Don't Worry About the Kids (27 page)

She explained to him that the single-engine planes he often saw circling about the harbor were there to spot sets of herring and to radio their locations to the fishing boats. The boats used large nets called purse-seines. When the fishermen surrounded the herring with the net and pulled a cord, the cord would cinch the bottom and trap the fish. Then the fishermen would haul the net up and suck the fish out of it with enormous hoses. The hoses measured two to two-and-a-half feet across. The fishermen salted the herring, layer by layer, until the boat was down to its gunnels, then transported their cargo straight to the factories in Rockland. A single set of herring might fill three or four twenty-four-foot trawlers. As a girl she had begged to go out with her father in the boats so she could see the herring come hurtling from the hose in a silver stream, as if spangled in sequins. Wouldn't he want to film that?

To film her as a young girl watching the men fish? he asked. Of course he would love to film that. But how? She talked about growing up in Tenants Harbor, about how things had changed. October was her favorite month, she said. It was a time when the tourists and summer people were gone, when the harshness of a long, dark Maine winter had not yet moved in, when life, suspended between autumn and winter, made her feel that time itself moved more slowly, that her home and town were closer to what they had been thirty and forty years ago. He listened, with interest, but what he really wanted to do, he knew, was to take her face gently between his hands, to kiss her, to press her body to his, to have her mouth open to him, to have her hands move through his hair, across his face, down his sides, along his back.

Her name was Nancy Medeiros. She was forty-two years old, divorced once—ten years before—and she had no children. Her house had been built in 1922 by her father and her grandfather. She had gone to Wellesley College, and now lived and worked outside of Boston. It had taken several mornings for him to work up his courage, and when he had done so, and had begun a conversation, she had responded pleasantly, easily. This was the third evening in a row they were together—they had driven north to Rockland for dinner the night before; and the evening before that they had gone for a walk along the beach in front of his house.

Her face moved in and out of focus. Soft focus. Deep focus. He had had too much to drink, he knew, and he wondered if she noticed. He imagined a camera dollying in, centering on her eyes, the film a grainy black and white. He remembered what a director had said about Garbo; about how during a take the scene would seem ordinary, but that when he played it back on the screen you could see something behind the eyes that you never saw until you had photographed them. You could see thought, the director said.

He went to the window, trying to walk a straight line, trying not to sway. He felt light-headed. Go slowly, he told himself. The fog was moving out again, so that, in the dusk, the islands began to appear as if from nowhere, as if rising from the sea itself, like ghosts. He saw himself on the beach, Nancy materializing suddenly in front of him, out of the fog. Her cheeks were moist, her black hair glistening. Had she been crying? He imagined a Close Up of a single raindrop on her cheek. He could make the drop of rain appear to be a tear, he knew. He could turn a tear into a river, a river into a waterfall, a waterfall into a flood, a flood into a lake, a lake back again to the calm gray of her eye. On film there was nothing he could not do.

She was talking about the tidal coves, about how it still amazed her to know that the water could rise and fall a full ten or twelve feet in a day. Voice Over, he thought: Nancy talking about her childhood while the tide moved out, while a blue heron poked aimlessly in the mud. Her voice, like the film, had a mottled, grainy quality to it. Still Shots: Nancy at 10, Nancy at 15, Nancy at 20. Had he known her through those years he imagined that they would have been good friends, in the way cousins could become friends. He did not imagine that they would have let themselves be drawn to one another sexually. For if they had, it would have destroyed the safety of a friendship in which they could confide anything and everything.

That, he decided, was what frightened him now: if he kissed her—if they made love—would he still be able to talk with her as if she were a friend? He didn't know which scared him more: the possibility that she would reject him, or the possibility that she might not.

