Spartina (27 page)

Dick said, “Is she sick?”

“It’s her … you know, her annual spell.”

“I thought that was more toward the end of the summer.”

Elsie said, “Well, yes. It usually is. But I’ve been—or, I should say, her doctor and I have been—trying to talk her into taking a drug, and all our talk seems to have upset her. Look, can you come to my house in a half-hour? Or maybe you can just go over there now. Just go on in. I’ll be back, and I’ll explain it all then. She’ll be glad you called on her. I’ll tell her.”

“I came to ask her to lend me money.”

“Oh.” Elsie stepped back. “Oh dear. I don’t know. Look, I’ve got to arrange some things. Captain Texeira’s coming over, and then the doctor’s going to call, so why don’t you go on to my house. I’ll see you there.”

Elsie closed the door. Dick stood there. He felt too reckless and
lightheaded to feel he had shamed himself, but he could tell he was going to feel shamed. He got back in his pickup. When he got to the crossroads of Miss Perry’s lane and the dirt road, he stopped. What was the point in going to Elsie’s house? But, then, what was the point in going home?

When he got to Elsie’s house, he sat in his truck and smoked a cigarette. He lit another but put it out. He went into the house.

He felt odd being there alone. He was glad to feel odd, it kept his thoughts from settling. The scarlet curtain was drawn back from around the bed, the bed unmade but not messy, just the near corner of the covers flapped down, two pillows on top of each other.

The sun was bright on the little pond and on the slant of the greenhouse roof.

On the table by the window there was a plate with a wet peach pit and a coffee mug. A letter addressed to Elsie, several pages covered with handwriting on both sides. Next to it a tablet of paper and a pen. At the top of the page only “Dear Lucy” in Elsie’s writing.

These pieces of interrupted activity made the house even more charged with stillness.

Elsie didn’t come in a half-hour. Dick waited. He was made uneasy by the peach pit and the unmade bed. He threw the peach pit in the trash and tucked in the bedcovers. He sat back down at the table by the window. He let his mind go lax. Nothing here in this bright room. The sun moved across the pond, across the slant of glass. Now his thoughts began to settle. What had he done? His face felt cold, but busy with sensation. He’d blurted out how he needed money. Why did that feel so bad? He’d made himself more naked in front of bank officers, in front of Joxer Goode. The difference was that with those people he had an argument. They stood to gain if they used him shrewdly. Neither Miss Perry nor Elsie really knew the argument. They weren’t fighting for advantage.
They didn’t set themselves out as being in business. Going to them was begging. There it was.

Dick thought he’d leave. Maybe write a note to Elsie saying he’d changed his mind. He felt weightless again, as though he’d been cut loose and might end up anywhere. Was this what Parker felt like all the time? Was this what it felt like to be a player? Or did you find yourself feeling like this and that’s when you had to decide whether you were a player? Parker wasn’t tied to anyplace or anyone. That part was how Dick felt now, but the difference was Parker wasn’t scared so much as dizzy about it. Once Parker started moving dangerously, he thought it all out. And Parker grinned. That was a difference too.

Dick thought of Parker’s grin. He saw it clearly. For the first time in all the years he’d known Parker, Dick noticed there wasn’t quite enough flesh between Parker’s nose and Parker’s upper lip. No wonder Parker had paid to get his teeth fixed, even before he paid to fix his boat. Parker couldn’t help that grin. Was that how it worked? Parker was just born with that short upper lip and couldn’t help living up to it? Or had that lip shortened up a hair’s breadth with every quick trick Parker pulled? With every sly dollar he conned from tourists, insurance companies, his crews of green college kids? Captain Parker’s Pep Pills for Sleepy Sailors.

Dick stopped. What was he up to? Blame it all on Parker? Dick had always known how Parker lived. If he’d gone along with Parker, it was because there was a piece of him that wanted to be just as sly. Dick couldn’t claim he caught that disease from Parker. He’d gone poaching clams all on his own, no matter that was small potatoes. And the way he felt about banks, if he could have robbed one without inconvenience, he just might have.

And it had been Dick’s idea to get Schuyler on board and stick him with the bill for the spotter plane. That was pure Parker, and Dick had done it.

As for Parker’s drug run, Dick had balked at that, but he’d gone ahead. And to be honest about that, he had more worry that Parker was going to stiff him than he had remorse. Goddamn right. He couldn’t get any more mortgages on what he owned, so he’d taken one on his being a free citizen. No interest, but lots of penalty.

