointed toward the stove, where my mother had been cooking dinner for the two of us. She had left me alone there when the doorbell rang-I was playing on the floor, pushing a toy dump truck around-and in her absence the fan had worked a kind of magnetic pull on me: I left my playing and went to stand before it, to watch its blur of blades and soak the skin of my face in the cooling relief of its man-made wind. My father flew jets, aircraft held aloft by forces as invisible to me as magic, but there were plenty of propeller-driven planes around, and one could not be a small boy growing up on the grounds of the Oceana Naval Air Station without grasping at least the basics of aeronautical propulsion. In my mind I connected the action of the whirling fan blades to my father’s mysterious and important job-a job that, I knew, scared my mother half out of her wits even as she told me constantly what a great, brave man he was-and the longer I waited alone in the kitchen for her return, the more I experienced both a deepening anxiety at her absence-there was a boiling pot on the stove, which I also dimly understood to be a danger-and a strong, almost mystical pull toward the blur of metal that floated before my face. It seemed to contain a strange and ancient power-the power of my father, of men and their machines-and I longed to touch it, a desire sharp as hunger. I had been warned against this a thousand times, as I had been warned against the stove, the electric outlets, strangers who might want to talk to me, and traffic on the street. The urge to obey such commands was strong, but in my mother’s lengthy absence I detected a quality of permission. For a long moment, two seconds or ten, I held my hand up in front of the fan to feel its wind more intimately, weighing my options. And then, from the hallway, the sound traveling unmuffled through the cardboard walls of our house, I heard my mother scream.

Which was exactly when my defenses collapsed and I extended a single, outstretched finger toward the fan, through the metal cage that wrapped it, and into the whirling blades. I did it quickly, furtively-so quickly I didn’t realize for a moment what I’d done, though the pain was, I imagine, instantaneous. The sharp metal sliced off the end of my finger so neatly that it seemed to simply vanish, and then a jet of blood shot out from this open tube of flesh into the blades, splattering everything-my hand and face, my arm and shirt, even the wall and floor, with its vibrant, Martian-red confetti-and it was this fact, as much as the pain itself, that made me scream too.

Jesus Christ almighty, I thought, and probably said so too, remembering all this in the parked Jeep on the side of the road. A logging truck roared past me, a hundred tons of naked trees stacked on its bed like corpses in a mass grave, detonating the air around me and making the Jeep rock like a toy in a tub. In the silent wash of its departure I held up and examined my right index finger, its end stublike and flattened, the nail stunted to the shape and size of a shirt button-a familiar sight, nothing I had ever given a second’s thought to, or not for years and years. I’d always thought I’d sliced it somehow on, or with, a bicycle; I’d even constructed a mental story as to how this had happened, riding my first two-wheeler and then, for no reason at all, reaching down and sticking my finger into the grinding gears of the chain ring. But this made no sense. Maybe it was something my mother had told me, though I quickly tossed this thought aside. It was, I understood, a tale my mind had told itself.

I drove on into town. At the hardware store, still feeling a little dazed, I fished through the little file drawers of screws, filling a sack with the ones I needed-up here we pay by the pound, like fruit-slung a case of motor oil onto my shoulder, and took it all to the register in back, where the owner, Porter Dante, was sucking on an unlit cigar and paging through a hunting magazine.