Crossroads (19 page)

 

. . .We safely arrived in Nantucket. Take out your map and look at it . . . a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background . . . Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles . . . that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time . . . that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander show-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed . . . that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sand turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

 

“So what.” I glanced up at him from a map of cranberry bogs I was examining. “It's obvious Melville had never been to Illinois.”

Sean looked puzzled. “Illinois? Who cares about Illinois? I think it's a beautiful passage.”

“I care about Illinois. There are amazing things in Illinois. I love the Midwest.” I tried very hard to think of images as magical about my home state as Melville had found about
Nantucket. It is true that Lake Michigan has none of the dangerous threat that the Atlantic has, that meat cutters don't evoke the romance and glamour of the long-gone whalers, that the flowing prairies have none of the mystery of the cranberry bogs, that the streets are asphalt, not cobbles from the ballast of ships, that travelers don't book months in advance to go to Peoria.

So why did I feel the need to argue with him? Why couldn't I just say, “You're right. Illinois is boring.” Instead I had to say “And what about Abraham Lincoln and Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway? What about the Museum of Science and Industry? The Art Institute . . .”

“Good night,” Sean said, getting up, closing his book, and crawling into one side of the big feather bed. “I just thought it was an interesting passage. I wasn't trying to make a federal case.”

“I think you were. I think you were attacking my home state. I think . . .”

What did I think? And what was I doing? A kind of gloom came over me. A gloom that hadn't come over me in a while. An inexplicable urge to thrash out and destroy whatever it was that came near me. I got into my side of the bed and turned out the light. In the darkness near the french windows, I saw the shadow of panthers, which came to me in the night the way Sean's tiger came to me. I saw the dark, sleek body of the woman who'd taken my husband away. I felt her as a moving presence in the room at the Coffin House. She was what stood between me and the world. Lila means night, and she came over me as the darkness came over me. She was a cat that hadn't been declawed. And she was Illinois. Even the letters of her name—the
i
, the two
l
's—reminded me of Illinois.

If childhood had become synonymous with gloom, if what had been familiar to me was now some dark, obscure foreign place, it was because of her. If some great wall had been
constructed, keeping me away from the rest of existence, keeping me away from Sean, it was a wall I'd constructed to contain my hatred of her. The light from the fire cast shadows on the wall, animal-like shapes, and it was as if she were right with us, taunting me. Sean reached across and touched my breast but I pulled away. “Please don't touch me. I don't want to be touched,” I said.

Outside the waves crashed. I could imagine whitecaps, cold frigid water. Oh, God, I was cold. I was suddenly very cold. Sean perched his elbow above me, like some wave about to break over me. What fool comes to Nantucket at the end of November, I thought to myself. Just a few dead whalers, I knew was the answer. Sean spoke to me with the flat voice the first mate uses when he thinks his captain has gone mad. “Pray tell, what is the matter?”

I didn't want to start over. I didn't want to try again. It hadn't been all bad. That's what was the matter. It wasn't all bad. Zap could walk away from Jennie because they'd never really shared anything, but Mark and I had had good times—those late-night suppers, sipping wine. Early-morning hikes in Montana. The time I broke my arm in Mexico and Mark told the doctor, “Now listen, this arm is very important to me.” And that priest in Jerusalem who told us Christ was betrayed by a kiss and a kiss isn't for betrayal. Mark had agreed solemnly. A kiss isn't for betrayal.

I wished it had all been bad, except it wasn't.

I snuggled against Sean. “I'm tired. Let's just go to sleep.”

When I woke in the middle of the night, the fire was out and I was colder than I could ever imagine being cold. I shivered and looked around. The doors leading to the widow's walk were ajar. I threw on my parka and went to close the doors. But just as I was about to close them, I saw a figure, cloaked in some kind of a shawl, gazing in the direction of the sea. It was a dark, shapeless form and it seemed to be grieving for some
thing it had lost. I zipped up my parka and the figure turned.

I went and stood beside Sean, who had taken a quilt off the bed. He was standing, looking out, where I imagined widows had stood, waiting for their men who would never return, women who'd lost the only ones who really mattered to them, blank stares on their faces, unwilling to come away from the sea, a breed of women that didn't exist any longer.

I put my arm on his shoulder. “Bad dream?”

He shook his head. “I haven't been asleep.”

“What have you been doing?”

He shook his head again. “Watching you sleep. I've been wanting to wake you.”

I tugged on the blanket. “Can I get in?” He opened his arms and let me slip under the quilt with him. He wore a thermal top and sweat pants. As I slipped under the blanket, I felt him go tense, as if he didn't really want me near him at all. He was shaking very hard from the cold. “Why did you just push me away before you fell asleep?”

“I had some things on my mind.”

He was shaking very hard. “Like what?”

“Well, I was thinking about Lila and Mark.”

Sean wouldn't look at me. “Look, Deborah, I really care about you, but I don't think I want to go on with this. I mean, it's not very much fun for me.”

It was odd, because when I crawled under the blanket with him, I knew he had in some way stopped wanting me. I found myself suddenly feeling panicky. “Listen,” I said, “I think I could love you. Maybe I do love you. I know I care about you. I just need more time . . .”

He shook harder. “I think you don't know what you want and I'm not sure I want to wait around to find out.”

Who can really grasp the fine mechanism of wanting another person? But it seems some of us are destined to want others when they don't really want us any longer. And then
there are those who expend enormous amounts of energy in making ourselves loved, only to lose interest the minute we are close to achieving our goal. I always thought I could be counted among those who wanted the people who wanted me. But at that moment on the widow's walk, looking into a freezing sea, I wasn't so sure, because I was aware for the first time that perhaps I really wanted him and for the first time he really didn't want me.

