Poached Egg on Toast (6 page)

Ah, Sea. September winds blow the head clear. “Level out, level out,” her friend Jay had said, over the phone. “Go to the Island. Start something entirely new. Get back into yourself. Maybe a story will come to you there.”

As if stories distilled from salt air. It was he who’d phoned two weeks earlier and said, “Now I want you to put down this phone, have a long bath, soak, relax, put on your best perfume and negligee, and when Richard comes home from work, make love to him.”

She heard it for what it was. Male power. The vision, the cure-all. What else could a woman possibly need? And she’d never owned a negligee. Always slept in her bare skin; could not imagine sleeping any other way. Her nakedness pressed into Richard’s nakedness, every night of her life. Almost every night. Not here, at the sea, alone. Jay had added, in his quick, high-pitched voice (Ah, here was the real conversation), “It can never be me, don’t you see, Josie, it can never be me.”

“You’re moving too close,” she’d warned Jay. But he did that. Barged in, disturbed, and then pulled away quickly, as if he’d spilled out too much. Friendship interruptus.

Cosmos—after the Greek,
Kosmos
. Order and harmony in the universe. She saw them at the road’s edge in the early morning as she walked towards shore. Bright faces with their painted disks on long stalks. Showy flowers. Show flowers. Reminded her of school fairs in the fall. Pressed dried petals. Maple leaves and oak under cellophane. Smell of scrapbook paper, labels underlined. The Catholics, the Protestants, only time of year the two schools combined. Where winning a ribbon was made to be everything. Even third place better than not winning at all. Winning, and the smell of fall, the two things brought forward thirty years. Pumpkin, apple, Indian corn, arranged with random artistry across the front of the stage. And huge bouquets of brittle red leaves.

Thirteen years ago, on this island, in a holiday cottage near these same roadside cosmos, she and Richard had sat in a tiny living room, glaring. No order and harmony then. They’d fought—not a serious ongoing argument, but a fight over which of them would stay to look after the children while the other would go to the lodge to have evening tea with the guests. Both wanted to go. Both were tired at the end of a baby-filled day. Both wanted—needed—other adults.

So neither went and, once the children were asleep, the two sat in the living room, their stony heads buried in books, each knowing that the other could not concentrate enough to read.

The adjacent cottage shared a wall with theirs, but had a separate entrance. Because she and Richard sat in frosty silence on their side of the wall, the couple who checked late into the next cottage must have thought the other was vacant. Or could not have known then that the walls might as well have been made of onionskin. Or perhaps didn’t care. Because they arrived and were heard to lock the door, and immediately began to make urgent love on the chesterfield, inches away from where Richard was leaning back against the wall—which began to move in and out like a bellows. Josie was in an armchair a few feet away. If they hadn’t been so angry, she and Richard might have tiptoed into the bedroom and made love, themselves.

But because they’d remained motionless at the beginning, it would have seemed rude somehow, intrusive, even obscene, to start moving about the room. So suffered, yes, suffered the panting and rolling (would two writhing bodies come bursting through the wall?) and the frantic, final moments that culminated in the woman’s terrible, desperate cries (Oh God, No, No!). And then, all was silence.

Josie and Richard, who hadn’t looked at each other throughout this, still could not move. Uncomfortably aware of their own anger. And would it not have been in poor taste to let the couple know they’d shared their passion with unwilling strangers?

She and Richard laughed about it later, but Josie never forgot those terrible, desperate cries. Learning and relearning the ancient lessons of love and pain. (Jay barging into her life—he didn’t like it when she said barging, but there were things about her that seemed to drag him to her and drive him away. Visiting her the first time—Richard was not at home, of course—telling her, suddenly, that he loved her. Phoning later, saying, “You’re so sensual, Josie. Everything about you is so sensual.” And another phone call—the phone was safe, after all—”I’d like to come over there right now, and take you in my arms.” That was Jay all right. Blurting it out and then later, trying to cover his tracks.) And Richard? It was impossible to let Jay or anyone know how deep a love like that could go. Wasn’t love just one measure of life in the same way that life was one measure of love?
Now I want you to go and make love
to Richard. I want you to have it all.

