17.
Late summer. Overnight, our retreating star has sapped the green from the trees. A hurricane ravages the water fifty miles offshore. These are my favorite days, these maudlin Sundays, when everyone else has gone away, left me alone, and the water roars against the gray coast, the wind mighty and melancholic enough to herald the return of a more beautiful God. Every piece of metal and glass and silver on the island clangs and chimes to the storm, and all the bells in the distant churches ring a new music into the world. And I am returned to Simon’s home on Riverside Drive some sixty years ago, where we sat over supper in our last days in New York, the only sound that of the maid replacing our salad dishes with supper dishes, clang, clink, and then on to cheese and dessert. And when everyone else had placed their utensils at the proper diagonal, clink, clang, to summon the maid again, mine remained on either side of my half-full plate. The maid stood to my side, so nervous I could nearly hear her heart beating, until Simon announced: “Miss Cumberland is finished.”
From that day forward Simon would announce when I was through with a meal, even long after I had gained my awareness of the protocols of china and silverware. And didn’t that summarize, in three simple words, what it is for a woman to grow old? She is finished.
I never adapted to the art of drinking to blur the violence of such thoughts, to arrest the march of memory, or to dissipate the angst over the ending of one’s time on this planet. That escape was Simon’s. Nightly he returned home after emptying a bottle of bourbon with the help of whomever, an associate, and proceeded to drink another bottle of wine with dinner. Never did he yell or hit me. He was more or less a happy drunk and spoke mostly aloud to himself, his soliloquies a mix—depending on how much he had imbibed—of forgotten piano melodies and digressive tangents on the ongoing hunt for the bluest diamond. I sat with him for hours in the evenings, watching him grow messier, more hysterical, pretending to listen, a stale glass of water at my side—until one day when, for no particular reason at all, I decided it was time to get dead drunk and have it out.
We were, by this time, middle-aged already. The children were grown enough to look after themselves. It was a fifty-degree day in December, and we were down on the beach, four bottles in. The skies were cloudy, but we’d protected ourselves from any chill with wine. Chatting about nothing for hours. Gossip, really. The men who worked for Simon supplied an endless amount. Then, suddenly: “Are you angry with me?” Simon asked. “Is that why we’re here? Why we’re drinking?”
I had no reason to be upset with him, I replied. Unless he knew of one himself?
“Because I’ve betrayed you,” Simon confessed at last, and he began weeping then, and because of that, and perhaps because daylight still reigned implausibly overhead, though it felt so deep in the night, I started tearing up, too. But why? Truly I no longer even knew. I cried often in that time. I woke up to it; it was my certain weather. It was that inescapable. The wave would never pass me by.
“If I just could figure out the melody,” Simon said, diverting from his admission of betrayal. “You see the jewels glowing, just three feet below the surface, they tug at the drills, heavy as lead, and then—they’re out of the water for one second and . . . and then, poof, they’re gone.”
“Gone? I don’t understand,” I replied.
“To dust, Elle. They turn to dust as soon as they leave the water. Like a melody, there and gone. We’ve been trying for years, but we haven’t found the way around it yet. Even Clarke pulled out of the company. He’s the one who sold us this goddamn delusion in the first place.” Simon began to slur. “And I don’t know how long we can keep the employees . . .” He paused, distracted. “And, yes, I’ve betrayed you. I’ve betrayed you badly. Over and over again.”
I could barely follow Simon’s drunken thread. We were both smoking then, Simon and I—everyone was smoking then—and I remember our lanterns along the beach had just flickered on, and their light was so gauzy beneath the fog of our cigarettes that I wanted to lose myself there, to wander into some realm less defined, less oppressive, than the one Simon had brought descending on our own.
“Do you know why they banished me here, Elle? Because they found me with Elgan, the piano teacher, the famous one, the one who was going to make me famous.” Simon fumbled to open yet another bottle, dripping wine into the sand. “I was going to play Carnegie Hall and the London Symphony and I’d be the king of goddamn bohemian Paris and I was going to be famous famous, but then they saw me with him—oh, they wanted me to be like Joseph, be like good Joseph, so well adjusted, but I wasn’t like Joseph, I was in love with Elgan, so they rushed to have me married to the closest . . . heh,” he murmured, trailing off.
