Paper Lantern: Love Stories (19 page)

The timidity of my own Romantic rebellion disappointed him.

“All you need for a barbaric yawp, Byron, is the circular vowel that this vulgar century we’re forced to inhabit has appropriated for the Big O,” Shelly confided. “It’s the secret of Romantic transformation: O sullen soulless homework! O sperm-crusty plaid boxers! O morning woody saluting attention, sir!”

Shelly returned to mind on a weekday when Mariel and I played hooky from our sullen soulless jobs in order to sneak in a last trip to the beach, and I found myself yawping: “O final flame of Indian summer before the frost!”

“I hope that term hasn’t become offensive,” Mariel said. “Do you think Native Americans call it Indian summer, too?”

“Stop worrying and give the old poetic O a whirl,” I told her, not that she struck me as the type who would have gone in for black lipstick, or for a poseur like Duane. But then, despite all our time together, I knew next to nothing about what she’d been like in high school, or, for that matter, about the kind of boys she’d found attractive. Early on, Mariel told me she wasn’t one to dwell on the past. She thought the boomers still lining up for Dead concerts were pathetic. She said nostalgia, like most things self-indulgent, was ultimately boring.

“O hidden heart of fading summer,” she said, being a sport and playing along in a way meant to be ironic. Yet I caught a note of such wistfulness in her voice that I had to suppress an impulse to ask:
Are you talking about us?

And if she had answered yes, I would have had to admit that I, too, felt that something had faded between us, and I missed Mariel and Bryan, that crazy-about-each-other-couple-living-for-the-moment we’d once been. I wanted to be them again.

O haloed trips to the beach when we first met! It was thrill enough then simply to watch Mariel strip down to her swimsuit as if she couldn’t wait to shed her clothes. She’d kick off her sandals and unbutton her blouse while simultaneously shimmying from unzipped jeans, and then adjust her swimsuit like a teenage girl, tugging it over a buttock and hitching up her top as if concerned with modesty even though the choice to wear a revealing pink bikini was hers. She’d stretch out facedown on a beach towel, untie her bikini straps, and have me slather her with lotions scented with coconut and almond. Her sun-streaked hair seemed a perfect complement to her gleaming skin. I told her once, “A lot of people would pay to have hair your color.”

“And I’m one of them,” she said.

I’d laughed. We were still all but strangers then, having met earlier that spring, and I remember wondering if she was the kind of woman whose self-deprecating humor sprang not only from a distrust of vanity but also from a refusal to play along with the manipulative flattery of men. It turned out that she was gracious when told she was beautiful, although the fact that she
was
beautiful may have made the compliment acceptable. She prided herself on being a realist, someone who, as she liked to say, “tells it straight or not at all.” I hadn’t realized yet that the emphasis fell on
not at all
.

I drove a vintage VW Bug at the time, pumpkin-orange with the engine in the rear and a convertible top that folded down by hand. Mariel liked my choice of car—“the ultimate beachmobile,” she observed—even though it was April, rainy and chill and therefore cruel given the Bug’s dysfunctional heater and leaky top. Once summer kicked in, that car lived up to her name for it. We’d pack a cooler with a picnic lunch—cold pizza and a bottle of wine—and drive to one beach or another, each weekend farther south along the coast. We were on a quest to find a beach with a riding stable nearby. Mariel, who moonlighted as an instructor at a school for dressage, had heard about a place where you could rent horses to ride through the surf, though we never found it. I’d never seen her ride, but horses were the measure in the sweetest, most haunting thing she ever told me: “The way I know I’ll always love horses, I know I’ll always love you.”

After the battery dropped through the rusted-out floor, I sold the beachmobile to a collector. I drive a Ford Taurus wagon now.

It was a day for hooky. The twisting shore road climbed through the color change, its macadam pasted with leaves. We sped along windward stretches where the rainbow haze of spindrift made it seem as if we’d just missed a sun shower. This time we were heading north, where the coast was wilder and deserted, as if making a getaway. And maybe we had escaped, if only for the drive, from Mariel and Bryan—a couple we referred to in the third person. “I liked those two people,” Mariel would say in a rare nod to the past, and I’d agree. Despite their unfair competition with the present, I liked them, too.

