Storm Tide (21 page)

“Live here?” Judith squeaked. “Couldn’t we just find him a rental?”

“In June we’re supposed to find him a summer rental? Be real. He could live in the cabin Ben built. He wouldn’t be underfoot.”

She could not deny Gordon his wishes; she had never been good at that. So Brian moved into one of the cabins in the compound, and he was indeed underfoot. He was a wistful good-natured man, a little sorry for himself, talkative but not much of a physical presence. He did not dominate space the way Gordon always had, which was a plus under the circumstances. He took over making lunch and some of the shopping.

“You have the domestic virtues,” Judith said as he was helping her clean up from supper. “I appreciate that.”

“My wife didn’t.”

They had tried very hard to have a baby, but the wife miscarried time after time. Finally they had decided to adopt. They were still waiting for a baby when the marriage came apart.

In some ways having Brian around did make life easier. When she could not make it back to the island because of the tides she did not have to put in a desperate call to Jana Baer. Brian was always there, and he was good company for Gordon. The book was marvelous therapy, aside from whether it would ever be finished. Brian seemed in no hurry to be done. He was happy to live with them. Why not? Saltash sure beat Manhattan in summer. The most awkward times for Judith were the evenings, since Gordon often grew weary and went to bed early, leaving the two of them tête-à-tête for hours. Sometimes they both read. Brian was not musical, and if she put a CD on, he would talk over the Mozart until she gave up trying to listen. The trouble was, he was beginning to stare at her when he thought she would not notice, to dote visibly, to sigh and gaze and otherwise exude a gentle but disconcerting desire.

“Gordon, I think maybe having Brian living here is not a great idea.”

“I thought you were getting along splendidly.”

“Brian’s easy to get along with, unlike myself. But Gordon … I think he has a crush on me.”

“Of course he does. How could he live with you and not fall in love? He’s a sweet young man. He’s bright and vulnerable—”

“And as crazy as you are.” She stomped out of the room, overwhelmed with the suspicion that Gordon was intentionally throwing them together.

Gordon followed her into her room and shut the door. “You can’t live out here alone. It’s too difficult.”

“So I’ll get a roommate.”

“Judith, you’re still young enough to have a family.”

“Gordon, you’re way off. And you’re a damned control freak, you know that? What are you trying to do, plan out my life for the next twenty years?” She stalked from her own bedroom, slamming the door.

When Natasha came home from vet school, eventually Judith told her. Anger roughened her voice. She could not hold it in. “He’s pushing me to have an affair with that Brian, can you believe it? As if I’ve ever, ever shown interest in another man! It’s just sick!”

Natasha had a conversation with Gordon. After that, she saw the situation differently. “He wants to know you’ll be all right. And he loves this place. I think he wants to control who lives here, who shares it after he … in the future.”

“It makes me feel dirty.”

“Why?” Natasha propped her sharp chin on her hands. Her hair was her mother’s, pale apricot, but her eyes were Gordon’s, fiercely blue. “Why does it scare you so much? It would give him a sense of survival, to know who you were with, to know that the family goes on. He wants to have input into the choice of your next husband, Judith. Can’t you understand?”

“I can’t accept it.”

“Even to make him happy? Even to give him some peace about how things may go? Maybe he’s right. We all want to know that we can still come here, that we can feel at home here.”

“I’m not shopping for a husband. I have one. Can’t you just trust me to make the family feel at home?”

“He thinks you don’t know much about men. He doesn’t want you to get hurt after he’s gone.”

Judith paced, clutching her arms. “This is unbearable!”

“He wants to have an afterlife in your life. Of course it’s weird, Judith, but this family is pretty weird. You play housemother to children older than you are. Gordon tries to stay friendly with all his ex-wives, and mostly he manages, but he doesn’t think much of the husbands they acquired after him. You were more like an older sister than a mother to me, but you were the main woman in my life for years and years, and you still are. Listen to me. Don’t be conventional about this. You didn’t marry conventionally. You didn’t live your married life conventionally. Listen to Gordon. If you don’t agree with him on the man he chooses, say so. Say you’ll pick out your own.”

She told Hannah what was going on. Hannah was silent for a while. Then she said, “You know, a minor affair isn’t the end of the world. It needn’t damage a central and serious relationship.”

Hannah had been with the senator for nine years. Judith asked, “Have you been involved with anyone else?”

Another silence. “I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say involved.”

She wanted to ask Hannah how could she, why would she, but she did not, for she did not want to alienate her closest woman friend (unless she counted Natasha, whom she did think of as her daughter). She did not want to make Hannah defensive, so slowly and carefully she circled toward the questions she wanted to ask. But even as she did so, she realized it was futile. Hannah was not her; the senator was not Gordon.

Finally she spoke to Barbara. “Why a man?” Barbara made a gesture of dismissal. “It’s so like a man to discount half the world. I like Gordon, but it never seems to occur to him you have other choices.”

“Barbara, I respect your choice, but it isn’t for me.”

“You’ve never been involved with a woman …. But he’s pushing the envelope so hard he could rupture it. Why do you have to torture yourself now? Why can’t he let you enjoy the end of his life with him, as much as you can?”

“I wish he would. I feel coerced into a complication I don’t need.”

“But you don’t have to do it, Judith,” Barbara said calmly, putting her hands flat on her desk. “He can inflict Brian on you in the house, but he can’t make you fall in love with him or even in lust. After a while he’ll let it go. It will be too boring to continue.”

