Vigil for a Stranger (16 page)

When darkness approaches, the wind dies down and a belated red sun comes out. The air warms up. We have a picnic on the beach: bread, cheese, salami. Emile and I have wine. From here, none of the cottages are visible. The beach is clean and windswept, but it seems creepy to me, not because of Robbie but because of the isolation: we have seen no other people, no boats. The sky presses down. The sun makes a path like fire across the water. The scene suggests a movie to me: something coming up out of the water, some evil presence.

I can almost, almost understand why Robbie chose this particular place to do what he did.

Denis runs until he's exhausted, and then he asks questions: How did the mice get here? Can we build a lookout in that big tree? How much did Tom's boat cost? Why do we have to put in a toilet? What are the birds doing now? What's this? What's that?

We watch the sun begin to set behind the church steeple and the motels. Denis can hardly stay awake long enough to use the chamber pot again. Long before dark, we put him to sleep in his Big Bird sleeping bag. He passes out instantly, and Emile and I make love in the outer room. For a while, we're fond of each other (this is a feeling that comes and goes), and we fall asleep in each other's arms.

I dream of water, of going under again and again, of green darkness and no air, of water invading my lungs and eyes and veins, and I wake up screaming.

Dear
Maman
,

By now you must be knowing the Yale news. This is certainly super! Although it is hard to believe that I will be really living in America, only a few five or six months away from now. It will be good to be in your city, which Papa has told me is not such a great city, but I have a feeling I will like it. How much crime and danger is there? Papa says these are excessive. However, these are not the kinds of things I consider worries. The Yale photos make it look very beautiful. Do you have further Yale photos besides the ones they send? I like very much to see more, I like to look at my new home.
Maman
, I look forward to seeing you so much, and I am told the Yale band is a very good one, a very funny place to be in …

I told James I was sick of coming home on the late train. I told him I might even find a way to stay overnight sometimes. I told him that I needed to be more adventurous. I told him that if I were ever going to make it as a painter I needed to be more in touch with what other painters were doing. I told him my visits to the museums and galleries gave me more energy to paint. I told him I'd been stuck out in the boonies too long.

He asked me, “Are you having an affair with that fucking Drescher?”

Pierce picks up a sturdy old picnic basket at a junk shop in Manlius, and we take it with us up to Plover Island. Charlie is supposed to go too, but his grandfather has died and he has to be home with his family, so it's just Pierce and Robbie and me in Pierce's VW.

Charlie and Pierce are rooming together in New Haven, thinking about joining the Peace Corps or hitchhiking through Europe. Pierce is between jobs, and he's been staying with us in Jamesville that summer for a couple of weeks, working at the motel and refusing to take any salary—a fact that almost succeeds in impressing my father, who is not an easy man to impress.

When we pull out of the driveway, Dad says, “Have fun, kids. I wish I was going with you,” and he punches Robbie on the arm. “We'll have to get up there again before the end of the summer, you and me.”

Robbie says, “Sure, Dad. Why not?”

In the picnic basket Pierce has packed a fifth of vodka, a fifth of tequila, a small plastic bag of marijuana, and a hash pipe.

Pierce drinks a lot of vodka in the car. We play Botticelli, and when Pierce gets drunk enough he sings “Bull Cow Blues” and “You Can't Tell the Difference After Dark” and “Please Warm My Weiner.” He buys me the wind-up penguin in a souvenir shop in Ogunquit when we stop for food. We sit in a diner where the penguin keeps walking off the tabletop and Robbie and I try to force Pierce to drink black coffee. Pierce pulls over outside Portland and tells me I'd better drive. In the back seat, Robbie sits slumped with his eyes half-closed, smoking my cigarettes and trying not to show how relieved he is.

We've missed the last ferry, and we have to pay a preppy couple at the marina ten dollars to let us leave the car there and then take us out to the island. They bitch all the way about what a favor they're doing us, and about how some kids trashed somebody's summer place on one of the other islands. Robbie tries to make conversation with them. Pierce sits in silence, smoking, looking bored and gloomy.

The island is a dark, angular shape against a dark sky. When we arrive, there is very little light left. All three of us stumble getting out of the boat, and end up soaked to the knees. The mosquitoes are fierce, and we're too loaded down with bags and duffels to swat at them.

