A Multitude of Sins (26 page)

And yet, she realized, as spring came on and Tom remained in the Larchmere Apartments—cooking his miserly meals, watching his tiny TV, doing his laundry in the basement, going to his studio in the co-op—the entire edifice of their life was beginning to take on clearer shape and to grow smaller. Like a valuable box lost overboard into the smooth wake of an ocean liner. Possibly it was a crisis. Possibly they loved each other well enough, perhaps completely. Yet the strongest force keeping them together wasn’t that love, she thought, but a matching curiosity about what the character of their situation was, and the novelty that neither of them knew for sure.

But as Tom had stayed away longer, seemingly affable and well-adjusted, she indeed had begun to feel an
ebbing
, something going out of her, like water seeping from a cracked beaker, restoring it to its original, vacant state. This admittedly did not seem altogether good. And yet, it might be the natural course of life. She felt isolated, it was true, but isolated in a grand sort of way, as if by being alone and getting on with things, she was achieving something. Unassailable and strong was how she felt—not that anyone wanted to assail her; though the question remained: what was the character of this strength, and what in the world would you do with it alone?

“Where’s Nova Scotia?” Nancy said, staring at the sea. Since leaving Rockland, an hour back on Route 1, they’d begun glimpsing ocean, its surface calm, dense, almost unpersuasively blue, encircling large, distinct, forested islands Tom declared were reachable only by ferries and were the strongholds of wealthy people who were only there in the summer and didn’t have heat.

“It’s a parallel universe out there,” he said as his way of expressing that he didn’t approve of life like that. Tom had an affinity for styles of living he considered authentic. It was his one conventional-cop attitude. He thought highly of the Mainers for renting their seaside houses for two months in the summer and collecting fantastic sums that paid their bills for the year. This was authentic to Tom.

Nova Scotia was in her head now, because it would be truly exotic to go there, far beyond the green, clean-boundaried islands. Though she couldn’t exactly tell what direction she faced out the car window. If you were on the east coast, looking at the ocean, you should be facing east. But her feeling was this rule didn’t apply in Maine, which had something to do with distances being farther than they looked on the map, with how remote it felt here, and with whatever “down-east” meant. Perhaps she was looking south.

“You can’t see it. It’s way out there,” Tom said, referring to Nova Scotia, driving and taking quick glances at the water. They had driven through Camden, choked with tourists sauntering along sunny streets, wearing bright, expensive clothing, trooping in and out of the same expensive outlet stores they’d seen in Freeport. They had thought tourists would be gone after Labor Day, but then their own presence disproved that.

“I just have a feeling we’d be happier visiting there,” she said. “Canada’s less crowded.”

A large block of forested land lay solidly beyond a wide channel of blue water Tom had pronounced to be the Penobscot Bay. The block of land was Islesboro, and it, too, he said, was an island, and rich people also lived there in the summer and had no heat. John Travolta had his own airport there. She mused out at the long undifferentiated island coast. Odd to think John Travolta was there right now. Doing what? It was nice to think of
it
as Nova Scotia, like standing in a meadow watching cloud shapes imitate mountains until you feel you’re
in
the mountains. Maine, a lawyer in her office
said, possessed a beautiful coast, but the rest was like Michigan.

“Nova Scotia’s a hundred and fifty miles across the Bay of Fundy,” Tom said, upbeat for some new reason.

“I once did a report about it in high school,” Nancy said. “They still speak French, and a lot of it’s backward, and they don’t much care for Americans.”

“Like the rest of Canada,” Tom said.

Route 1 followed the coast along the curvature of high tree-covered hills that occasionally sponsored long, breathtaking views toward the bay below. A few white sails were visible on the pure blue surface, though the late morning seemed to have furnished little breeze.

“It wouldn’t be bad to live up here,” Tom said. He hadn’t shaved, and rubbed his palm across his dark stubble. He seemed happier by the minute.

She looked at him curiously. “Where?”

“Here.”

“Live in Maine? But it’s mortifyingly cold except for today.” She and Tom had grown up in the suburbs of Chicago—she in Glen Ellyn, Tom in a less expensive part of Evanston. Their very first agreement had been that they hated the cold. They’d chosen Maryland for Tom to be a policeman because it was unrelentingly mild. Her feelings hadn’t changed. “Where would you go for the two months when you were renting the house to the Kennedy cousins just so you could afford to freeze here all winter?”

