Tolstoy in Maine

SMOKE, LIKE early morning mists, rose from her cupped palms. The woman was lighting a cigarette, shielding it from the breeze. Martin watched the smoke thin, spread, dissolve—veils of frayed linen disintegrating, drifting into the fog beyond. Was she aware of him? She stood on the pier behind the fish market, talking to the men who worked the boats. She seemed at home, and he liked watching her without being able to hear her words. He liked the easy way she had with the fishermen. She glanced toward him, but without either invitation or curiosity; he looked away at once, embarrassed.

He closed the door to his car, walked toward the docks, let the reels inside his head spin, play back images from the previous few days. Long Shot: the woman laughing easily, soundlessly. Medium Shot: the woman leaning against a railing, flipping the stub of cigarette into the harbor. Close Up: the woman staring directly at him, a lopsided stack of lobster traps behind her, out-of-focus. Two Shot: the woman inclining her head toward one of the lobstermen, smiling with casual affection, touching the man’s forearm. This was, then, the fifth morning in a row that, by the time he arrived, she was already there.

He was a stranger in the Maine fishing village, there for a few months—to get his bearings, to prepare for his next project, to recover from what had been the most difficult year of his life, a year that had included divorce, a brutal custody battle, loss of his two children to his ex-wife, heavy drinking. He reached into his side pocket for a coin, then remembered that he didn’t need a coin, that the reason he drove in each morning to use the phone next to the fish market was because it was the only public touch-tone telephone in the town.

The phone rang twice, clicked, his message came on, and he listened impatiently for a few seconds to the sound of his own voice, then cut it off by tapping in his personal code. The modern world, he thought. Fishing nets and microchips. Divorce and silicone. He looked up, toward the pier. She was gone.

He listened to the swish of blank tape, to his answering machine, some five hundred miles away, preparing to play back messages. He wiped the screen inside his head clean, forced it to go black, and in that blackness he imagined giant squid moving steadily forward. The water was a dark block of blue-black stone, the bodies of the squid, caught suddenly by the camera’s fan of bright arc-lights, seemingly transparent. The tape stopped. Silence again. His children had not called. His lawyer had not called. His agent had not called. His ex-wife had not called.

He wanted to be alone, to be left alone—it was why he had left job and home and city and moved here, taken the small house in Tenants Harbor. Yet he was disappointed. He missed his children. He missed cooking for them, shopping with them, helping them with their homework. He missed touching them and being touched. He smiled. He even missed breaking up their fights. He put the receiver back on its hook. Sure, he thought. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

He turned, saw the woman standing no more than ten feet away, at the entrance to the fish market, her hand on the screen door. She looked past him, to the telephone, her eyes mildly inquisitive. He wished he could keep her there by coming up with something clever, but there were no words in his head. What he saw instead were stones—millions of them, like enormous pearls—and they were tumbling through water, piling one upon the other, becoming a wall beneath the sea. He tried to smile at the woman, but in her presence he felt like a young boy. She hesitated, as if to give him time to regain his confidence. Her eyes were pale gray, flecked with white, nearly translucent, and as he stared into them it became very important to him that she not think him foolish. She smiled slightly, the corner of her mouth lifting as if to receive a cigarette, then said good morning and walked off, her hands deep in the pockets of her suede jacket.

The boat came with the house: a sixteen-foot-long fiberglass training shell with a sliding seat and nine-foot oars. The topsides were green, the deck blue with white trim, the craft so wonderfully new that when he looked at it each morning he felt as if he were looking into an enormous jewel that had been split open, the crown lifted off so that he could explore the facets below. But he couldn’t recall what the cut of the jewel—oval, pointed at the ends—was called.

He pulled the boat from the shed, hoisted it onto his shoulders, carried it to the water some fifty yards away, wondered why it was that the name of the stone kept slipping from his mind. Two years before he had made a documentary film in which he traced the journey across the world of a single diamond, from its mine four hundred feet below ground in Kimberley, South Africa, through stops in Johannesburg, Tel Aviv, Antwerp, and New York City, until it arrived in Rahway, New Jersey, and was placed on the ring finger of 22-year-old Katherine Bak’s left hand. He had interviewed each of the people whose lives were in some way touched by the diamond—the black miners and those for whom they worked; the diamond dealers in Johannesburg; the Israeli merchants; the diamond cutters in Antwerp; the jewelers on 47th Street in Manhattan; the jewelry store owner in Rahway, New Jersey; the engaged couple and their families. He had alternated the interviews—the story of the stone’s journey—with sequences in which, via time-lapse microphotography, he journeyed deeper and deeper into the diamond itself, light and color exploding from the screen as the stone was divided, cut, ground, rubbed, polished, set. The film had earned him an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. It had brought to him the recognition and audience he had, during a quarter century of work and hope, been longing for.