But we cheer up when we get to the cabin. It's in good shape. Since our disastrous family trip, my father and Robbie have been there several times, and they have left lanterns, a charcoal grill and a bag of briquettes, a couple of cheap aluminum lawn chairs, some cushions, an L. L. Bean catalog, and a book called
A Guide to the Atlantic Seacoast
. There is a jug of bottled water, enough beef jerky for an army, and a roll of toilet paper for each chamber pot.

Pierce looks around with approval and says, “What a dump! What movie is that from?”—which is roughly the first line from
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
? in which he once almost got the part of George.

Robbie is glad to be out of Pierce's car, and he laughs at all his jokes. We have brought steaks, which we cook on the grill by the light of two kerosene lanterns. It takes forever, and by the time they're ready we are almost too tired to eat. We go inside, and while Robbie goes back out for his duffel, Pierce suddenly, out of the blue, kisses me. We would share a sleeping bag if Robbie wasn't there; that, at least, is what we say, standing there half asleep with our arms around each other. “We're doomed never to make it,” Pierce says.

“We haven't really tried all that hard,” I point out.

“Maybe we think about it too much,” Pierce says.

This is one of those remarks I will mull over for a long time: I will pull it apart and analyze it endlessly before I figure out that it really doesn't mean much.

I put my head on his shoulder. He smells like kerosene and charcoal smoke.

The next day I walk around the island sketching while Pierce and Robbie mess around: they're like little boys, they build a fort out of driftwood, they try to identify different kinds of seaweed with the guidebook, they catch crabs and then don't know what to do with them. I meet another artist on my walk, a woman in a smock with an easel set up on a rocky point. She and I smile shyly but don't speak. I meet a couple of red-faced old men who tell me they're brothers, both retired, both widowed, they spend every summer on the island. They look like fishermen, but one was a pharmacist and the other an insurance executive. The pharmacist gives me three plums.

For lunch we have plums and beef jerky and cold canned stew and tequila. We sit in the hot sun on the rocky, sandy beach. Robbie dozes off, and I begin doing drawings of the patterns the seaweed makes drying on the sand. Pierce gets bored and goes inside for the picnic basket. He takes out the pipe, but neither of us is in the mood, and then he takes out a paper bag, and inside it is the .38, wrapped in a red bandanna.

I feel no fear, we've been friends so long, but the gun makes me uneasy. He has changed since college. His life is no longer going well. For years, he got what he wanted, or nearly: Oberlin instead of Harvard, B's instead of A's—Horatio instead of Hamlet, perhaps, but still a great part. Now he has to struggle, and somewhere he has lost the will.

“Why do you have that, Pierce?” I ask him.

“For protection in the big bad city.” He gives me the sly look, narrowing his eyes against the sun. He ties the red bandana around his head. “It's full of bad guys,” he says. “Me among them.”

“This isn't the big bad city. You really didn't have to bring that damn thing.”

“I didn't like leaving it behind,” he says. “This damn thing cost me half a week's pay.” He raises the gun and points at a seagull posing on a rock. “Ka-boom, little guy.”

“Pierce. Please.”

Robbie wakes up as Pierce is aiming at another gull. “Jesus Christ,” he says, and looks at me:
your friend, where did you get this jerk
.

“Relax,” Pierce says. “It's not loaded. I'm not entirely crazy.”

“Just don't aim that fucking thing at me,” Robbie says.

Pierce aims it at him and says, “Ka-boom.”

It's not a good place for swimming. The water is deep and clear green, but the rocks are brutal except around the bend, and over there the seaweed is thick and the water full of crabs. Robbie and I are used to our tame little backyard pond. Pierce grew up on the coast, but he hates the water, hates slimy things and things that crawl. We decide not to bother going in. We sit on the warm rocks, letting the water cool our feet, and eventually we get out the marijuana and smoke it in Pierce's little clay pipe. The sun gets lower in the sky. We will stay one more night, and then on Sunday morning the people from the marina will pick us up because the ferry doesn't run on Sundays. “But you'll have to wait until after church,” they said, looking with distaste at Robbie's long hair, looking at me and imagining a drunken gang bang.

