Spartina (23 page)

He was just getting over the effect her words had had and understanding what she meant when she laughed. “You should see your face now. You’re really shocked. I should think you’d like the idea.… Or is it another hippie girl with hairy legs?”

“No …”

“You’d just prefer a prettier piece of poetry.”

“No. It was just sudden. I’d just as soon have stayed a little lazy.”

“Well, yes.” She took his head between her hands, but then sat back on her heels, her eyes turning beady as a bird’s. “You know, I once asked a doctor if a shot of sperm had any nutritional value. He said, ‘Certainly, it has about the same number of calories as a slice of white bread.’ ”

“Now you’re doing it on purpose.”

“I am. I can’t help it, you make it so worthwhile. When I shock you, I feel as if I’ve shocked a whole layer of granite.”

He tried not to think about her when he wasn’t with her, but of course he did. One of the most unsettling thoughts that came to him was that the things he liked about Elsie were at odds with each other. That wasn’t how it was with May, May was a single settled person. He stopped there—he didn’t want May and Elsie getting together in his mind.

After the first delirium—a word Parker used to describe his shore leaves, along with lotus-eating and postcoital amnesia—phrases Dick found leaking into his thoughts no matter how often he bailed them out—Dick and Elsie fell into an odd mental intimacy, which, like the other stuff he liked about Elsie, had its opposed charges. It was cozy but high-strung, idle but energetic, aimless but part of a design. She could be absolutely sympathetic (“Good God, Dick, I don’t see how you could stand it!”) but absolutely
remorseless about drilling into him for the facts and the tone of his life. The rhythm of her inquisition was vaguely familiar to him, but he couldn’t place it for a while. They spent a couple of afternoons just lazing around. Dick was secretly relieved that the sexual schedule was less urgent, though there was still an erotic shimmer to just coming up to her house. It occurred to him at last what the rhythm was: A blue heron wading in the marsh on her stilts, apparently out for a stroll—suddenly freezing. An imperceptible tilt of her head—her long neck cocking without moving. No, nothing this time. Wade, pose. Abruptly, a new picture—a fish bisected by her bisected beak. Widening ripples, but the heron, the pool, the marsh, the sky serene. The clouds slid across the light, the fish into the dark.

He told her about this picture. She said, “I liked it when you thought I was like a tern.”

“You’re like a tern. You can be all the birds you want. You …” He bit his tongue. He’d been about to talk about her croaking like a shypoke.

“I was certainly an ugly duckling.”

“Come on, Elsie. You were kind of a tomboy, is all. You weren’t ugly. I remember seeing you and Mr. Bigelow go out in the blue canoe, come surfing in over the sandbar. It looked nifty. You were a cute kid. Brown as a berry. Your hair coming out from that Red Sox hat you used to wear all the time. It seems to me you wore that hat everywhere. Except when you went in the general store, then you’d clutch it in front of you.”

“I was covering my chest. I was embarrassed when I first got bosoms. No bosom was okay. And real bosoms would have been okay … weird but okay. My sister and mother and Mrs. Bigelow all walked around as though they were normal. That was the summer I was thirteen.”

“I guess. You still called me Mr. Pierce. I went into the Coast
Guard right after, I don’t think I saw you again until you were sixteen. That summer with you and your baseball hat was the last time we farmed Sawtooth Point. We picked a hundred and thirty bushels of sweet corn an acre. Your father came out one evening when I was in the field, offered me a ten-dollar bill to pull the poison ivy out of the raspberry bushes. I said sure, I’d get around to it. But then it turned out Mrs. Bigelow, who was the one put him up to it, she had in mind I was to do it
right then.
Because you were all going to have raspberries for dessert that night. She was nearby, just hanging back on the lane by your tennis court. So when she heard me say I’d get around to it, she came up to coax me. I didn’t mind being a part-time farmer for my old man on top of working at the boatyard, but I wasn’t keen on becoming Mrs. Bigelow’s gardener. I didn’t say anything for a bit. I wanted to be obliging, but I didn’t want her to get in the habit.… I still hadn’t said anything when she reached into your father’s pants pocket, pulled out a five-dollar bill and slipped it into my shirt pocket. She said, ‘To insure promptness’—and she made that little sound, you know, sort of a little two-note laugh she used to put on the end of everything—”

“Yes—actually it had three notes, it was a little rising trill. We used to call it Aggie’s hemi-demi-semiquavers.”