He returned to the shed, picked up the oars, the Wetproof bag in which he kept his charts. He thought of the final sequence in the film, a triptych: the diamond in the center, the engaged couple to the left, the black miner to the right. The miner, 19-year-old Joseph Kenaba, was shown on an ordinary day of work: rising from sleep, washing, dressing, eating breakfast, tending his rabbits and goats, boarding a bus, arriving at the mine, descending into blackness.

Was Joseph still alive? He would write again—perhaps later in the afternoon, in the hour before dinner that he set aside for correspondence, for working at his journal—and he would hope, yet again, to receive a reply. In his mind the fire in Joseph’s eyes—the pride, the rage—more than equaled the fire at the diamond’s heart. This fire had drawn Martin to Joseph and surely, given events in South Africa in the three years since Martin had been there, now marked him as a man in danger.

Marked him easily, Martin thought. Sure. Mark-ease. Marquise. There it was: the diamond that resembled his rowing shell was called a marquise-cut diamond. The light given off by a diamond reflected through its side facets and the marquise cut, he recalled, somewhat shallow due to its elongated shape, did not break up the light into as brilliant a display of prismatic fire as did the round or rose-cut stones. Martin nodded. When he let his mind wander lately—when he didn’t force things—he could sometimes retrieve words, pictures, and feelings he feared were lost.

River, a pure white touched lightly with blue, was the name given to the color of the highest quality diamonds. Martin set the boat in the water, climbed in, pushed off with an oar. The water was steel gray, darker than the granite shore. Mists hung along the banks like smoke from dying campfires. He thought of dew riding the filaments of spider webs, recalled a fifteen-minute film he had made a dozen years before, a film still used in schools, about the spider and the fly, Burl Ives singing the ballad on the sound track.

He loved the tidal coves at this time of day, when the wind had not yet come up and the air was still, the water calm. The shell drew only an inch and a half of water, so that even later in the day, when the tide would run out and large sections of the cove would turn to mud flat, he could, if he wished, find enough water to keep going. But he would be home by then, at his desk. He would be writing to Joseph. Perhaps, too, if he felt easy and confident enough, he would write letters to each of his children. Perhaps he would find something clever—a phrase, a joke, a self-mocking description of his solitary life—that would make one of them smile, would make one of them think of him with affection.

He leaned forward, pulled on the oars. The seat whirred gently along its stainless steel runners. The cove stretched before him, some twenty-five to thirty yards across, widening gradually until, at the headlands a quarter of a mile away, it bent and angled west, away from the sea. Later, when he returned to his house, and after he had split wood, showered, and eaten lunch, he would let his mind play back the things it had seen and experienced. Then, like a schoolboy doing his homework, he would spend the early afternoon studying in guide books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries, learning about all those things he had not until now known much about: trees and shrubs and flowers and fish and rocks, boats and clouds and weather and tides and the movements of the stars.

In his films, he often believed, he had cheated: he would learn just enough about a subject so that he could make the film, could render for others the illusion that he knew things. Were a merchant to show him a dozen diamonds, though, could he type them, grade them? If he looked through a jeweler’s glass, what would he really see, other than the same fractured geometry, the same gorgeous slashes of light the camera had seen?

His film had earned him both the admiration of his peers, and honor in the world. It brought him offers—from producers, studios, foundations, corporations—of a kind he had yearned for through most of his life. He was happy in a way he had never expected to be happy, and to his surprise the happiness had been soiled neither by bitterness nor by cynicism. But what had the film done for Joseph’s life? And what had it and all the films before it done to keep his own life from blowing sky-high? What had it done to enable him to keep his wife from betraying him, to keep his children from turning against him? He had loved his family more than anything in the world. He had worked hard at being the man his own father had never been. And then, at the moment when he thought he had it all—the life and the work, the family and the career—everything came crashing down.