On a stretch of beach selected at random, I set down the cooler, slipped off my backpack, and Mariel plunged the stake of her beach umbrella into the sand. Then she kicked off her sandals, undid her blouse, and eased off her jeans. She was wearing a black one-piece I hadn’t seen before. We hadn’t been to a beach in a very long time. The suit emphasized the swell of her breasts and the width of her shoulders. In an evening dress, those shoulders were arresting. She had a rider’s posture and a swimmer’s build.

“That’s an athletic-looking suit,” I said.

“I’m afraid my bikini days are over.”

“Nonsense, you’re trim as ever.”

“Forever young?” she asked. “Do you think, to remain so, one has to become her own child?”

“You’re still a beautiful woman, is what I think.”

“Thanks, Bry. I know you mean it. We’ve grown older and it’s sweet of you not to notice, but I don’t want to be someone who doesn’t realize when it’s time to dress appropriately.”

The beach was deserted, and the water, despite the sun flaring off its surface, was already too cold for swimming. We sloshed barefoot, stopping to skip stones and to collect shells, though they were wave-worn beyond recognition. It was like wading along a coast of broken china. We were about to turn back when Mariel noticed hoofprints in the sand. They emerged suddenly from the water and continued at a gallop down the beach in the direction we’d been heading.

“Let’s follow them,” she said.

I was sorry I’d left my watch and the car keys behind, in one of my shoes. We walked, glancing back to see if our encampment was safe: our towels, the cooler with its iced bottle of champagne, the blue ukulele on which I could pick out “Blue Moon” but no longer remembered how to tune, and the umbrella she called her Italian umbrella.

That faded beach umbrella obviously meant something to her. I recalled a day toward the end of one of our first summers together—they seemed a single, seamless summer now—when we’d accidentally left it behind. We had camped on the windward shore of a peninsula that wasn’t on the highway map and, after drinking a bottle of wine, lay kissing beneath the umbrella, beside the surf as if—Mariel joked—we were auditioning for parts in the love scene in
From Here to Eternity
. We’d fooled around at beaches before—Mariel called it mashing—but that particular afternoon we kissed in a trance. I stretched out against her and she began to tremble until she was in the throes of an abandoned shuddering. It felt like we were connected only by the pressure of our lips, even when she locked her legs around me and clung, intent upon taking me along to wherever she was rushing. Her breath seemed to echo through my body, through a labyrinthine network of self I didn’t know existed until I heard her moaning lost in it.

Afterward, we lay drowsily staring at the underside of the umbrella, Mariel squeezing my hand with each aftershock. The sounds of gulls and surf arrived as if from a great distance.

“That was oceanic,” she whispered.

“Have you ever come kissing before?” It wasn’t the kind of question I normally asked, but I felt shaken, changed. It had never happened to me with anyone.

“Sometimes in dreams,” she said. “Sometimes I wake coming.”

“With whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t remember who once you wake?”

“It’s always a stranger.”

We repacked the beachmobile in a daze and must have driven off leaving the folded umbrella leaning against a tree I’d parked beneath for shade.

That night, Mariel called to say she’d just realized her Italian umbrella was missing. I felt I’d left something behind, as well, though I couldn’t say what. Truth be told, the umbrella was ratty—lopsided, rust-stained, mildewed—an anomaly, given her otherwise tastefully chosen beach gear. When I offered to buy her a new one, she was insulted that I’d think it was a matter of money. Her sense of loss over an umbrella seemed at odds with her avowed disregard for the past. It was well after dark when she called, and the beach we’d happened upon was an hour and a half away down an unlit back road. I wasn’t sure I could locate it again even in daylight. Although I didn’t hold much hope for finding the umbrella, I offered to go back with her the next morning.

In the middle of the night, unable to sleep, Mariel unhitched the horse trailer from her pickup and drove back alone. The entrance to the beach was unmarked and she wasn’t sure she’d found the right turnoff. Her headlights followed a sandy two-track to a crest of hissing pines. On the other side, a dune descended to the water. She could hear the scuff of combers. She dug a balky flashlight from the glove compartment and stepped out but she couldn’t identify the tree we’d parked beneath. She searched around each tree as her flashlight flickered and died. While she pounded the battery chamber against her palm, marbled clouds parted above, revealing a moon of luminescent blue.