She offered him another drink and he declined, said something about having to get up early the next morning, about wanting to stop in town on the way home to telephone his daughter, Carol. It was her fifteenth birthday. Nancy said he could use her phone, that she would leave him alone and go to the kitchen, make some supper for them—would he stay?—and he found himself feeling flustered and dizzy, talking about his answering machine. He told her that when he called in, he would sometimes imagine a Close Up of a telephone, and then a deep voice booming through static:
Hi! You've reached Yasnaya Polyana. This is Leo Tolstoy speaking to you on a recording. I'm sorry I'm not here right now, but if you'll leave your name and a brief message…

She laughed and refilled his glass. He sat in a rocking chair, his back to the living room window. She set the telephone down on the table beside him, then sat across from him, a Hudson Bay blanket across her lap.

“How are you, Martin?”

The urgency in her voice startled him.

“What?”

“How
are
you?”

He shrugged. Her voice was warm, close. He pressed his eyes tight, saw white lights swirling as if being drawn into an amber whirlpool. Bourbon. He had not drunk this much since he had left Manhattan. He opened his eyes and she was still there. He started to tell her that he felt fine, that he was in the best physical shape of his life—from the rowing, the wood splitting, the walks, from being on the wagon the past two months—but she interrupted him and asked him why he was here
really
. She could understand his not wanting to make a film for a while, his wanting to be in a place where nobody knew him and he knew nobody. But why not go to Paris to
not
make a film? Why not go to Florence, to Vienna, to Bangkok?

He said that an old friend from college, Phil Yarnell, aware of his troubles, had offered him the house. She nodded, said that she knew Phil.

“You've had a hard time, haven't you?”

“Yes.”

“Phil told me about it—not the details—just that you'd been through hell, that he didn't quite know how you had made it to the other side.”

“Me neither.”

“What I wanted to say—to put on the table between us, as it were—is that he told me about how difficult things had been, how discouraged you'd become. I probably should have said something that first morning. It hasn't seemed quite fair these past few evenings, me knowing and you not knowing that I know.”

“It's all right. Who cares?”

“I do.”

She was beside him then, lifting the glass of bourbon from his hand. Her hand touched his. He felt chilled, wished that he could ask her to wrap him in a blanket, to set him on the porch and rock him back and forth. He imagined the porch coming detached, moving out to sea. He wanted her slender fingers to be ribs cradling him, her fingertips touching, her hands a small boat riding the waves in the harbor. Fade. Dissolve…

She asked him if he would like to talk about it—about what had happened—and he said that he preferred not to, that it was the same boring horror story most men had to tell these days, filled with the same standard items: infidelity, jealousy, rage, divorce, depression, humiliation, insolvency, lies, pain, fear.

“That's
all?”

He shrugged.

“What's the hardest thing, Martin?”

The directness of her question surprised him. “The hardest thing is not having my children around,” he said. He was relieved to hear his answer, yet afraid to look at her. “I miss being
near
them. I brought boxes of photos, some old home movies, and when I first got here I thought I might make a film, using family material and mixing it with whatever I might discover here—something about daily life in the town.” He stopped. “I don't know what I'm saying,” he stated. “I mean, I'm not sure I'm being clear—if
I
knew what I really wanted to do. I just had an idea that maybe I could alternate scenes of my life here with scenes of the life we used to have, then put it all together and send it to them for a Christmas present or something.”

He looked up. Nancy was smiling, her gray eyes fixed on him, asking him to tell her more. “But I haven't begun yet. I haven't had the heart to begin, if you want the truth.”

Martin shrugged. The ice cubes swirled in his glass, creating arabesques of pale amber. He felt dizzy, vaguely nauseated. He wanted to lie down, to sleep. He thought he could hear Dan's voice, asking him if he would buy him a Ferrari. Dan pleaded with him, promising to pay him back out of his allowance, week by week, saying that he knew he could pay the whole thing back some day… at least by the time Martin was dead. Astonished, Martin looked at his son, and then, an instant later, saw the light in Dan's eyes, the pleasure Dan took in teasing him this way.

“I had the epigraph chosen,” Martin offered.

