The Maytrees (3 page)

M
AYTREE LEFT TOWN ON
impulse and headed toward his shack. The planet rolled into its shadow. On the high dune, sky ran down to his ankles. Everything he saw was lower than his socks. Across a long horizon, parabolic dunes cut sky as rogue waves do. The silence of permanence lay on the scene. He found a Cambrian calm as if the world had not yet come; he found a posthumous hush as if humans had gone. He crossed the low swale and climbed a trail his feet felt. He ate a sandwich. Now he knew, but did not believe, she loved him. Her depth he knew when he kissed her. His brain lobes seemed to part like clouds over sun.

He massed three glass lamps on the shack’s table beside
the speckled notebooks. The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.
The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees/—Those dying generations—at their song.

Every book he read was a turn he took. He ran aground. He started new notebooks without having made the least sense of any old notebook. He pitched into the world for plunder, probed it with torches, filled his arms and brain with its pieces botched—to what end? Every fact was a rune. Whole unfilled systems littered the kitchen and beach of the house he shared with Lou. He wanted to spend himself broke in the brain, to master something and start again. Since everything fit with everything else, how could anyone begin to think or understand?

He took off his shirt. Love itself raised other honest questions, more than several. Was romantic love a modern invention? How long could it last as requited, as unrequited? Does familiarity blur lovers’ clear sight of essences and make surfaces look significant? Since love intensifies in parted lovers, presumably because the lovers forget and reimagine each other, is love then wholly false? How false? Thirty percent false? Sixty percent? Five?

Later he stood on the foredune’s lip and looked at the stars over the ocean. A wider life breathed in him, and things’ rims stirred and reared back. Only the lover sees what is real, he thought. Only the lover sees the beloved truly, inwardly. Far
from being blind, love alone can see. Watching the sky now, and forever after, doubled his world. He felt he saw through Lou’s eyes as an Aztec priest, having flayed an enemy, donned the skin. Or somewhat less so.

A
WEEK AFTER THEIR
wedding, Reevadare stopped by their house—Maytree had moved into Lou’s. Raising a coffee cup as if to toast, she said,

He knew Lou was not at all sorry. The quatrain was new to Maytree. It posed a question he was circling then: Do women in love feel as men do? Do men love as women love? His virgin bride shared her pipe-frame bed all smiles and laughter. When they were intimate to the last degree on that bed, did Lou’s experience join his, did his experience match hers, during this moment and that moment?

In the course of his reading he could survey, informally, what ground other students of the matter had won. He seized their green kitchen table as a desk.

Later while Lou bathed, Maytree copied from a volume of Keats’s ever-young letters a possibly unrelated but similarly unanswerable question: Who enjoyed lovemaking more—the
man or the woman? He popped it into that spotted notebook in dimeter and trimeter:

The woman, everyone knew Tiresias said, but Tiresias was made up. On what grounds had the Greek man let full-fictional and full-switched Tiresias answer, The woman? Did lovemaking then and now run to male, or to female, noise-making? Speaking of wild surmise?

For lovemaking nearly killed Lou. Was she all right? Abashed, he held her steady until she opened her eyes. Was he a brute? What ailed her?—Whoo, she answered once, and another time, Yike. He stopped worrying. Hours afterward he used to see her, firm and young as she was, gripping the rail to check her descent downstairs.

He proposed Keats’s question to Lou one morning as they shared the last of the tooth powder. —Say, Lou—here’s a question. Keats put it, “Who shall say between Man and Woman which is the more delighted?” What do you think?

—The woman. Rather prompt of silent Lou. Much later that night in their shack bed she added just as he was rolling asleep, If the man is John Keats.

T
WO MONTHS AFTER THEIR
wedding, Lou helped Deary shift to her shed. Year-round Deary kept rough headquarters in an abandoned cold-storage shed on Cold Storage Wharf. Provincetown’s painters depicted this long shed so often they called it “motif number one.” Deary looked now to be wearing several dozen layers of bright-print cloth. Her hoop earrings were the size of parrot perches.