Dick laughed at that.

Elsie said, “Could you tell she was fucking my father?”

Dick didn’t know where he was.

Elsie went on, “I didn’t know she was, not then. I didn’t find out until I was sixteen. The year you came back. We’d all been on Sawtooth Point together ever since your father sold us the two house lots. Our two families built the tennis court together—that is, we got Eddie to, but Dad and Timmy Bigelow were out there, Mom too. Aggie didn’t do outside work, but she made lemonade. And the blue canoe. The blue canoe belonged to all of us. My
sister found out first, then the Bigelows’ son, then me. Then my mother. She says that wasn’t the only reason they got divorced. Timmy—Mr. Bigelow—didn’t find out for years and years. Just last spring. Some burglars thought their house was an empty summer house and broke in, discovered Timmy and Aggie. They tied them up. They broke open a box they thought was Aggie’s jewelry box. It was old love notes from my father. The notes were lying there at Timmy and Aggie’s feet after the burglars left. They, I mean Timmy and Aggie, had to lie there together for hours. Nobody came until morning. They lay in front of all those strewn
billets doux
.… The burglars opened them. I guess they were looking for bonds or something. Timmy could read them—well, of course he knew the handwriting, but he could read some of the lines … fond and apparently graphic letters.” Elsie laughed. A little venom in it. She said “Oh, Aggie … ‘Lay not your treasures up on earth where thieves break in.…’ You know, if Timmy wasn’t so sweet the whole thing would make me laugh. If he’d been the kind of man who could have laughed at her, just laughed in her face … Because it’s so pathetic. Now she’s an old hag. She’s got something wrong with her, I mean, she’s sick with something and completely dependent on Timmy. But I’m afraid he was just hurt, lying there facing this secret that was ripped open in front of them.”

Although Elsie was being kind enough about old Mr. Bigelow, there was a bitter triumph in her voice when she talked about Mrs. Bigelow that Dick found repellent but fascinating. When Elsie broke in on
his
story, he’d been irritated, then stunned by
her
story. He still felt irritated, maybe because Elsie was putting his story in its place, just a complaint from the handyman, pretty much of a nothing story really, nothing like the inside story. And yet he was thrilled, in fact a little turned on by her malice.

Elsie said, “You know, I
remember
Aggie’s jewelry boxes. They were covered with some kind of silk quilting. When Sally and I were
little, she used to take us up to her room and fix our hair. I had long hair then. She’d take out her bracelets and let us try them on. And sometimes she’d put makeup on our faces—it felt wonderful—she had cool, light hands. I used to close my eyes and wish it would go on forever.… I used to wonder—I mean afterward—where she and Dad did it. Now I wonder where she kept that box of secrets. And did she take them out and read them late at night? Maybe it didn’t matter about not having Dad, maybe all she needed was a secret. And at last it’s been ripped open.”

Dick said, “Does that happen a lot in the big-house set—some guy running off with someone else’s wife?”

“Oh, they didn’t run off. After it came out—except to Timmy—Dad just split. It wasn’t ‘Women and children first.’ It was ‘Every man for himself.’ Maybe that got to Aggie, that she was more hung up on him than he was on her. She got her hooks into him because he was weak and she lost him because he was weak. So she got what she deserved. Except for Timmy. She doesn’t deserve Timmy. I really adored Timmy when I was little. He’s too nice, though. I never wanted a boyfriend like him.”

