On Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, I took the expressway directly from my office to the Cape to visit Harry and Clay in their new house. Their summer lease had begun and they wanted me to help them get settled. Besides plain housework, we planned to do some surf fishing while the beaches were still clear of weekend campers. Harry and Clay are my best friends, though I think Harry is a fool and Clay can be frighteningly mercenary with her affection.
When I arrived, Clay greeted me at the porch door with a bowl of steamed fiddlehead ferns. I did not know what they were until she flirted me into eating one dipped in a paper cup of vinaigrette. I told her the truth, that except for the vinaigrette, it tasted like an undercooked violin. She said this was approximately everyone’s response, that it was boring how unadventurous most of her friends were.
“Harry said the same thing. You’re really very much alike, you two. But I guess it’s a comfort to know that if I bug out on the one I married, there’s still another left.” She nipped at one of the curly sprouts herself before dumping the rest on the lawn. “Come in, dear. My husband is off digging bait.”
The inside of the house was still wintertime, with sheets over the furniture and cardboard boxes of dishes open in the kitchen. Suitcases and books were piled around the floor. She asked me to help her slide the refrigerator away from the wall so she could reach its plug. Then we sat at the kitchen table under a brand new white paper lantern. She diced carrots while we talked, stopping every six or eight chops to flick a blond strand of hair out of her eyes.
“Harry has spent Moving Day getting his fishing gear together,” she said. “I’ve been dancing with that refrigerator since seven o’clock this morning, among other things. How are you?”
“I’m going a little crazy at my job, but they keep giving me a raise.”
“They like crazy people.”
“More and more. And how are you?”
“If ground chuck was selling for ten cents a pound, we couldn’t afford a raffle ticket on a squirrel.”
“Funny.”
“No, it’s not. But we’re probably still in love.” She handed me a slice of carrot.
“And Harry is working?” I asked, squinting the carrot disc in my eye like a monocle to ease the gravity of the question.
“He’s been depressed lately about money. But he’s sketched out some good ideas in spite of it. He has sworn in alizarin to fill this house with canvases by Labor Day.”
She continued with the methodical knife cuts. Harry is a painter, besides being a competent saltwater fisherman and an amateur authority on the history of warfare. He was educated, like me, to be an engineer, but chose not to enter the profession. He always claims it was because the only job offers he got when we graduated—during Vietnam—were from the weapons industry, but I know he has wanted to paint since we were in grade school together. Whether he has enough talent to succeed is not clear to me, but he is tough and honest about his work. Much more so than I am about mine.
Clay went to the fridge and brought me a warm can of beer. She untied a bag of apples, began to peel them for pie. Her bare arms and legs were just beginning to turn the rose-brown of early summer. Cut-offs and a man’s sleeveless undershirt gave the sun a maximum chance at her. She and Harry have been married for four years, had lived together for two before that. They are the longest surviving couple I know. Her mother, an economics professor in Boston, rented this house supposedly so that she could take a few weeks off through the summer. But Clay said they would probably see her for several days at most out of the whole season. Harry believes that Clay and her mother are exactly, though not boringly, alike: effortlessly generous with those they love, chilly to non-drinkers, fed up with the fruits of understanding, fond of material security. He says there are mornings when he feels he hardly knows Clay, but there is always a sense of irony between them that seems close to connubial solace.
“To change the subject, the local fishermen haven’t been catching much lately,” Clay said. “They think the big fish-kill this spring is going to ruin the rest of the season.”
I was staring out the window at a seagull, not listening.
“Hey, I said a carload of cheerleaders just drove by shouting your name.”
“Sorry. I was thinking about how much I like you.”
She stood and leaned across the table to kiss me.
“Sweet blindness, me and you are going to burn . . . ”
Harry was either hiding behind the back door or waiting for a false move, because it whipped open and he appeared with a bucket of clams in one hand and a nine foot surf rod in the other. He stuck Clay’s behind with the rod before she could sit down.
“Wench. Do I have to lock you in the attic every time I go out? And who’s this subversive?” He put the bucket in the sink, leaned the rod carefully against the fridge. “Somebody plugged it in, excellent!”
We shook hands and rubbed each other’s heads. “Glad to see you, man,” he whispered. He is thick, squat like a high-voltage line tower.
“You always arrive just when things are getting good,” I said.
“What’s a little smooch between old fishing buddies, right?” he said.
“Right,” I said.
“Right,” said Clay. “So now you two old Summer of Love fishing buddies sit down while wifey serves dinner.”