We stood together, teeth chattering, and I realized I probably could fall in love with him if I could just get rid of my rage. But here on this island of lore, this island that had been the scene of Melville's dream of a great chase, his dream of revenge, my own fury came surging back at me. I knew times were different from when men had ventured forth on whatever romantic adventures awaited them while their women waited with one eye out to sea. I knew that once I had fallen in love with innocence and faith, and from now on I would set out in fear and mistrust. I knew that I was now in pursuit of the object of my own anger, blinded by that anger, and that I lived with the same passion and doubt that had driven Ahab after a white whale. And I knew that in a sense you had to be a little like Ahab to have your white whale in the first place.

I persuaded Sean to come back to bed, and we made love gently until we drifted to sleep. Perhaps things would have been all right between us if he hadn't dropped me off at my apartment the next night, when we returned to the city, instead of spending the night with me. “Look,” he said when the cab pulled up, “I'm very tired and I have an early shoot in the morning. Why don't you stay here and I'll see you tomorrow night?”

I argued that I'd go up with him to his place and stay there, but he was adamant. “I need some time alone; that's all.”

When I walked inside, a strange terror overcame me, a kind of terror I'd never really experienced before. The terror of the person who is alone, the terror of the single person. It took me a
moment to understand that my shortness of breath wasn't from climbing the stairs. It was from being alone. I phoned Sally but she wasn't home. I tried other friends and talked to their answering machines.

And so, in an impulsive moment I've since lived to regret, I called Mark, not so much because I wanted to talk to him as because I wanted to know he was still out there. As I dialed Lila's unpublished number he'd given me at the Echo Inn, I knew I'd hang up when she answered and that would be that. But when Mark answered, I said hello. When he told me Lila was out of town, I asked if he would come over.

Mark never loved me more than when I was flat out with the flu, and he could tell on the phone that somehow I was desperate. It still amazes me how I can plan routes and paths for millions of people, how I can organize their lives in ways they never dreamed, and still make such a maze and muddle out of my own.

M
ARK CLAIMS
his problems began when he reached puberty and his parents moved from his secure, tree-lined corner in Brooklyn to a crossroads in the Bronx where Cummings Avenue intersected Seaman Road. How, he used to say, could a young boy in his family grow up normal with such street signs glaring him in the face? He lived on a lewd corner and pornography was embedded in his soul. At night Mark touched himself as he stared down at the street signs, flickering in the green neon light, foreboding years of self-abuse and a licentious longing for women.

I never intended to sleep with Mark that night. Actually I'm not sure what I intended. Perhaps simply getting him to come over was a victory for myself over Lila. But it was clear when I opened the door that Mark had come over with the intention of sleeping with me.

I thought of all the nights and weeks and months when I would have given anything to have Mark standing at my door in a flannel shirt, clutching a bottle of wine. But now at that
moment I didn't really care very much. “Hi.” He kissed me on the cheek. “You look taller.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“Maybe it's the shoes.” Mark had always loved the fact I was tall. “But I'm sure you're taller.”

“So, how've you been?”

“Oh, you know, busy. Let me open this.”

He walked into the kitchen and went right to the spot on the peg board where the corkscrew hung. My heart sank. He still knew where everything was. “We've got a new case in the office. Some mad subway slasher. A disgusting guy. I have to defend him, but I hope they send him up the river for good.” He had very smoothly inserted the corkscrew into the cork and now he was extracting it from the bottle. “So how goes the South Bronx?”

“Oh, you know. I keep waiting for funding. I'm thinking of going back to school in historic preservation.”

Mark reached for the wine glasses and poured me a glass. “You don't have to go back to school. You could just start working in historic preservation. Oh, I guess you could use an M.A. in architecture.”

“Cheers.” We clinked glasses. “Mark, I didn't really call you to discuss my career.”

He walked with me back into the living room. “So why did you call? Did that guy jilt you or something?”

“Oh, no. We're seeing each other. We're just seeing less of each other. He was living here for a while but now he has his own place.”

“Oh, he was living here . . .” Mark's voice trailed off.

It was strange, having him back in the apartment. I didn't quite know what to do with him. I felt as if we should go and check into a motel somewhere. “So how are things with you?”

“Oh, O.K. Lila's in California, finalizing her divorce, I think. We're getting along all right. I don't know. She can be moody.”

“So can you.”

“Yeah, you're right. Things are O.K.”

“You look tired. Are you still taking all those vitamins?” I don't know really why I asked him that, but I found myself struggling for anything to say to him at all.

Mark must have felt at a loss as well, because he answered the question in some detail. He was still taking his multiples and a lot of C's, but he'd quit taking the stress formula and all those E's. “Why?” He ran his hand over his cheek. “Do I look older?”

“Oh, no, not older. Just tired.”

“You look pretty good. Your cheeks are rosy.”

“We spent the weekend in Nantucket.”

“Nantucket.” He sat back, surprised. “Who goes there now? It's cold.”

“Oh, my friend wanted to get away. He's working very hard on a film and he wanted to go there, so we went.”

“Seemed like a nice person. I liked his manner.” Mark spoke quickly and I knew he was jealous.

“He's been very nice to me; it's just that . . .”

“What?” He knew me well enough to know I was about to talk about more serious subjects.

“I'm just not over it yet. It's taken me a long time to get over what happened with us.”

“And, are you over it?”

I paused and thought for a minute. If I wasn't over it, I was almost over it. I'd been fairly certain on the widow's walk in Nantucket, as I held Sean's trembling shoulders, that I was more over it than I'd ever been. The mere fact that I could see Mark at all meant that I was well along in the process of getting over him. “I'm getting over it.”