Usually Deary lived there all winter, often sheltering a loose person or two who needed a roof. To Lou, the shed smelled of gasoline, engine oil, and shellfish. For utilities, Deary used a woodstove, and a pier hose till it froze. Everyone helped her by buying the oyster-shell sculptures she glued for tourists, purple eyes out. One winter Deary lived in Cairos’ summer cottage. If almost anyone had a baby winter or summer, Deary moved there to watch the older kids, to shop, cook, and shift laundry. One October she moved into Cornelius Blue’s dune shack to tend him when he broke his pelvis at low tide flying from a horse that bucked. Bauhausy in fits, Deary carted to wherever she was staying a pedestal chair sculpted as a hand. Lou liked it. She sat on the plastic palm and leaned on the black fingers. In summer when Deary slept
on the dunes or on Cairos’ porch, the chair stayed in the shed. So, often, did Crazy Joe, a harmless bum.

Last year on this pier by a creosoted piling Lou met Deary’s mother, pearls and pearled hat, suit, and heels, on a rare visit: Ruby Hightoe. Glaring and calm in her tailored suit, she steered her red alligator-skin high heels around a pile of cord net that seaweed and beer bottles fouled. Deary’s mother reminded Lou of Mrs. Buff Orpington, whose
husband invented the chicken
and portions of whose car stretched across four panels of
Blondie.

Deary had floored her long shed and painted it yellow. Where Lou’s eye wanted a window, Deary tacked the Modigliani print—the long-drawn-out red-cheeked woman’s head and neck—that they all had. The opposite wall showed Picasso’s usual blue clowns on a beach. A brass porthole was a window. Three bushel baskets hung from nails and served as dresser, closet, and pantry. Her bed was a cot mattress on a door on iron milk crates; Crazy Joe’s was a mattress across the room. Some of her wool skirts stretched between wall nails like tapestries to block wind. Her bookshelf was a stepladder. Lou liked to peer down the gap between planks and wall where she saw fish swim. Now Deary handed Lou an old corn dodger to drop in. The fish were on the corn dodger before it hit.

Lou walked back from the pier, hoping Maytree was home. Vietnamese legend calls the earth the realm of desire. When Maytree laughed he loosed his legs. His collarbones and Achilles tendons were thin. He whistled, wore loose pants, and rattled on.

M
OVING HOUSES WAS
M
AYTREE’S
paid work. Since he returned from out West and the war, Maytree hauled whole houses for hire, on afternoons only. He got paid for hijinks. He worked some afternoons with his old college friend Sooner Roy. They started as carpenters, turning porches into rooms, adding apartments, and raising roofs. Then for friends they moved the Protos’ house on a Monument Hill traverse. They detached the pump, braced corners and doorways with two-by-sixes, jacked the mildewed house, and with advisers pushed it onto a haywagon hitched to a mule team. The mules were having none of it. Maytree forbade whacking the mules with planks.

Old Flo Proto, inside, chopped onions and carrots. People could hear her knife hit, or was it a hatchet. Maytree guarded the mules while Sooner rounded up two tractors and Flo Proto cranked up her woodstove. The tractors, themselves whacked, worked. Splay-legged in her wobbling kitchen, Flo Proto cooked on the woodstove a slumgul-lion to feed the crew. The chimney smoked, and its smoke marked their route. Schoolchildren broke out to trail the house.

The more houses they moved, the more house-moving jobs offered. People dragged anchor to a patch of trees, or a hollow cheap to heat, or a patch of waterfront exposed but eminently rent-outable. The process stimulated Maytree, and Lou, too—and children, and retired sailors, and off-duty coast guards, and neighbors—by its many routes to disaster.

That summer Lou watched Maytree and Sooner move a house or two a month. Most larky, they floated houses alongshore—if half the hawsers in town and Sooner’s truck, two veteran jeeps, two tractors, and the milkman’s piebald cob could ease a house down to the bay without a wreck. Lou followed the trek. When they gained the beach they propped railroad ties as ramp to logs on the beach. They pushed the house to slide on the logs. Bystanders propped low walls. Lou stood at water’s edge as one of their house tows rolled into the drink. It would have turned turtle but the bottom snagged the stovepipe. It got epic quickly. Where was Winslow Homer when you needed him? After that day, they breasted to the top-heavy raft four gasoliners to power the contraption and act as Mae Wests.

Maytree was no more finicky than house owners or the town about who might own lots’ titles. During the war, property bills, if any, lapsed. Yankees paid back taxes and taxes on empty lots. After the war they owned them all.