If your mother tells you one thing and I tell you the opposite, what are you to believe? Christ! He was the one who had cheated on their mother, they said. He was the one who had refused to get back together. He was the one who had destroyed their family. The litany of accusations became painful, crazy, familiar. He loved his work more than he had ever loved them. Well, he thought. Short of telling them that their mother had lied to them as maliciously as she had to everyone else, what else could he have said or done? And once used to destroy his happiness at home, his success in the world came to seem hollow, repugnant, deadly.

He pulled hard on the right oar so that the boat curved to the left, turned into a narrow channel lined on either side by high banks. He noted pin oak, mountain laurel, birch. He recalled the first time his children had come to his new apartment, after the court decision, how awkward it had been, how happy he had been before their visit, when he was alone in their rooms, making up their new beds for them, touching clean linens that they would soon touch.

A flight of black duck shot out from the steep bluff to his right, crossed the cove like an arrow, disappeared. The bluff was covered with swamp maples, their leaves a wild explosion of vermilion against a wall of green. He rowed on. There were no houses along this arm of the cove, no signs that, less than a mile away, most of the world was waking, was going about its daily business.

There were black workers in South Africa who traveled eight hours a day in old school buses, back and forth on small hard seats, from their settlements to their jobs, their jobs to their settlements. They worked ten to twelve hour days, averaged less than three hours sleep a night. What, other than death, could ever burst from them the way colors now burst from the trees he passed? If his children could understand why it was he had tried for so many years to get the images that were in his mind—that exploded there endlessly—onto strips of celluloid, would that allow them to understand that he was not the kind of man who would have done the awful things their mother claimed he did?

He saw the woman’s face again, and she seemed to be asking him questions, encouraging him to talk. What she wanted to know was this: If he was not a film maker, who and what was he?

He pushed off with his legs, pulled harder, felt sweat slide down his back. The faster the shell moved through the water, the more stable it became. When he was rowing well he could do nearly five miles in an hour, the shell racing along as if it were riding on the water, not in it.

He saw the woman reach toward him, to touch his mouth, and then the boat was rising crazily from the water. He gasped, held his breath, saw the water churn inches from his face, felt his heart crash against his chest. He screamed, raised the oars high, shifted his body to the right. The shell rocked violently, took on water, righted itself. He sucked in air, imagined his heart falling from his chest, sinking through the surface of the icy water. He saw a young boy in a row boat, the boy letting his dropline down, hooking the heart, hauling it in, gazing at it with curiosity.

The boy was his son, Dan, he saw at once, and Dan looked the way he himself had looked when he was Dan’s age—twelve—visiting his Uncle George in Orleans, on the Cape. Martin started rowing again. He had caught a crab, he realized, playing the scene back—he had hooked the water with his left oar while pushing the oar forward, while the woman reached toward him. The boat had veered, tilted. In his mind the woman was smiling at him still, as if she had noticed neither his error nor his panic. Blood rushed to his heart, then flowed from it: to his arms, his hands, his legs. In the bottom of the shell, water sloshed back and forth, drenching his sneakers, his socks, his jeans. He had long ago stopped trying to explain who he was by the craziness of his childhood, by what had gone on hour after hour in the three small rooms of his Somerville home. Everybody had parents. Everybody had a childhood. He rowed harder, let images refract inside his mind, let light play on the planes of the woman’s face. She was about his own age, he guessed. But why were her eyes suddenly sad, and why, when she began to speak, did her upper lip tremble slightly? It occurred to him that he could reach toward her if he wanted. He could reach toward her and reassure her with the touch of his hand. The movement came to him as a sequence of matching shots: she looking into a silver mirror, he looking down at the plum-colored water. He saw crow-black hair threaded with gray, high foreheads, sad pearl-gray eyes, wide mouths that were slightly open, as if about to speak. Her face was his face.

