I have these pictures--two in fog, two in sun. Fog: a man in a deck
chair is playing a trumpet, his feet on the stern railing of a ferry.
Fog: a telephone pole seen through a windshield. Sun: a young woman on
a bicycle is climbing a cobblestoned street, blonde hair bouncing,
white blouse, solid breasts. Sun: a snake falling back to the bank of a
stream, a dragonfly in its mouth, dazzling, iridescent.
Put in a certain order, riffled through, they make a silent
movie--until sounds grow more insistent. A Jeep honks twice,
accelerating past the biker, driver and passenger turning to look. She
ignores them. She doesn't notice me watching from a doorway. I suppose
my heart leaping toward her made no sound. She was locked into my blood
and bone before I knew any words for her, her name even. The shock of
recognition left me wide-eyed and strangely blind. Nothing would be
seen for itself, only in terms of her--whether she was there or not,
how likely it was that she might appear, how _not her_ everything else.
Nantucket is ten miles long with one central town. I worked in a
restaurant on the main street. The following day I saw her stop at a
bakery/cafe which became my hangout. When she came in again, my throat
went dry and my knees shook. I don't remember what I first said to her,
but she responded to some sort of signal. She was willing for me to pay
more attention. We began to meet in the cafe.
It is hard not to put what I know now into what I knew then. I
presented what plumage I had--no money, but a small currency of
integrity. I had survived childhood by learning to please. Eventually,
I could no longer do that and I started over, was reborn at nineteen.
While I was only five, by that count, when Jamie (her name) pedaled up
the main street of Nantucket, I was uncompromised; I offered myself for
whatever waited inside that white blouse.
One wet morning, she agreed to a picnic on my next day off. I stood in
the bakery entrance and listened to water running from the roofs and
downspouts, down the sidewalk and street. It didn't matter that I would
be soaked by the time I got to my room. Nothing mattered except that we
had a date. Because we had a date--were together already, really--the
universe made sense. The rain fell equally on us all, rich kids with
Jeeps, waitresses, cooks, masons and roofers, the young and the old.
It's raining, I said to myself. The words meant more than they did
before. It's raining, I said again. All over the town.
Harry, the chef, made a mixture of spices for me. He handed me a
plastic bag and told me to shake a swordfish steak in the bag and not
to broil the fish too long. She'll never forget you, he said without
smiling. Harry cooked breakfast at the Gray Gull and lunch and dinner
at The Upper Deck, a sixteen hour day. Our relationship was respectful.
Eight hours a day was enough for me, but while I was working I did my
best. When Harry, under stress, snapped at me, I learned to hear him
say, "Take another shrimp, Joe." Cocktail shrimp, waiting in the
cooler, out of sight from the grill. I acquired a reputation for good
humor.
I borrowed my buddy Morgan's truck on a clear evening in late July and
picked up Jamie. Madaket was her favorite beach, less known, wilder. We
drove out and made a driftwood fire, opened a bottle of wine, and
talked as the sun went down and the moon rose. We were easy with each
other by then, although we had never touched, let alone hugged or
kissed. The swordfish was a success. The moon sent its ivory path over
the wave tops, inviting and promising. Jamie told me how she liked to
swim that path and how, several times, she nearly hadn't made it back.
We were young.
I was giddy with accomplishment as we finished a second bottle of wine.
She was wearing a tight T-shirt and shorts, apparently unaware of the
effect her body had on me as she told me about her parents and her
friends on the island. She had summered on Nantucket for years. She was
in a suspended state--too heavy for ballet, too young for graduate
school. She did not want to marry an engineer and live in a suburb of
Philadelphia. She was clear about that. I offered a possible
alternative: an honest life built one stone at a time.
We put out the fire and walked along the beach. Fog blew in, softening
the lines of the horizon and dune, thickening as we reached the truck.