Sooner Roy wore a slouch hat, its brim a sawdust gutter. He followed the Red Sox in frenzies terrible to behold. He was trying to borrow land on which to build, under a
canvas canopy, a forty-foot sloop or yawl to sail to Maine. He grew up in Missouri. Maytree was tall, and Sooner was strong as Babe Ruth.

T
WO YEARS LATER THEY
were dancing in the kitchen to “Lady Be Good.” Maytree turned down the radio and ran his notion by Lou. It is an unnameable boon love hauls down, that people rightly prize as the best of life, and for which it fusses over weddings. Not only will a cave-dwelling pair cull food and kill so kids thrive, but their feeling for each other, not to mention for the kids, brings something beyond food people need. Each felt it between them when they danced. It was real as anything the mind could know. Her eyes’ crystal, her split-faced smile, agreed. He rolled the volume knob. Oh sweet and lovely.

After their first year or so, Lou’s beauty no longer surprised him. He never stopped looking, because her face was his eyes’ home. No, what so endeared her now and forever was her easy and helpless laughter. He felt like the world’s great wit. She worked, walked, stood, or sat like a mannequin, shoulders down and neck erect, and his least
mot
slayed her. Her body pleated. Her rusty-axle laugh sustained itself voicelessly and without air. At table, if she was still chewing when the laugh came rolling on her backward like a loose cart, she put a napkin on her head. Otherwise she dropped on the ta
ble. If it slayed her yet more, she knocked the table with her head in even beats. Or her long torso folded and her orbits fell on vertical fists on her knees. Unstrung with hilarity, she lost her footing and rolled down a dune. More than once—anywhere—she dropped backward and straight-legged like a kid in diapers.

He fell in love with Lou again and again. Walking, he held her hand. She seemed, then and now, to roll or float over the world evenly, acting and giving and taking, never accelerating, never slowing, wearing a slip of red or blue scarf. Her mental energy and endurance matched his. She neither competed nor rebelled. Her freedom strengthened him, as did her immeasurable reserve. Often she seemed the elder. She opened their house to everyone. Actively, she accepted what came to her, like a well-sailed sloop with sea room. Her face was an organ of silence. That he did not possess her childhood drove him wild. Who was this impostor she sang with in college—how dare he?

Their intimacy flooded. Love like a tide either advances or retreats, Maytree opined into a recent notebook. Their awarenesses rode waves paired like outriggers. Maytree thought Plato wrong: physical senses and wordless realms neither diverge or oppose; they meet as nearest neighbors in the darkness of personality and embrace.

They named the baby Peter and called him Petie. From his first interview with this implausible son, then purple, Maytree curbed his vision of teaching it to read and love literature, to row, fish, hit and pitch, miter corners, frame walls, sail, and
rebuild motors. His sole intended fatherly prohibition—that his son never draw his living from the sea—was superfluous. He seemed incapable even of drawing breath. He was not so much delicate as hopeless, predating vulcanization.

A pity because his plainly not-viable person, unfit for the grating air, enchanted Lou, of whose taste for primate fetuses or naked hatchlings he had no previous clue. Lou saw something in the organism that bypassed him, but apparently hit other females, including tourists, as if the quality inhered in females as a class rather than in babies as a class. Even managing his wormy limbs was an ordeal beyond Petie. If Lou handed the creature to him, Maytree had to remember to hold its head up, or his own Lou would scold him.

Once on a renovation job he deliberately described Petie as “time-consuming” to Sol Raposo, a mason. Daily Maytree watched Sol’s three kids make a reunion party at the site by bringing him the lunch he ate playing with all three. Sol looked up incredulously through his bison curls and shrugged. He said, Have more.

One day they settled with Petie under a bamboo-and-canvas beach umbrella. A red scarf held Lou’s hair. The tide was out; the flats were mud. The sun was low; soon their friends would show up with drinks and bottles. Friends would help drag Petie back by the heels and try to get sand from his mouth’s ungraspable drool.

When he first moved in after their wedding, Maytree got to work enlarging the beachside crawl space. Now they had a wedge-shaped basement furnished with a galley and head. He
finished it off by installing many-paned French doors right on the beach. When storms came, he removed both doors so the seas could pour in without breaking glass. In ordinary weather, friends entered the front door, went downstairs, and opened the French doors to the beach.

