MY GOAL HAD been to show up at the fair with fifty spy clocks. I felt productive, creative and fulfilled making the clocks in series, ten at a time. But when I was wrapping up the first batch, I realized how stupid I’d been. I was taking it for granted that only the people on the island would buy my clocks. But the fair was known throughout the region, and people came from the surrounding towns and islands. What good would it do me to have a clock in a cabin in Woods Hole? That setback made me feel stupid. Very stupid.
I shattered the clock on the floor. Not that it had really turned out so well.
While I tried to piece my plan back together, I took refuge in Mark. We started to see each other often. Almost every day. Once it was established that those encounters weren’t part of any of my lines of investigation, I let myself go. The excitement of the forbidden won out—just a little—over guilt. And the excitement of the new did the same—once more, just a little—over penitence. And though that battle of contradictions didn’t give me rest and was still far from being resolved, I decided to open a new sexual chapter in my life. Because, yes, I wanted, I needed to center it in the terrain of the sexual, to try and keep my emotional life in check, because even if I was still in mourning, rays of light began to filter through with the need to love and be loved.
Despite the spark and the excitement, our encounters were marked by the hurry, the timetable and the narrowness of the place. It couldn’t be otherwise. I set the frequency. I was the one who had decided to go almost every day. It seemed as if I were speeding everything up. As if I wanted to wear it out as soon as possible. To stop doing it, I suppose, to lose the urge, to exhaust the novelty. But the more I did it, the more I liked it, the more I got hooked. I was plunging headfirst into the eye of Hurricane Mark. In the end, everything came down to the fact that I felt very much alone. I needed his warmth more than the sex. Maybe that was why I couldn’t help but feel a little used—and jealous? And yet, strangely, the more we saw each other, the better he felt—and this I heard through the snitches—being with Julia. They were rediscovering each other after a long period of absence. Often I surprised myself by listening to them make love. I was absorbed, unable to silence the snitch. He didn’t tell me he was better, that he had lowered his dose of antidepressants. Nothing. As though now his relationship with her was the one he had to hide and deny. As if I had become the wife instead of the lover.
But that wasn’t Mark’s problem, it was mine. I lived my life through others.
“Hey, Frank. I want to give you a present.”
“Me? Why?”
“Because you treat me and my girls and especially Pony very well.”
“Sorry, but I should be the one giving you the present, you’re my best customer.”
“I’m happy to be. Here, take it.”
I gave him his gift. It was a spy clock shaped like a guppy for the wall.
“How pretty. It’s Flint, right?”
“Yeah. For you to put in the vet clinic. It would look great above the counter.”
“I love it. Thanks so much.”
Though I still hadn’t resolved what I was going to do about my clock strategy at the Cherry Blossom Art Fair, I kept on working, advancing, because time was tight. Besides, I was worried about Frank. His Alzheimer’s episodes were getting worse. He had come to my house a few more times. Olivia went crazy every time he showed up at the door—A free ride on Panda! When he came, I didn’t call Barbara or take him back to Horse Rush Farm right away. I just let him stay. We had practically adopted him as Grandpa Frank. He usually showed up on the weekends. According to Barbara, that was when Rose’s parents had let him pay his visits to their house. He always came with the portable record player, though it had stopped working a long time ago. Olivia loved playing at being Rose. Eating pancakes with Frank, which is what they did when they were kids. It’s not that Frank was in another world, another reality. He was in limbo. You could see he wasn’t totally lost, that there was a push and pull inside. He was in a place as comforting and recognizable as it was false and shadowy. He was fighting not to vanish completely, but he didn’t want to leave, or he didn’t know how. The boy was reborn; the adult suffered. Seeing him sitting there in the kitchen, looking at the fork as if it were the first time he had seen one in his life and he was trying to find the purpose of it, provoked an intense mixture of sorrow, tenderness and identification, because I was also trying to figure out things as basic as knowing whether my life had been a big lie.
Barbara was afraid he’d hurt himself during one of these episodes, that he’d have an accident at the wheel or in the clinic with all the veterinary equipment. She even considered encouraging him to retire or making him do so, but she knew that would spell the end for him. That’s why I gave him a spy clock, to keep an eye on him. And frankly, because I was a little bit tired of seeing nothing on the monitor but the fishbowl in reception at Karen’s Petite Maison. I had debated between calling it a fishbowl or a cage every time a signal came through. Until one day I looked closely at Flint, who was turning around and around obsessively in the water, trying to find a way out, and I decided on fishbowl. Now, after finding out Chris had spent a night at the inn and without John there, Karen’s fishbowl was as boring and unproductive as watching Flint. Plus, it was frustrating to watch her drink so much. I started to seriously question whether I should intervene with that issue. But how? Our friendship wasn’t that close, and she herself recognized now and then how plastered she’d gotten the night before, asking people to forgive her and laughing at herself. She did it so naturally, so aware of her actions, that it threw you off, and you’d think: Well, we’re all old enough to know what we’re doing Take a look at yourself, Alice. You should be starting Spies Anonymous; you could be the association’s first member. Hi, my name’s Alice, and I’m a spy, not a real clever one, but a spy.
And then the messenger arrived with the results of Stephen/Chris’s DNA test. It came in a hard cardboard envelope, very thin, very discreet, without a return address. I had waited for it impatiently, almost as impatiently as I waited for John to come back from his deployment on the submarine. And yet I was surprised I didn’t get nervous, that my heart didn’t speed up at all. Was I getting used to this life on the border between illegal and extralegal? I didn’t even do any special ritual before opening it. It came; I opened it; I looked at it. There were three pages with all sorts of explanations and data. But only one phrase mattered to me:
Probability of genetic link: 0.00001%
I don’t know if I was irritated or relieved by that infinitesimal possibility. Because in one sense, I would have loved it if Chris and Stephen were related. That they were family, which would make me family too.
But curiously, the result that I thought would push me into helplessness, actually reoriented me. I lived in fear of getting stuck in a dead end, waking up one day with no more threads to pull on. But in this case, having discarded such a solid clue made me feel I was getting closer. It drove me; it activated me. Now I really did have to explore the whole range of possibilities, set up new fishbowls to make room for the lives of the other little fishes.
So I decided three things:
1. To make two of each type of clock. That way I could put the ones that didn’t have cameras on display, without being afraid the ones with the spy cameras would end up in the hands of the wrong person. And if I was interested in spying on the buyer of a certain model, I would give them one already wrapped, which I had kept under the counter. All that would naturally mean twice the work. I couldn’t lose even another second. Not even to beat myself up, because this was an idea so obvious I shouldn’t have needed almost a month to hit on it.
2. Not to hook up with Mark again.
3. To call my stand Alice in Wondertime. Because it was my time. My moment. And I was going to grab hold of it.