Don't Worry About the Kids (26 page)

He closed the door to his car, walked toward the docks, let the reels inside his head spin, play back images from the previous few days. Long Shot: the woman laughing easily, soundlessly. Medium Shot: the woman leaning against a railing, flipping the stub of cigarette into the harbor. Close Up: the woman staring directly at him, a lopsided stack of lobster traps behind her, out-of-focus. Two Shot: the woman inclining her head toward one of the lobstermen, smiling with casual affection, touching the man's forearm. This was, then, the fifth morning in a row that, by the time he arrived, she was already there.

He was a stranger in the Maine fishing village, there for a few months—to get his bearings, to prepare for his next project, to recover from what had been the most difficult year of his life, a year that had included divorce, a brutal custody battle, loss of his two children to his ex-wife, heavy drinking. He reached into his side pocket for a coin, then remembered that he didn't need a coin, that the reason he drove in each morning to use the phone next to the fish market was because it was the only public touch-tone telephone in the town.

The phone rang twice, clicked, his message came on, and he listened impatiently for a few seconds to the sound of his own voice, then cut it off by tapping in his personal code. The modern world, he thought. Fishing nets and microchips. Divorce and silicone. He looked up, toward the pier. She was gone.

He listened to the swish of blank tape, to his answering machine, some five hundred miles away, preparing to play back messages. He wiped the screen inside his head clean, forced it to go black, and in that blackness he imagined giant squid moving steadily forward. The water was a dark block of blue-black stone, the bodies of the squid, caught suddenly by the camera's fan of bright arc-lights, seemingly transparent. The tape stopped. Silence again. His children had not called. His lawyer had not called. His agent had not called. His ex-wife had not called.

He wanted to be alone, to be left alone—it was why he had left job and home and city and moved here, taken the small house in Tenants Harbor. Yet he was disappointed. He missed his children. He missed cooking for them, shopping with them, helping them with their homework. He missed touching them and being touched. He smiled. He even missed breaking up their fights. He put the receiver back on its hook. Sure, he thought. Don't call us, we'll call you.

He turned, saw the woman standing no more than ten feet away, at the entrance to the fish market, her hand on the screen door. She looked past him, to the telephone, her eyes mildly inquisitive. He wished he could keep her there by coming up with something clever, but there were no words in his head. What he saw instead were stones—millions of them, like enormous pearls—and they were tumbling through water, piling one upon the other, becoming a wall beneath the sea. He tried to smile at the woman, but in her presence he felt like a young boy. She hesitated, as if to give him time to regain his confidence. Her eyes were pale gray, flecked with white, nearly translucent, and as he stared into them it became very important to him that she not think him foolish. She smiled slightly, the corner of her mouth lifting as if to receive a cigarette, then said good morning and walked off, her hands deep in the pockets of her suede jacket.

The boat came with the house: a sixteen-foot-long fiberglass training shell with a sliding seat and nine-foot oars. The topsides were green, the deck blue with white trim, the craft so wonderfully new that when he looked at it each morning he felt as if he were looking into an enormous jewel that had been split open, the crown lifted off so that he could explore the facets below. But he couldn't recall what the cut of the jewel—oval, pointed at the ends—was called.

He pulled the boat from the shed, hoisted it onto his shoulders, carried it to the water some fifty yards away, wondered why it was that the name of the stone kept slipping from his mind. Two years before he had made a documentary film in which he traced the journey across the world of a single diamond, from its mine four hundred feet below ground in Kimberley, South Africa, through stops in Johannesburg, Tel Aviv, Antwerp, and New York City, until it arrived in Rahway, New Jersey, and was placed on the ring finger of 22-year-old Katherine Bak's left hand. He had interviewed each of the people whose lives were in some way touched by the diamond—the black miners and those for whom they worked; the diamond dealers in Johannesburg; the Israeli merchants; the diamond cutters in Antwerp; the jewelers on 47th Street in Manhattan; the jewelry store owner in Rahway, New Jersey; the engaged couple and their families. He had alternated the interviews—the story of the stone's journey—with sequences in which, via time-lapse microphotography, he journeyed deeper and deeper into the diamond itself, light and color exploding from the screen as the stone was divided, cut, ground, rubbed, polished, set. The film had earned him an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. It had brought to him the recognition and audience he had, during a quarter century of work and hope, been longing for.