She explained to him that the single-engine planes he often saw circling about the harbor were there to spot sets of herring and to radio their locations to the fishing boats. The boats used large nets called purse-seines. When the fishermen surrounded the herring with the net and pulled a cord, the cord would cinch the bottom and trap the fish. Then the fishermen would haul the net up and suck the fish out of it with enormous hoses. The hoses measured two to two-and-a-half feet across. The fishermen salted the herring, layer by layer, until the boat was down to its gunnels, then transported their cargo straight to the factories in Rockland. A single set of herring might fill three or four twenty-four-foot trawlers. As a girl she had begged to go out with her father in the boats so she could see the herring come hurtling from the hose in a silver stream, as if spangled in sequins. Wouldn’t he want to film that?

To film her as a young girl watching the men fish? he asked. Of course he would love to film that. But how? She talked about growing up in Tenants Harbor, about how things had changed. October was her favorite month, she said. It was a time when the tourists and summer people were gone, when the harshness of a long, dark Maine winter had not yet moved in, when life, suspended between autumn and winter, made her feel that time itself moved more slowly, that her home and town were closer to what they had been thirty and forty years ago. He listened, with interest, but what he really wanted to do, he knew, was to take her face gently between his hands, to kiss her, to press her body to his, to have her mouth open to him, to have her hands move through his hair, across his face, down his sides, along his back.

Her name was Nancy Medeiros. She was forty-two years old, divorced once—ten years before—and she had no children. Her house had been built in 1922 by her father and her grandfather. She had gone to Wellesley College, and now lived and worked outside of Boston. It had taken several mornings for him to work up his courage, and when he had done so, and had begun a conversation, she had responded pleasantly, easily. This was the third evening in a row they were together—they had driven north to Rockland for dinner the night before; and the evening before that they had gone for a walk along the beach in front of his house.

Her face moved in and out of focus. Soft focus. Deep focus. He had had too much to drink, he knew, and he wondered if she noticed. He imagined a camera dollying in, centering on her eyes, the film a grainy black and white. He remembered what a director had said about Garbo; about how during a take the scene would seem ordinary, but that when he played it back on the screen you could see something behind the eyes that you never saw until you had photographed them. You could see thought, the director said.

He went to the window, trying to walk a straight line, trying not to sway. He felt light-headed. Go slowly, he told himself. The fog was moving out again, so that, in the dusk, the islands began to appear as if from nowhere, as if rising from the sea itself, like ghosts. He saw himself on the beach, Nancy materializing suddenly in front of him, out of the fog. Her cheeks were moist, her black hair glistening. Had she been crying? He imagined a Close Up of a single raindrop on her cheek. He could make the drop of rain appear to be a tear, he knew. He could turn a tear into a river, a river into a waterfall, a waterfall into a flood, a flood into a lake, a lake back again to the calm gray of her eye. On film there was nothing he could not do.

She was talking about the tidal coves, about how it still amazed her to know that the water could rise and fall a full ten or twelve feet in a day. Voice Over, he thought: Nancy talking about her childhood while the tide moved out, while a blue heron poked aimlessly in the mud. Her voice, like the film, had a mottled, grainy quality to it. Still Shots: Nancy at 10, Nancy at 15, Nancy at 20. Had he known her through those years he imagined that they would have been good friends, in the way cousins could become friends. He did not imagine that they would have let themselves be drawn to one another sexually. For if they had, it would have destroyed the safety of a friendship in which they could confide anything and everything.

That, he decided, was what frightened him now: if he kissed her—if they made love—would he still be able to talk with her as if she were a friend? He didn’t know which scared him more: the possibility that she would reject him, or the possibility that she might not.

She offered him another drink and he declined, said something about having to get up early the next morning, about wanting to stop in town on the way home to telephone his daughter, Carol. It was her fifteenth birthday. Nancy said he could use her phone, that she would leave him alone and go to the kitchen, make some supper for them—would he stay?—and he found himself feeling flustered and dizzy, talking about his answering machine. He told her that when he called in, he would sometimes imagine a Close Up of a telephone, and then a deep voice booming through static: Hi! You’ve reached Yasnaya Polyana. This is Leo Tolstoy speaking to you on a recording. I’m sorry I’m not here right now, but if you’ll leave your name and a brief message…

She laughed and refilled his glass. He sat in a rocking chair, his back to the living room window. She set the telephone down on the table beside him, then sat across from him, a Hudson Bay blanket across her lap.

“How are you, Martin?”

