Strange Fits of Passion (16 page)

"Something like that," I said carefully.

"You're on your own now," he said, more to himself than to me.

"For now," I said vaguely.

There was an awkward silence. I felt his presence beside me. He was standing close to me, calmer, not moving now.

The back of his finger brushed the bruise at the side of my cheekbone. I flinched, more because of the shock of his touching me than from any pain.

"Oh, did that hurt?" he asked, as if surprised. "Sorry. Didn't mean to hurt you. It must still be pretty raw."

I stood up. The chair was between us. I put my hand on the chairback. "I'm tired," I said. "I didn't sleep well. I think you'd better go now. I'd like to take a nap."

He put his hand on my hand. His fingers were dry and cold. He looked at the place where our hands were touching.

He said, "You wouldn't like to—you know—like fool around, or anything, while the baby is asleep?"

I slowly pulled my hand from his, crossed my arms over my chest. My chest was tight, and for a moment it was hard to breathe.

"No," I said. And then again: "No." I shook my head.

He quickly withdrew his hand, put it into his pocket. "Yeah, well, I didn't think so."

He nodded, as if to himself. He took a last swallow from the can. He sighed.

"Sometimes," he said, "a women gets left by a guy, she needs a little lovin', you know what I'm talkin' about. Nothin' heavy, just a little comfort. I thought maybe..." He shrugged.

I didn't say anything.

"So no hard feelings, right?"

I looked down at my feet.

"Come on, Red, let me off the hook."

I looked up at him. On his face was an expression of genuine, if mild, anxiety. Perhaps he had been opportunistic, but there had been no malice behind his request, I thought. He had tried and failed, and that was all right with him; he would think that it had been worth trying.

"No hard feelings," I said.

He made a show of relief, letting his breath out, wiping imaginary sweat off his brow. "Well, good," he said. "That's settled." He began again to move his shoulders from side to side.

I was thinking how long it had been since I had been able to say no to a man and not be fearful of the consequences, since I had been able to say no to a man at all. I was almost glad that Willis had asked, despite the minute of awkwardness between us.

"There's Jack," Willis said, turning away and walking to the window.

I followed him and looked out at the water with him. The green-and-white lobster boat had entered the channel and was closing in on the mooring. We stood together and watched as the man in the yellow slicker snagged the mooring, hitched the boat to the buoy, and jumped back into the cockpit to turn off the motor—a fluid motion, a graceful maneuver.

"He's crazy," said Willis. "You wouldn't catch me out there on a day this cold, but Jack, he don't give a shit, excuse me, about the weather."

We watched as the tall man with the sand-colored hair unloaded buckets of lobster into the dinghy that he had pulled alongside the larger boat. He returned to the cabin then, appeared to be fastening a door.

"Course if I had his home life, I might be out on the water year round too. His wife has got the blues real bad. She don't clean the house or nothin'. Jack does it all. Him and his daughter. I used to feel sorry for his kids. They're good kids, but it's a sad house. My wife, Jeannine, she tried to go over there once, sort some things out; Rebecca was in her room, wouldn't come out. Jeannine swore she heard her cryin' through the door. They got a Cape down the road here. Cries herself to sleep most nights, so I'm told. Jack, he don't say much about it, but you can see it on his face. I'll hand it to him, though, he's stuck by her all these years. She waited for him when he went away, and he came back and married her."

He peered closer out the window, as if something interested him there.

We watched the man in the slicker scull toward shore. The water was a deep, crisp winter blue.

"Rebecca didn't start gettin' sad till after she got married and her babies come. They say that happens to women sometimes. But it's the sea and the weather what does it. The gray and the long winters—that really does 'em in.".

The man in the slicker beached his boat, made it fast on the iron ring.

"He's stuck with her for the kids, of course. Although sometimes I think he mighta done better by the kids if he'd got out of there, married someone else. Well, you can't ever know why a person does what they do, can you. Maybe he still loves her; you never know."

Willis turned away from the window.

"I gotta go," he said. "The guys at the fish house, they're goin' to want to know what happened to me. They'll start makin' jokes. And if I drink any more of these, I'll fall asleep; then they'll really be ribbin' me."

