Island Read online

  Outside the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the traffic was streaming along steadily. He held onto La Vida’s brick exterior and breathed deeply, watching his exhalations emerge in doughnut-shaped clouds in the cold air. I have done it, by God, he thought. He recalled how Anderson, who teaches Shakespeare, had taken three months to woo his present mistress. And Sanders, the Chair, had taken well over six with his. He felt a ball of laughter forming within himself, and when it pleaded to be released, he took to coughing so as not to alarm the passers by. But then he abandoned his sham cough and let the laughter tumble out, yes, naturally—for he had done it! He had the formula! Poetry and proclamation! The nectar and the net! It was masterful. It was direct. It required little time and no money or even energy—for had she not done all the work herself? Furthermore, it was foolproof. He detached himself from the brick wall and spit out the butt-end of his laughter. And still lightheaded from all the excitement, he walked back to campus, hungry, but smiling and jingling the change in his pocket.

  But when he returned to the reality of our stuffy office, the clown and the voyeur merged, though neither had intended it, and I was quite myself again. What, I wondered, had I gotten myself into? The woman was crazy about me, true, but was I, after all, crazy about her? Or was I merely crazy? Certainly I had taken it too far too fast. A poetic redhead had been coming up to my office of late, wanting, ostensibly, to learn the difference between dactyls and spondees. How would she respondee when she learned that I had proclaimed my love for another woman? And what business had I using that word in the first place? Did I really want to be in love? Had I forgotten that Love plucked her victim out of the pit and held him briefly suspended above it, merely to abandon him so suddenly that the impact of his collision not only deepened the pit but often created a landslide? How many times had I already emerged, brushing the dirt from my collar, wiping the grime from my eyes? Several, I was certain, though offhand I could not remember any of them.

  When it was nearly four, I left my office and walked calmly to La Vida’s. I had decided to invite Carole to have an early dinner with me—nothing more. I would not mention “love” again. And then, after the meal, I would vanish from her life as quickly and as cunningly as I had entered it. I would begin taking my Friday lunches elsewhere. There were plenty of good restaurants in town. As for Forneau, I would explain that on the occasion of my meeting with the neurotic student, I had found a human fingernail in my hamburger. Forneau would be aghast. It would all be over. The only thing that troubled me was that I would never get to see the butterfly close up, trilling before my eye.

  I found her sitting at the bar, engaged in a low-timbred conversation with its tender. As I approached, she ceased mid-sentence, and the bartender, as if on cue, backed away. So, I said to myself, she has made my declaration public knowledge. A madman came in today and declared his love for a waitress who had chanced to wait on him a few times. It was just as well. “Hello,” I said.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” she asked.

  “Can we go somewhere else?”

  “Okay,” she said. But her response was uncertain, and the young man, the bartender, turned from his business at the bar and fixed me with his icy stare.

  “Never mind,” I said, and I ordered a drink.

  She smiled. I smiled. The bartender’s smile flashed in the mirror before him as he prepared my drink.

  “Do you make your living writing poetry?” she asked.

  “No, I teach literature. At the college.”

  This seemed to satisfy the bartender, for after he had delivered my drink, he moved down the bar to where the television was and became immediately engrossed with the events occurring on its screen. His absence afforded me the opportunity to invite Carole to dinner. She agreed readily now that her guardian was gone, saying that she had only to first call her son and let him know she would be late. “He’s fifteen,” she declared as she slid off the stool, “but he still worries when I’m late.” I put a few bills on the bar, for she had apparently forgotten her offer to pay for my drink, and followed her to the phone booth. I, too, had a call to make, to my daughter.

