12.
Simon walks to the window, opens it, and draws a long breath. From his pocket he unfolds a magazine. “Twenty years gone in an afternoon,” he whispers to the oblivious night. “Thomas Green the geologist sent me a letter with this poem earmarked in this old New Yorker. He says I loved it ages ago, but I hardly recognize it now. . . .”
Simon pats the window seat beside him, then reconsiders and finds me in our bed. He handles the magazine’s pages as if he were caressing butterfly wings. When I am very close to him, I rediscover his handsomeness, my own husband of all these years, the princely cheekbones, that sweep of hair, once black, now white, across his head, the prettiness of his plum lips, and the long lashes covering those famous blue eyes. And it has not just been his face and clothing that are so beautiful, but the way he has moved through life, deliberate as a dancer, equally elegant while eating or holding a magazine, as he is now. Simon has always known all the gorgeous rules. His hands fall over the paper; they have grown paler, I see, and sadder. Entropy is undoing Simon’s ability to maintain them. “You remember him?” he asks, finally opening it to the page where the poem is printed. “The gentleman from New Orleans?”
I don’t remind my husband that there were always two such gentlemen: my Gabriel and this Thomas, his Thomas. I conjure the face of Thomas’s wife, Genevieve. “When was it he left Lyra, again?”
“The late sixties, I think. Went back to Louisiana. Or was it the seventies? Whenever we transitioned to the Caeruleum. Thomas was such a romantic when it came to those jewels. He didn’t want any part of . . .” Simon drifts, then regathers his composure. “Well, he’s living alone in Savannah now. I was very fond of him, as you may recall. As I was saying, he left because he did not want to become involved in the new pharmaceutical arrangement. I suppose, in the end, he was right.”
I wonder at the implications of his living alone—whether Genevieve has already passed—but refrain from probing further. If encouraged, Simon will collapse into a maudlin reverie of the good ol’ days with his dear Thomas, which can consume an entire evening. “Simon, I can’t read this poem he’s sent you without my glasses.”
“But you don’t wear glasses, Elle,” he says.
I have always worn glasses for reading; now I reach pathetically for them from the table on his side of the bed, if only to win this pathetic battle over the state of my sanity. “Perhaps you forgot that I’ve worn them for decades because you are always stealing them from me,” I say.
Dissolving our little spat, Simon reads the poem aloud, and twenty years gone in an afternoon, past me to the empty house, the silent rooms, the den and its dusted billiard table, the sleeping garden, on through the woods, all the way out to the murmuring sea.
“I recall now why I liked this poem. It reminded me of the beach house at Neponsit. That line about the sun and the shutters and June. We always arrived there in June,” Simon says, once finished. “Remember?”
“I wouldn’t know. I was never there, Simon,” I reply.
“You were there, Elle,” Simon says. “I know it. We spoke about it before we were wed. When we were still in the city. And then I brought you there. . . .”
So long ago, when we were still only engaged—October, November, far past the season for trips to the sea—I asked Simon to describe to me the house in Neponsit, his favorite place in all the world. I was trying to disrupt another of his many spells of silence. His face brightened toward me when I said Neponsit, as if its mere mention had rained new and beautiful clothing on my figure.
“Ours is the last of them all, at the very end of a row of houses! And you walk onto the balcony and there is nothing at all, just blue and more blue. But the most magical part is that, on the other side of this tiny strip of land, if you squint your eyes, you can see the Empire State Building!” Simon said to me.
Back then, I tried to smell it in advance, the Neponsit house, its linens of perfumed salt. I imagined rubbing my face against them like an eager and hungry cat. Not only would he take me the following summer, he went on to say, but one day it would be ours.
But there is another reason I remember that day so vividly: it was the day that Gabriel and Simon first met.
In Simon’s sudden excitement for me—or, perhaps, for his longed-for Neponsit—he had insisted on joining the driver to escort me home rather than sending me home on my own, as I had always gone before. Shame passed venomously through me. I did not want Simon to see where we lived. It was such an entirely different world from his, where music floated out of seven-bedroom apartments. We lived in two different versions of New York that should never have mixed. The driver seemed to know his way around my neighborhood; I wondered if he lived near me, if he traveled, as I did, between two realms. I felt sure that Simon would quit the engagement then and there, but he seemed to look upon it all—at the street vendors’ carts and the shouting and the smoke, and the masses of people, all the general ugliness that plagues the life of the poor—with the same tranquility as when he had gazed out over the river earlier that afternoon, a melody forming in his head about it. Or perhaps he wasn’t seeing anything at all. Perhaps he was still caught in his trance—a child building sandcastles on the shores of near or far Neponsit.