He put the two cans in the trash, walked to the door.

"So," he said, "you're all set, right?"

I nodded. I thanked him again for the fish.

He waved his hand as if to toss my gratitude away. He looked at me.

"I gotta go fix some pots," he said.

As it grew toward evening, Caroline began to fret, then to cry. Nursing didn't help; she refused me, twisting angrily away and scrunching up her features in a grimace of discomfort. I thought: If she won't feed, how can I help her? She wasn't content to lie or rock in my arms, and seemed to be trying to jam her fist into her mouth. This convinced me again that she must be hungry, but each attempt to feed her ended in tears and frustration. I put her then up against my shoulder and began to walk with her. She was quiet as long as I was actually walking. If I sat and tried to duplicate the sensation of bouncing up and down from the walking, she quickly saw the ruse and cried almost at once. What was it about the walking? I wondered. It was mysterious and exhausting. I walked in a circle through the kitchen, the living room, the downstairs bedroom, around and around until I thought I would drop, or go mad from the tedium. I was sure she would fall asleep against my shoulder, but as long as I walked, she remained contented and alert. If I stopped, even for a minute, she would begin to cry again. I thought: If whatever hurts her doesn't hurt when I am walking, how can it hurt when I sit down?

I walked for at least an hour, maybe two. Toward evening I remembered the baby sling, endured her wrath as I dressed her and myself for the cold, and struggled to get her into the new contraption. A change of scene might save my sanity, I thought, and the fresh air might let her drift off to sleep.

The air stung: I shielded her face in my coat. The sling allowed her weight to rest on my hip rather than in my arms, and it was such a relief to be out of the cottage, I didn't mind the cold. The sharp air was bracing, but not as bitter as it had been the day before—or perhaps the damp by the sea had taken the edge off; I don't know. I walked down the slope to the pebbled side of the spit, made my way along its expanse. My boots, even with their modest leather heel, were inappropriate for the rough surface, and the walking was slow going. I thought immediately that I would have to be careful, that I could not afford to stumble or to twist an ankle. Apart from the damage to Caroline from a possible fall, there was the total isolation of the point. Would anyone hear my shouts if I was in trouble? I looked around and thought not. The nearest cottage, a blue Cape up on the main road, was too far away to call to: I would not be heard against the white noise of the surf and wind, particularly if all the windows and doors in that cottage were tightly shut, as they must be on a cold night.

Dusk was gathering quickly, seeming to rise in a mist from the gray gulf itself. Already I could no longer make out the horizon—only the blip of the lighthouse at rhythmic intervals. There was seaweed on the stones, some old weathered boards—driftwood—empty crab shells, bits of blue-violet mussel shells. As I passed the fish house, I could smell the lingering scent of a dampened fire. I was intrigued by the fish house. I walked over to it and peered into the windows, but I could not see much in the gloaming: two or three aluminum-and-plastic lawn chairs; a stack of slatted traps in a corner; a low wooden bench along one wall; a small, untidy fireplace. I thought about the men who gathered there during the day, imagined their voices as they sat in the stuffy warmth, mending their gear. I wondered what they said to each other, what they chatted about.

I crossed the ridge of grasses to the beach side of the spit, enjoying the comfort of the hard sand underfoot in place of the uneven stones. I thought briefly of the honeypots that Willis had warned against, but I wasn't sure I believed in them; anyway, I reasoned, if I kept close to the high-water mark, I wouldn't step in one.

When I reached the point, the green-and-white lobster boat had lost its color. There was a faint outline of its shape, a sense of rocking from side to side. Only a set of yellow foul-weather gear, hanging on a hook by the pilothouse, caught what was left of the light. The gear looked like a man moving with the boat—so much so, in fact, that I felt as if someone were watching me.