But mainly here he was fooling around with Elsie. Parker didn’t have a thing to do with this.

With every minute of waiting, Dick saw more and more clearly how Elsie was linked to every piece of his life. To his father’s land, and even to his father’s death by that odd condolence. To the bright rich people who now inhabited his father’s land by the salt pond—Joxer, Schuyler, the whole clambake. To Natural Resources, for God’s sakes. To Miss Perry. To his own sons. Dick remembered Charlie’s startled look of longing at Elsie’s legs when she’d whipped off her skirt to go swimming.

Charlie’s dreams might be full of Elsie—Miss Buttrick to him. Charlie’s puppy love merging with Charlie’s first spasms of billy-goat anguish. Banging his head on a tree for sweet Miss Buttrick, for her complete sweetness as she bent over him at her ecology class, her sleeve touching his hand as her finger touched the powder on a butterfly wing. Gritting his teeth at night, thinking of the terrible things he wanted to do to Miss Buttrick’s body, imagining with equal and simultaneous shame and pleasure Miss Buttrick saying “No, Charlie,” Miss Buttrick saying “Yes, Charlie.”

Dick cringed. He didn’t want to get that close to that part of Charlie.

But the thought of Charlie clung to Dick’s mind; Dick’s actual pleasure—accomplished not ten feet from where he now sat—seemed pale by comparison with Charlie’s dreams.

Dick was finally getting rid of Charlie’s daydreams when Elsie came in the door, down the two steps. He stood up. She put her pocketbook on the table. One hand on his shoulder, she kissed
him shortly. She said, “I thought you told me you’d be back day before yesterday.”

Dick thought of what to say—“We got into some fish” was answer enough for anyone—but the sight of Elsie in a blue seersucker woman’s suit, dressed up as soberly as if she worked in a bank, and Elsie’s face cocked to one side in such a perfect imitation of a wife waiting for an answer, not May, not May now, not May ever—this was an affronted wife out of someone else’s life, someone wearing a suit and a tie to match her suit, someone who would say, “I’m terribly sorry, darling—I got tied up at the office”—all this was so far from Dick, so far outside what he’d just imagined, that Dick was popped right out of a straight answer.

He felt himself slide back into himself, reinhabit his body, from his vacant face down to his wide feet in his tight good shoes. He looked up to Elsie’s face, still cocked, her chin stuck out, her forehead furrowed up. When she folded her arms across her chest, he started to laugh.

He tried to stop. Elsie said, “What’s so funny?”

Dick shook his head. Elsie said, “It’s the whole thing, is it?”

Dick said, “That’s right,” and sat down.

Elsie said, “You son of a bitch.”

“It’s not the whole thing with
you
,” Dick said. “It’s everything right now.”

“You liar,” Elsie said. “You think you can get away with anything because you still think I’m just a spoiled brat.”

“You’re wrong there,” Dick said. “That’s just one thing I think you are.”

“You asshole!” Elsie wasn’t out-and-out screeching but there was some screech to her voice. It struck Dick as odd that Elsie was losing it. In all his set-tos with yachtsmen, bankers, and such, Dick had been the one to lose it. The other guy may have been mad too, but it was Dick who lost it. Just now he’d been a little riled, but he didn’t want Elsie to lose it.

“Aw, come on, Elsie. I couldn’t use the radio, for God’s sakes. The operator at the Co-op is nosy as hell. And Charlie was on board, remember how close by everyone the radio is? I know I said I’d be back, but if you get into fish, you—”

“I don’t give a damn about your calling in. Though I’ll bet you could have thought of something if you’d tried just a little. You could have sent some innocent message, you could have asked if I still wanted a basket of lobsters even if you were going to be late.”

Dick said, “I’m not too good at thinking up things like that.”

“But what is rude, what is unspeakably rude, is your sitting here going har-har-har like a big oaf! I come in, you’ve been gone nearly a week, and you laugh in my face.”

Dick said, “I wasn’t—”

“And in fact the first person you go see is Miss Perry.”

Dick said, “It’s hard to explain. I was—”

“I’m sure it is,” Elsie said. “In that case you could at least have had the grace to lie and say you were looking for me.”

Dick didn’t try to say anything.