He returned to the shed, picked up the oars, the Wetproof bag in which he kept his charts. He thought of the final sequence in the film, a triptych: the diamond in the center, the engaged couple to the left, the black miner to the right. The miner, 19-year-old Joseph Kenaba, was shown on an ordinary day of work: rising from sleep, washing, dressing, eating breakfast, tending his rabbits and goats, boarding a bus, arriving at the mine, descending into blackness.

Was Joseph still alive? He would write again—perhaps later in the afternoon, in the hour before dinner that he set aside for correspondence, for working at his journal—and he would hope, yet again, to receive a reply. In his mind the fire in Joseph's eyes—the pride, the rage—more than equaled the fire at the diamond's heart. This fire had drawn Martin to Joseph and surely, given events in South Africa in the three years since Martin had been there, now marked him as a man in danger.

Marked him easily, Martin thought. Sure. Mark-ease. Marquise. There it was: the diamond that resembled his rowing shell was called a marquise-cut diamond. The light given off by a diamond reflected through its side facets and the marquise cut, he recalled, somewhat shallow due to its elongated shape, did not break up the light into as brilliant a display of prismatic fire as did the round or rose-cut stones. Martin nodded. When he let his mind wander lately—when he didn't force things—he could sometimes retrieve words, pictures, and feelings he feared were lost.

River, a pure white touched lightly with blue, was the name given to the color of the highest quality diamonds. Martin set the boat in the water, climbed in, pushed off with an oar. The water was steel gray, darker than the granite shore. Mists hung along the banks like smoke from dying campfires. He thought of dew riding the filaments of spider webs, recalled a fifteen-minute film he had made a dozen years before, a film still used in schools, about the spider and the fly, Burl Ives singing the ballad on the sound track.

He loved the tidal coves at this time of day, when the wind had not yet come up and the air was still, the water calm. The shell drew only an inch and a half of water, so that even later in the day, when the tide would run out and large sections of the cove would turn to mud flat, he could, if he wished, find enough water to keep going. But he would be home by then, at his desk. He would be writing to Joseph. Perhaps, too, if he felt easy and confident enough, he would write letters to each of his children. Perhaps he would find something clever—a phrase, a joke, a self-mocking description of his solitary life—that would make one of them smile, would make one of them think of him with affection.

He leaned forward, pulled on the oars. The seat whirred gently along its stainless steel runners. The cove stretched before him, some twenty-five to thirty yards across, widening gradually until, at the headlands a quarter of a mile away, it bent and angled west, away from the sea. Later, when he returned to his house, and after he had split wood, showered, and eaten lunch, he would let his mind play back the things it had seen and experienced. Then, like a schoolboy doing his homework, he would spend the early afternoon studying in guide books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries, learning about all those things he had not until now known much about: trees and shrubs and flowers and fish and rocks, boats and clouds and weather and tides and the movements of the stars.

In his films, he often believed, he had cheated: he would learn just enough about a subject so that he could make the film, could render for others the
illusion
that he knew things. Were a merchant to show him a dozen diamonds, though, could he type them, grade them? If he looked through a jeweler's glass, what would he really see, other than the same fractured geometry, the same gorgeous slashes of light the camera had seen?

His film had earned him both the admiration of his peers, and honor in the world. It brought him offers—from producers, studios, foundations, corporations—of a kind he had yearned for through most of his life. He was happy in a way he had never expected to be happy, and to his surprise the happiness had been soiled neither by bitterness nor by cynicism. But what had the film done for Joseph's life? And what had it and all the films before it done to keep his own life from blowing sky-high? What had it done to enable him to keep his wife from betraying him, to keep his children from turning against him? He had loved his family more than anything in the world. He had worked hard at being the man his own father had never been. And then, at the moment when he thought he had it all—the life
and
the work, the family
and
the career—everything came crashing down.

