Moon Tide (22 page)

Patrick

H
e finds her in Paris. He tracks her to the small apartment near the Place de la Concorde. He pays the landlady to leave a dozen lilies outside her door with a note: a quote from Thoreau and the address of one of the pavilion restaurants surrounded by chestnut trees near the Rond-Point.

He is on his way to Cologne, he says, for a conference. She has brought Madeline with her, and the three of them have dinner. They sit at a table that has been set for two, the girls close together. They dip bread into lamb juice and garlic oil and feed each other playfully, laughing, in front of him, and when Eve orders the baked snapper served whole and Patrick exclaims, “But how primitive!” she glances at Madeline, who shoots her a cunning smile in exchange, and Eve does not argue with him, she does not try to explain that she prefers the fish whole, that she has always preferred the fish whole, with the eyes and lips and bones and gills—with all the parts it had still living—instead she lets him persuade her to order the fillet of salmon instead, and when it arrives, poached and skinless, a gorgeous orange flesh sprinkled with green shreds of dill, she picks at it carefully, in small bites, with her fork.

After dinner, they walk down to the quay. Retaining walls heave up on one side, vast sections of blocked stone pierced by openings that
were once old water gates. The trees lean over the edge of the Seine. Their fractured shadows pass through the slow-moving water at the fringe. The sun has not yet set, and the light scatters on the cobbles. Eve walks between Patrick and Madeline. She is quiet as they speak and laugh and flirt around her. She can hear the sluggish purr of the barges on the river, the scrapped conversations of couples strolling by, the call of a small boy pushing a cart full of wildflowers, crude wheels turning over the stones.

“Et toi?”
Madeline says, nudging her shoulder. “What do you think?”

She pushes Eve gently toward Patrick as the three of them walk, and they make a game of her, nudging her back and forth as if she were a piece of driftwood caught between them. She is aware of her own light weight, as easily swayed as a blade of eelgrass at slack tide.

As they are turning onto the vast and tree-lined esplanade that will lead them back up to the street, Eve notices a man farther ahead along the quay. She pauses for a moment. He has his back to her and he is scything down the weeds along the bank. It is the motion that reminds her. It is the motion he seems to inhabit, that steady hooked flow of the blade.

“Viens toi, cherie,”
says Madeline, tugging at her sleeve, but she does not turn.

“Eve,” says Patrick firmly. “Come.” He takes her by the elbow, tucks her arm under his, and draws her away from the river up the esplanade. She does not look back. The pressure of her arm clipped under Patrick’s is decisive. It grounds her and she lets herself be led.

They take their coffees at a smaller street café by the Dôme. They order a raspberry tart and a plate of biscuits with cheese. They are drinking their coffees when Patrick spots a colleague of his from the States in a group on the other side of the café. He excuses himself and leaves the table. Madeline leans over and whispers to Eve that she would like to bring him home. Her breath is full of almond. He will lie between them on the white sheets, she says, they will make love and drink wine and then he will sit slightly apart on the window
seat and he will watch them together. He will tell them what he wants to see.

Eve looks after Patrick stepping around the small tables that stumble out onto the street—his gray suit weaving through the yellowed light—a slight forked wrinkle between the shoulder blades.

Under the table, she feels Madeline’s hand press against her thigh, and it occurs to her that they will not be this close again. It occurs to her that the way Madeline touches her—fingers curious and lithe—is something she will miss. The affair itself was careless, she knows this, but it had its own playful life, skittish and surreal, that she will miss.

She leaves them that night—she kisses Madeline on each cheek and offers Patrick her hand.

“Of course I’ll see you home,” he says, standing up.

“Thank you. I’m quite all right.”

“I insist.”

“Again, thank you but I’m fine.”

“A taxi then. Let me call a taxi for you.” He takes her arm, but she gently slips it loose.

“I assure you,” she says. “I’ll be fine.”

His face is red and disarranged the way it was that first day she saw him on the Coleses’ terrace by the Brie. He sits down again.

She glances back at them once. Madeline has leaned across the small table, and she is whispering something to Patrick as if the level of noise around them has prevented proper distances. His chin is bent, listening, but he glances up once, and his head raises slightly when he catches Eve looking back. She turns away toward the stream of traffic through the street. It is September again, she remembers, as she waits for a horse carriage to pass. She crosses to the other side.

She does not go directly back to her apartment. She walks through the narrow streets to the painting studio above the boulangerie. The bakers have already come. They are setting tomorrow’s loaves into the oven, painting them with a wash of sugared milk.

The easels are set, stripped in their rows—awkward skeletons in the
dark. She opens the drawers of stones and steals the chunk of lapis. She steals it for the white vines that web through its surface. She steals it for its weight in her hand. That night she packs the green steamer trunk and sets the blue rock next to her pillow. As she lies in bed, the curtains heave up like white ghosts around the devastating freedom of the open window space. She can feel her face in colors when she closes her eyes. She dreams of standing in the lower meadow at Skirdagh knee-deep in sunlight with the birch trees close by—their small leaves trembling, a wild green music in the wind. She dreams of walking with her father on the beach at Horseneck. She dreams of the moon on the river at night, the way the light unravels. She dreams of a time once when she was a child wading barefoot with her grandmother through the maze of eelgrass in the let. They were gathering elderberries, and as they walked, Elizabeth told Eve that once the let was open to the sea. It was filled when the road was laid down across East Beach and the summer people began to build. She told her that over the years the let grew into a haunted place, and its hauntedness came because it was not often touched. Eve walked on quietly beside her grandmother through the shallows, her skirt tied up around her knees, mud running soft between her toes. She looked for the fish hiding in the ridges where the water level changed.

