The Big Why (16 page)

We visited the Bartletts and the Pomeroys. Rupert liked Kathleen. I overheard them speaking of flowers. She made him comfortable, as they were both quiet people. I’m often anxious around quiet people. I want them to talk more. It was part of the reason I liked Newfoundlanders — for the most part they talk a lot, and conversation encourages more conversation. Kathleen and I read books and played music in the Bartlett parlour. We listened to Rose Foley sing. They had heard my flute and wanted me to play. We appeared at church and sang. I stood, upon request, to perform Schumann’s “Two Grenadiers.” I sang it in German and thought of my nanny, Rosa, who had taught me the language. Outside, after the service, I was applauded.

Rupert: You know German.

I learned it as a boy. But it has made me appreciate German culture all the more. They are quite a sophisticated people.

But the kaiser is a greedy throat.

Yes, I said. For him there is always more.

And speaking of more, we had little. Money. The allowance from Charles Daniel was always late. Even though I had lived much of my early life without money, I acted as though I had it. This comes from a privileged childhood. My father, a lawyer, was well paid. My mother was used to civic responsibilities. There was a strong house and my German nanny, Rosa. But when my father died the money went with him and we had to go live with my mother’s sister. Rosa did not come with us. Losing Rosa was the worst of it, and it took me a long time to realize that her departure was not strictly a result of our lack of money. One afternoon I went upstairs because I heard my father laughing. I saw them standing by the mirror of my mother’s dresser. Rosa was bent over, her elbows on the back of a chair. My father behind her. My father was looking at himself in the mirror, and Rosa was holding her head in her hands, almost blissful, as my father pushed into her. It was the chair that my mother sat in to do her face. They were in their clothes, but it was Rosa I noticed. My father’s hands were on her hips. I never asked my mother if she knew, but when my father died she fired Rosa immediately and we moved to my aunt’s.

From then on we lived as though we had money because that was the only way we knew how to behave. I’m still this way. I dont own a wallet. My money is crumpled in my pockets. I dig into a pocket for money and the money is there. I’ve always felt money is my right, even though I had no cause to expect it. But I’ve learned that much comes to those who expect it should.

Tom Dobie had a few pots out for lobsters. It was early May.

Ever done that before?

I did. In a place called Monhegan.

Did I want to go with him. We have to leave early, he said. Before daylight.

I’m usually up, I said, before daylight.

It was still very cold. I went down to the stagehead. He’d brought the three-legged dog.

His name is Smoky, yes?

He’s like a puff of smoke.

He’s a beautiful dog.

Tom: He’s all dog.

Smoky was a big black dog with white markings.

Tom Dobie threw a set of oilskins at me. I put them on, standing in the punt, as he rowed out to the dory moorings. The oars spattered with ice. They rubbed on the thole-pins. My oilskins went stiff from the cold. We reached the dory and Tom chopped ice off the gunwale, and then I helped him row out to sea just as the first light appeared. The dory’s oarlocks were outrigged, which was unusual in a rural boat.

You got to go with a bit of technology, he said. He learned that from Bartlett.

We each took an oar, and then Tom told me to sit in the back and rest up. The shape of him rowing, against the dark water and the bright morning light, I knew it would make a good woodcut.

Cold enough for you.

I like the cold, I said. It’s stimulating.

Yes, Tom said. It’s nice to build a fire out of wood youve cut yourself to warm a little dory youve built yourself.

He had a stove under the seat, and wood in the cuddy.

We rowed out to the cork buoys for the lobster pots. Smoky sat behind me and licked the back of my head. The land being carved from the sky. The rub and sloosh of the oars. I was about to haul lobsters. I looked like a man of action. And yet the essence of me is a man of sloth. And I despise that man. I work against him.

I get up early, Tom. Because I want to lie in bed. And I work because I’m lazy.

That’s a queer thing, he said. When there’s a choice in the matter.

The dory was spruce, with maple runners and an oak footrest from a kneeling stool in a church. That’s sacred, he said. We were still in low voices. Any place you pray in, they can’t tear it down. Me and the Pomeroys we built her in February.

Who painted it.

I did.

It’s a nice colour, the green.

Yes, it sets her off, dont it.

A cork buoy and a slanted rope down to the lobster pot. Hand over hand hauling it up, a wet wooden cage with three purple lobsters.

Looks, he said, like we’ll have a good haul.

Kathleen had kept it to herself. She knew it was wrong, but she had to manage her feelings. I had to forgive her that. She had a letter and she was unsure of its contents. It was a letter from Jenny Starling. It arrived, she said, two days before they left. Its shape and colour and postmark of Boston struck her as hard. It made the first letter, from four years before, feel like a fresh incident. She was not happy to be the bearer of such a letter. She hated having it on her.

I would rather, she said, this woman dropped out of our lives forever.

Her entire trip had been clouded by that letter.

I had not heard from Jenny since we’d drawn up a settlement over the future of our son. This letter. I opened it.

Our son, George, had died.

I sat in the studio with the letter. Kathleen said I should be alone with it. I turned the painting
House of Dread
upside down. To make it less literal during this moment, but it seemed to intensify its loneliness. The letter was formal, brief, but tenderly inscribed. Jenny’s penmanship, which I’d thought childish, now endeared her to me. That she had to tell me this. And how she must have looked as she wrote it. Where was her husband, and what did Luis Starling think. And had Luis Starling tried everything to save the boy. Yes, George’s illness had been very bad.