“I’d buy a boat. Sail it around.” Tom extended his estimable arms and flexed his grip on the steering wheel. Tom was in dauntingly good health. He played playground basketball with black kids, mountain-biked to his studio, did push-ups in his apartment every night before climbing into bed alone. And since he’d been away, he seemed healthier, calmer, more hopeful, though the story was somehow that he’d moved a mile away to a shitty apartment to make
her
happier. Nancy looked down disapprovingly at the pure white pinpoint sails backed by blue water in front of the
faultlessly green-bonneted island where summer people sat on long white porches and watched the impoverished world through expensive telescopes. It wasn’t that attractive. In the public defender’s office she had, in the last month, defended a murderer, two pretty adolescent sisters accused of sodomizing their brother, a nice secretary who, because she was obese, had become the object of taunts in her office full of gay men, and an elderly Japanese woman whose house contained ninety-six cats she was feeding, and who her neighbors considered, reasonably enough, deranged and a health hazard. Eventually the obese secretary, who was from the Philippines, had stabbed one of the gay men to death. How could you give all that up and move to Maine with a man who appeared not to want to live with you, then be trapped on a boat for the two months it wasn’t snowing? These were odd times of interesting choices.

“Maybe you could talk Anthony into doing it with you,” she said, thinking peacefully again that Islesboro was Nova Scotia and everyone there was talking French and speaking ill of Americans. She had almost said, “Maybe you can persuade Crystal to drive up and fuck you on your yacht.” But that wasn’t what she felt. Poisoning perfectly harmless conversation with something nasty you didn’t even mean was what the people she defended did and made their lives impossible. She wasn’t even sure he’d heard her mention Anthony. It was possible she was whispering.

“Keep an open mind,” Tom said, and smiled an inspiriting smile.

“Can’t,” Nancy said. “I’m a lawyer. I’m forty-five. I believe the rich already stole the best things before I was born, not just twenty years ago in Wiscasset.”

“You’re tough,” Tom said, “but you have to let me win you.”

“I told you, you already did that,” she said. “I’m your wife. That’s what that means. Or used to. You win.”

This was Tom’s standard view, of course, the lifelong robbery-detective
slash
enthusiast’s view: someone was always
needing to be won over to a better view of things; someone’s spirit being critically lower or higher than someone else’s; someone forever acting the part of the hold-out. But she wasn’t a hold-out.
He’d
fucked Crystal.
He’d
picked up and moved out.
That
didn’t make her not an enthusiast. Though none of it converted Tom Marshall into a bad person in need of punishment. They merely didn’t share a point of view—his being to sentimentalize loss by feeling sorry for himself; hers being to not seek extremes even when it meant ignoring the obvious. She wondered if he’d even heard her say he’d ever won her. He was thinking about something else now, something that pleased him. You couldn’t blame him.

When she looked at Tom he was just past looking at her, as if
he’d
spoken something and
she
hadn’t responded. “What?” she said, and pulled a strand of hair past her eyes and to the side. She looked at him straight on. “Do you see something you don’t like?”

“I was just thinking about that old line we used to say when I was first being a policeman. ‘Interesting drama is when the villain says something that’s true.’ It was in some class you took. I don’t remember.”

“Did I just say something true?”

He smiled. “I was thinking that in all those years my villains never said much that was true or even interesting.”

“Do you miss having new villains every day?” It was the marquee question, of course; the one she’d never actually thought to ask a year ago, during the Crystal difficulties. The question of the epic loss of vocation. A wife could only hope to fill in for the lost villains.

“No way,” he said. “It’s great now.”

“It’s better living by yourself?”

“That’s not really how I think about it.”

“How do you really think about it?”

“That we’re waiting,” Tom said earnestly. “For a long moment to pass. Then we’ll go on.”

“What would we call that moment?” she asked.

“I don’t know. A moment of readjustment, maybe.”

“Readjustment to exactly what?”

“Each other?” Tom said, his voice going absurdly up at the end of his sentence.