When we arrived, Simon lifted me out of the car, more affectionately than he ever had—a princess from her carriage—and guided me around the puddles in the street. I looked up, and from nowhere there was Gabriel. For a moment he appeared to me as he must have to the rest of the world: A man without a home, without a single article of clothing that was not ripped or stained. A man who had not bathed in days. A man no woman with any sense would marry. He appeared shrunken and emaciated, as if the world had grown too large and full of possibility, of fairy-tale beach houses, for Gabriel to remain in it.
I squeezed Simon’s hand and said it was already very late and that I had better run upstairs on my own. Gabriel shouted my name accusatorily, but Simon never reacted. “Next summer in Neponsit, my dear,” he said to me in parting, oblivious to his foe. To Simon, Gabriel was of no consequence. He was a mere detail in the landscape, a faint apparition, as the poor always are to the rich.
“No, I was never in Neponsit,” I say into the dark. Simon is gone. The wind has lifted the aged magazine from the bed, its pages now splayed open to an advertisement for Camel cigarettes. Nothing else from that past remains: not the Neponsit house, not Gabriel, hardly my husband or me. I want it all back. I want a hot dog from Coney Island. I want to look in the mirror and find my body shining, blemishes of youth across the chin and cheeks. I want to be haunted by the music of sex in the bath, before bed. I want to smoke and to drink and to make love and to smoke again. I want to want. But time has no further reservations with desire for me. Life diminishes our breadth until we are but the size of a grave, and then less than that. I shake Mina, to get her to look at me, but her tired eyes just blink flirtatiously and then close. I cannot tell if we are deep in summer or already in fall. The fog presses against the windows, making the island as gauzy as the blind dream. Perhaps the seasons are on the brink of ending completely to make way for a fifth time of year, one when the sky and the sea no longer have a barrier.
Since no one is here to mind my coming or going, I leave for a walk. There is no moon. Indeed, it is like that fifth season, the one that will draw the next world into our own. There is lightning in the clouds, a bonfire gathering in the heavens. When I am halfway across the lawn, the house disappears completely.
I rest in the beach chair. The sound of the sea draws me into the diaphanous world of sleep, then back to the long drive before our home—but at the door, inviting me in, are two old ladies I have never seen before. Inside, the house is in a marvelous state of disrepair. The staircases slump, the fixtures droop from the ceiling; the lights in the chandeliers are either dimmed or fully blown out. Dust clings to everything. The house is stripped of furniture, except for a single room I have never seen before, furnished with nothing but a bed I am informed will be my own. The ladies say: We are happy you are here. Welcome, welcome. I glance out of one of the windows and expect to find the ocean again but instead the oak trees are afire. Their branches grow flames rather than leaves. Black smoke subsumes the sky. When the ladies notice my eyes wandering out onto the destruction, they draw close to me and ceremoniously shut the blinds.
“Where am I?” I ask them.
“You have always lived here,” they say.
Dawn rises over the sea. The last streaks of night and its parade of stars fade in the west. Day emerges again in gratitude to the killing hand of time. All possible shades of pink and purple reflect off the water. I look back at the woods with the fear of my dream, that everything is on fire, but instead of fire I see again that blue voltage shimmering through the branches, traveling into the sky, pulsing and luminescent. Then, walking along the coast, beneath umbrellas of a very different era, are the two ladies from my dream. They pause before me and look up at me in the chair. One carries a red picnic basket. For a second, I stare across the sand at myself. Then at Ethel. I close my eyes again, and open them, and two wild horses have taken our place.
I quit the scene fast as an old lady can, not quite running, but not walking, either. Back in our driveway, I am relieved that our house remains. Simon and Raymond are in the car. “Where have you been?” Simon screams when he sees me. Looking down, I realize I am still in a nightgown.
I hunt quickly for a proper-sounding excuse. “I was walking to Tilly’s,” I say. “After I lost my glasses, you see, I . . . And I was thinking about Neponsit, so the ocean—”
“Tilly’s is gone, Elle. It’s been gone for many, many years.” Simon looks at Raymond meaningfully.
“I know that,” I say with a shudder. I knew it was gone. I just wanted to see what it had become. “I had this dream . . .” I start to say. I have to tell them, to warn them. “Our house is being haunted—Simon, you know this. By the ghosts of those who want to burn it down.”
“We’re not doing this with you today,” Simon says. “Get in the car. We’re already late.”