Elsie said, “Do you know what Captain Texeira does when he gets back to port? He phones Miss Perry. If he comes in late at night and can’t call, he leaves flowers. She finds a little flowerpot on her front step and she knows he’s back safe. And he named his second boat after her.”

Dick was afraid he was going to laugh again. Flowers. Him and Elsie Buttrick arguing about flowers. He got up and walked to the window, looked down at the pond.

“I don’t have one boat, let alone two. I’m not sure I’ll ever be the kindly soul Captain Texeira is, even if I do.” The pond was glaring, exposed as muddy by the midday light. Dick said, “I told you why I was going to see Miss Perry. I can tell you too that I don’t want to. I’m going ’cause it’s rock bottom. It came to me this morning when I got in. This trip I did as good as I could hope for, I had as good luck as I could ask for, and it ain’t enough. If it was just me,
I’d give up, I’d salvage what I could from the goddamn boat and beg for a job. That’s what May would have wanted a year ago.
Now
she wants the boat in the water because she says I’ll be poison to her and the boys if I give up. And she’s right. I could bring myself to sell off the boat, but I couldn’t do it cheerfully. Even if I got fifty or sixty thousand for her, that money would evaporate. If I back off now, I won’t ever get a boat. So I’m willing—just barely willing—to go begging to Miss Perry. I knew this morning, if I didn’t do it that very minute, I wouldn’t ever do it.”

Dick heard Elsie moving around behind him. After a while she said, “Let me get this straight. You want a loan.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re not begging. A loan isn’t begging. I know you went to Joxer Goode—”

“Joxer Goode is a businessman. He stood to gain. But even talking to
him
I felt I was stripping myself naked. I’ll tell you something I don’t like to remember. Joxer asked me about collateral, and after I’d listed the house and truck I said, ‘There’s my eighteen-foot skiff and there’s the boys’ little skiff.’ ”

Elsie said, “I don’t get it. What’s so bad about that?”

“Jesus, Elsie. It was like I was going into the next room and coming back with the boys’ piggy bank. It’s the boys’ boat. And it was so … puny. Joxer’s a decent enough guy, so he didn’t laugh. Not to my face at least. But there I was in front of him, turning my pockets inside out. I might as well have been taking off my damn pants, I might as well have said, Go on and take the boys, take May. They’ll pick crabs for you, they’ll clean your house.…”

Elsie said, “I don’t think he saw it that way. I understand how you feel—”

“Do you?”

“Yes, I do,” Elsie said. “Goddamn it, I do. And it’s wrong of you to think I don’t.”

Dick turned around.

“It makes me mad,” Elsie said. “The way you think of me. You should have made this clearer to me before now. Much clearer. Either you think I’m a moron, or you don’t trust me. I know things, for God’s sakes. I built this house, I live on a salary. And I’m trustworthy.” Elsie pursed her lips. “I’m not perfect, but I’m trustworthy.” Elsie suddenly deflated. She said, “I know it’s complicated. I mean, we
are
having an affair and that’s always more than anyone imagines.… And I’m tied up in odd ways with all sorts of people you might not trust—there’s my brother-in-law for one, building his dream resort for the right people on Sawtooth Point. He’s not a bad person but … One thing I’ve always felt is how unfair it is that my family just swooped down on Sawtooth Point. And now my sister and brother-in-law are doing it again. I’ve always felt my family owed you something. And I understand how hard you’ve worked. I feel guilty. I can even imagine that it might make you angry to come here and see this house.”

“No. Jesus, Elsie, I don’t hold your house against you. And if your father bought land from my father, that’s their business. My old man needed the money. And it was later when he sold the rest of the point. Once he knew he had cancer, he was scared they wouldn’t treat him right if they thought he couldn’t pay his bills.

“It’s funny—these last couple of weeks I’ve softened up a lot. I’ve never laid around so much in my life. I’ve never spent so much time in bed.”

Elsie cocked her head. “Is that so? Sloth and lust drive out anger and envy. So what does that make me? Some siren luring you to a doom of pleasure in her enchanted cave?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to start nagging you about working on your boat?”

“No.”

“Do you think we should stop? I mean, do you think there’s some correlation between our affair and your not working on your boat?”

“No.”

Elsie said, “You always get so gloomy when I ask you questions. Submerged swamp Yankee. But it does you good, you know. On a scale of one to ten, how guilty do you feel about sleeping with me?”

Dick said, “Jesus, Elsie.”