“
The lighthouse sat up on a crumbly cliff, a hundred feet above the ocean, on a point that extended way out into the Gulf of Farrows.”
“
Farralones,” I correct him.
“
That’s it. The Gulf of the Farallones. It had a red metal roof and white walls. With glass on three side of the keeper’s house and on all sixteen sides of the lighthouse. The tower seemed so much taller than it was because I first saw it from the shore, along the path you had marked on the map. It seemed so tall as I climbed the concrete steps from the water up the cliff to the tower. But the tower itself was really only thirty or forty feet tall. I think the people waiting for our private tour to end must have heard us. I think the four men who work there knew what we were doing.”
I look at him. So he remembers each of the ‘private tours’ I have arranged. I thought he might, and I thought those might be good memories for him. Apparently I was right.
“
I remember when we came back on the last day, when we walked the three hundred steps from where the workers live down to the tower. We saw how it was bolted directly into the rock. I thought it had a solid foundation and it could withstand anything, but then just twenty feet away the cliff was fracturing and slowly surrendering to the ocean. I did some research and they figure it will take five thousand years for those twenty feet to erode. Five thousand years or one good earthquake.”
“
I thought about us, and our foundation. I remember the tour guide explaining how Point Reyes was the windiest and foggiest point on the Pacific Coast, where the wind can blow fifty miles per hour for days and then how the fog can blanket everything for ten or twelve days without break. I thought how completely different the Pacific was there than in Costa Rica. How the cold water and the fog were so opposite to the warm water farther south. In a way I wished we could have flown straight from Point Reyes to Costa Rica and gone swimming or surfing and closed our eyes and imagined the wildness of the cliff above the Pacific, just visible in the fog. But I don’t indulge in fantasies that can’t come true,” he said.
I wait to see whether there is more to his last sentence. Because there was something there, a tone I’ve heard once or twice, but only once or twice, but that I have just heard again from my fifty nine year old lover. He will be sixty later this year. We have been together ten years.
“
The next year was in Canada, near a fresh water lake so large it seems like an ocean. A cold ocean surrounded by rock. With petroglyphs on the rock. A lighthouse and petroglyphs. The lake is so big that it has a thirteen hour tide that goes in and out an inch or two. And it has a seiche that can be as much as two feet!”
“
Every year you’ve surprised me with how different each lighthouse is and how different each place is. And every year I am comforted by how we are the same, no matter what lighthouse we visit.”
There it is again. That tone. Is he telling me that he wants to visit me near my lighthouse in Ohio? Is he telling me that he thinks we will be the same even there?
I interrupt his story. “It was near Thunder Bay. I went canoeing near there for two weeks with my sister a couple years ago to look at the petroglyphs,” I say.
Joe looks over at me, wonders why I haven’t shared that fact before. I see him wondering what else I haven’t shared. How much more of my life he has missed, and how much of his I have missed. While there are ten years of ten or twelve weeks of memories, there are ten years of forty or more weeks of absences.
“
It had a red metal roof and white walls like Point Reyes. But it couldn’t have been more different. It was on a break wall near the harbor. A dozen freighters went by in the days we were there. It couldn’t have been more different than the other two. Fresh water instead of salt. No breeze. And the coldest water.”
“
Next year, at Cape Florida, was the warmest water. It was like bath water. With those crazy complicated currents where the ocean and the bay wrestled with every tide to see who would control that little stretch of water. We walked for hours up and down Bill Baggs State Park. Just a few miles from Miami and just a mile from the condos and hotels in Key Biscayne we walked for hours and only saw a few people. That lighthouse has been out there since 1825 and I’ll bet we were the only people who climbed it the entire time we were there. Which was a good thing, because apparently not even you could arrange a ‘private tour’…”
“
We saw the cyclists and the kayakers and watched the people fishing off the break wall down below. But we were as alone up there as we are on your back porch in January. Even though they give group tours, we didn’t see anyone else climb up the all-white lighthouse to its black top with the three hundred and sixty degree view. I couldn’t believe we didn’t get caught when we stayed past closing. And then I realized you must have bribed someone to look the other way.”
“
Guilty,” I reply.
“
I thought so,” he answers.
“
We went from Florida that year to Montauk the next. The tall lighthouse on the cliff. Red below, white on top, with the exterior walkway that somehow we were allowed onto, even when none of the other tourists were allowed. We were there just before the hurricane. If I had any doubt about the phrase ‘the calm before the storm’ it was erased on that trip. The ocean was mirror flat, with not a breath of wind. And then twenty four hours later it had twenty foot swells and breakers that crashed all the way over the boulders at the bottom of the cliff and sprayed all the way onto the roof of the clapboard museum.”
“
We stayed at a hotel that had a salt water pool and a spa. We had to stay two extra days because of the storm. I’ve been back there. For business. While we were there I started talking to some people on Long Island about expanding my coffee business to Long Island. My franchises were in the City at the time, but hadn’t come out onto the island. When they decided they wanted to meet and talk I suggested the hotel. I went up the lighthouse by myself and wrote a letter to you.”
“
I think I know which letter it was,” I say. “It was so different from all the others.”
“
I bet you’re right,” Joe answers. He stares out over the ocean as the weak sun becomes a little weaker and the already cool temperature drops another degree.