Who really wants to hear the truth? The full truth. To press him further was like sniffing at a dead corpse, but I couldn’t resist. “Closest what, Simon?” I asked.
“My father saw us and we were only holding hands, innocent as two schoolboys, and he screamed at Elgan to get out—‘Get out, Elgan, get out, you faggot,’ he said—and Elgan ran right out and he didn’t look back and I was thinking all the while, David—that was his name—David, save me, but he kept on running, and the next morning Father told me he was going to find me an appropriate marriage. But just in case I was an embarrassment, it would have to be to someone outside their circle. So Father decided on this little worker of his, someone who worshipped him, the one who had a pretty daughter, but far outside of his society, so the gossip could be contained. But that wasn’t enough. The pretty, poor daughter and the faggot son had to get engaged quickly so they could go far, far away, too far away for any future rumors to reach New York. But at least there would be jewels in exile. Shiny melodies, Elijah calls them. Elijah’s about the only one who still believes in them.”
When Simon finally finished, I began, against all reason, to laugh. I laughed so wildly that it verged into crying. Simon started laughing, too. We went on that way for hours, long after we finished the last bottle. In not belonging to each other, we had found a way to be together at last.
“And then there is Thomas.” Here Simon drifted into a commotion of tears. “You know, my geologist on the Blue Rose. The one with the French wife who lives apart from him now . . . in New Orleans. You know, there has been Thomas—”
At last, I discovered why I had never once seen Genevieve again on Lyra after our encounter, though I had seen Thomas. One evening, he and Simon were very nearly camouflaged by the woods past the shed, wrapped into each other, as if mimicking the entangled oak branches. Simon appeared to me then as a complete stranger, a phantom, a trick of the dusk. I had missed my habitual attendance of the sunset, watching them from my hiding spot. And when the sun’s abandonment turned the sky crepuscular, I heard Simon laugh, truly giggle. I was almost happy for him, happy that the one he loved was abundantly present, whereas the one I loved was dead. But then Simon would go on to lose his love, too.
“Is the wine all gone?” I yelled that day. The alcohol had abandoned us, just as Genevieve had and Thomas would eventually. We were alone in our misery, as every couple has been since Adam and Eve. Simon fell fully into self-pity; he tore down the beach away from me, throwing off his clothing, howling like a madman as he jumped into the ocean. I closed my eyes and conjured a vision, of Gabriel returning from the water in Simon’s stead. But this end to the story was in some ways sadder. Simon had become my best friend. I had spent most of my evenings on the planet listening to him at the piano, each note struck perfectly and mournfully, and heard in each melody that dream he had, of playing music halls and concert stages on Broadway, David Elgan applauding in the audience, rather than hunting dust off a forgotten island with me. In that moment, as he tore into the surf, his body disappearing and reappearing, pale and steadfast, I understood that I would be a ghost first, that I would die first and be the one to watch over him, an old man at the piano, forgetting his notes, trembling over what might have been.
“Yes, the wine is finished!” Simon yells back across the years. My vision clears. I am sober and withered, and in Simon’s place at the shoreline is a familiar woman with long gray braids and a warm chestnut face. She beckons me toward her. The wind and rain are all over her, having their way with her skirt and billowing inside of her shirt. On the sand behind her sits a red picnic basket.
“Come on into the ocean, dear,” she whispers, though yards away, now waist-deep in the sea. She holds an umbrella foolishly overhead, even though the water already has her entire body in its grip.
“It’s time to come inside, Ma—storm is here,” a man’s voice calls from behind me. He takes my hand forcefully in his. His breath smells of lemon and the sharp hint of vodka. “Ethel made fried okra. Your favorite.”
In the instant between beholding the man’s face, his sad blue eyes, and returning my gaze to the ocean, I see that the stranger has already walked so far out that the waves have swallowed her neck. I struggle away from the man. I want to recover her. I scream for her, but a wall of rain rushes toward me. The body of the ocean yearns to just cover me. Soon it will cover the entire world.
