Friday morning
He wakes late, having once again forgotten to set an alarm, sits on the edge of the bed, and fumbles at the message app on his cell phone. A slight headache from the night before. Maybe a little too much Scotch on the upper deck as he weaved his way down memory lane.
The app is there, exactly where it’s supposed to be, but the thumbs are not quite up to the job. He switches to his index finger, and blink!—there it is, an 8:25 a.m. message from J’nelle: “Just landed in Raleigh. See you soon.”
Damn, he’s been so distracted chasing memories and tracing the twisted path of how her plan to visit came about, he hasn’t thought through the details, like how long it takes to fly from La Guardia to RDU, pick up the rental car, and head east toward the island. A weekend, light traffic, she could be at his house, looking up at him from the bottom of his back-porch steps, in a little over three hours.
He braces his fists on the mattress and pushes himself to his feet. A slight tremor in his right wrist migrates to his knuckles and fingers. But he will be OK—the next steps are memorized: walk to the toilet, stand holding his dick for however long it takes, get in the shower, and lower the water temp until he finally wakes up—a trick Pam suggested because, she said, she was tired of talking to a zombie every morning.
All is on track until he steps from the shower, grabs the towel, and catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the line of prescription pill bottles he has trouble keeping straight. Sweet Jesus, he thinks, that cannot be me! Muscles vanish before his eyes, which themselves have a vanishing look as they stare back at him from their deepening sockets of purple. White hair leaps from his pate as if fleeing a condemned building.
He rummages through the drawer by the sink for his barber scissors. He cuts his hair every three months or so—he can’t stand barber shops and places with names like “Fancy Cuts”—and he’s a month overdue. But this morning, the first joint of his arthritic thumb will not fit through the hole on the scissors handle. He tries the scissors in his left hand until the tremor hits.
“Fuck it,” he says and jams the scissors back in the drawer. He dresses and heads down the hallway to the main room to fix breakfast, walking straight and tall with that old military bearing he affects sometimes to remind him that once, long ago, he was, well, straight and tall. The feeling lasts until he steps into the main room and takes a look around. The house has not been cleaned in months except for his half-assed, lick-and-a-promise effort. He can smell it: dirt and dust everywhere, mold climbing the grouting in bathroom tiles, mouse droppings in the drawers and corners, that bat-like stink in unaired closets.
He puts on coffee, eats a quick breakfast, then vacuums, wipes, and dusts in a flurry that reminds him of an I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy scurries about with her hair wrapped in a scarf pushing a vacuum with one hand, wielding a dust mop, broom, and dustpan with the other—on her face that scatterbrained, wild-eyed look of panic as she rushes to clean up some goofy mess she’s made, before her husband Ricky comes home. All of this over a weekend visit from an old girlfriend—an old woman—he hasn’t known for almost sixty years. For all he knows, her eyesight is so bad she can’t even see the dirt. He tries to put the Lucy image out of his mind, but it keeps coming back, like a TV channel that pops back on every time you try to change it.
“To hell with it,” he says.
He straightens from cleaning the shower in the guest bedroom, throws the brush under the counter, gives the toilet an extra flush, and looks at his watch. Nearly ten-thirty. He grabs wallet and car keys and clambers down the steps to his car, drawing a list in his head of the ingredients for fish stew, his specialty. He’ll hit the fish market first, then on to the grocery store for vegetables, fruits, lettuce, and—oh yeah, toilet paper and probably a bunch of other stuff.
And maybe some bottled water?
He freezes with his hand on the car door handle. What about the storm? His house is on a well, and his generator is an old 7000-watt Briggs & Stratton. He hits the weather app on his cell phone: Freya has reclaimed her status as a Category 1 hurricane and has slid up the map to roughly the latitude of the Georgia-Florida line. Tracking lines spray all over the Southeast coast and northward out to sea. So, nothing to worry about yet, but he might as well grab some water just in case. And maybe fill up with gas. There’ll probably be a run on that too.
The fish market yields grouper, shrimp, and clams, each with its special brand of stink, bagged in separate pockets of ice and slime. At the supermarket, he fights his way through a traffic jam of carts loaded with water, milk, bread, OJ, and canned goods in time to grab the last six gallons of water, then turns to face an empty cart pushed by a wild-eyed, underfed-looking woman, translucent skin stretched tight across the bones of her face, a snake tattoo slithering from the top of her tank top to under her chin. Two equally wild-eyed kids trail behind her, maybe three and five years old.
Her eyes are probably brown, but they seem black, as if he is staring into holes in the earth.
