Perfection (20 page)

“I don’t know, honey, I ask myself the same question every day.”

She gave me a hug, one that I really needed, and smoothed my damp hair.

“But I’ll do better,” I said, my tears, snot, and sweat dampening Anna’s clean tank top, “starting right now, this minute. I promise.”

“I know you will,” Anna said, with a confidence I welcomed. “You’re tougher than this. I know you are. You need to have a nice cool shower, take care of yourself, and eat some food. Here, have a tissue.” I tried to wipe my eyes and dripping nose with a sense of purpose.

“Things will get better, right?” I asked her, like a pleading younger sister. “Just tell me it can’t get any worse.”

She smiled and began to laugh, and then I laughed, just because it felt good to laugh.

Anna and I completed preparations for our three weeks in Maine.
We had gone up together the year before, while Henry was away on a West Coast trip and John had chosen to stay home. At the time we never imagined the vacation in Maine would be a sort of dry run for our future lives. Foodstuffs and a few essential kitchen tools were now carefully stacked in corrugated boxes I’d snagged from the grocery store. Our clothing and linens were folded into duffel bags. I was almost ready to leave.

I drove the familiar route to Tomas’s home. I was pretty sure I would return home from Maine to find another woman in his life, perhaps even someone he had kept from me to spare my feelings. But I wanted us to end as friends.

We stood in the grassy meadow, behind his studio, where there was a bit of shade.

He said he had taken a lot of criticism about being with me. People had said he was taking advantage of me, the lonely, distraught widow.

I knew that. I’d heard the same rumors. “You didn’t take advantage of me. I didn’t do anything I didn’t want to do. You and I know that, even if those people don’t.”

Sometimes my emotional turmoil had frightened him, he said. I knew that too. I thanked him for the companionship that had kept me going longer than we’d both planned.

I told him I loved him. He said he loved me. So, we loved each other, in some way that was meaningful.

“I think,” I said, “that one day, we’ll both understand this better, what happened these last months.”

He nodded.

I felt intense sorrow and loss but also some freedom. Now I could start to walk away from his twenty-eight-year-old world, and he could walk away in the other direction and find whatever
it was he wanted next.

He gave me an old stone roof slate from a pile in his backyard, leftovers from his house renovation. “You know, a clean slate,” he said with a smile. I took the gift with pleasure.

When I got home I wrote on it with some of Liza’s colored chalk: “Things will get better, things will get easier.” I propped the slate up on the counter in my kitchen as a reminder for future dark days.

August 2003

Blue sky, feathery clouds,
a supreme August day. Barefoot in a bit of mown grass, I was hanging up laundry, wearing cotton underwear and an old tank top. My mother had bought this tank top for me, Calvin Klein no less, the summer I packed up to go to college. It had faded from black, through many washings, to a charcoal gray.

The laundry line was strung up between two arthritic, lichen-covered crab apple trees. One by one, I pulled out clothespins from an old half-gallon plastic milk container, the top cut away for easy access. The clothespins were as gray and weathered as the cedar shingles on the farmhouse just down the gentle slope of open meadow, edged with wild rosebushes and thistle.

Anna was a small moving form in the middle distance, recognizable in her cheerful red canvas sun hat, wandering the low-tide mudflat beach. Her son, Leo, and my Liza, in their colorful swimsuits and billed caps, trailed behind her with plastic beach buckets, filled with a collection of small blue crabs, hermit crabs, and periwinkle snails, a mucky, messy adventure. We’d have to hose the kids down later and wash all those clothes. The kids loved rinsing themselves off with the coiled green garden hose, and I looked forward to the ritual of laundry. I would have been happy
to spend every noontime on this island hanging up clothes and taking them down.

You never can tell much about weather out here. The sheets and towels, T-shirts, shorts, and sundresses snapping and ruffling in the breeze might be sopping wet with rain or invisible and clammy in a pea soup fog within the hour. It’s what I’ve always liked about this place. You must surrender control and just enjoy whatever happens.

Sometimes it takes several days to get clothes dry. I hang them up, rushing back half an hour later to take them down as rain clouds approach, and hang them back up again when the storm passes. During longer damp spells, I reluctantly drive to the coin-operated Laundromat on the other side of the island to use the dryer. But I always feel cheated. Hanging the laundry is both a meditative ritual and a game, never a chore, not here.

Henry and I started coming to this house the year after Liza was born. I enjoyed hanging up the laundry in those early parenting years, with my baby crawling about at my feet. Liza liked to pull the wet clothes out of the wicker basket, or follow grasshoppers through the grass, trying to catch them in her still clumsy hands.

Henry never really learned how to relax here. He had trouble with solitude, and after a few days was desperate for social activity. He organized dinner parties for our small collection of island friends. He needed off-island trips to shop for these events, to reconnect with “the real world” and buy a same-day copy of
The New York Times
. Two Augusts earlier, he had insisted on paying for dial-up Internet service and spent many days indoors, in front of his laptop. He’d said he was researching and writing, but now I thought it more likely that he’d been corresponding with Cathy.