“I wish you could have just heard yourself. There wasn’t anyone in that story you didn’t scalp. And Aggie—”

“I can say anything I want about Aggie. You know why I started working for Natural Resources? I mean, I believe in saving nature … but part of why I started is that I get to be in the same sphere as Aggie—her favorite place in the world is this part of South County. She’s one of the four grown-ups who discovered it. Anyway, I get to be here too, but in the job I do, I’m her opposite. She’s an idle, feminine, scientifically ignorant, snobbish, physical coward. I’m a hard-working, tomboyish, scientifically educated, socially declassed jock with enough nerve to go out in rough weather in a small boat.” Elsie paused. Dick was about to take her down a notch by bringing up how pale around the gills she’d been
on account of the sharks, when Elsie looked up at him and said, “Otherwise I’m exactly the same kind of bitch Aggie is.”

Dick knew she meant it, but he didn’t know which way she meant to go with it. Away from him? Toward him? Maybe it was just one of her solo aerial maneuvers, one of her swoops to see how fast she could go.

He said, “Well, neither one of us is about to get a good-conduct ribbon.”

“I wasn’t thinking of good conduct. I was thinking of my bad character. My secret, outlaw nature.
You’ll
end up with good conduct again.
Won’t
you?”

Dick didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he nodded and said, “Yup. I’m not running off anywheres.”

“You’ll go home. That’s right. You should go home. I wouldn’t want you anywhere else. Safe and sound. And I’ll be here, locking up the big bad secret.”

Dick wasn’t sure if she was stinging him or stinging herself. He said, “Well. You want me to go now?”

“Oh, for God’s sakes!” She made an exasperated humming noise. “You know, sometimes you’re … For God’s sakes, where’s your sense of …”

“Of what?” Dick said. “Direction?”

She was revving too fast to think he was funny. “Where’s your sense of … play, your sense of timing, your …” Elsie took a breath and said, “Your sense of me!”

She hovered for a second and then Dick saw she was going to laugh. He watched her laugh get the better of her, and he felt a current of pleasure he’d never thought of looking for.

B
y now some of the lobster in the pots he’d set would begin to eat each other.

Or a big eel would get in, go after a lobster, get hold of its claw, lash it back and forth, and tear hell out of the inner netting.

Pots would work themselves so far into mud or onto the wrong side of a rock, the gangions would break when he pulled the trawl.

Or a dragger would have steamed through with her net set, torn up a whole trawl.

Dick called Keith college-boy again. Someone else answered, said he didn’t know where Keith’d got to. Dick left another message. High time to pull the damn pots.

Dick started for the Neptune—have a beer, maybe see if he could pick up a hand for one trip.

He couldn’t get past Elsie’s driveway.

He thought if one day Charlie was driving the pickup, Charlie would suddenly find himself in front of Elsie’s house. The horse knows the way.

He told Elsie that. She was delighted. He was getting so he told her everything.

Elsie said, “That must have actually happened when people drove horses. What a way to be found out! I think there’s a Maupassant story about that. No—no horses. Just the son taking over his father’s mistress.”

She got him a beer. She drank wine. She kept beer in the icebox for him.

The house seemed very bright, sending out a whole roomful of light through the picture window. She said, “Dick …” and stopped. She said his name intimately and familiarly, but in a way that made him feel unfamiliar.

“Yuh.”

“Never mind, I’ll get back to it. After you’ve settled down. Is it my imagination or are you awfully restless?”

“No. Just worried about all those pots.”

She didn’t ask about the pots. She settled back in her chair, stretched her legs. “Have you seen Mary Scanlon?” she said. “I’m worried. I think her father’s awfully sick.”

She was slouched so low she used her stomach to set her wineglass on, kept it upright with one finger. “I saw Miss Perry’s light on last night. Very late. I’m afraid she may be in her manic wind-up before her depression. Have you seen her lately?”

“No.”

“Jack came over to look at the cottages.… They’ve sold more than half already. He came by here this afternoon. I thought it might be you.”

Dick still felt unfamiliar. He knew all the people, was interested in the news, but disliked the skimming, didn’t like Elsie skimming.… He couldn’t tell; what the hell did they do over at the Neptune but trade “Did-you-hear-about?”s?