The meal was simple, pinto beans and brown rice, showing the extent of their poverty, though Clay had splurged on a cheap Bordeaux. Clay joked about it. Harry did not. I could tell he was counting change. Day after day of it becomes like having a derelict in the house who keeps following you around, treading on your heels. Theirs was a false extreme, because there was that family net under them to catch them if they ever truly fell. Nonetheless, it nagged at them, wore them down as surely as if they had been born beggars. And it would likely break them, too, if they let it go on too long.
We talked about jobs. Harry said that from time to time a teaching job would open at an obscure art college, that hundreds of super-qualified candidates from around the country would apply, and then the department would finally hire an odd duck who could be dumped easily at tenure time. Clay said that she was hoping for a chambermaid’s job at a local resort, that she had to fill out a three-page application, and that two other women with graduate degrees inquired at the office while she was there. Harry and Clay both asked me about my job, but there is never much to tell. I go from eight to five, I write things down and talk on the phone, I kid around with a few other people my age, I get paid a lot of money every two weeks. It’s a waste of time but there is nothing else I want to do enough to risk quitting. In other words, I have joined the labor force.
“I feel like the money boat left the dock while I was still at the ticket counter,” Harry said, stretching his arms over his head. His eyes looked weak, a tuft of hair stuck through a hole in his t-shirt like a piece of loose straw.
“Oh sure, you can still make it,” I said.
“Money boat,” Clay sang to a made-up tune, “get onboard that money boat, money boat, money boat.”
Later she placed her bare foot over mine under the table and stroked lightly while we finished the wine.
I grew up piss poor. Harry knows how poor because he grew up in a better part of the same Florida beach town. His father was an engineer, a civil engineer in charge of the county roads, and my father worked for him on the maintenance crews. Harry’s father tried every year to put my father in higher positions, but basically he never felt like handling more than a back-hoe or a mosquito fogger. He had come home from World War II having learned how to pound the dents out of damaged B-25’s at a Texas air base, tried to open a body and fender shop, but local patronage politics quickly sapped his ambition. What I most remember about my father was that he smoked cigarettes every minute he was awake, sucked them down to the filter and, at the supper table or in his tv lounger, lined the butts up in a perfectly straight row like spent handgun cartridges. I also remember the tattoo across his back of a pin-up riding a B-25. When he was dying that girl got skinnier and skinnier until she looked like a terrible witch under his skin. After he died—and then my mother a year and a half later in a car crash—Harry’s father got me a scholarship to the same boarding school Harry was going to. Later, we went North to the same university.
For a while we stayed away from each other there, mostly over the issue of Vietnam. Harry joined ROTC. I joined SDS and got arrested for touching a policeman at a campus demonstration. The cop came up the front steps of a research lab SDS was picketing. When I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir, but this is really not something you need to worry about,” I was clubbed, wrestled down by three other officers, handcuffed, and thrown in jail. Harry heard about it on the radio and came to the police station, where he met Clay and some other SDS members who were trying to bail me out. Clay was not a student at that time. She was a townie, more precisely a faculty brat who hung out with townies, who for one semester had lived with me in my dorm room to escape her mother’s drunken rages. It was neither the time nor the setting for a fine romance, and we avoided each other when it was over. When she fell in love with Harry, I said ‘small world’ and got on with the work of smashing the State.
Harry took longer to see the truth about the war, with Clay’s help. But when the time came to find jobs, it was he who thumbed his nose at the military-industrial complex. I fell for the cash, because I didn’t have any. I mean zero.
Harry and I washed the dishes quickly after dinner. We went outside on the porch to rig our fishing rods while Clay unpacked more boxes. High tide was at nine-thirty on a rising moon; we were excited by the prospects and badly needed to forget about the jobs we either had or did not have. Harry grabbed my arm when a heron glided low over the trees into a nearby marsh. It was a clear evening, warm for the end of May. A breeze came off the shore, jigging fireflies across white beach-plum blossoms.
“This is the life,” I said.
“This is it,” Harry said. He drew his line through the rod ferrules and tied it back to the reel bailer, businesslike.
“I think I envy you living here like this.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Someday we’ll look back on this as the best, Harry.”
“I hope not.”
“Are you unhappy?” I asked, looking up from my reel.
“No. I’m just unnerved by the prospect of turning into a bum.”
“How much longer do you figure you’ve got?”