Until the daily party dropped in they were reading on beach towels and leaning against the basement. The chairs were for visitors. Lou realized years ago that the sight of her reading impelled Maytree to try to drag her into his reading. She always went back to her book without a word.

—If you were a prehistoric Aleut—

—What?

—If you were a prehistoric Aleut and your wife or husband died, your people braced your joints for grief. That is, they lashed hide bindings around your knees, ankles, elbows, shoulders, and hips. You could still move, barely, as if swaddled. Otherwise, the Aleuts said, in your grief you would
go to pieces
just as the skeleton would go to pieces. You would fall apart.

He watched her close her book on a finger and train on him a look. He knew she hated his interrupting her reading.

—But the troubadours, she said. They made up romantic love.

—Where did you learn that?

—In college. And she added, Maybe only the husbands fall apart. The men.

What made her say that? What of life had she seen? Had not her mother fallen apart when her father left?

—Anyway, she said, prehistoric means only: before those
people wrote. They could have learned to understand sealers’ or whalers’ love songs, long after the troubadours.

Maytree well knew peoples had managed swoons of their own devising having never heard of Europe. Archaeologists find love poetry in unopened pyramids. She was unreasonable. That he could fix.

—Until you have a baby, her mother had said, you don’t know what love is! Her mother volunteered this on the day of Lou’s one and only wedding. —Oh, Lou wanted to say, go soak your head. After Lou brought forth Petie, she at once recalled her mother’s words, forgave, and endorsed them. That her mother was so often right no longer irked her. As she would never irk Petie, now joyful in her arms. He sucked her nose. Later his pointy fingers made faces with her face. She never put him down. She must feel his skin on her, feel his cranium in her arm’s crook, his belly on her belly, and smell his breath, his scalp, etc., etc. He obviously felt the same way. They were pieces of each other foully parted. When they had to separate, she took ever-deeper breaths as if air had no use. Her sternum and her ventral torso and arms ached. Maytree had some horseshoe magnets in the kitchen. She gave each a wrench to hold.

She and Petie laughed to flout fate by smashing together, thigmotropic. Or they met staring forehead to forehead, then twisted and laughed.

Lou saw that she had hitherto wasted her life. When he was six months old, she asked Maytree, Can we have more?

—Sure, he said. More what?

When he was fifteen months old, Petie could say “anemometer” and “horseshoe crab.” Sometimes he sang to the sand, Hyannis, Hyannis.

—Hold him while you can, Reevadare Weaver told Lou in her smoky voice. In the history of the world, Lou suspected no one had ever asked Reevadare for advice. She perceived others’ needs so keenly she anticipated them every time. What an odd thing to say: anemometer.

At four Petie took to yelling at the heavenly bodies: —Hey, orbs! Wait for me! or, Orbs…listen to this! A genius, Lou thought; he commanded constellations. Clearly a poet. —A tyrant, Maytree said. —They are all tyrants, Deary said. His milk teeth separated neatly, like unripe corn on the ear. More children were evidently not in store for them. A sore spot, but she knew she could never love another so much.

Maytree and Lou were learning night skies together and trying to teach Petie. Star-watchings-with-child were now a moral imperative. They had read in
Wolf-Children and Feral Man
about Caspar Hauser, locked from birth in a low German attic he later called a hole or cage. His captor taught him to talk, fed him, and removed his waste. He played with a wooden horse. When he was a big seventeen his captor took him outdoors for the first time and abandoned him at a Nuremberg intersection. The groping boy carried
CASPAR HAUSER
written on paper. Bright and curious, he could scarcely use or understand fast speech. After a newspaper fuss (the criminal was never found), a benefactor adopted him and helped him adapt. He never complained of his captor’s treatment but once, early. Then he wept to see for the first time—in
the city!—those scattered thousand stars he realized everyone else on earth had been able to see all along. “His astonishment and transport surpassed all description.” Caspar said that the man ought to “be locked up for a few days,” for withholding the sight of the stars. It was the only indignation at his captivity he ever showed.

The first thing Lou and Maytree learned about sky-watching was to lie down. Since town’s light blanked skies, they watched from the dunes. Friends joined them. Once they settled down on the beach at sunset Lou saw terns nock their spines to bowstrings between their crossbow wings. At the last second the terns looked, cocked one wing, and smacked. A bluefish boil blackened the water. If she looked away, the bluefish sounded like popping corn. Geography laid their position bare. Overhead clouds cracked the last light like crude.