Her feet tramped hard into sand as she skirted the cliff, a brief moment out of the wind’s roar behind a dune. Urgency fell away and she slowed her pace and then stopped when a sudden rainbow arced perfectly in a sky heaped with thick grey clouds. The sun broke through over her shoulder, invisible spray blowing into her face from the northeast. No one was on the beach. Two gulls were lifted by the wind, not having to move a wing; two sandpipers scurried like busybodies on their way to market. She clenched her teeth again when a long line of geese overtook her, the
V
shaping and reshaping in flight; and then another, and another, from behind.

She reached for her shoulder pack, curled up behind the dune, out of the wind, and had a slow, secretive cigarette. (Jay would not think she was sensual, smoking behind a dune.) Richard had lowered his head over his book and said, patiently, confidently—how could he be so sure?—”You’ll be all right. The next story will come. You’ve been writing stories for fifteen years. You’re
between
things.” Her friend Betsy—but Betsy was a lawyer, not a writer—had said, “You’ve always been the first to say that the worst place to be is between stories.” And then cackled and added her own, “Or between lovers.”

Josie had been on the Island only once during the winter months, late winter at that. The year before last. A three-day conference called:
What IS the Story?
And being alone at the shore now, in September, the breakers whipping high, spume flying through the air, the red cliffs silent, silenced (being eaten away steadily, from below), made her think of the March day she’d left the company of her country’s writers, had taken the rented car and driven to the north shore—alone then, too.

She’d been surprised at the red silt strewn through huge chunks of ice. But why surprised? The cliffs were sandstone, the sand naturally eroded, driven, frozen to unpredictable shapes and patterns. The vast floes of ice seemed, at the time, dirty, sad. House-sized chunks were tossed on their sides, battered against the cliffs (battering, battering at the woman. Would they come bursting, in their moment of ecstasy, through the wall?).

Now, she walked an hour along the beach; rolled up her pantlegs, waded through fresh-water rivulets which emptied into the sea but were too wide to hop across, her bare feet cold, so cold they numbed, and after that, seemed warm. Her sandals were in the pack with one apple and the cigarettes. Uncertain Vs of geese trailing, overtaking her, flying into the wind.

(Jay would never be able to tolerate the wind here. He’d phoned one day and was giving the customary report on his health: he’d taken his pills, cleared up the ear infection—for reasons unknown to him and his doctor, he was always getting ear infections—had gone to bed early, and then, had asked, “Now, am I not a good boy?” And she, “I’m not going to answer
that.”
Thinking, “Is it a mother he wants? I don’t need another son. Already have three of my own.” Betsy, who knew Jay, had said, “He’s a hopeless neurotic, Josie, for heaven’s sake!” And she, “That may be. But he’s my friend.”) Breaching. Moving, both forward and back. The human condition. The loneliness of the race, the species.
Friendship interruptus
. Friendship in various guises. Moments that eroded, from below. The red cliffs, falling, falling, into the sea. Massive irregular pieces of rock strewn like crumbled Walls of Jericho. Eaten away. Battered (Oh God, No, No!).

But she wasn’t alone, after all. She climbed around the cliff, bare feet searching out shelves of rock, and saw, in a cove, two horses in the sea. One with a rider, bareback, holding the collar with his left hand, a short thick rope in his right. Dressed in waterproof pants and jacket, rubber boots. Every few steps, he slapped the horse gently with the rope. For the horse was dragging a heavy load, harvesting Irish moss, from the sea.

A second man, in chest waders, walked into the waves with his horse, the two joined by a tether, though neither seemed to lead the other. They worked in unison; each knew what had to be done. The horse made a continuous figure eight, dragging the wide heavy scoop behind, a third man on shore upending it so quickly no pause was necessary to dump the load; the scoop landing right side up, the horse entering sideways, again and again, the cold sea that whipped its belly from below, white froth tossing at its neck, its tail dripping and bedraggled, its mane tangled and green as if slow moss had been growing growing creeping up into it through time. (Were the horses glad to go back to their stables? Were their bellies shocked by the frigid water?)