She is not entirely surprised when she meets Patrick on the ship pulling out of Liverpool. They have already lost sight of land when she turns the corner on the first-class deck and he is there, strolling toward her.

She asks him about the conference in Cologne.

“Canceled,” he answers and smiles.

As the days deepen across the ocean, she senses Paris growing farther and farther away.

Patrick finds her nearly every morning after breakfast on the deck. He sits with a book several chairs away as she sketches, the way they sat together in the afternoons at Skirdagh the summer before. Once in a while, when she looks up at him, she can see the aliveness of the city
she has left in his face. She can see Madeline, red geraniums, crushed zaffer, her own free body, and the wrought-iron window grates. They take four o’clock tea together, and he tells her that, in the year she was away, he went to work for Arthur Coles and the Westport Real Estate Trust.

“Coles has great plans for the town,” he says, stirring cream into his tea.

“For the harbor side?”

“No, for the Point. North of the Point. Farther up Main Road from your family’s house.”

Eve breaks a scone and sets half down on her plate. “There’s nothing but farms farther up Main Road.”

“It’s the farms Coles wants.”

“They won’t sell their farms.”

“Oh yes, I think they will,” Patrick answers, heaping out a teaspoonful of sugar.

“That’s their land. You don’t understand how they feel about their land.”

“Arthur Coles is a certain kind of man,” Patrick says. He pours more tea into her cup. “He knows how to offer someone not too little, not too much, but just enough.”

She takes the half of scone and breaks it again. She nibbles at the dried currants that have soaked in butter and flour.

“Are you that kind of man?” she asks.

He takes her hand gently, tucks it into his. She clings to the bland screen of his face and the images massing there.

“I can offer you enough,” he answers, and she notices that when she is with him, she does not feel. He reminds her of things that have mattered: of Skirdagh, of that day of the storm on the sandflat, of Madeline and the strange, unbandaged span of time she spent in Paris. He is linked to these disruptions in her life, these moments of irrevocable impact, and yet when she is sitting with him, when he takes her arm to steer her through a door, even now, as he is holding
her hand across the table, she finds herself curiously numb, her fingers like clay-cold fish. His rather dispassionate attitude toward the town, his work, even toward her, mutes her own desire, and she notices as if she is studying herself from a distance that she derives a sense of comfort from the absence of feeling. She is safe, detached, like a shadow unhinged.

Wes

O
n the second Sunday of September, 1933, Caleb Mason stops down at the Shuckers Club to tell Wes about the schooner coming in that night with six hundred cases of Indian Hill. Sailing down from Nova Scotia, she will anchor past the wreck for one night before she continues down the coast to drop whatever’s left to Chape Fisk’s gang at Sakonnet Point. They plan to meet at the wharf after dark and to push off close to ten. That same morning on his way back up Main Road, Mason busts a wheel on his wagon by the Tuttle Farm. As he is fixing it, a truck comes over the hill, bearing straight toward him. Mason slides out from under the wagon and runs across the road. The truck swerves to avoid him, sideswiping the wagon, which ricochets across the macadam, picks Mason up on the edge of its flatbed, and pins him, head first, into Joe Tuttle’s new stone wall.

Billy Gallows comes down to the Shuckers Club to tell Wes the news.

“Dead?”

“Not quite.”

“He will be?”

“Not sure.”

Wes lights a cigarette. He racks the balls on the pool table, breaks them with the cue, and begins to shoot a game against himself. He
sinks a stripe in the corner pocket and glances up at Billy. “What you waiting on?”

“You’ll need someone to go with you tonight.”

“Nothing’s doing tonight.”

“I hear there is.”

“Yeah? Who’d spin that for you?”

“Someone who’d know.”

“No one knows nothing, ’cause there’s nothing doing.”

Gallows scuffs his foot into a loose board.

“Who told you?” Wes asks, chalking the end of the cue. He drags in on his cigarette and watches the younger man’s face. “Thin Gin?”

“Naw, he’s a dumb fuck.”

“Davoll?”

“Nope.”

“Penny?”

“Old man’s cracked.”

“Blackwood?”

In the eyes, a brief flicker. “No way,” says Gallows.

“Was Blackwood, wasn’t it.”

“Said no.”

“Blackwood’s wet. Always been wet. You know that, well as I do. He ain’t from here.”

“Wasn’t him, I say.”

“All right then.” Wes stands up. He blows off the tip of the cue and stubs his cigarette out on a sawhorse. “Get yourself gone.”

That afternoon, Wes goes out alone to dig. He leaves the skiff aground at the edge of the bar. As he drives his feet into the shallow murk, and his toes scrape the rough-lined shells of clams, he knows that what he is looking for is the solidity of Maggie—the taste of her. He digs deeper—down to the point where the grass takes root, the point where he lost her, where she became vast, and his own desire unintelligible and frightening to him.