Fortunately, my new understanding did nothing to ruin the island for me. I was happy to hang up laundry, go on walks in the woods or on the pink rock ledges, make paintings of the rocks and sea, think about how I missed kissing Tomas, take down laundry, take my turn making macaroni and cheese for the kids, play evening games of Monopoly, make pancakes, hang up more laundry.

Anna and I had caravanned in our separate cars, each packed with gear and groceries, wending our way up the coast, stopping off to visit friends in Portland. The final push led us to the dock where we waited our turn to drive onto the car ferry. Life slows down as soon as you arrive at the ferry terminal—there is no rushing this situation. Anna and I spent the one-hour wait happily eating a crab roll from a nearby restaurant while the kids played at water’s edge until one of them spotted the ferry coming into view. Driving onto the ramp was a mental journey, signaling the end of worries about work, and the turmoil I had left behind at home. Once we were parked on the deck, the four of us were giddy with anticipation.

“I can’t wait to see the big tide pool again!” Liza shouted above the noise of the ferry engine. She and Leo began planning their first creature-hunting adventure. Anna and I smiled, delighted to see the children so eager. The wind whipped her red ponytail back and forth like a flag on a mast. Despite the long driving days, she looked more relaxed than I’d seen her in months. I hoped that her divorce battle in progress wouldn’t press too much on our time here.

After unpacking our groceries and making up the beds, we slipped quickly into an easy routine. Anna and I rose early to
make coffee and breakfast, while the kids lazed around the house. Sometimes Anna and I tried to do yoga on the lumpy lawn in front of the house. Liza and Leo watched on amused, occasionally inverting into a Downward Dog with us before we all headed down the path to our tidal pool to do some crab catching. By lunch I’d hung out the wash for the day, and we had planned an afternoon activity.

The first days were filled with simple discoveries and amusements—caterpillars and butterflies to inspect, a colony of funnel-shaped spiderwebs in the tall grass, a brightly painted lobster buoy washed up on the shore. There were apples and raspberries to pick along the road. Herons and cormorants came to feed in our inlet, and an occasional eagle perched in the tall firs. One afternoon the kids staged a hermit crab race on our deck, unbeknownst to the hermit crabs, who skittered as they pleased. Other days Leo and Liza played with toys in the grass or we read them books while lounging in the hammock.

Nighttime was less lonely as the four of us climbed the staircase of the house, with steep treads so narrow that it resembled a ladder. There were three bedrooms on the second floor, all in a line. The kids shared the end room, and Anna took the middle bedroom. I slept in the room Henry and I had always shared. A twisted maple tree with small, ashy silver leaves gently tapped its branches against the glass panes. The owners of the house had planted another maple nearby, anticipating the death of this crooked old lady, but I was praying she had a few more years in her yet. Every year, as we packed up to leave the house, I wished her a healthy winter and a fond farewell, just in case. In the middle of winter, back in New York, when I felt a yearning for the sea and that house and that cove, it was the sound of the brown leaves
rustling on the oak tree in my own yard that brought the island back to me.

One morning I drove with Liza
to visit a longtime friend named Jim. Now in his late sixties, Jim had originally come to the island as a summer visitor like me but had been living there full-time for many years, making the most of his quiet life by developing his gifts as a glass artisan. Jim had one of those New England faces that you might encounter in a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne: long, vertically lined, with an exuberant head of white hair—a retired sea captain came to mind. I always saw him in the same clothes—a pair of well-worn trousers once white, now a mottled putty; an equally worn pale blue, short-sleeved button-down shirt flecked with stains; leather boat shoes or old white sneakers—all of which looked as dignified on him as a tuxedo would on any other man. As we approached the house with its lush vegetable garden, his two elderly Jack Russell terriers trotted out to greet us.

In addition to his skills as an artist and gardener, Jim was an excellent and adventurous chef. He and Henry had met through other island friends and bonded over the stove. He led us into his home, which felt like being aboard ship, full of marine hardware, shells, dried seaweed, interesting rocks, books, and artwork. Liza was particularly fascinated with a thermometer he displayed on his kitchen counter—a tall glass cylinder in which glass balls filled with colored liquids rose or fell according to the temperature. Jim took Liza’s hand and led her to his back deck so that she could feed the koi fish in his rectangular lily pool. I accompanied
Jim back to the kitchen, where he offered me a glass of wine and I filled him in on the events of July. Though Jim came from another, more discreet generation, he was, in private, one of the most irreverent people I knew, unshockable, with a sly sense of humor.

“Ah, so I see Henry was a bad boy,” he said in his raspy baritone.

“Yes, indeed,” I said with a sigh.

“You know, I saw him,” Jim remarked, matter-of-factly.