I told Kathleen and she was sorry to hear it. There was peace in her face. She was kind to me. I was surprised by her sincerity. This boy had been an irritant to her, I understood this. But Kathleen was not flushed with any relief, only with regret at her tardy delivery.

Is there anything I can do, she said, in her child voice.

I’d like a bath, I said.

I’ll heat some water.

The bath was good and it made me think of Gerald’s bath, and how you could hear the subway in it. That made me think of Jenny. She was the kind of woman who, in the bath, turned off taps with her feet. When we returned to our Monhegan bedroom there would be coins on the blankets from our pockets. When she spoke. There was something rude in Jenny’s face, yet she had a polished gait. I liked her shoulders, her big hands and wristbones, how they made her arms appear slender. Yes, there was something in the wrists, watching her open up a jam jar.

I’d met Jenny at a restaurant in New York. I was single then. I’d spent the day with Gerald Thayer. Gerald knew tricks that fascinated children. I watched him dress for his son and daughter. He had them sit on his bed: he was stripped to the waist after shaving, and he dried his arms with a towel then put on a dinner jacket. Just his bare chest and the jacket. He unhooked a blue shirt from his closet, held the shirt in his hands as though it caused a problem. It was as if he could not take the jacket off again. The children urged him, Take off your coat, Dad. No, he forced the shirt up the sleeve of his jacket. He bent his back, shrugged the shirt across his back, and then a blue cuff appeared at his other wrist as he buttoned up the chest. His children delighted. He did this nonchalantly, as if no one were watching him, as if they were watching a film of their father. I have seen him press his daughter’s wrist and make her fingers curl. He was the reason I married and had children — the sadness of solitude is forgotten by those with families: they envy solitude, but only the peace of it.

Gerald had been dragging a finger down an open atlas. You want to get a piece of pie?

Me: I’m not hungry.

Gerald: What’s hunger got to do with it?

Me: What are you doing.

Gerald: I’m looking up the Hellespont.

Did you find it.

What do you think.

He was staring down at the pale blue of the Mediterranean. It looked like a country.

What made you think to look in there.

Dont people go skiing at the Hellespont?

Me: People dont ski at the Hellespont.

It’s something I’ve heard all my life, and three times this week — I’m realizing I dont know what it is, okay?

It’s a part of the sea. Keats drowned there. Or Byron.

So it’s Greek.

You got it.

He turned to me and saw my new coat.

You must think you look really nice in that.

I scanned his bookshelf and found a guide to classical literature. I tossed it to him.

Look it up in there.

He did and read aloud about Athamus and his children and his second wife, who was mean. The way he read from the book made me love him. Gerald was the kind of man who made mistakes often, but he learned from them. If he did not know the Champs Élysées was the same as Elysian Fields, and even what those fields referred to, he said so and asked about it. So it wasnt embarrassing to hear him mispronounce a word. Nor was it sweet like my wife, who might refrain or avoid having to face the word.

Do you ever think of the ideal woman.

I think of my inability to be satisfied.

But the ideal, Kent.

I’ve built up a list of qualities.

Gerald: What does that tell you.

It tells me we should go eat.

Youre not hungry.

Youve made me hungry.

I make people hungry.

No, Gerald, you only make
me
hungry. And not all the time.

I’m not a man who encourages hunger?

You are an exemplar of the appetite, Gerald. Jesus, let’s go.

He put on his coat.

Gerald: Do you listen to what your body tells you to eat.

Yes, I said.

That’s a form of. What is that. That’s sort of mystical, isnt it?

It’s hunch-driven.

Yeah, a person who follows his hunger, who tries to give the hunger a brain to think with. That’s my kind of person.

You can reason with him.

That’s what I want in a woman.

Me: A woman with a brain in her hunger.

You know what I mean.

I think youre misjudging your current wife.

I might be one of those men who marries the same woman he’s just divorced.

You mean the very same woman.

Yeah. Not some twin.

Have there been men who do that?

It runs in my family, Gerald said.

Oh, it’s in your blood.

My mother’s brother. Also some cousins.

That I did not know.

And people leave each other. To return.

Without all the official divorcing and marrying.

Yeah, no paper trail.

Me: It’s living a life more intricate than the record shows.

But I definitely want to get divorced. I mean, I’m happy now, but when it happens I want to have that experience, legal and otherwise.

You want to be able to say youre divorced.

It’s the having something official.

You see it as like getting a degree.

You could look at it as a form of study.

You are a strange man, Gerald Thayer.

We crossed a wide road and the numbers, I noticed, were large:
1138
and
1140
.

Me: Would you ever live in a house where your number was up in the thousands.

It would never occur to me to question the number of my house.

So that’s the difference. Between you and me.

Go live in your number
3
, your number
24
, Kent. Go bake your bread and smoke your pipe and thresh your wheat and hew your wood. Go, for fuck’s sake.

A horn sounded. It sounds like a tongue depressor, Gerald said, stuck up a cormorant’s ass.

We sat outside a small restaurant and ate. We shared sour cabbage served in a cast-iron pan. We talked like this through the afternoon in the open air as traffic passed us. It was all theoretical. It was, Assume this. It was, Consider the following. It was analysis, but it was honest. Gerald said it’s true you can’t work when youre drunk.