Spartina (48 page)

“Well,” Elsie said, “she didn’t give anything to you, she gave it to Charlie and Tom.” Elsie laughed. “You aren’t jealous, are you? You’re not worried she loves them more than she loves you? She did lend you some, but you have to pay yours back.”

Dick looked at Elsie. She’d turned impish again, grinning and poking. She said, “Maybe you’re annoyed she’s setting your boys free from you. You are sort of a tyrant, aren’t you? But there isn’t anything you can do about this. As soon as the boys turn eighteen, it’s just between Miss Perry and them.” Elsie laughed again. “There is an irony here—last summer you were scrabbling hard for every penny. You conned Schuyler into paying for the spotter plane, poached clams out of the bird sanctuary, ran drugs.… There was no stopping you. But now—now you want to give it all away. Pay for my baby. Make poor old Miss Perry take back her presents to your children.”

Elsie was nettling him, but she was also jostling him out of his sense of oppression.

“You know,” Elsie said, “Miss Perry sold me my five acres at way below market value. Why can’t you be as cheerful and grateful as I was?”

Dick said, “Passing money from rich to rich isn’t the same.”

Elsie laughed at him. “I wish I was as rich as you keep thinking I am. Get it straight, will you? I’m not rich, I’m privileged.” Elsie cracked herself up over that.

Dick didn’t laugh. He still hadn’t made his good reasons clear to her. “Look. I’m as fond of Miss Perry as anyone, but there’s a mockery in it. Whether she meant to or not, it mocks me. For four years I tried to borrow money from the bank. We didn’t eat red meat but once a week and that was hamburger. An awful lot of fish, which none of us like all that much. I was hauling pots, building boats for other people when I couldn’t afford to work on my own … and that whole time, all those years, one of my kids has some … 
storybook
 … worth five thousand dollars! Goddamn. I built a whole catboat and didn’t get five thousand gross.”

“I understand,” Elsie said. “I agree that what some people get paid is crazy, how people get money is crazy. Miss Perry thinks the whole thing is crazy too. She sold an old painting she’d never liked much—she was horrified at what it brought in.”

Dick said, “Horrified. Yup.”

“She knows that people get rich by chance. At least she’s a rich person who admits it. And at least she’s generous. I admire what she’s done, and I think you should too. If she’d said straight out to you, ‘I’m going to help send your kids to college,’ you might have given her a flat no. She’s given your kids some things she owned. It didn’t cost her anything. She let them catch a ride on this crazy inflation. If you weren’t such a prickly bastard, you’d be generous
about it. You could be a perfectly nice man, you know. You
are
a perfectly nice man when you’re not being a tightwad.”

Dick said, “I’m no tightwad.”

“Yes, you are. It’s just as stingy and graceless to tighten up when someone’s being generous to you as it is to be a miser. It’s just as unsympathetic, just as defensive. It’s all the same old Yankee vice.”

Dick let what she said lie on him. It wasn’t just one of her nettles.

She got up from the armchair, hoisting herself on the arms. She stood in front of him. “I’ve gone too far,” she said. “I don’t know why I do. I’m sure you and Miss Perry are nicer with each other than you and I are.” She took his head in her hands, ran her thumbs across his forehead until they met. She laughed a little and said, “At least in some ways.” She parted her thumbs slowly. “Models of comportment.”

He scarcely felt her fingers and thumbs, but he felt her presence. It concentrated around them, began to tug him up from a depth as though he and Elsie were being hauled together, thrashing in the same net, not touching the weave yet, still darting this way and that but feeling everything lift—what was there, what was around them—feeling the water bulge upward, the turbulence push on their lateral stripes.

He thought maybe Elsie wouldn’t notice, would just go on talking. He closed his eyes, opened them, saw her puffy bare feet. As she swayed a little, her feet spread at the edges.