Two farm trucks rattled over the rocks, making a run for it when the waves sucked out—Josie couldn’t see how they could have got down here below the cliffs. They loaded the moss between the board sides, the man on shore raking and then tossing to his right the unwanted kelp with his bare hands. And the wind: preventing speech, sound, thought. The only thing that existed was dogged motion, the rhythm of work. Horse and rider, pushing against high huge waves, entering them as if one animal had been fused from two. The sea a rusty brown because of the red sand churning. For there was no harvest without high sea. The moss a green deeper than could be imagined, suspended under the surface, washing in in in because of the contours of continent, this portion of continent that had shaped this cove.

She thought of accusations that had drifted her way. That she was guilty of probing back, back, always further back. Her friends. One layer of reality skimmed close to the ground and this she insisted on facing, examining. Richard seldom looked at it, Jay wouldn’t look at it, Betsy came close. (Betsy asked her once, “Have you ever fucked in the back seat of a car?” “Front,” Josie had answered. And they’d started snorting and hooting. Their husbands’ eyebrows moving; the men had been deep in conversation of their own, and thought, but weren’t certain, that they’d heard the fringes of this one.) Yes, she sometimes faced that line across the earth with Betsy. But she freely admitted (and this itself was contradiction) that she lived largely in the world of her imagination. For how could she be a storyteller and not dwell in the land of her own creations? No single version of her fiction was the truth. She was a liar, like all the other storytellers of the world. Learning and relearning the ancient lessons of love and pain.

The lodge was five hundred metres from shore. Its windows never stopped rattling in the wind. The last two evenings, Josie had sat in the big sitting room and watched retired couples come and go. (Families with children were not around, now that school had started.) What she noticed about these couples was their
feet
. They wore sensible shoes. All those respectable, sturdy shoes astonished her. Thick soles. Thick socks. Wide thick platforms. No bare feet. No risky heels. Nothing frivolous about this crowd, no sirree bob. And when she was upstairs in her room at night, staring at her blank page, she could hear first one and then another couple pause outside her room to inspect an antique in the hall. Here, too, the walls were thin, pulsing membranes.

“Now what do you suppose this is, Mother?”

“You’ve got me.”

“A pitchfork?”

“Don’t know. Read the sign.”

“A bootscraper! Well for God’s sake! “

“Now what do you suppose this is, Mother?” (Did all men mate with mothers? Would Richard, in his old age, call her Mother? If he did, she would leave him.)

“You’ve got me. Read the sign.”

“A pitchfork? No, a bootscraper.”

“Well I’ll be damned.”

“Now what do you suppose …?”

This is life!

(Her youngest son, pointing to an accident his puppy had had on the kitchen floor. “This is LIFE, Mom, this is LIFE.”) Those old couples continuing on down the hall at a run in their sensible shoes, following the tilt of the lodge floor, six inches to the south and east.

She pulled herself up the cliff, having stayed too long in a crouch watching the horses loop their figure eights across the wet sand and into the waves. And like an image illuminated by lightning in the dark, saw, in its entirety, a flash of what had earlier eluded her when she’d thought about her one winter trip to the Island. Another fiction? Another lie?
This
would be her story.

She had kept the rented car for the return trip, and boarded the ferry for the nine-mile crossing to the mainland. The ferry was, at that time of year, an icebreaker. Pack ice was still drifting in the Strait. Only two days earlier, another ferry had been locked in the ice for twelve hours—normally a forty-fiveminute trip. She’d left the car on the lower deck, and joined the other passengers in the sealed salon above, its huge windows sloping at an angle that allowed her to lean out and over the black sea below. And in the middle of the Strait, found that she was watching with two parts of herself, one frightened, one exhilarated, as the ferry entered pack ice. Treacherous ice, which looked unyielding, but parted with a grating shudder as the vessel went over and through it, shimmying as if it, too, would break into pieces from below.

The coyote appeared so suddenly, she wondered at what she herself was watching, a grey-dusky creature crazed and running running, first in one direction, then another, beside the ferry. Always the ice parting and breaking, the animal leaping across black open space, darting, finally, in front of the monstrous vessel—which had not altered speed—sure to be hit or drowned. But no. Passengers were running across the salon, cheering the animal when it appeared, wet and freezing, on the other side. A woman’s voice (the sombre, confident tones of someone not herself in danger, but who enjoys passing on news of tragedy): “Would be better for it if it
had
been hit. It’ll starve slow out here on the ice.” Of course, nothing would save this stranded creature, unable to go forward or back, water for miles on all sides.