Finding a Girl in America (27 page)

Wondering about Sharon and Lori gives him some respite but it is not complete. For all during the drive there is the cool hollow of sadness around his heart, and something is wrong with his body. Gravity is more intense: his head and shoulders and torso are pulled downward to the car seat. He crosses the bridge to the island, turns right into the game preserve, driving past the booth which is unmanned now that summer is over. To their right is the salt marsh, to their left dunes so high they cannot see the ocean. He parks facing a dune, and walking between Lori and Sharon, holding their hands, he starts climbing the grass-tufted slope of sand; his body is still heavy.

At the dune's top the sea breeze strikes them cool but not cold, coming over water that is deep blue, for the air is dry, and they stop. They stand deeply inhaling the air from the sea. On the crest of the dune, his eyes watering from the breeze, holding Lori's and Sharon's hands, breathing the ocean-smell he loves, Hank suddenly does not know what he will do about last year's dead fetus, last night's dream of her on the summer beach with him and Sharon; he cannot imagine the rest of his life. He sees himself growing older, writing and running and teaching, but that is all, and his tears now are not from the breeze.

‘Let's go,' he says, and they walk southward, releasing each other's hands so they can file between the low shrubs on the dune's top. He turns back to the girls and points at Canadian geese far out in the marsh, even their distant silhouettes looking fat, and he thinks of one roasting, the woman—who? his mother? he sees no face—bending over to open the oven door, peering in, basting. They walk quietly. He can feel them all, free of house-wood and car-metal that surround most of their time, feeling the hard sand underfoot, the crisp brown shrubs scratching their pants, their eyes looking ahead and down the slopes of the dune, out at the marsh with its grass and, in places, shimmer of standing water, and its life of tiny creatures they can feel but not see; and at the ocean, choppy and white-capped, and he imagines a giant squid and killer whale struggling in a dance miles deep among mountains and valleys. For an instant he hopes Lori is at least a bit sad, then knows that is asking too much.

They walk nearly two miles, where the dune ends, and beneath them the island ends too at the river which flows through the marsh, into the sea. The river is narrow and, where it meets the sea, the water is lake-gentle. It is shallow and, in low tide, Hank and Sharon have waded out to a long sandbar opposite the river's mouth. Hank goes down a steep, winding path, and they move slowly. At the bottom they cross the short distance of sand and watch the end of the river, and look southeast where the coast below them curves sharply out to sea. They turn and walk up the beach, the sand cool and soft. He is walking slightly ahead of them, holding back just enough to be with them and still alone; for he feels something else behind him too, so strongly that his impulse is to turn and confront it before it leaps on him. He wants to run until his body feels light again. They move closer to the beach and walk beside washed-up kelp and green seaweed. He stops and turns to Lori and Sharon. Their faces are wind-pink, their hair blows across cheeks and eyes.

‘I don't know where the car is,' he says. ‘But I know a restaurant it can get us to.'

Sharon points at the dune.

‘On the other side,' she says.

‘Oh. I thought I parked it in the surf.'

‘It's
right
over there.'

‘No.'

He looks at the dune.

‘You want to bet?'

‘Not with you. You'd bet a dinner at the Copley against a hamburger at Wendy's.'

‘Okay. What's the Copley?'

‘A place I'm not taking you. Lori and I go Dutch.'

‘That expensive, huh?'

‘We go everywhere Dutch. You can't tell me that part of the dune looks different.'

‘See the lifeguard tower?'

He looks north behind him, perhaps a half-mile away. Sharon talks to his back.

‘When we climbed the dune I looked that way and saw it.'

He looks at her. ‘If you're right, I'll buy you a meal.'

‘You already said you'd do that.'

‘Right. Let's climb, ladies.'

He leads them up and, at the top, they see the car to the south.

‘I was a bit off,' Sharon says.

‘No more than a hundred yards.'