“People like that are what's wrong with this country,” Pierce says. “People like that are what's running it, that's the scary part. You know what I mean? He looks at us and thinks: draft dodgers, punks, hippies. But catch that guy over in Vietnam charging up some hill with his M-1.”

“You're not doing that either, buddy,” Robbie points out amiably.

“I've been lucky,” Pierce says. “But I'm not hiding out up here in America's vacationland doing the holier-than-thou routine in my madras-plaid Bermuda shorts. What was this guy doing when we were marching on Washington? Painting the boat, man. Shopping for new deck shoes.”

I don't point out that what Pierce and Charlie did in Washington was get stoned in the Georgetown apartment of one of our old college pals. “Don't argue,” I say. “I don't want anybody to argue.”

Pierce puts his arm around me, and we sit looking at the sky just beginning to get pink over the town back on shore. The windows of the buildings shine gold, the hills behind them are purple. The only sound is the surf's gentle crash against the rocks, and us sucking on the pipe. I could stay there forever, much longer than the weekend. I think of telling Robbie I'd like to come up there with him and Dad next time, but it's too much trouble to talk. Then Pierce says, “Let's play a game.”

Robbie asks, “What game?”

“Russian Roulette,” says Pierce.

They get high, and they do it, and they make me watch. We sit on the lawn chairs. It is still very hot. The sky turns colors, the water turns black, and the mosquitoes come out. None of us notices the mosquitoes. We keep our eyes on the gun, which looks businesslike, lethal, and at the same time strangely unreal. Robbie and I used to have water pistols that looked like it. Pierce puts a bullet into the chamber and spins it. It's as if he has done this a dozen times: he is completely calm, he's laughing, he keeps telling me to calm down, not to worry, it's a game.

Robbie says, “It's no worse than driving up Route 1, Chris. In fact, your chances are probably better.”

“Especially with all those drunken maniacs on the road yesterday,” Pierce says.

“I hope you're not counting on me,” I say. “You two can be as stupid as you want, but leave me out of it.”

“No girls allowed, anyway,” Pierce says. He holds up the gun and says, “I'll go first.”

“Oh, do, by all means,” Robbie says in an upper-crust accent. “After you, old man.”

Even I laugh. Maybe we don't think he will really do it. Pierce sits with the gun in his hand, looking off at the horizon. For a moment I wonder if he's forgotten. Then, without warning, he raises the gun to his temple and pulls the trigger.

“Pierce!”

There must have been a click but I didn't hear it. He cradles the gun against his chest and smiles at me. “Christine, my dear. Please. A little dignity.”

I put my hand over my mouth to keep myself from crying. The worst of it is the sky, the gorgeous sunset, rose and purple and gold. Robbie's head is outlined against it. I can't see his features. His skinny knees sticking out of his old cut-offs look like the knees of a little boy.

Pierce holds the gun out to Robbie. “Your turn, old fellow.”

Robbie takes it, weighs it in his hand, examines it. I wish for the woman I met on my walk, or one of the old men—anyone—to appear from behind a rock and say something sane.
Any of you kids seen a dog? Have a few more of these plums. Do you have some matches we could borrow
?

I say, “Robbie, forget it.”

“Calm down, Chris,” he says. “A little dignity.” He looks at Pierce.

Pierce says, “One if by land, two if by sea.”

This makes no sense, but the two of them begin to cackle, loud hysterical laughing that sounds like gulls.

“You two are such jerks,” I say. “I hate you when you're high. I hate you both.”

They stop laughing. Pierce holds his cheeks and says, “Ooh.”

Robbie reaches over and pats my knee, grinning. Then he sighs and says, “So what do I do? Just spin it?”

“Just give it a good one, old man.”

“Right-o.” He spins the chamber once, pauses, spins it again, and holds it to his head.”

I cry out, “Don't!” and lunge toward him. He says, “Jesus, Chrissie,” and lowers the gun. He looks toward Pierce, who leans forward to grab me.

“Leave him alone, Chrissie,” he says. He holds my arms, draws me toward him, and pulls me down on his lap. “Now sit down like a good girl. Sit here with Uncle Pierce.” We are awkward together in the flimsy chair. His arms are around me, clasped across my stomach. “There.” He puts his lips against the back of my neck. “Chrissie Chrissie Chrissie,” he says with a sigh.