Oh, look at the moon!
she told herself.

The vision was worth the drive. Then, across the beach, near the water’s edge, she saw the silhouette of an umbrella. She distinctly remembered uprooting her umbrella as we’d gathered our things from the sand, and my asking her, “How could I not love you?” to which she’d replied, “A rhetorical question?”

Wind in her face, she skidded down the dune, and jogged past the embers of a driftwood fire reflecting off shards of wine jugs, expecting the silhouette to be revealed as an optical illusion, a mirage of moon glow. A snatch of song stopped her in her tracks.
You saw me standing alone
: over the surf, a voice carried the melody of “Blue Moon” before a gust blew it away. Shadows thrusting beneath the umbrella seemed to possess the substance of bodies.
It’s just kids, lovers
, she thought. At the same instant, she realized how alone she was—no one even knew she was there. The wind thrashed the water and drove the sky. A fuming collision of clouds snuffed the moon just as a draft lifted the umbrella off the sand, whisking the shadows beneath it into darkness. Mariel had the urge to flee back to her pickup before she was erased, but she’d come too far to give up.

She chased the umbrella as it wheeled along the shore and was sucked into the surf. She waded in, grabbing for the canvas canopy, but the backwash ripped it away, knocking her off balance. She floundered to her feet, lunged for the umbrella, and was knocked down again. Choking, she fought to surface against an undertow of raking hands. She was clubbed across the mouth but managed to seize the bobbing pole of the umbrella and, in a momentary trough between waves, drag it ashore.

She knelt on the beach gasping for breath, already shivering, suddenly aware the waves had shredded her blouse. The umbrella, waterlogged and caked with sand, was as ungainly in the wind as the sail of a dismasted boat. Its ribs were bent, but she was able to fold it partially and lug it up the dune. She’d lost the flashlight and was terrified she’d lost her truck keys, too, but they were wadded in wet Kleenex in the pocket of her jeans.

By cab light, she dabbed the Kleenex over her bloodied breasts looking for where she’d been cut until she realized the blood was drooling from her split lip. It felt to her tongue as if she’d chipped a canine. She loaded the umbrella into the truck bed and, careful not to spin the tires in the sand, got the hell out of there.

The next day, when she told me the story, I chastised her for going alone. “You should have called me,” I said.

“I wasn’t going to wake you at two a.m. If I hadn’t gone then, I’d have lost it.”

When I asked what it was about the umbrella that made it so important, she answered that what had drawn her to me was that I seemed to understand instinctively that a person is defined by the present—and by the possibility of change that living in the present affords. The past, as far as she was concerned, was another word for stasis; the only means of changing the past was to lie about it. She’d thought I agreed that it wasn’t necessary for people to know every little boring, neurotic detail about each other. The way she said it implied that maybe her assumptions about me had been wrong.

I didn’t reply, but her rebuke bothered me, and not just because it was unfair—from the time we’d met I’d been anything but overly inquisitive. What I found disturbing was that the more defensive she became, the less she seemed to realize how sketchy her past actually was.

I had presumed that part of the attraction between us was that we were both loners. As loners do, we’d made a private world together. What did I care, at least at first, about her past? The relationships I’d had until then never lasted long enough for history and its supposed predictive power to matter. It seemed enough that Mariel was beautiful to me. If that was a questionably romantic basis for a relationship, then I was willing to admit, at least in retrospect, to having chosen—in that unconscious way one chooses without being aware that one has—a life of sensation over a life of meaning. Maybe the real choice I made was to accept the consequences. Perhaps beauty was different in Keats’s time, but I never expected that beauty, at least physical beauty, would equate with truth.

The lost umbrella, a small thing in itself, was a turning point. Until her strange behavior about it, I hadn’t admitted to myself that Mariel was in hiding, perhaps simply hiding how disconnected she was. Isn’t that, after all, the secret we most keep both from the world and from ourselves—not what we know, but the extent of our ignorance? True or not, the thought consoled me. The incident with the umbrella confirmed what she had already intimated: the kind of men Mariel was attracted to were the kind who didn’t ask questions. That had narrowed the field to someone like me.