“Yes?”

“All intact families are alike,” he recited, “but each divorced family is crazy in its own way.”

“Listen, the stories
are
familiar enough, Martin, even routine these days,” Nancy said, “except that when there are children involved, when the kids are endlessly torn, endlessly in fear of losing one or the other, of being abandoned—” She stopped. “All right. So listen. Do you know what
my
idea is, about what grown men and women should do to avoid all the crap they put themselves and their children through?”

“Tell me.”

“I think that once the parents decide to get divorced, and if they both want the kids, then they should flip a coin and the loser should put a bullet through his or her head.”

Martin applauded. She clinked her glass against his and then her voice came to him from a distance. She was in the kitchen, telling him that he could have privacy while he telephoned his daughter. He walked outside, inhaled enormous quantities of salt air, tried to sober himself up. He wanted to feel better. The islands in the harbor were dark brown mounds on a disc of black glass. He imagined a cold room, a tub full of warm water, the steam billowing up. He imagined the camera rising to reveal a layer of clear air just above the tub, between the water and the steam. The camera dipped slightly and he saw himself in the tub, his eyes closed. Was he asleep? He imagined intercutting, from one scene to the other, from the mists in the room to the mists on the bay. He saw his head sinking below the water, the water turning red, the red bleeding to pink, to white.

He came back inside, went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, looked in the mirror and imagined a Sony camcorder on a shelf in the medicine chest, behind the mirror. He saw himself in a black scuba-diver's suit, underwater, filming the fishermen as they dragged the bottom of the harbor with their balloon nets, raking in cod, hake, halibut, haddock, and thousands of tiny plastic capsules. The capsules came spraying out through a hose and the hose became his mouth and he leaned forward, wanting, he knew, to smash his head against the mirror. Would he ever,
ever
stop seeing the world as if through a camera lens? Maybe he really
didn't
love anything in life more than the images that roamed through his mind. Maybe his wife and children had known something he still didn't know.

In the kitchen, while they ate, she asked him questions and he found that he wanted to answer, that he wanted to tell her everything. He went through the story, sometimes summarizing, sometimes going into detail. Nancy didn't say much while he talked, except to ask a question now and then, and her questions seemed eminently sane: Why did he still seem to feel the need to justify himself against accusations that were so patently ridiculous? Why had he chosen, so rigidly, to hold back the truth about their mother from his children? There was something about his actions that didn't make sense—some part of the story he was leaving out.

They finished their coffee, returned to the living room. He didn't understand why he had felt so free suddenly to mouth off to her the way he had, why he was able to listen to her questions without feeling much need to argue against them. Was
that
crazy? he asked. She replied by saying what he had been hoping to hear—that she thought he was a very attractive man, more attractive now when he seemed less sure of himself, now that he had given her his story. She said that what he'd been through
was
horrifying, but that she figured he had spent enough time during the past year or two feeling sorry for himself. The last thing he needed was for her to feel sorry for him, too. Still, she wondered about something he had said on their first evening together, about his feeling that he might not make films for a while because he didn't
know
anything. She couldn't understand that. He knew how to make films, didn't he? She had seen a few of them, on public television, and they were excellent. Why, then, should he feel that knowing about fishing nets or sea breezes was more valuable or real than knowing about how to make a film?

He stood, said that he had to go. Could they get together again the next day? She stood next to him. She smiled and touched his arm, told him that she hoped he wouldn't regret having told her so much that was so private. The next time they were together, she promised, she would tell him the story of
her
life. Fair enough?

Fair enough, he said, and then, to his surprise, he took her face in his hands, very gently, and kissed her. It was the first time in nearly twenty years that he had tasted the lips of a woman he was not married to. Nancy's lips seemed amazingly warm and soft, and when he heard a slight whimpering sound come from her throat, he saw no pictures, imagined no camera angles. Her mouth opened to him, her hands went to his hair, then moved along his neck, his face, his sides, his back.