He was still sitting on the sofa. Maybe she was still talking, maybe she still had her hands on his head. Elsie and he were all alone now, submerged together. No old light falling from a single star, not this time. It was all undersea, briny and blind. He felt her as though he were a fish, no hearing, just flutters of her disturbing the water. He felt them on the stripes along his flanks. Flutters on one side, then the other. Then flutters pressing equally on both flanks, running from gills to tail—that’s how he felt her dead ahead.

He was baffled by feeling. He was deep and dumb as a fish. He felt the pressure this way and that as she moved. Maybe she wouldn’t notice his hulking attention, hovering and swiveling in the stream of presence she sent out.

“Are you tired?” she said. “You must be tired.”

He looked up at her face. Maybe he would just sink. Maybe he could just give up and sink.

“I suppose you’ve been up since dawn.” She put her palm on his forehead. He felt her palm and leaned into it. He pushed himself up from the sofa. When his face came up to hers and up a little higher, she let her hands fall along his shoulders and arms. She said, “Oh my.”

He kissed her. He held the sides of her belly. “Oh my,” she said, “I ought to talk you out of this.” He kissed her again, moved his hands to her shoulders to steady himself.

“Well, yes,” she said. “But listen.”

He looked at her face until he saw it clearly. His sense of sight helped him veer off. Part of his imagination told him this would be a disaster, would shackle him to trouble for the rest of his days. But most of him was for going on, for finding her. He was touching her, his hands on her belly.

She put her hands over his, held his hands tightly while they rested on her belly. If she raised him too quickly, he might burst.

“I’m glad, I really am glad,” she said. “But listen.…”

Years ago he’d dived down to wire the bolt of a shackle on a mushroom anchor. One of the workers at the boatyard had screwed it shut but forgotten to wire it before he chucked it in. Not far down, maybe fifteen feet. He’d gone in in his skivvies, over the side of the yard skiff. He’d hauled himself down on the chain. Just five feet down in the silty water it was dark. Fifteen feet, not even a memory of light. He’d reached the shackle, got the wire in the eye, and twisted it round, his legs hooked around the stem of the
toppled anchor. When he was done, he panicked. He’d forgotten which way was up. Dumb, dumb as could be, all he had to do was let go and he’d go up. Plenty of air in his lungs. But he’d gone dumb for a bit—it seemed long but it was probably just a few seconds. He’d clutched the stem of the anchor, couldn’t get himself to turn it loose. Didn’t even know he was holding on. He was all blank mind. Lost his body. In his blankness he couldn’t imagine anything, let alone what was holding him down there. Then he was loose. He saw dim brightness where he was headed, and that seemed to take a long time too, the brightness getting brighter.

The relief hadn’t been air or light. Or, after a jumbled second, being able to hear the two guys in the skiff talking to each other; nothing was going on for them, they were just passing the time, no time at all. The relief had been finding his fingers and toes, he’d been as dumb as that.

Now he popped up in front of Elsie, saw the corners of the room, the lamp, the fire. Amazed. Amazed at what he’d wanted, amazed at how completely.

Elsie was talking still. He pieced it together now—she’d been explaining in her seesaw way why they weren’t going to, but how glad she was, how nice he was, how funny it was.… He’d caught some of it. She’d been interrupting herself, but her voice had been steady and soft.

She held on to his hands while they sat down on the sofa. They slumped back. She was amazed too. She unbuttoned his shirt cuff and peeled it back, shoved back the loose sleeve of his union suit. She kissed his forearm, then put her hand on it. His arm lay between them. A plank lodged between two rocks after a big tide. He was relieved after all to be inert, glad she was soothing him.

Elsie lifted her head to speak. Dick said, “Don’t say any more, not just yet.”

Elsie said, “You’ll be glad.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“You don’t want to go, do you?” The way she said it she didn’t mean anything, it was just a light breath.

“No, let’s just stay a bit.”

T
hey sat up till past midnight. Elsie talked, took naps, got up to go to the bathroom or get a bite to eat. She started, broke off, and resumed various conversations, in between various silences.

Elsie apologized several times for not making love. “I hope you don’t think I’m just being good. Or that I’m suddenly scared of being bad.”

Dick was amused, now he was calm.