The restaurant is nearby, on the mainland road that curves away from the island; and it is there, seated and facing Sharon and Lori, that whatever pursued him on the beach strikes him: lands howling on his back. He can do nothing about it but look at Sharon's cheerful face while he feels, in the empty chair beside him, the daughter salined or vacuumed from Monica a year ago. The waitress is large and smiling, a New England country woman with big, strong-looking hands, and she asks if they'd like something to drink. Sharon wants a Shirley Temple, Lori wants a margarita, and Hank wants to be drunk. But he is wary. When his spirit is low, when he can barely feel it at all, just something damp and flat lying over his guts, when even speaking and eating demand effort, and he wants to lie down and let the world spin while he yearns for days of unconsciousness, he does not drink. The only cure then is a long run. It does not destroy what is attacking him, but it restores his spirit, and he can move into the world again, look at people, touch them, talk. Only once in his life it has not worked: the day after Edith told him to leave. He would like to run now. Whatever leaped on his back has settled there, more like a deadly snake than a mad dog. He must be still and quiet. He remembers one of his favorite scenes in literature, in Kipling: ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,' when Nagaina the mother cobra comes to the veranda where the family is eating, coiled and raised to strike the small boy, the three of them—father, mother, son—statues at their breakfast table.

‘A mongoose,' he says.

‘He'll ask me how to make that one.'

‘It comes with a cobra egg in its mouth.' She is looking down at him, her eyes amused yet holding on to caution too, perhaps anger, waiting to see if this is harassment or friendly joking. ‘It's the last egg in the nest. He's killed the others. He comes up behind the cobra and she turns on him just long enough for the father to reach over the table and grab his son and pull him away.'

‘Sounds like a good one,' she says. ‘Must start with rum and keep building.'

She is smiling now, and he is ashamed, for he sees in her quickly tender eyes that she knows something is wrong.

‘I'm sorry,' he says.

‘For what? I like a good story. If we had cobras around here I swear to God I'd go live up ten flights of stairs in Boston and never see grass or stars again. You going to drink that?'

‘I'll have a Coke with a wedge of lime.'

‘So that's a mongoose. I think I'll call it that, see what he comes up with. Now I like Jackson. But he's his own man behind the bar. Any time—
every
time—somebody orders a sombrero, he says, What do you think this is, a dairy bar? Doesn't matter who they are. He makes them, but he always says that. Won't make a frozen daiquiri. Nobody orders them anyway. Maybe five-six a year. He just looks at them and says, Too much trouble; I'll quit my job first. Young guy came in the other night and ordered a flintlock. Ever hear of that one?'

‘No.'

‘Neither did Jackson. He said, Go home and watch Daniel Boone, and he went to the other end of the bar till finally the guy goes down there and asks can he have a beer. Jackson looks at him a while then opens up the bottle and says. You want a glass with that or a powder horn?'

Hank keeps smiling, thinking that on another day he would stay here for hours, drinking long after his meal, so he could banter with this woman with the crinkles at her eyes and the large hands he guesses have held many a happy man. He could get into his country-western mood and find the songs on the jukebox and ask about her children and wonder how many heartbreaks she had given and received.

‘Better just tell him Coke then,' he says. ‘You order a mongoose and he'll send me the snake.'

‘He's a bit of one himself. Coke with a wedge,' and she is gone. He looks at Lori. She understands, and he glances away from her, down at the red paper placemat. When the waitress brings their drinks, they order food, taking a long time because Sharon cannot decide and the waitress, who is not busy this early in the afternoon, enjoys helping her, calls her Honey, tells her the veal cutlet is really pork tenderloin but it's good anyway, the fisherman's platter is too big but if she doesn't stuff on the fries she might eat most of the fish, with maybe some help from the mongoose-drinker. Sharon orders a sirloin, and Hank is glad: he wants to watch her eating meat.