I was thinking about the man Willis had referred to as Jack, and about his wife, Rebecca, who had become melancholy, when I idly stuck my little finger into Caroline's mouth for her to suck on. I sometimes did this if I thought of it, because it seemed to soothe her, but when I put my finger in this time, she immediately bit down on it, and I felt the tiny sharp surprise. That was it, then, the source of her discomfort and irritation: My daughter had another tooth, one on top this time. I could feel only a sliver of a rippled ridge in her gum; I couldn't see the tooth in the darkness. She looked up at me and smiled. She seemed almost as relieved as I was that I had solved her mystery. I remembered then that I didn't have any baby aspirin with me. I wondered what the women of St. Hilaire used when their babies teethed—a sluice of brandy along the gums, a frozen crust of bread to gnaw on, or the prosaic baby aspirin I'd have used if only I had thought to buy it at the store?

I heard a motor on the lane. I turned to look back in the direction from which I'd come, but darkness had fallen so swiftly I could no longer see the cottage, only a flicker of headlights as a vehicle bounced along the dirt road toward the beach. I thought it might be Willis, wanting company—perhaps thinking to try his luck again now that it was evening and I'd been softened by an entire day alone with the baby. But when I saw the headlights make their way steadily along the beach, I was inexplicably frightened, as though I were trespassing and would be caught or scolded. I was standing just south of the point; the truck was moving along the northern edge of the spit. I was sure the headlights would soon pick me out, but the truck stopped just short of where it would have found me. The driver left the headlights on and got out of the cab. He still had on his yellow slicker; you could see that right away. I stood motionless behind a small hillock of sand. I put my finger in Caroline's mouth to keep her from crying, but it wasn't necessary; she had finally fallen asleep.

I watched as the man called Jack walked along the sand to his dinghy. He bent into the boat to retrieve a metal box, like a toolbox, but as he straightened up, he seemed to hesitate. He laid the box on the edge of the dinghy and bowed his head, as if thinking for a moment. He replaced the box in the boat, walked back to the truck, and turned off the headlights. I was puzzled. I could barely see him now—just a hint of a yellow slicker moving across the sand to the dinghy again. He got inside and sat down. He didn't move.

I could have turned and walked back to the cottage along the gravel beach. He'd have heard me, but I'd have been walking away from him by then, and there'd have been no need to call out to me or to speak. I could have done that. But I didn't.

I stood at the edge of the point, cradling the baby, my finger in her mouth. I was watching the man in the dinghy—only a suggestion of yellow against the black of the sand and the water. The natural light, what little remained, was playing tricks with my eyes. Already it was impossible to tell where the water met the shore, and I was no longer sure I knew where the truck was parked. The man lit a cigarette. I could see the sudden flare of the match, the red ember.

I stood and he sat for perhaps five minutes. I don't know what I was thinking then; I was just watching, trying not to think. I did not consciously decide, yes, I will speak to him; I did not have a reason to speak to him beyond a vague curiosity or wonder about what his life was like, with his wife and his children and his boat. Possibly I felt that I wanted to dispel the image of trespassing, that I didn't like the image of myself sneaking away. I crossed over the hillock to the northern side of the point, walking toward him, saying as casually as I could—as if it were noontime, summer, and I were having a stroll on the beach with my daughter—
hello,
as I walked.

I startled him, I could see that. He'd been far away, or he was surprised to see another human being. Probably, I thought, he was used to having the point to himself, had forgotten there was a car at the cottage.

He stood up, stepped out of the dinghy, faced me. I said hello again, and I think he must have answered me or nodded.

I walked close to him. Now that I had intruded upon him, I had to let him see me—though I must have appeared to him as only a gray shape in my coat and scarf.

My first impression of him is distinct and clear. I am not overlaying this with later images, seen in the sunlight, or by firelight or at daybreak. His face was angular, and I was aware that he was taller than I'd thought. There were deep lines running from his nose to the bottom of his chin at either side of his mouth, but I didn't think these were from age, even though he looked as if he was in his forties. They were from weathering; his face was weathered. You could see this even in the darkness: the roughened skin, the wrinkling at the eyes. His hair was average length and curly. You could not see the true color in the darkness, but I knew already it was the shade of dry sand. He wore an off-white Irish knit sweater underneath his slicker; there was a hole unknitting itself where his collarbone would be. He threw his cigarette onto the sand.