The urgency in her voice startled him.

“What?”

“How are you?”

He shrugged. Her voice was warm, close. He pressed his eyes tight, saw white lights swirling as if being drawn into an amber whirlpool. Bourbon. He had not drunk this much since he had left Manhattan. He opened his eyes and she was still there. He started to tell her that he felt fine, that he was in the best physical shape of his life—from the rowing, the wood splitting, the walks, from being on the wagon the past two months—but she interrupted him and asked him why he was here really. She could understand his not wanting to make a film for a while, his wanting to be in a place where nobody knew him and he knew nobody. But why not go to Paris to not make a film? Why not go to Florence, to Vienna, to Bangkok?

He said that an old friend from college, Phil Yarnell, aware of his troubles, had offered him the house. She nodded, said that she knew Phil.

“You’ve had a hard time, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Phil told me about it—not the details—just that you’d been through hell, that he didn’t quite know how you had made it to the other side.”

“Me neither.”

“What I wanted to say—to put on the table between us, as it were—is that he told me about how difficult things had been, how discouraged you’d become. I probably should have said something that first morning. It hasn’t seemed quite fair these past few evenings, me knowing and you not knowing that I know.”

“It’s all right. Who cares?”

“I do.”

She was beside him then, lifting the glass of bourbon from his hand. Her hand touched his. He felt chilled, wished that he could ask her to wrap him in a blanket, to set him on the porch and rock him back and forth. He imagined the porch coming detached, moving out to sea. He wanted her slender fingers to be ribs cradling him, her fingertips touching, her hands a small boat riding the waves in the harbor. Fade. Dissolve…

She asked him if he would like to talk about it—about what had happened—and he said that he preferred not to, that it was the same boring horror story most men had to tell these days, filled with the same standard items: infidelity, jealousy, rage, divorce, depression, humiliation, insolvency, lies, pain, fear.

“That’s all?”

He shrugged.

“What’s the hardest thing, Martin?”

The directness of her question surprised him. “The hardest thing is not having my children around,” he said. He was relieved to hear his answer, yet afraid to look at her. “I miss being near them. I brought boxes of photos, some old home movies, and when I first got here I thought I might make a film, using family material and mixing it with whatever I might discover here—something about daily life in the town.” He stopped. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” he stated. “I mean, I’m not sure I’m being clear—if I knew what I really wanted to do. I just had an idea that maybe I could alternate scenes of my life here with scenes of the life we used to have, then put it all together and send it to them for a Christmas present or something.”

He looked up. Nancy was smiling, her gray eyes fixed on him, asking him to tell her more. “But I haven’t begun yet. I haven’t had the heart to begin, if you want the truth.”

Martin shrugged. The ice cubes swirled in his glass, creating arabesques of pale amber. He felt dizzy, vaguely nauseated. He wanted to lie down, to sleep. He thought he could hear Dan’s voice, asking him if he would buy him a Ferrari. Dan pleaded with him, promising to pay him back out of his allowance, week by week, saying that he knew he could pay the whole thing back some day… at least by the time Martin was dead. Astonished, Martin looked at his son, and then, an instant later, saw the light in Dan’s eyes, the pleasure Dan took in teasing him this way.

“I had the epigraph chosen,” Martin offered.

“Yes?”

“All intact families are alike,” he recited, “but each divorced family is crazy in its own way.”

“Listen, the stories are familiar enough, Martin, even routine these days,” Nancy said, “except that when there are children involved, when the kids are endlessly torn, endlessly in fear of losing one or the other, of being abandoned—” She stopped. “All right. So listen. Do you know what my idea is, about what grown men and women should do to avoid all the crap they put themselves and their children through?”

“Tell me.”

“I think that once the parents decide to get divorced, and if they both want the kids, then they should flip a coin and the loser should put a bullet through his or her head.”

Martin applauded. She clinked her glass against his and then her voice came to him from a distance. She was in the kitchen, telling him that he could have privacy while he telephoned his daughter. He walked outside, inhaled enormous quantities of salt air, tried to sober himself up. He wanted to feel better. The islands in the harbor were dark brown mounds on a disc of black glass. He imagined a cold room, a tub full of warm water, the steam billowing up. He imagined the camera rising to reveal a layer of clear air just above the tub, between the water and the steam. The camera dipped slightly and he saw himself in the tub, his eyes closed. Was he asleep? He imagined intercutting, from one scene to the other, from the mists in the room to the mists on the bay. He saw his head sinking below the water, the water turning red, the red bleeding to pink, to white.