When it comes he does watch, eating his haddock without pleasure or attention: Sharon is hungry and she forks and cuts fast, and he watches the brown and pink bite go into her mouth, watches her lips close on it and her jaws working and the delight on her face. He remembers the smell of the sea, the feel of her hand in his, the sound of her breath beside him.
Life
, he thinks, and imagines the taste of steak in her mouth, the meat becoming part of her, and as his heart celebrates these pleasures it grieves, for he can see only the flesh now, Sharon's, and the flesh of the world: its terrain and its seasons of golden and red, then white, then mud and rain and green, and the blue and green months with their sun burning then tanning her skin. All trials of the spirit seem nothing compared to this: his grave and shameful talk with Monica and her parents, Monica's tears and seven more months of gestation, his taking the girl home, blanket-wrapped on his lap on the plane: cries in the night and diapers, formula and his impatience and frustration and anger as he powdered the pink peach of her girlhood, staying home with her at night and finding babysitters so he could teach—all this goes through his mind like blown ashes, for he can only feel the flesh: Sharon's and his and the daughter in the chair beside him: she is a small child now, has lived long enough to love the sun on her face and the taste of steak. And for the first time in his life he understands that grief is not of the mind but the body. He can dull his mind, knock it out with booze and sleeping pills. But he can do nothing about his pierced body as he watches Sharon eat, can do nothing about its pieces sitting beside him in the body of a daughter, nor about the part of it that was torn from him last October, that seems still to live wherever they dumped it in the hospital in New York. He offers Sharon dessert. The waitress says the apple pie is hot and homemade, just out of the oven. Sharon orders it with vanilla ice cream, and Hank watches her mouth open wide for the cold-hot bites, and hears the sea waves again, and sees the long rubbery brown kelp washed up on the sand.

He does not phone Edith that night because Lori stays with him. She ought to go back to the dormitory: Friday night she walked to his house with clothes and books in a knapsack, and if she goes back now she can say she spent the weekend in Boston. If anyone asks. No one does, because her friends know where she is. Tomorrow she will have to wake at six while the students are still sleeping and no one is at work except the kitchen staff and one security guard who might see her walking from the direction of Hank's apartment, not the bus stop. The security guard and kitchen staff are not interested; even if they were, their gossip doesn't travel upward to the administration; student, secretarial, and faculty gossip does. Lori and Hank have been doing this for nearly a year, with a near-celibate respite last summer when, except for her one day off a week, they saw each other in Maine, after she had finished waitressing for the night. The drive from his apartment was only an hour, but he decided, grinning at himself, that it meant he truly loved her, that he had not just turned to her during the school year because he was lonely. He had not done anything so adolescent since he had been one: at ten he met her in the restaurant, they went to a bar for a couple of hours, then to her house for coffee in the kitchen, talking quietly while her parents slept; they kissed goodnight for a long time, then he drove home. He did not even consider making love in the car, told her if he did that, hair would grow on his bald spot, his love handles would disappear, and he'd probably get pimples. Some nights her family, or part of it, was at the restaurant, and they all went out together: father, mother, and one or both of her sisters home for a weekend. Hank liked her father, though he was hard to talk with, for he rarely spoke; Lori's mother did most of that, and the two sisters did most of the rest. Everyone pretended Hank and Lori were friends, not lovers, and although Hank wanted it that way, it made him uncomfortable, increased his guilt around Lori's father, and kept him fairly quiet. Often he wanted to take Mr. Meadows aside and tell him he and Lori were lovers and that he loved her and was not using her. He felt none of this with Mrs. Meadows, perhaps because as father of a daughter he imagined Mr. Meadows's concern. Hank danced with all the women in the family and the mother was foxier on the floor than her daughters. She told Hank how pretty she was by joking about how old she was, about her lost figure (the body he held was as firm as Lori's); she asked if he wanted to go to the parking lot for some fresh air, smiling in a way that made him believe and disbelieve the invitation; she did not ask what he was doing with Lori, but when she talked about Lori she looked at him, as they danced, with various expressions: interrogation, dislike, and, most disconcerting of all, jealousy and lasciviousness. On Lori's day off each week she drove down to Hank's, telling her mother the beach was better there, sand instead of rocks; she needed to get out of town for a day; Hank did all that driving back and forth and she owed him one day of visiting him; told her mother all sorts of surface truths her mother did not believe, and on that day they made love and after dinner she drove home again.