  At the Chinese restaurant two blocks south of La Vida’s, I told her, in ten minutes, everything I thought she might want to know about me. I had spent my life studying and had never really lived it. By then the soup had come, and as we ate it, she told me everything I had already surmised about her. She had spent her life living and had never really studied it. Of course, she did not use those words. What she actually said was this: She had grown up nearby in the Catskills. She had wanted to become a portrait artist, the sort that make their living sitting on sidewalks in cities or on boardwalks by the sea, reproducing passersby in charcoal. But her father’s shoe factory went bankrupt, and he did not have the money to send her to art school. And since her talent was not such that she could have pursued her goal without it, she began waitressing, and made of her previous pursuit a mere hobby. At twenty she married the young astronomer who had been summoned up from Florida to organize the layout of the local university planetarium. But a year after their son’s birth, he left her to return to Florida and take up with the woman he had loved before meeting Carole. When their divorce was final, he married the other woman and bought a house in Miami. Carole seldom heard from him after that. For a while she lived with an astrologer, but that hadn’t worked out either Naturally, the astrologer had known from the start that it would not, and thus had never suggested marriage. Her succeeding affairs, which I assumed were at least somewhat less celestial in nature, were numerous, but she never again lived with any man, because of her son.

  None of her narrative was lamentation; she merely presented the facts, in good order and smiling all the while, not flirtatiously, but the way one does when one feels one is in good company. Alternately, she insisted I try various victuals from her plate—she had gotten the combination platter—and when I declined, she held her fork up for me and said, “Oh, come on,” so that I felt forced not only to try them but also to attest to their savoriness as well, an experience I quite enjoyed once I had gotten used to it. We drank several glasses of plum wine and she asked me again about my poetry. I lied and invented a project which I proposed to be working on currently, a long narrative poem about sea monsters, an idea I had stolen from my daughter who is obsessed with the subject of the sea. Carole said she had been thrilled to receive my poem, that it was the best poem she had ever read. Then, blushing, she bent her head and admitted that she had not read any poetry since high school. But at that time, she added eagerly, her favorite had been “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” and she thought mine superior by far to that. And when I said that I had read so many poems over the years that I no longer recalled how “Sam McGee” began, she appeared somewhat amazed, and then shyly at first, but with more and more expression as she went on, she recited the thing for me in its entirety.

  Despite her charms, I remained calm, dispassionate, even detached. And if she realized that she was with a man other than the one who had stood before her dogged-faced that same afternoon, she did not give an indication of it. So certain was I that I was in complete control, that the clown and the voyeur had merged not into a clownish voyeur, but into a third creature who had none of the qualities of his predecessors, that I ventured to ask for permission to inspect her tattoo.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised, for we had been talking on another subject entirely. But she lifted her long, thick ponytail obediently and turned her head.

  “Ah,” I said, pleased with myself.

  Later I walked her to her car, an old Chrysler with a dangling muffler parked behind La Vida’s. When she had gotten settled in it, and had rolled down her window to thank me for the dinner, I kissed her—a quick peck on the lips, the kind friends exchange when they are planning to see each other tomorrow. But as I watched her pull away, I laughed to myself, for there would be no tomorrow for us. Yes, it had been a pleasant evening, and yes, I was drawn to the way she cocked
her head and squinted her eyes when she spoke, but as I walked down Chestnut Street, still holding my fortune-cookie fortune—If you think you must find someone worthy of your love, you never will—between my fingers in my pocket, I was very much aware of my resistance, and I liked the way it felt. Love had intended to jerk me out of the abyss, but I had planted my feet so firmly on the ground that she had been unable. And it was for the best. For all her allure, Carole Glass was too sure she already “had” me for me to give even a thought to the notion of seeing her again. And who could blame her after the way I had behaved earlier in the day? Nevertheless, she was mistaken. I belonged to no woman, and it gave me some pleasure to imagine the despair with which she would be overcome when I did not show up for lunch on the following Friday.

  As the days passed, however, I found it was I who was overcome with despair, for I saw that I had cheated myself. Yet I had no will to reverse the situation. Just as I had been unable to impede myself in my pursuit of her, I was now unable to motivate myself to revoke my decision to abandon her. I simply did not have the energy. And besides, I had already told Forneau about the fingernail, and we had decided to try George’s, a small steak house closer to campus than La Vida’s, and therefore a sensible alternative in the increasingly wintery weather.