Another figure emerges through the blinding weather, breathless. Simon has finally returned from his swim. But how has he already dressed? All the bottles on the beach from our afternoon together have vanished. What year is it? What day? My name is Elle. Elle Ranier, née Cumberland. The stranger has sunken into the waves.
“Ray, we’ve got to get inside!” Simon shouts. “It’s really coming in!”
Raymond is before me again. Who is he and why is he here? He gathers me into his arms like I’m his child. Simon trails us. A creeping sensation grows in me, a feeling that perhaps this has happened before. That this is all that has happened. No other memories reign. We have been two miserable souls, acting one scene: Simon following miserably as I am taken away from the ocean and my desire to fall into it, thrashing and screaming. We are locked in these roles forever and ever. I wonder if this is how it ends, all of it.
Lightning coils in the clouds extravagantly above me, like a revel of snakes. I am stung. Blue unravels me. I look frantically back at the ocean. But the woman is gone.
“She was out here talking to some imaginary person. Like she used to after the electroshock,” Raymond shouts. I writhe helplessly in his arms.
“Don’t mention that word!” Simon screams at Raymond. “Or Madera. You know how she gets.”
The days return, the weeks, the years, tumble down on me again with the rain, terrific and relentless. Madera’s mouth. One, two, three. Elle, you ready? Blink. Ray, Simon, Ray, Simon. The clamps are cold. My mouth hurts. Shut your mouth. One bottle, two, three, Genevieve, I have to go. I can’t see. I was just tired. I am just so tired. I have to go. The fifties, the sixties, the seventies. Just two pills, just three pills, just four. Make it five. One, two, three, start. A bathtub full of a drop of blood. Let’s try something new, something blue. Yes, Joe, let’s call it Caeruleum. You were right. You were right. It’s working for Elle, it’s really working! Zelda screams: It’s ruining her, Daddy! She’s not there! She’s not even there. All that blue just yonder un bon marche chérie au ciel Elle Bell you and me a sweet reverie c’est une chanson I’ll never forget. Ethel frowns oh now why’d they go and try to take all the blues away no no no the blues always come back Lord don’t I know it.
The hurricane changes course and recoils from Lyra through a black stage door in the sky. Even the horses emerge from hiding to bid it farewell. Everything returns to life. The birds chat frivolously, as if spring and not fall were on the horizon. It is always after a deluge that we animals suffer the delusion of miracles. Our house reconfigures itself around me. I wish for once it might transform as it has in my dreams—grow extravagant hallways leading to secret, magical rooms, rooms decadent with velvet and gold, where fairies wander and cats talk and angels do govern the living, rooms I never realized were here, rooms I’ve fallen for again and again only to awaken and find them gone.
This house, in its true form, was a dream to me once. I was stupefied by its beauty. Like Simon’s apartment on Riverside Drive, I believed our estate here on Lyra had sentience, that it watched me stumble down the stairs and trip over its humid carpets. I would never be elegant enough for it. Then one day there was nothing left to trip over, no spiderweb left to memorize. The house had become mine. I knew the feel of the silk in the beds on my skin, their scent, which blue china complemented the mahogany dining room. My hands grazed, day after day, the dusty spines of hundreds of books in the library, so many of which remained lonesome and unread. I could lose my hearing and still recall the music of the creaks in the stairs, the sighs of the ceiling, the ghost’s cry in the first spit of water from the bath. I could lose my sense of smell and still conjure the house’s perfume of tobacco, sandalwood, must, time, and rain. But all my magical rooms were in the past, and the future, for a long time now, has raced toward me like a lion hurtling toward my neck.
Still, Lyra, this buoy between me and the bottomless sea, has remained unknowable. The dunes of the island throw themselves against the ocean, keeping it in its place, but even they can last only so long. Soon wind will break the windows of this house. Soon these walls will crumble, and our home will burn into a circle of mysterious stones like the Clarke mansion before it. And soon this entire strip of land will be under the sea. Lyra will be a shipwreck.
For now, I go into the garden and raise my arms. The blue light rises from the ground, crisscrossing the oak like primordial snakes. I fall to my knees like the prophets before the face of God in all the forgotten deserts. The dead already move here. Their language is painted before me. Lyra disappears beneath such haunting illumination, as if it is already afire.