“Not funny. I give Clay about six more months of sacrificing for the sake of my . . . art, then if she’s got any sense she’ll leave. At that point, no doubt I’ll start to discover what art is all about.” He lifted his rod and snapped its tippet off against the ceiling. “Or not.”
“And if not?”
“Then the joke is on me. Hand me that duct tape.”
Clay came out with a Thermos of hot-buttered rum and we headed for the trail that passed over grassy dunes to the beach. Harry led the way—a thick silhouette against the dune ridges, limbs and torso pumping with something less than athletic grace. Someday he will have a big belly and resemble the rednecks who raised us. The bucket of clams he carried had a pinhole leak that soaked his jeans as he walked, but he did not bother to rotate the bucket. Clay was next—muscular long legs, all her bones more tractable than Harry’s, hooded sweatshirt unzipped down her chest. She has beautiful feet with long, spatular toes.
We slid down the dune faces and spaced ourselves along the beach. Harry gave us each a cup of clams. We baited our hooks with the clam meats, then casted them in turn beyond the nearest rows of breakers. The last daylight turned the wave foam peach. Harry squatted next to his rod while the moon rose off the horizon. He soon moved farther down the beach, toward a rip on the other side of an eroding dune. Clay slipped out of her shorts and pulled her sweatshirt off. She waded into the cold water, then jogged along the wet sand to where I stood.
Surf fishing is a humbling activity. After dark, the sky extends the ocean’s apparent boundaries rather than foreshortening them. The monofilament sagging and pulling taut from your rod tip seems a ridiculous, though clever, link to the forces out there. The hope that you might actually figure out how to trick a living creature from the edge of the sea starts to get funny. We looked up and down the deserted beach, which shown brighter than the rufous dunes as the moon rose higher.
“So, hick, why don’t you marry somebody?” Clay said, essentially picking up the conversation we were about to have when Harry came home with the bait.
Even though Harry and Clay and I had been naked in each other’s presence before, the occasions had always been plainly benign or, at most, sophomoric gestures against the bourgeoisie. But her legs and sex were beaded with saltwater in the moonlight, and there seemed no mistaking this now for either innocence or some political statement.
“Because you’re the only one I love,” I tried, truly, but couldn’t quite avoid the hollow sound of a pop lyric.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Funny, that’s the same thing Harry told me.” I adjusted the drag control on my reel to appear at ease.
“Fuck you, hick” she tried her best to say, but she had grown up too comfortably in Concord and it sounded rather like ‘giddyup.’ “You know what I’d do if I were married to you?”
“Purchase a designer appliance?”
“Fuck you again, hick. I’d have a kid, that’s what.”
I looked down the beach for Harry, but it was too dark. Theatrics were not really fair here.
“Why don’t you have one with him?”
“Money, mostly. In addition, I don’t believe the kid would like the world it grew up in.”
“That’s a plainly presumptuous feeling about the world.”
“My feeling is that the world is not worth the bottom of a parrot’s cage. But you’re a hick engineer, so you wouldn’t know.”
One thing about Clay is that her vitriol is pretty concentrated. She also has a large heart that saves her from being a vampire. My feeling is that such a combination comes from growing up in a household of drunken liberals. Her mother is one of the few female economists who holds any clout in Washington and her father was way up in line for Attorney General in the Johnson Administration when he died. Clay never knew them very well because they were always away lecturing or consulting. When they were at home they drank and chased each other around the house with squash rackets and fireplace implements, as she tells it. Still, they saw that she was raised with a minimum, under the circumstances, of hurt. But by the time I met her at college she had swallowed enough of them, and for a short while found bliss in my hick tales of tropical game fishing, sugar cane harvests, and hurricane seasons. We might have gone back to Florida together to fish and sell conch shells to the snowbirds had it not been for the war in Asia that made our pillow-talk sound unconscionable. So we got what we could from the sexual revolution, which was quite a lot, and moved on.
We fished for an hour past high tide. Harry stayed at the rip, alternating a shiny surface-popper with his live bait. He does not like to talk while he fishes. Clay wandered back down the beach to find her clothes, and I had to free her line when it snagged on a stick of driftwood. None of us caught anything. Finally, Harry yelled “let’s forget it.” In fifteen minutes we were back at the house, sipping straight rum and getting sleepy.