They were nearing a town.
BELFAST
,
MAINE
. A black and white corporate-limits sign slid past.
ESTABLISHED
1772.
A MAINE ENTERPRISE CENTER
. Settlement was commencing. The highway had gradually come nearer sea level. Traffic slowed as the roadside began to repopulate with motels, shoe outlets, pottery barns, small boatyards selling posh wooden dinghies—the signs of enterprise.

“I wasn’t conscious I needed readjustment,” Nancy said. “I thought I was happy just to go along. I wasn’t mad at you. I’m still not. Though your view makes me feel a little ridiculous.”

“I thought you wanted one,” Tom said.

“One what? A chance to feel ridiculous? Or a period of
readjustment
?” She made the word sound idiotic. “Are you a complete stupe?”

“I thought you needed time to reconnoiter.” Tom looked deviled at being called a stupe. It was old Chicago code to them. An ancient language of disgust.

“Jesus, why are you talking like this?” Nancy said. “Though I suppose I should know why, shouldn’t I?”

“Why?” Tom said.

“Because it’s bullshit, which is why it sounds so much like bullshit. What’s true is that
you
wanted out of the house for your own reasons, and now you’re trying to decide if you’re tired of it. And me. But you want
me
to somehow take the blame.” She smiled at him in feigned amazement. “Do you realize you’re a grown man?”

He looked briefly down, then raised his eyes to hers with contempt. They were still moving, though Route 1 took the newly paved by-pass to the left, and Tom angled off into Belfast proper, which in a split second turned into a nice, snug neighborhood of large Victorian, Colonial, Federal and Greek Revival residences established on large lots along an old bumpy street beneath tall surviving elms, with a couple of church steeples anchored starkly to the still-summery sky.

“I do realize that. I certainly do,” Tom said, as if these words had more impact than she could feel.

Nancy shook her head and faced the tree-lined street, on the right side of which a new colonial-looking two-story brick hospital addition was under construction. New parking lot. New oncology wing. A helipad. Jobs all around. Beyond the hospital was a modern, many-windowed school named for Margaret Chase Smith, where the teams, the sign indicated, were called the solons. Someone, to be amusing, had substituted “colons” in dripping blood-red paint. “There’s a nice new school named for Margaret Chase Smith,” Nancy said, to change the subject away from periods of readjustment and a general failure of candor. “She was one of my early heroes. She made a brave speech against McCarthyism and championed civic engagement and conscience. Unfortunately she was a Republican.”

Tom spoke no more. He disliked arguing more than he hated being caught bullshitting. It was a rare quality. She admired him for it. Only, possibly now he was
becoming
a bullshitter. How had that happened?

They arrived at the inconspicuous middle of Belfast, where the brick streets sloped past handsome elderly red-brick commercial edifices. Most of the business fronts had not been modernized; some were shut, though the diagonal parking places were all taken. A small harbor with a town dock and a few dainty sailboats on their low-tide moorings lay at the bottom of the hill. A town in transition. From what to what, she wasn’t sure.

“I’d like to eat something,” Tom said stiffly, steering toward the water.

A chowder house, she already knew, would appear at the bottom of the street, offering pleasant but not spectacular water views through shuttered screens, terrible food served with white plastic ware, and paper placemats depicting a lighthouse or a puffin. To know this was the literacy of one’s very own culture. “Please don’t stay mad,” she said wearily. “I just had a moment. I’m sorry.”

“I was trying to say the right things,” he said irritably.

“I know you were,” she said. She considered reaching for the steering wheel and taking his hand. But they were almost to the front of the restaurant she’d predicted—green beaver-board with screens and a big red-and-white
MAINELY CHOWDAH
sign facing the Penobscot, which was so picturesque and clear and pristine as to be painful.

They ate lunch at a long, smudged, oilcloth picnic table overlooking little Belfast harbor. They each chose lobster stew. Nancy had a beer to make herself feel better. Warm, fishy ocean breezes shifted through the screens and blew their paper mats and napkins off the table. Few people were eating. Most of the place—which was like a large screened porch—had its tables and green plastic chairs stacked, and a hand-lettered sign by the register said that in a week the whole place would close for the winter.