  So things were back to normal, if one discounts my emotional state. The redhead had come to understand meters and was now attempting to master couplets. She had promised to bring some up for my examination as soon as she was certain they were worthy of it. She was a very confident young woman; I did not believe I would have to wait too long. And, if one allows for the possibility of disease, which is always a factor, she was safe. Like the others before her, she would expect nothing from me once we had had our fling. Carole, I believed, was out of my life.

  On the Thursday before the first Friday on which I planned to be absent from La Vida’s, however, I found myself sitting in my office late into the afternoon. The temperature had dropped thirty degrees within the last three hours, and because Wednesday had been warm and the snow had melted, the streets, I knew, would be extremely hazardous. I was not ready to confront them. I had my feet up on my desk and I was staring at the pencil sharpener on the wall beyond them, at the eight different settings, seven of which I had never used. I seemed to recall a time when pencils came in various thicknesses, but I could not recall ever owning a pencil myself which was not what is now considered the standard thickness. This thought filled me with great sorrow, and it was that which I was examining when I heard, all at once, footsteps coming fast down the hall, as though someone was running, not hard, like a thief, but on one’s toes, childishly, almost a skip. I got up to have a peek, for when my door is ajar, I can stand behind it and see through the narrow space between the hinges without being easily observed. I was standing very close, with my eyelashes batting against the wood, when a beige blur went by, halted suddenly, and stepped back. “Is that you, Donald?” it asked, peering into my hiding place.

  I stepped out from behind the door and presented myself. Carole entered, walking past me.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” she said as she slid her shoulder bag down her arm and onto a pile of student essays on my desk. She unbuttoned and removed her camel-colored parka. “I hope you don’t mind me coming here. The secretary downstairs didn’t think you’d still be here. She said ’most everyone has already gone for the day, because of the weather. She said most likely classes will be canceled tomorrow.”

  She sat down to catch her breath. Her face was red from the cold. Her hair was not in the familiar ponytail, but hanging down, well past her shoulders, spreading out around them like a cape. She was wearing faded overalls over a heavy green sweater. For no particular reason, I looked at my watch.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” she said.

  I sat down and folded my hands on my desk, hoping the action would calm me.

  “I could start at the beginning, lay it out slowly, or I could give you the bottom line and then try to explain.”

  She was waiting for me to make the crucial decision. “The latter,” I mumbled.

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Here goes. I want to have a baby.”

  I felt my face swell. My mouth moved, but no words, as far as I know, emerged.

  “It’s not that I don’t know other men I could ask. In fact, my dentist offered. But he’s young. He’s never been married. He should start out with a woman his own age, don’t you think?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s not like I’m twenty anymore and I can wait until things are just so. I’ve been wanting this for a long time. And it occurred to me the other night that you’d be perfect. You’re a nice, kind man. You have a daughter who needs a mother. I have a son who needs a father. We could get married, agreeing to commit ourselves only to staying together until after I’m pregnant, and then renew our commitment again after that if we both want to. No hard feelings if things don’t work out. And if they don’t, you needn’t be responsible for child support.” She wrinkled up her nose and thought it over. “No,” she reiterated. “That wouldn’t be fair.” She slapped her hand on my desk. “I cook well, I don’t tell secrets, I don’t stick my nose in other people’s affairs, and I like sex. What about you?”

  I nodded.

  “Of course, as with anything else, there’s a down side. I don’t like to clean, I’m grumpy in the mornings, and it doesn’t take much to make me jealous, but that I’m working on because—”

  “My daughter has no feet,” I heard myself blurt out.

  “No what?”

  “She was born without feet. She has stumps. The doctors didn’t feel it was anything genetic.”

  “No feet,” she whispered.

  “I thought you should know.”

  She lowered her head and nodded slowly. Then, silently, with only her shoulders betraying her, she began to cry.

  Meredith

  Somewhere, east of here, the fish have discovered the nearly imperceptible variation in the sea-level pressure. And because they recall what it is like to hunt when the skies and the seas are at odds and the sun has backed out of their quarrel, they are biting nicely. And the old brown man, who is pulling in his lines and preparing to turn back now, is happy to see how nicely the fish have been biting, happy, that is, until his ever-active eye settles briefly on the white cloud column towering Babel-like on the eastern horizon. And the laughing gull, who is the old man’s friend, and who has come, as always, to inspect the old man’s catch, stops laughing suddenly and gathers in his strength to resist the rising air. And down deep, deep down, down so deep that the sea-surface tug and the ascent of the air and the cloud column shadows have not yet even been discerned, someone’s lips are laboring to say my name.