He came back inside, went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, looked in the mirror and imagined a Sony camcorder on a shelf in the medicine chest, behind the mirror. He saw himself in a black scuba-diver’s suit, underwater, filming the fishermen as they dragged the bottom of the harbor with their balloon nets, raking in cod, hake, halibut, haddock, and thousands of tiny plastic capsules. The capsules came spraying out through a hose and the hose became his mouth and he leaned forward, wanting, he knew, to smash his head against the mirror. Would he ever, ever stop seeing the world as if through a camera lens? Maybe he really didn’t love anything in life more than the images that roamed through his mind. Maybe his wife and children had known something he still didn’t know.

In the kitchen, while they ate, she asked him questions and he found that he wanted to answer, that he wanted to tell her everything. He went through the story, sometimes summarizing, sometimes going into detail. Nancy didn’t say much while he talked, except to ask a question now and then, and her questions seemed eminently sane: Why did he still seem to feel the need to justify himself against accusations that were so patently ridiculous? Why had he chosen, so rigidly, to hold back the truth about their mother from his children? There was something about his actions that didn’t make sense—some part of the story he was leaving out.

They finished their coffee, returned to the living room. He didn’t understand why he had felt so free suddenly to mouth off to her the way he had, why he was able to listen to her questions without feeling much need to argue against them. Was that crazy? he asked. She replied by saying what he had been hoping to hear—that she thought he was a very attractive man, more attractive now when he seemed less sure of himself, now that he had given her his story. She said that what he’d been through was horrifying, but that she figured he had spent enough time during the past year or two feeling sorry for himself. The last thing he needed was for her to feel sorry for him, too. Still, she wondered about something he had said on their first evening together, about his feeling that he might not make films for a while because he didn’t know anything. She couldn’t understand that. He knew how to make films, didn’t he? She had seen a few of them, on public television, and they were excellent. Why, then, should he feel that knowing about fishing nets or sea breezes was more valuable or real than knowing about how to make a film?

He stood, said that he had to go. Could they get together again the next day? She stood next to him. She smiled and touched his arm, told him that she hoped he wouldn’t regret having told her so much that was so private. The next time they were together, she promised, she would tell him the story of her life. Fair enough?

Fair enough, he said, and then, to his surprise, he took her face in his hands, very gently, and kissed her. It was the first time in nearly twenty years that he had tasted the lips of a woman he was not married to. Nancy’s lips seemed amazingly warm and soft, and when he heard a slight whimpering sound come from her throat, he saw no pictures, imagined no camera angles. Her mouth opened to him, her hands went to his hair, then moved along his neck, his face, his sides, his back.

In the morning, at breakfast, he felt very happy, very shy. She talked about the errands she had to run, and he talked about the call home he had never made. They talked about the weather, about lobster traps, about his racing shell, about answering machines, about his children. He wanted to ask her how she felt, if it had been as wonderful for her as it had been for him, but when he alluded to their love-making she stopped him by remarking, sharply, that such comparisons were always invidious.

After breakfast they lay down on her bed again, and later, when they woke, she sighed, nestled close, rubbed the muscles of his back, marveled at his shoulders, asked him how old he was. Forty-three, he replied. Keep rowing, she said. She moved away from him, sat up and then, her cheeks radiant, said that she had one other question for him: Was he absolutely certain this was his first time out?

Toward dusk, walking from his house to hers—a mile and a half along the rocky beach—he kept seeing her face, the light in her eyes as he had begun to answer her question, to tell her that of course he had been telling the truth. The smile that burst from her then—playful, teasing, affectionate—gave his heart the ease it had been yearning for.

He had spent the afternoon going over notes for films, sketching ideas, blocking out sequences, making lists of people to call. He decided that the idea of making a film for his children in which they appeared was as sweet as it was wrong-headed. Instead, he thought that the next film he would make, the one that might begin to show his children what the love of parent and child was about, would be the film about Yoshiko Fukuda and her daughter. Yoshiko was a concert violinist, born and raised in Japan—a single parent—who, when she was forty years old, adopted a six-year-old black girl from Savannah named Jean. Jean was now twelve, and she toured the country with her mother, as her mother’s accompanist.