“
Montauk was commissioned by President George Washington, and it was finished in 1796. It’s not the oldest in the country, but it’s old. Old and solid, like me. They had to import the sandstone blocks to build it, and they built it sturdy. On a foundation over ten feet deep and ten feet thick. It’s sandstone. And it’s old. So old you can see what two hundred years of sea breeze has done to the rock. Sculpted amazing shapes into it. It’s actually leaning an inch inland now because the sea sides have been eroded over those hundreds of years and the weight is out of balance.”
“
I sat in the hotel and watched the light blink every five seconds and tried to match my breathing to it. That’s how I started meditating.”
“
You meditate?” I asked. Here was something else I didn’t know about Joe. Maybe I should have engaged him in conversation more often.
“
Yes. Nearly every day. Apparently it’s an excellent outlet for my OCD tendencies.”
“
I ought to try it,” I say.
“
If you insist...” Joe says, letting the implication trail off.
We laugh our comfortable back porch laugh, sip our coffee, and continue to look out across the grey and foam flecked ocean.
“
Sardinia was next, our seventh trip. It was the first time and last time we flew anywhere together.”
“
I remember that cliff,” I say, busting in one Joe’s story telling. “You hired a guide and climbed the cliff starting from a boat. I was amazed, I am amazed. That cliff must have been three hundred feet high!”
“
Three hundred and forty feet of perfect seaside limestone. The guide had climbed it before and said it was one of her favorite climbs. She was actually one of the people who drilled the bolts for the climb.”
“
You’re not going to tell me you’ve gone back and climbed that cliff again are you?” I say.
“
Not
that
cliff,” Joe answers.
“
But you’ve been back to Sardinia? To go rock climbing?” I ask, amazed.
“
After reading Mina’s Eyes, and knowing what they were talking about, being able to see what they saw, smell what they smelled, feel what they felt, how could I pass?”
“
You have a lot of secrets Joe,” I say. I look at him.
“
They’re not secrets. They’re just things I do when it’s neither January, Costa Rica, July, nor lighthouse week. That’s what I call it. ‘Lighthouse week’. They’re just things I do. Like you canoeing the lake head to see the petroglyphs.”
“
I see,” I say. Somewhere inside I feel an ache for all the things I’ve missed. But I quickly put that ache aside because for everything I have missed with Joe I have done something else with myself, or with my sister, or with my family. The sum of the two is greater than if I had surrendered my life and my family to be with Joe. The exoticness of it, and the adventure, has taken me places I never would have gone if I had surrendered one or the other.
“
The Mediterranean is warm, and clear. The Pacific is warm in Costa Rica, but it isn’t clear.”
“
Not in the surf where we are all the time. But it’s clear farther out,” I say.
Joe turns in his chair.
“
How would you know that?” he asks.
“
Because I have seen pictures,” I lie. I don’t lie often to Joe, but I have just lied. I still haven’t told him about my house in Costa Rica, or about the days and months I have spent there poring over geological surveys, exploring the jungle, and surfing with Salvaro. Or about the calm days where Alvaro’s people have taken me out fishing and I’ve hooked some things that ended up being dinner for a tourist. After seeing the hurt, however small, that he felt when I told him about canoeing the petroglyphs, I think this house would cause him a bigger hurt. So I maintain the lie.
“
Well it is clear in Sardinia. Just like Kane found out when he was swimming with Mina. I did practically the same thing he did. I was swimming and I saw a shiny rock on the bottom and I thought I would swim down and get it but it was too far. It was just like what happened to Kane.”
“
Hopefully you didn’t end up lying on top of a naked ballerina who had almost drowned?” I ask.
“
You did read Mina’s Eyes,” Joe says.
“
I love that book,” I say.
For a moment we are both caught in our memories of the book, both made more visceral and instant by our memories of actually having been on Sardinia, the one time for me, more than one time for Joe.
“
After Sardinia we went to England,” Joe continued.
“
You had new knees and hips and you could barely walk,” I say. “I still can’t believe you had a quadruple joint replacement and didn’t tell me, didn’t want me there.”
“
I didn’t tell you, but I kinda sorta wanted you there,” Joe says. His voice trails off. “But that’s not part of our deal, and I didn’t want to amend the terms unilaterally.”
“
Is our deal so rigid that we can never renegotiate?” I ask. “Like when you’re having both knees and both hips replaced and are going to be in the hospital for ten days and then in a rehab facility for two weeks and then need a private nurse for a month after that?”
“
Okay, under those conditions we can renegotiate.”
“
Jerk,” I say.
Joe makes a face and moves on.
“
Anyway, after Sardinia we went to England, where I still had a cane, which made climbing the tower to answer your wave a bit of a challenge.”
“
If you recall, when I saw the cane I came down and helped you.”
“
But you still made me climb the tower,” Joe says.
“
If I remember right you were pretty anxious to get up there,” I say.
“
You have no idea,” Joe says.
“
I have a pretty good idea,” I say.
We laugh together again. I love how we can laugh together. At each other, at us collectively, and at funny things or times. We have always been able to laugh together easily. I think it is something that has made our deal work. That we are so completely together when we are together and that our laughter binds together what would be otherwise disjoint units of time. Our laughter weaves individual threads into a single whole tapestry.
“
It was white on the bottom, red in the middle, and white on top and was sitting on a crumbling cliff. Point Reyes was like impenetrable granite compared to that choss,” Joe says. “That lighthouse in England has probably fallen into the ocean already.”
“
It’s possible,” I say.
“
Then we went to France,” Joe continues.