“Barbara, you’re always right, do you know that? Or at least fifty percent of the time.”

“Eighty-five.”

“Fifty-five.”

They grinned at each other. Judith felt as if she had been an idiot. She had always taken Gordon’s desires, even his whims, seriously, because she wanted so much to please him. If he saw a shirt he liked as they walked past a clothing store, she would return the next day and buy it. If he dropped a hint he was curious about a show, she would call at once for tickets. Perhaps she had had a lot to prove, being the fourth wife, being the child bride, being the youngest, being … the last.

Brian was acceptable as a member of the household. She could think of him as a stepson, like Larry. She could think of him as a family pet.
She could handle him: just never let him declare his feelings. She started watching television in the evenings. Renting videos. Then she began to fix up her office at home so she could escape to it. She mostly hadn’t bothered working on the island since Austin retired and she moved her practice to the harbor, but it was time to refurbish her home office. It was a distance from the main house, and she would gradually begin spending evenings there. She could bring the walkie-talkie out with her, and if Gordon needed something, he had only to summon her. She would order a new computer Monday with a fast modem. All right, Gordon wanted Brian, he could have Brian as much as he wanted. But she could erect a few barriers to limit Brian’s access to her and keep his yearning safely distanced. She would waste no more of their precious time together arguing with Gordon, but neither would she let herself be pushed.

D
AVID

    Candidates’ night was a blood sport in Saltash. Every April, heron stabbed alewives, coyote fattened on nestling rabbits, and the people of this town gathered in the elementary school gymnasium with a similar hunger for flesh. Judith had invited me over to help write a speech, but I felt that as soon as she saw me, she’d know; as if that one night with Crystal could cling to my skin like the odor of sex. When Judith telephoned, I said I didn’t need help. “You think I don’t know why?” she said.

I felt my body square, as if to defend myself. I’d spent one night with a lonely woman while Judith herself was home with her husband. I was about to say something about our little triangle when she added: “You’re determined to lose this election, aren’t you?”

The election. My shoulders relaxed. “I’m just doing it my own way.”

“Which amounts to the same thing. What are you scared of, David?”

Five meetings a week for three years. Small town newspapers poking into my personal life. Town crazies calling me at all hours. And that was if I was elected. At candidates’ night last year, a guy running for selectman had to shout to be heard above the insults of the same block of guys now sitting with their legs outstretched in the first row. Although I was pretty sure none of them were against my stand on the issues (since even I couldn’t say what my stand might be), old grudges were seldom buried in this town but polished to a shine like brass. Harlan Silvester. Jimmy Phillips. Their fathers had worked for mine. Tony Brockmann had stripped my sister to her underpants when she was ten years old and tied her to a tree. I beat him until his ears filled with blood and earned the enmity of the largest family in town. A quarter of a century had passed; he had married twice, lost his oldest son, buried his parents. Now Tony Brockmann, in unlaced work boots, legs spread wide, himself a grandfather at thirty-eight, glared at me as if to say my time was finally at hand.

The man we called Ahab smelled of beer and climbed the steps dragging his bad leg. With a permanent squint, his nose and cheeks were a crosshatch of tiny broken blood vessels and his face always seemed to be on fire. He had one issue, fishing, and spent almost all his time on the town pier. I only realized, when he raised his chin to return my
hello, that I had observed him for years, hands thrust in pockets, collar upturned against the wind, but I had never heard him utter a word.

In contrast, Birdman was usually the first and last to speak at any event and had run for this office three times before. He was built from the waist up like a stack of tires, one smaller than the other as they progressed from his belly to his head—balding and fringed with wild white hair. He was well known to birders statewide for leading a campaign to save piping plovers who nested on the beach. Instead of the binoculars he always wore, he carried a large rolled-up map, which he tapped nervously against his knee.

I figured I’d make it through my five-minute speech with platitudes about hard work and growing up in this town, but I was worried about the questions and answers. I was going to lose this election. I was eager for the campaign to end, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself. I had made a mistake. I had a crush on a woman. She asked me to run. Had she asked me for all the savings I had in the bank, or even to help her rob one, I’d probably have agreed. But I didn’t have the mind for budgets or the wit to think on my feet. I had for one sterling period of my life mastered the ability to throw a baseball, but now I moved dirt for a living.

Sitting straight in the chair next to mine, her thin ceramic lips counting her supporters as they filled the room, was the front-runner, Blossom Endicott, whom Judith dubbed Blossom End-Rot. A teacher for many years in the Saltash Elementary School, Mrs. Endicott had so internalized her profession that she viewed the world and addressed everyone in it as if it were the fourth grade. Her hair was the cut and color of a stainless steel mixing bowl. She wore a corduroy jumper and clean white Keds. She walked to the stage with a clutch of official-looking papers, which she used like a cop used a club, to divide crowds and hint at her unleashed power.

I was attempting to look neither at Judith, pacing the aisles in her pin-striped coat dress, nor at Gordon among the
alter kockers
, nor at my mother, who was sending me little waves from the third row. I tried to ignore the stooges in the front row and to look at nothing but the double doors at the back of the gym, propped open for air, the whole time praying not to see Crystal in her fringed jacket and cowboy boots. Just as the house lights dimmed, a big late model Ford pulled up in front of the gym. I watched its headlamps die, saw its ceiling lamp flash on as the door opened. The young duty patrolman, upon spotting the vehicle in the fire lane, immediately ran outside—not to chase the illegally parked car but to escort its driver inside.