Harry told a story he had read about the Battle of Britain. An RAF pilot was on furlough in Brighton. He went to a pub on one of the amusement piers there, and while he sat at a window trying to drink his jitters away, he watched a crowd dancing around a bandstand. After a few whiskeys he decided to join them. As he left the pub, he glanced up at the sky and noticed twisting vapor trails of a dog-fight in progress. The Spitfires and Messerschmitts were so high that no one heard them. For seconds he stood mesmerized by the shifting patterns, the band music, the scuffle of shoes across the pier boards. Then he felt a tap on his arm, and a girl asked him if he were feeling all right. Soon they were dancing with the others. The pilot forgot about the mortal combat overhead. They whirled to the American songs, were jostled by other couples to the center of the crowd.
Suddenly something struck the girl with such force that she fell out of his arms. She crumpled at his feet, but the band kept playing and no one seemed to notice. When he knelt to lift the girl’s head, he found a heavy leather aviator’s boot lodged under her shoulders. He looked up at the planes still fighting, then again at the boot. It contained a foot sheared off at the ankle. He tilted backwards screaming, and never flew again.
Clay said it was an awful story and began to unpack their sleeping bags. Harry protested that it was totally true. He took off his hiking boot and tossed it at her. She caught it, slung it back at him as hard as she could.
“I don’t like people throwing stuff at me,” she shouted. She grabbed a sleeping bag and the rum bottle and ran upstairs.
“Aren’t you going to say goodnight, sweetheart?” Harry shouted after her. There was no answer. He looked at me, embarrassed. “Want a beer or should we just call it a day?”
“Sleep,” I said.
I took a bag onto the porch and was surprised when Harry came out to sleep there, too. We unrolled the bags without saying anything. I got into mine and lay still; Harry kneeled on his with his head in his hands.
“She’s testy sometimes,” he said.
“Mm.”
“Sometimes we dislike each other.”
“That’s amore.”
“Have you had any girlfriends lately?”
“I think so, kind of. But they don’t find my life exciting. I can’t seem to come across with any density. I haven’t got that ironclad character, round and solid.”
“Why don’t you become a painter? You can be as weird as you want. The rhetoric of terminality, that’s where the action is.”
“Go to sleep.”
We lay still while the moon went about its business of pulling the ocean back twenty feet. After Harry fell asleep, I went upstairs and got into bed with Clay. She was not surprised. We made love until we smelled like horses. I stayed with her until the gulls woke me up at dawn.
After that weekend I did not visit Harry and Clay again until the end of August. I received postcards from Clay that confirmed the poor fishing and the frailty of their budget. Finally Harry wrote that if I did not come soon, they, the fish, and the summer would be completely gone.
Now the reason I let most of the summer go by without taking even a day trip to the shore was that Clay called me one morning at my office. She was slightly high, working at the resort and using a room phone. She told me that Harry had not come home the night before, that she thought he was sleeping with a nineteen-year-old Cliffie whose parents rented a cottage near theirs. She said she had confronted him about it, but he had been derisive, claiming a midnight fishing hunch. She asked me if she could come to Boston for a few days. She was crying a little. When I said no, she turned chatty and impersonal. I immediately regretted saying no, but there was a hint of chaos in the situation that disinclined me to see either of them for awhile, whatever they were going through.
I rose early on an overcast Saturday morning, took the country roads instead of the jammed expressway. I needed an easy drive to help forget about my job and to try to get into a good mood. By the time I passed over the Canal, the change of scenery had worked its usual analgesia.
Their house showed the signs of a matured season: thick tattered ivy on the chimney wall, late roses climbing a trellis by the cellar door, baskets of seashells from beach walks piled on the porch, an aging vegetable garden drooped by ripe tomatoes and string beans next to the garage. Vehicles of every description blocked the neighborhood streets as tourists maneuvered for the last days before Labor Day.
Harry came out of the house as I was lifting my tackle box from the trunk of my car.
“Forget that,” he said. “Jesus himself couldn’t catch a goldfish this summer. The ocean is empty.”
Clay leaned out of a second story window in her bathrobe and called, “Take him for a walk, will you Harry, while I finish my shower?” She waved and blew a kiss.
“Let’s walk into town, then,” Harry said. “I want to buy a newspaper. Want-ads, you know.”
From October to April, the town was essentially locked up, except for the liquor store, a mom-and-pop grocery, and a tiny diner that catered to commercial fishermen. The widow of a state political boss lived year-around in a huge old mansard Second Empire monstrosity, and an Italian doctor who wrote purple romances spent a few weeks in an A-frame behind the pricey summertime restaurant he owned, but by Thanksgiving the only people on these streets would be idle retirees and utility maintenance men. Now, however, as Harry remarked as we passed each white clapboard relic, every resident seemed to be either a dentist or a psychiatrist, confident and good-natured, lending a temporary flourish to a setting that otherwise embodied the most shabby-genteel sense of the past.