From deep water Lou saw a seal head appear. Deary stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled. The seal perked and, without diving or moving its eyes from Deary, came inshore to her feet in lappets of foam. The creature came to Deary without stirring the water. It rolled in surf, dark and half on sand. Its nose touched Deary’s painted toes. She had conjured a seal. She talked to it. As they quit the beach the seal searched all around, even up in the sky. It was Deary’s pure heart—why should not a seal love it as they all did?

“A silkie,” Cornelius said of Deary.

In darkness they watched Venus, fastidious, track the downed sun. Alterf, the glance. Diphda, second frog. —Do
you feel a fool for trying to learn what the Stone Age people already knew? Maytree did not. Lou saw the Milky Way’s two bands merge over the sea. There, scoopings of stars made an oval where suns mixed it up in a spree. And that—that oval—was the galaxy’s core. But—how do we know?

—We’re complex jellies, Cornelius said. One animal among many. Well, the others didn’t know jack, and scientists knew a lot. Lou watched stars bang their burning knuckles on the dome.

Now between his parents outside the shack on a blanket, Petie raised his head. He unfurled an arm and placed a boneless hand on his father’s forearm. He had shed that clouds-of-glory, that leaving-of-fairies glaze by which newborn people keep parents in thrall till other charms appear. Like his mother, he did not say much. His eyes gleamed dark beneath low brows, and everything struck him as funny.

His parents murmured, a sound unnamed like foghorn or wind. Above him the shack’s pitcher pump’s handle, a shape like a hungry monster’s neck, loomed. He looked at the stars around it. He felt cold sand at the back of his head. His mother covered him with her sweater.

He knew their name: stars. They rustled in place in the black sky. Unrelated to him, they made as much sense as most things, and more than some, for their harmlessness and calm. Of which he instantly tired, for nothing changed or required him. For a second on the blanket between his parents and watching stars, Petie knew he was alive.

Lou took a part-time job at Jen and Barrie’s art gallery. She could read there, and stare at action paintings. She saw no reason to subject Petie to the austerities she and Maytree enjoyed exchanging for free time. Maytree must not give up his mornings writing poetry, and from her wages, baby got a new pair of shoes.

At six Petie with his friends made lemonade from ants and sold it on wharves. A scallop-edged new front tooth just cleared gum. His other, deciduous, teeth were the size of graph-paper squares. He could not yet build a fire; he could build a smoke. Cornelius called Petie “Spotey-Otey.”

At eight Petie wrote for school, “Mice are a small creature who come in.” In rain Maytree helped Petie carve whistles and daggers. One May three blizzards dropped eight feet of snow. When school let out Deary played with a two-year-old and a child, and carried around a baby or two, while she kept an eye on Petie. With Deary, with the Cairos from New York and Cornelius from the dunes, Lou and Maytree sat outside the basement doors on the beach during a southerly. They watched Petie and the neighbor Bonobos boys race up the beach and dare incoming waves like pipers. Overhead skies loosened.

Lou and Maytree saw their marriage as unique. Of course they rarely fought; she rarely spoke. They both knew love itself as an epistemological tool. As if mechanical, a halyard, love drew up something new that raised an everlasting flap and sped. How? Why?

On holidays, ancient Greeks reddened the marble face of Jupiter with cinnabar. Maytree celebrated Thanksgivings by beginning work on a book. He wrote book-length poems. Three of his books, at four stressed syllables a line, took three years apiece to write. Others split like mica books.

Maytree hoped to inspire his Boston publishers to tout those books widely by showing up unannounced. As if they were idle. He was riding the bus back from such a surprise visit when he thought of a new book-length poem to start this Thanksgiving. Boston or New York embodies our condition in one aspect: We are strangers among millions living in cubes like Anasazi in a world we fashioned. And Provincetown shows, by contrast, that we live on a strand between sea and sky. Here are protoplasmic, peeled people in wind against crystal skies. Our soft tissues are outside, like unearthed and drying worms’. The people in cities are like Mexican jumping beans, like larvae in tequila bottles, soft bits in hard boxes. And so forth. The length to which we as people go to hide our nakedness by blocking sky!