If your mother tells you one thing and I tell you the opposite, what are you to believe? Christ!
He was the one who had cheated on their mother, they said. He was the one who had refused to get back together. He was the one who had destroyed their family. The litany of accusations became painful, crazy, familiar.
He loved his work more than he had ever loved them
. Well, he thought. Short of telling them that their mother had lied to them as maliciously as she had to everyone else, what else could he have said or done? And once used to destroy his happiness at home, his success in the world came to seem hollow, repugnant, deadly.

He pulled hard on the right oar so that the boat curved to the left, turned into a narrow channel lined on either side by high banks. He noted pin oak, mountain laurel, birch. He recalled the first time his children had come to his new apartment, after the court decision, how awkward it had been, how happy he had been before their visit, when he was alone in their rooms, making up their new beds for them, touching clean linens that they would soon touch.

A flight of black duck shot out from the steep bluff to his right, crossed the cove like an arrow, disappeared. The bluff was covered with swamp maples, their leaves a wild explosion of vermilion against a wall of green. He rowed on. There were no houses along this arm of the cove, no signs that, less than a mile away, most of the world was waking, was going about its daily business.

There were black workers in South Africa who traveled eight hours a day in old school buses, back and forth on small hard seats, from their settlements to their jobs, their jobs to their settlements. They worked ten to twelve hour days, averaged less than three hours sleep a night. What, other than death, could ever burst from them the way colors now burst from the trees he passed? If his children could understand why it was he had tried for so many years to get the images that were in his mind—that exploded
there
endlessly—onto strips of celluloid, would that allow them to understand that he was not the kind of man who would have done the awful things their mother claimed he did?

He saw the woman's face again, and she seemed to be asking him questions, encouraging him to talk. What she wanted to know was this:
If he was not a film maker, who and what was he?

He pushed off with his legs, pulled harder, felt sweat slide down his back. The faster the shell moved through the water, the more stable it became. When he was rowing well he could do nearly five miles in an hour, the shell racing along as if it were riding
on
the water, not in it.

He saw the woman reach toward him, to touch his mouth, and then the boat was rising crazily from the water. He gasped, held his breath, saw the water churn inches from his face, felt his heart crash against his chest. He screamed, raised the oars high, shifted his body to the right. The shell rocked violently, took on water, righted itself. He sucked in air, imagined his heart falling from his chest, sinking through the surface of the icy water. He saw a young boy in a row boat, the boy letting his dropline down, hooking the heart, hauling it in, gazing at it with curiosity.

The boy was his son, Dan, he saw at once, and Dan looked the way he himself had looked when he was Dan's age—twelve—visiting his Uncle George in Orleans, on the Cape. Martin started rowing again. He had caught a crab, he realized, playing the scene back—he had hooked the water with his left oar while pushing the oar forward, while the woman reached toward him. The boat had veered, tilted. In his mind the woman was smiling at him still, as if she had noticed neither his error nor his panic. Blood rushed to his heart, then flowed from it: to his arms, his hands, his legs. In the bottom of the shell, water sloshed back and forth, drenching his sneakers, his socks, his jeans. He had long ago stopped trying to explain who he was by the craziness of his childhood, by what had gone on hour after hour in the three small rooms of his Somerville home. Everybody had parents. Everybody had a childhood. He rowed harder, let images refract inside his mind, let light play on the planes of the woman's face. She was about his own age, he guessed. But why were her eyes suddenly sad, and why, when she began to speak, did her upper lip tremble slightly? It occurred to him that he could reach toward her if he wanted. He could reach toward her and reassure her with the touch of
his
hand. The movement came to him as a sequence of matching shots: she looking into a silver mirror, he looking down at the plum-colored water. He saw crow-black hair threaded with gray, high foreheads, sad pearl-gray eyes, wide mouths that were slightly open, as if about to speak. Her face was his face.