When we came to the Town Hall, Harry waved to a group of teenagers loitering on the grass around a pile of cannonballs. One of the girls waved back and called his name.
“They’re bored out of their minds by the end of August,” Harry said. “Some of them hang out at our house at night. Clay calls them the ‘orthobonkers’ because their teeth are so straight and they’re all so neurotic. She likes to think I romance the co-eds behind her back.”
“Well, do you?”
“I haven’t romanced the snake in the woodpile, bub.”
We crossed the street and entered a drugstore whose decor had not changed much since World War II. Harry seemed to relax. He picked up a Boston paper and suggested we have a doughnut at the soda fountain.
“By god, the news doesn’t change much,” he said, checking the employment ads.
“You mean the dramatic recovery hasn’t reached here yet?”
“If a dime would buy a mink stole for a giraffe, I couldn’t afford socks for a tick.”
“Funny. Poverty is expanding your imagination.”
“Wearing it out is closer to the truth.”
We ate our doughnuts with no more talk. I am his oldest friend and he is mine, but we rarely have a prolonged talk about anything except fishing. Clay says it’s because people normally do not talk to mirrors. I tried to pay for our doughnuts, but Harry swore that on the day he could not afford to buy me a doughnut he would send his resume to Lockheed.
By the time we returned to the house, Clay had fixed a surprise breakfast fit for a major defense contractor and purveyor of bribes. There were fresh flowers on the table. Croissants, jams, maple syrup, and French coffee loaded the lazy susan.
“Okay, Harry. I freaked out at the grocery. I’ll clean five extra rooms next week to pay for this. But I had to do it. Look,” she said, holding up the frying pan, “fresh coddies”
Clay was so cheerful during breakfast, and Harry so stoney, that I began to worry. She laughed and told stories about the orthobonkers, generally acted like she had won the lottery or Harry had sold a painting. He chimed in at times, but mostly looked nervous. I asked him how his work was going. He rolled his eyes. Clay stood up abruptly and collected our plates. I did not touch that subject again.
“Why don’t you two take a walk on the beach,” Harry said as we finished our coffee, “I want to write a job query this morning before the mailman comes.”
Clay stared at him for a moment, then said, “All right, maybe we can find some quahogs for lunch. Tide’s out.”
I gladly went outside on the porch to find the clam rake. While I waited for Clay, I heard them talking in the kitchen. It was not a casual chat. Clay pushed the screen door open brusquely, realized her temper, and smiled perfunctorily.
“God save me,” she said, grabbing the rake out of my hands. She ran toward the beach. “But god damn him. I really mean it.”
I caught up with her at the top of the dunes, from where we could see only two or three people for half a mile in either direction. A drizzle was keeping most indoors. One Jeep went by, spooking a flock of gulls that immediately settled again to rummage across the mud flats. Clay drew a bead on the remains of a stone groin that lay about two-thirds of the way from the last dry sand to where rivulets still carried the low-tide run. Again, she ran ahead of me.
“Here,” she called, driving the rake in the wet sand when she reached the groin. “This is my private lode.”
She worked for a few minutes without success. I took the rake and tried another spot. We circled the entire groin and found one littleneck to show for our labor.
“Shall we keep it?” I asked.
“Show no mercy,” she said, pocketing the lonely creature.
We took shelter from thickening fog in a blind pocket of the dunes. Clay took the clam out of her pocket, opened it expertly with a penknife. She insisted that I eat it as my reward for having stayed in the city all summer.
“How can you stand living there?”
“It’s not so bad if you can afford to treat yourself well,” I said and felt like apologizing.
“Due for another raise soon?”
“Next month maybe.”
“Soon they’ll have you right where they want you.”
“Oh hell, they already do,” I said, pitching the empty shell over the dune.
We lay back on the slope and watched the low clouds blow over in a warm wind. I held her cold hand.
“Harry hasn’t painted all summer,” she said.
“I gathered that.”
“My mother was here two weeks ago. It was the only time we’ve seen her all summer. We had a good time, sort of—she didn’t drink a lot—and I thought Harry was snapping out of whatever’s been knotting him up. But on the morning after she left, we had the biggest battle ever. A real megatonner. We even started to slap each other—don’t worry, I started it—but it didn’t last long.”
“About money?”