“Here,” he says, and holds out one of the water jugs. “You take it—take ’em all. I can fill up the bathtub.”
The woman and her kids watch as he unloads the water from his basket into hers, then they turn and walk away without a word of thanks. The kids look back at him over their shoulders, the younger one’s thumb stuck deep into its mouth.
Drugs, he thinks. He saw it many times as a lawyer in Raleigh. Now meth has spread up and down the coast, with crime rising in its wake. He’s been reading about it for years in the Raleigh paper, seeing the statistics. So why is it just now occurring to him? The storm, maybe—people become desperate after a bad storm. And he won’t be alone. He’ll have a guest. Maybe he should be more careful, start locking the house.
He grabs a bunch of corsage-like flowers on his way to the check-out. Lavenders, yellows, pinks, and greens. Carnations, he guesses, but he thought they came only in red and white, at least they did in high school when he gave them to J’nelle for some dance or other. A thick ball of white pinned to her shoulder, glaring back at him when he got too close.
The day has warmed to an unseasonable seventy-plus degrees, and by the time he hauls the groceries and seafood up the steps and into the kitchen, he’s sweating. He sticks the flowers in a vase on the dining room table and busies himself stowing the food, soaking the clams, and peeling the shrimp, between glances at his watch. Something about the flurry of his hands over bowls, sink, and counter tops seems more hurried than usual—that I Love Lucy feeling again. When he wrings out the wash rag in the sink, it’s like wringing out a shrinking remnant of himself.
It is not that wild man he saw in the mirror earlier that worries him. It is the possibility, perhaps the likelihood, that to everybody but himself, he is boring. The round-cheeked checkout clerk in the grocery store kept her mascara eyes on the groceries he fed her and never looked up at him as she scanned them.
“Good mornin’, ju find everything?” (Zip, zip, zip)
“Yes,” he answered. “Nice day.”
“So far.” (Zip, zip, zip)
He could have been a movie star, a drag queen, a blue-faced baboon. She didn’t even glance up as he swiped his card.
He finds Pam’s old binoculars, climbs to the upper deck, and stands at the railing to search the sky for whatever happens by. Beyond the breakers, gulls squawk and fight over a morsel that drops from their grasps into the water that sloshes like melted silver under a cloud-muted sun. In the far distance, the Crowbank Inlet Bridge is all concrete pilings and bleached cement as it slopes downward to join the gray asphalt road. The cars move over it in business-like progression. He thinks of lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge… I had not thought death had undone so many.”
In a time long ago, he was part of that flow, the Raleigh version of it: off to work, grind out his days in office or court, back home at night to the father-husband thing, then off to bed, six hours, maybe seven, rise early, refuel with coffee, and head off into the next day. He liked it though, didn’t he? Most of the time, some of the time. It’s hard sometimes to remember.
He takes a seat in the rope-back hammock chair and rests the binoculars in his lap. A slight breeze. He fancies he can hear the endless purr of engines, way out there in the distance on the bridge, the bump of tires over strips of asphalt spacing the slabs of concrete. He’s been here before, this feeling of being caught in a pause in time between what has gone before, or what he believes has gone before, and whatever is coming. Maybe it is a premonition of death. Maybe that’s how it happens: there is a pause where everything stops, and this arrangement with J’nelle, this commitment to whatever disruption she will bring, is a way to keep things going, kick-start his way out of the pause.
The knock on the back door vaults him from the chair, down the stairs to the front porch, and into the house. Once there, he slows his steps to an easy pace across the main room toward the back entranceway door where she is framed in the full-length glass. She is taller and thinner than he remembers, especially compared to his memory of that bare back above the top of her sun dress. Maybe over the years he unconsciously enhanced that memory, air-brushed it with other memories of Esther Williams in her swimsuit, or Betty Grable, or that new actress, what’s-her-name—he can never remember.
A wild spray of hair with hints of red and gold fading to white brushes her shoulders. There is something fraught about it, as if it’s a part of her she’s been at war with for years but has finally given up trying to control. And lurking in it, no doubt, like a sweet predator, is that hint of shampoo that often lurks in women’s hair. Silver earrings flash from just beneath the spray and send a wind-burned tint along the gaunt ridges of her nose and high cheekbones. Prominent eyebrows shadow blue-green eyes, traced with flecks of gold that make them seem lightning-struck. It’s all there, just as it was before—the brightness, the rawness, the eagerness, the hesitation, right down to the slightly worried smile—only more so, and it strikes him as an astonishing reduction of the flush of her youth to the burned-in beauty of age.