Later on she said, “This isn’t any kind of self-pity—some attempt to get more.”

Dick was briefly impatient “I wish you’d quit being so suspicious of yourself. Or of someone. It sure isn’t me checking up on you.”

He was interested when she gave a real reason. “There are going to be lies about all this—about having a baby,” she said. “I didn’t see that as clearly as I do now. There are some lies I can’t do without, so I don’t want any extra ones. Extra lies or extra truths—you’d either have to lie to May or tell her. If we …” Elsie twirled her hand.

Dick nodded. Was it being pregnant that had cleaned up the way she talked?

Elsie said, “I don’t care what May thinks—no, I do care—I mean, I don’t care if … What I mean is I feel a bond to May, whatever she thinks. Her children and mine are related.”

“You said that,” Dick said. “It sounds simple and cozy when you put it like that. But I know it’s not.”

“If you were an Arab sea captain it would be that simple. Me in Abu Dhabi, May in Kuwait. You sailing back and forth between us in your dhow, praising Allah.”

“Yeah. That’d take care of everything all right.”

Elsie laughed. Then she said, “Look. As long as we’re getting rid of unnecessary lies … But, then, this may make you feel better about Charlie and Tom’s book.…”

“Skip the backing and filling, will you?”

“You remember I told you Jack would do anything I asked? Well, when I started to talk to Miss Perry about your loan, she didn’t seem … I mean, she was just too far along.… It
is
true that Captain Texeira said it would be okay to lend you the money, but he said it to me. I didn’t think it would be good to try to explain to Miss Perry. So I just called Jack.”

“What are you saying? He’s the one? But the note I signed was to you. Because you said you had Miss Perry’s power of attorney.”

“Well, that’s what I thought I should clear up. Jack loaned me the money, and I loaned it to you.”

“Jesus, Elsie.” But he wasn’t really angry. It seemed farther away than he’d thought. He felt some dismay as he reasoned it through, but not anger. He said, “So your brother-in-law figures I wheedled ten—no, eleven thousand dollars out of you on top of knocking you up.”

“I was afraid you might think that—I mean, that you’d think
he’d
think that. So I didn’t tell him what it was for.”

“He didn’t ask?”

“No. It’s hard to explain.… It’s not just that he’ll do anything for
me.… Every so often he likes to do something that makes him feel madly extravagant. But when Schuyler paid me what he owed me, I paid Jack some of what I owe him. So really we’re almost down to the simplest situation of all, which is your owing me eleven thousand dollars, and nobody needs to know about that except you and me. And after all—considering all the serious things everyone’s been doing—the money part is just comic.”

“Jesus, Elsie.” But he didn’t care to set her right. He couldn’t figure why. Maybe it was because Elsie had saved him just now in a way that absolved her of all her meddling. Maybe it was that the better part of five months at sea on
Spartina
came to him now to let him worry less about how he stood onshore. Or maybe it was because Elsie had been the one who kept them from sinking into worse trouble, so that he wasn’t the captain of this enterprise, the only one in charge making everything right.…

And still later Elsie said, “Is this how you and May got married? I mean, two people have this flare-up, it’s all perfectly natural at first. The woman fills up with a baby. Then it’s a social problem—in comes her father, the preacher. The man makes an honest woman of her. They get stuck with a life together. I can’t imagine putting up with that.” Elsie looked thoughtful. She added, “As it is, I don’t resent you at all.”

“Is that so?” Dick said. “That’s good. In case you worry about the way you may have led me by the nose, I better say I don’t resent you either.”

“Well, all right,” she said. “Have you noticed that we’re passing up some chances to have a fight? Maybe because we’re passing up our chance to …” She waved her hand again. “Maybe it’s because right now all I can think about is food.”

But she curled up again between him and the corner of the sofa and dozed off.

He felt peacefully attached, but snipped free from wanting anything.
He was clear enough for the first time to see how wanting had tugged him hard through the last few years—the long wish for his own offshore boat; the sudden pull of an old surprise that had sucked him in close to Elsie.