“That’s the simplest part.”
“I figured Harry felt guilty that your mother rented the house.”
“No. At least, I mean we’ve always had an understanding about the family. There was something else.”
“You want to tell me?”
“Sure. I told him I’m pregnant. I didn’t tell him it’s yours. I didn’t need to—there are no other possibilities.”
The clouds were dense, heavy as smoke with salty mist. Occasionally a sky blue hole would open up in them, racing by like a glimpse at eternity. You wanted to stop them just long enough to climb up through that hole, say hello, slip back down with your ears full of choir music. I do not remember saying anything to Clay. We both waited for something to say, but nothing came. I squeezed her hand, but she pulled it away. I do remember thinking that my muteness at that moment was like a witch’s curse, that if the moment passed without my finding a way to reach her, then I’d always be cemented in place with the knowledge of what I lost right then and there.
I closed my eyes when she stood up. I heard her walk a few feet to where the sand sloped steeply, topped by a crusty edge the wind had serrated like a hunting knife. She spoke softly, but the wet air and the band shell dune carried her voice to me with sure fidelity. She explained tersely that they would move in with her mother in Concord for a while, that Harry was going to look for a job around there. Her womb was a vault that held stolen goods that Harry and I would find a way of speaking for. Her responsibilities lay beyond us.
And I said nothing. I was thinking of a beach town within walking distance of missile gantries, of its harbor where tarpon swim in and out on the tides with submarines and telemetry ships. There was a restaurant where you could watch astronauts drink too many martinis. For most of my childhood I believed that both ends of the rainbow lay within the confines of that town, that if you could build a road across the universe it would rise up all wet and fish-smelling, then loop around for a trillion light-years until it touched down dry as hot sand at the top of one of those red girder launch pads. I asked Harry’s father once about the feasibility of such a road and he said that even though he wasn’t sure what the hell I was talking about, it sounded like it could get a boy into trouble. Try something simpler. He was right. I should have been an English major, not an engineer. But here, faced by a woman holding the seed of our child, I thought it was really my own father, tattooed and cancerous, I should have asked. Show me the airplane on your back, Daddy. How did you get that? Why do you rattle when you cough?
“Hold me for a minute, will you?” Clay said.
I held her while she cried, which did not last long. We walked back to the house, feeling maybe liked shocked soldiers, I don’t know. At the porch she told me to go buy something to drink. I walked into town and bought two fifths of the best scotch they had. Harry, Clay and I spent the rest of that rainy, rainy weekend indoors, drinking and playing poker.
After Labor Day, Harry and Clay left their house on the seashore. After learning of Clay’s condition, her mother announced that she was going to spend most of the Fall semester in London, so they currently have her house to themselves. Harry found a job as a part-time lab assistant. He paints in the morning and tests circuit boards in the afternoon. Clay works three days a week in a university counseling center. She is starting to expand handsomely.
I have been very busy and have not seen them much, though we sometimes cross paths at the shopping mall near where we work. At the end of October I was promoted to manager at my office. I now have more money than I know how to spend without looking piggy. Harry says that I should save for another year or two, then quit and move to Belize. That has been a dream for a long time, though I have never mentioned it to him. It feels like a taunt.
I have also considered having my body galvanized, my circuits micro-miniaturized, and volunteering to be launched to Mars on the next robot lander. I’m in love with Clay. I even suspect that Harry would give her up. He does not want her child. He does not like living under her mother’s wing. I’m the one who craves a home, a wife, a solid breakfast. But essentially I’m finished with Harry and Clay; I can’t move any deeper into their lives, no more than I’ll ever move to the Caribbean. I’ll never tell Clay I love her in any but the most harmless way. I’ll never pursue her until she admits that she hates Harry.
What would I like more than anything? I’d like to exchange what I have for what I want. It sounds so simple.
Lately I am having a recurring dream. When it begins I am on the beach at home, and out on the Atlantic you can just make out the backs of dolphins sewing a silver filament toward the Keys. Beyond them is a line of shrimp boats puffing to the Marquesas. The sea is so flat, only pocked by random raindrops from a lone cloud, that the whole scene might be the backdrop for an enormous shooting gallery. Flat iron dolphins on a wheel appearing every three seconds. Flat iron shrimp boats moving endlessly from left to right at the rear. Raindrops digging concentric circles in the water like bullets fired from the shore. As the dream ends, I am out there with the dolphins and shrimp boats, going around and around, being shot at.
in fond memory of Alice Turner, 1939-2015