We drove back happily involved with each other, unconcerned with
anything else. A telephone pole appeared directly in front of me. I
whipped the steering wheel to the left and almost missed the pole. The
right headlight smashed and I was thrown against the wheel, striking it
with my shoulder and bending it nearly double. Jamie went through the
windshield. After the crash, there were only hot sounds of metal
uncrinkling and moans from Jamie. Don't let me die, she was saying over
and over.
I pulled her back on to the seat and reassured her. Her hair was bloody
and glinted with broken glass. She was half-conscious. I took her in my
arms and walked away from the wreck. We were at a tiny unmarked traffic
circle with a house nearby. Lights were on in the house. I carried
Jamie to the front door which was opened by a woman who had heard the
crash. I waited while she spread newspapers on the floor, and then I
brought Jamie inside. An ambulance came within a few minutes and took
her to the hospital. I was taken to the police station to answer
questions.
She was all right, thank God, after a few days in the hospital. Some
dental work, a small scar. I had bruises. We got off easy. Morgan's
truck was totaled. The cop was tired and made a typo on the accident
form. I paid a fine and didn't even get a mark on my out of state
license. The little traffic circle was notorious, I learned. I went
back and nailed reflectors all over the place.
Every afternoon I visited Jamie in the hospital, and we became close.
Two days after she was released and life was getting back to normal, I
took a walk during the break between lunch and dinner. Things had been
happening fast; I needed to slow down. I followed a stream through a
marshy area to a dry bank shaded by a tree where I stretched out and
listened to the sounds of birds and insects. It was hot and the sounds
began to still. A dragonfly darted back and forth above the stream.
Movement caught my eye. A snake, three feet long, was winding along the
opposite bank, unhurried, almost casual. A dark snake, unremarkable. It
struck, too fast to see. It was falling back to the ground before I
could focus, the dragonfly in its mouth. The snake caught the dragonfly
in midair without coiling. Impossible. The most athletic move I've ever
seen. It was as though the universe had stopped, allowed the snake to
strike, and then started again for everyone else.
We made plans, Jamie and I, to be together in the fall in the
mountains. I turned down a flattering offer to follow Harry to a
hunting lodge in New Hampshire and from there to Florida for the winter
season. I had a different future. Jamie was coming.
I caught the ferry to Woods Hole on a foggy morning. It was chilly; the
passengers stayed inside. I went out on deck and heard jazz coming from
the stern. A man with his feet up on a chair was playing a trumpet
pointed toward the ocean and an American flag fluttering in the fog. He
played freely, a concert for the two of us, a farewell to the island
and summer.
Jamie arrived for a day several weeks later. When I put her on the bus
to Philadelphia to go home for her stuff, life was bright. I met her
bus that weekend, but she wasn't on it. A terrible emptiness spread
through me.
We wrote to each other for a year. She did, eventually, step down from
that bus. Two weeks later I put her back on. It had all been a kind of
sexual mirage, a passion that had nothing to do with who she was. Watch
out when your throat goes dry and you begin to shake!
We each have a type--someone visually our lost other self, male or
female. I've seen a few since, always blonde, earthy and radiant at the
same time, a particular combination. But they don't affect me the same
way. I shake my head and say, there's another one.
"What happened to Jamie?" W.cat and I were sitting on a bench that
looked out toward the White Mountains.
"She married into a wealthy Boston family. She escaped Philadelphia.
Thirty-five years ago. What did we know?"
"Not much," W.cat said. "Shall we go?"
As we were walking through the West End, she pointed to a poppy that
had fallen over on the grass at the edge of a flower bed. We crossed
the lawn, and she held up the blossom while I looked around for
gardeners and German shepherds; W.cat is sometimes unable to resist
flowers. The poppy had four unusually large petals, deep lavender, each
bearing a dark, nearly black, irregular circle. It might have been a
hall of flags or a gallery of abstract sunsets, regal and empty,
waiting for its visitors. I suppose it is the fleetingness of life that
makes us story tellers and flower thieves.