Martin was eager to tell Nancy about the film—about the excitement he had felt when it occurred to him that he could do it, that he could make it—but when he arrived at her house, her car was gone and a blue Ford pick-up was parked in the driveway. An elderly man in khaki workclothes was on the porch, repairing the screen door. Martin said hello. The man turned, nodded, went back to his work. Martin asked if Nancy Medeiros was home and the man said that she had left early in the afternoon. Martin’s heart lurched. Did he know if she would be returning later?

Without expression the man told Martin that Nancy was gone for the season, that she would not be coming back for another year. Martin walked up onto the porch, tried to remain calm, hoped that the man would not sense his confusion, his panic. He felt betrayed, abandoned. The man worked methodically, steadily, and seemed unaffected by Martin’s presence. Martin began talking. He told the man where he was living and how long he had been there. He told the man that he and Nancy had spent a few evenings together, had had dinner together the night before.

The man responded with the standard Maine “ayuh” to most of what Martin said, but after a while he did offer some information about himself. His name was Frank Cahill and he took care of Nancy’s house for her when she was away. He had worked for the Medeiros family since he himself was a boy—before Nancy was born. The house needed a lot of work—a new roof, a paint job, some rewiring, new flooring for the porch—but he was gaining on it, he said. Martin liked the figure of speech, one he had heard others in the town use occasionally.

Martin took his time, told himself that time was the one thing he had plenty of. With or without a camera, he had always been a good interviewer. He had always been able to get people to talk to him. People liked him, trusted him. He had always, with others, had a talent for mixing patience and curiosity in the right proportions.

When the sun set, Frank put away his tools and sat with Martin on the porch. They watched the lights come on in the harbor. Martin talked about the rowing he had done that morning, about how the fog never seemed to come into the coves. Frank nodded, said that it was so. He said that most of the local fishermen knew the coastline so well that they could tell where they were in the harbor from the sound of the water against the shore. Frank went to his truck, came back with a six-pack of beer, offered one to Martin. They sat and drank beers, looked out to sea, talked, and after a while Frank allowed as to how he remembered Nancy saying something about a friend named Martin—he was the film-maker, wasn’t he?—and as to how he might be stopping by.

Martin said that he didn’t know Nancy well, but that he had enjoyed her company, that he had rarely met a woman who had seemed so calm, so sensible, so forthright. Oh yes, Frank said. Nancy was a fine woman. Quite a story there, though, he added, and gradually Martin’s patient ways won for him what they had often won before. Frank told him the tale: Nancy Medeiros had always been the smartest girl around, the kind of young woman you knew would leave Tenants Harbor one day to make something of herself. Her mother had been a schoolteacher who died when Nancy was eight and her younger brother, Nick, was five. Nancy had been the apple of her father’s eye. But when she was sixteen, out with her father on his fishing boat one afternoon, the weather went sour suddenly. The wind—a fall northwester—came tearing through in a bad blow. While they were trying to batten things down, Nancy’s brother had tripped, skidded, fallen overboard. Without hesitating Nancy’s father had leapt into the sea after him, rubber boots and all. Nancy watched them go under, then had gone below deck, waited out the storm, brought the boat in by herself. The father and son were found two days later, washed up in the mouth of a cove about three miles north of Nancy’s house.

Nancy came back every year at this time—the anniversary of their drowning—and stayed for about two weeks. Nobody knew much more about her than that. She had gone to college, and then to medical school for a while, but she hadn’t finished. She had married briefly and badly, and nobody had ever met the man. She had had a series of breakdowns, had spent a good portion of her adult life in and out of hospitals and rest homes. Her father had provided for her pretty well, so that when she felt the world going out from under her, at least she was able to be taken in by places whose surroundings were reasonably pleasant.

Frank said that he thought Nancy seemed in better shape on this visit than she had in many years. Maybe what she had seen and felt a quarter of a century ago was finally wearing off a bit. She was a smart and good woman. He figured she deserved better in this life than she had received, so far. But she was gaining, Frank said, as he stood to go. She was definitely gaining.