“Oh?” I asked. “Tell me. I’ve had plenty of visits myself, but I didn’t realize he was making the rounds.”

“Well, now, let me remember,” he said as he began lunch preparations. “Yes, I was in my truck one morning, coming back from the post office, and I looked to my right and there he was in the passenger seat, smiling at me. Just that one time. I was happy to see him. I miss him.”

“Henry was a good friend, though maybe not the best husband. There sure were a lot of people at that memorial service who loved him. I loved him.”

“I wish he’d been better to you, my dear,” he said, giving my hand an affectionate squeeze. We stood quietly for a time, then we carried lunch out to the elegant table he’d set on the porch. Liza looked up hopefully at the sight of the smoked salmon and homegrown tomato salad.

Over the years I’d become
part of a circle of friends on the island, other families with more or less same-age children. We were artists, writers, musicians, and teachers on summer vacation. Some days we all met at the island’s sandy beach, where we
could hunt for sand dollars at low tide and I could channel my inner architect and help build elaborate castles and water canal systems to temporarily house the hermit crabs that scurried in the shallow waves. Liza was game for a swim in the frigid water and once a season managed to persuade me to take a quick dip. By late afternoon, we were home again, preparing a meal, setting up a board game. Anna and I had some peaceful hours together preparing food and cleaning up afterward, before the evening call from her soon to be ex-husband, John, who called nightly to speak to Leo. If I answered, I greeted him in the most businesslike way before passing on the phone. I couldn’t help notice that even this brief intrusion from outside caused Anna distress.

I was trying as hard as I could to keep my home life far away. In addition to being separated from work, I was separated from e-mail. Cell phone service from our house required walking to a certain spot on the lawn, which discouraged long conversations on blustery or rainy days. I called Tomas every few days, but our conversations were brief.

“I hope you’re getting out to paint a lot,” he said, with a sincere interest I appreciated. He told me about his preparations for a fall exhibition. We didn’t talk much about our parting at the end of July, nor did we dwell on the events of the recent weeks. I hoped we would still be friends when I got back home.

My college friend Sara
arrived from England with her family. For several years, two weeks every August had been our yearly time together. They were staying in a rented house nearby.

On our first group outing, we walked to the other side of the island, the wilder side, which faces the open sea to a place the is
landers call Hero Beach. The landscape is heroic, though it’s not exactly a beach, if sand and swimmable surf are what you expect.

A professor who summers here once explained to me how the island was formed. A wayward piece of Scotland smashed into a small chunk of the North American continent. At Hero Beach the primordial smashup is visible, like a still frame from a Discovery Channel TV reenactment. The pink granite resembles a lava explosion of strawberry soufflé, folding over the crags of charcoal black basalt. When I stood still with the sea and sky around me, I felt a witness to something elemental. I tried to imagine the sound of the original event, which must have been even louder than the ominous roar and smack of the seawater rushing up to meet the basalt crags. After each crash, the sea sucked the wave back, producing a shimmering clatter through millions of rounded pebbles.

We lunched on peanut butter, cheese, and tuna sandwiches. Food on the island was another adventure. There was no real store that year. We’d brought everything on, ordered up a resupply after two weeks from a mainland grocery, and bought milk, eggs, and other staples from the island family gracious enough to set up shop for the summer months in a tumbledown trailer propped on cement blocks. No easy conveniences out here, but the proprietress would bake you a fresh raspberry pie.

The kids—Sara’s two daughters and young son, Liza, and Leo—climbed up and down the ledges; the one we’d named The Brain was our favorite. A huge rising mound, as tall as a two-story cottage, pink, and creviced, its summit offered a view of the heaving sea, the jagged far reaches of the island, other small islands, and rocks covered with bits of windswept seagrass, where seals sunbathed at low tide.

Sara and I sat close to each other on another pink ledge watching Anna and the kids.

“He loved you, you know,” Sara said, as if sensing the essential question that had tormented me these last weeks. “No matter what he did. He loved you. He did like to flirt.” She paused, gazing out to sea before continuing, “He even flirted with me.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I think he flirted with every woman he found attractive. If I were a different kind of woman, if I’d expressed interest, he would have pursued.”

“Yeah, leave no stone unturned, I guess that was his policy.”

“But I know he really loved
you
.” Sara, not the most effusive woman, took my hand and gave it an earnest squeeze. “He wrote you those poems. Whenever I talked to him, he always spoke about you so adoringly. Don’t let this ruin everything you had in sixteen years. That wouldn’t be fair to either of you.”

“I’m not sure what’s left to cherish, really. I’m still trying to understand what kind of love that was, what he supposedly had for me.” I looked off, because tears were coming and I still felt so ashamed and lonely and afraid. “Sara, you are so lucky to have found someone loyal and decent.” Sara put her arm around me, and I relaxed for a moment into her shoulder.