  Carole

  You are wondering where we are, aren’t you? A good question. Who says you’re less than perfect! You and I are on an island. You, doubly in a sense, because you are something of an island yourself, floating … The island is about twenty miles from the mainland. That’s two and a half hours by ferry. I guess it’s the long ferry ride that keeps the tourists away, because the islands north of here, the ones that are all bridged together, are supposedly very crowded. Of course, there are tourists here, too. You and I are tourists—or I am. But not as many as you would expect on an island this beautiful, and right off the middle of the East Coast. How did Donald and Elaine ever find this place? Did she love it as much as I do?

  I love it here, even though I have only been here two days. Let me describe it to you. Imagine a spoon. The island is shaped like a spoon. The long handle is a ten-mile long national seacoast with a two-lane blacktop running down the center of it. The bowl of the spoon is the village, the only place where building is permitted. The blacktop goes nowhere. It was built only recently to boost the tourist industry, so that the tourists can easily get to all points along the beach. Many of the buildings in the village were built at the turn of the century. They are lovely things, wi
th big, inviting front porches that make you want to sit and rest for a while. I plan to sketch as many as I can before we leave. At home I am going to work them up in charcoals. I have already sketched the lighthouse.

  Going north to south, through the handle to the bowl, is one way to describe the island. East to west is another. We are bordered by the Atlantic on the east, here fed by the Gulf Stream, which means that the waters are warmer and cleaner than the water just north of us where the Gulf Stream bears east. The beach along most of the island is wide and sandy. It is rich in beach fleas which make good bait for pompano. They’re running, a fisherman told me. He had four in his bucket. I have never fished and when I saw his four pompano, silver and gold in the sun, I wished I had a pole. Donald’s friends live in Key West. They’re sure to have a pole when they get here tomorrow … I wonder if they’ll mention … There are lots of birds here, mostly gulls, sanderlings, terns, and pelicans. Some sections of the beach are closed off to protect tern-nesting areas. There are also many blue crabs. I went to the beach this morning at low tide and saw them all about me in the surf. I left the beach, rode my bike to the tackle shop, and returned with a net and a bucket. I gathered up a couple dozen crabs in no time. It was quite a feat to get the full bucket back home on my handlebars along with the net too. I steamed the crabs for lunch.

  There are patches of sweet little clams called coquinas all over the beach. They burrow into the sand with the receding waves and pop back out again with the new ones. They are beautifully colored—orange, blue, purple, pink, yellow. Some are striped. No two are exactly alike. I first noticed them while I was sitting in the surf, resting from my crabbing. They appeared all around me so suddenly, like jewels coming up out of the sand. They took my breath away. A little boy told me their name. He and his mother were the only other people around that I could see. When I looked up and down the beach I saw only the hazy, blue vanishing point where the sky and sea and sand converge. A pattern is developing already. I come here early each morning while Donald and Meredith sleep. I return with whatever I have gathered for lunch. We eat. Then we all go to the beach together. Let me cook dinner, he said. It’s only fair after you spent the entire morning gathering … As if it had been work. Such a funny man … so sweet sometimes, … so aloof others. Us in two different worlds. Him working all day in one that I don’t really understand, and me working all day in one that he … Then meeting in the evenings for dinner, letting the kids dominate the conversation because we’re afraid our worlds might clash? And then, at night, in bed, after … a new man, tracing my lips with his finger in the dark. Are you smiling? Yes, I’m smiling. Then rolling over on his back beside me, and recalling this or that, things I didn’t know before, building himself for me in the dark. You know, when I was a kid … Or, You know, the other day I got to thinking … a single beam of light in a dark room. But always going out of his way to avoid saying her name. Saying ‘I’ in places where I know it should be ‘we.’