The doorknob is corroded from the salty air. He twists away at it until it finally gives, then throws the door open—and freezes.
“Hey,” she says.
The blue-green eyes brighten; her smile holds its tension in the creases at the top and corners of her lips.
A sigh, a slight shrug of her angular shoulders.
“Your directions were perfect. I didn’t have to listen to that obnoxious voice on the rental car GPS, telling me where to turn.”
He takes a step back, as if to distance himself from a glaring light that has just flashed on in a dark room.
“Great,” he says, “that’s really great. Glad they worked.”
Her carry-on, an expensive-looking one, stuffed and bulging, sits next to her on the porch. Tied to its handle to help her ID it in the bag carousel is a fluff of sand-colored knitting yarn that almost matches her hair. Her earrings are round and intricately designed. They swivel slowly in the quiet hum of her body’s static energy. She never wore anything like that when he knew her, just a charm bracelet with girl stuff on it.
“You look great,” he says. “It’s really great of you to come. I’ll get that.” He reaches for the carry-on and jerks the bag over the sill and into the house, then freezes again. The bedroom—he hadn’t thought about having to show her her bedroom, but it is the next logical step.
“Thanks,” she says. The smile relaxes a bit; the eyes twinkle.
“OK if I come in?”
“Oh! Yeah, sure.” He shuffles backwards with the bag. “Sorry. Maybe I’m a bit nervous.”
She steps into the house and glances around. “Yeah, me too.”
“So,” he says, “this way,” and starts toward the guest bedroom, rolling the carry-on behind him across the heart-of-pine floor. The wheels rumble like the wheels of an ancient ox-cart or maybe a hearse or maybe one of those carts they used in the old days to haul people to the gallows. She feels it too, he can tell, as if the rumble comes from long ago, and the bag is a crypt of squeaky, bat-like memories waiting for him to hit a bump so the lid can fly open.
He stops at the guest-bedroom door and stands aside for her to peer in. “I hope this is OK.”
“It’s nice,” she says, gazing about at what she can see of the house’s interior. “I like it—the house. It makes being here more than just being at the beach.”
“Yeah—good way to put it.”
“It reminds me of my grandmother’s place in Florida, where my family used to go for Christmas.”
Always family with her—in the old days, that got in the way a lot.
“Yeah, it stirs up memories for me too, but sometimes I don’t think the house is worth it—it’s too much trouble to keep up.”
“I know; I owned an old house once. They can be a real pain in the ass.”
Ah, yes—the two sides of the old J’nelle. When they first met in high school, she was the non-curser, the straight-A student whose face beamed from the choir stall into the sunlit vault of their church as she stole shy glances at him, the altar boy. Then toward the end of her senior year, especially late in the evenings, another J’nelle emerged. She smoked cigarettes, drank beer, and cursed, and led them into escapades he’d have never dreamed up himself, like the night they drove to Birmingham to spy on a Klan rally, or the morning of her last day in school when she talked him into skipping class, buying some beer, and sneaking off to a secret spot they knew by the river. He called this other version of her Midnight J’nelle, and that version scared him a little. She’s the one who, without actually saying it, kept bringing up the year’s difference in their ages. She’s the one who gave him the feeling of being left behind.
“And there’s the bathroom.” He gestures toward a door opening off the bedroom to reveal a toilet and part of the shower.
Christ, what else could it be!
“Thanks. Give me a minute, I want to change out of this.” She gestures toward her tan, pressed slacks and open-toed shoes.
Should he offer a drink, a glass of water first? He should have put some in her room, like they do in B&Bs and nice hotels. Pam would have done that.
“If that’s OK?” she says.
“Sure.”
She takes the carry-on handle from him with a quick brush of flesh—the student council president from days of yore, striding into the high school from the parking lot with a load of books, crammed with perfectly done homework, wrapped in her long, swimmer’s arms.
He waits in the kitchen area of the great room with his palms pressed flat on the counter and looks about without seeing anything, but feeling the urgent presence of the house around him—the exposed beams where he and Pam had the ceiling removed and the once nice but now old furniture and curtains and lamps and throw rugs with their vacuum-cleaner-chewed corners and edges.
A slight gulp of saliva, a nervous twitter in his forearm.
Something in him has weakened since last night when he sat on the deck and watched the lights. The dreams maybe. The dreams never help.
He hears the toilet flush and waits in the familiar no-man’s-land he recalls from high school, long moments spent slouched against walls across the hall from a ladies’ room—at movie theaters and ball games. The minutes swelled into fathoms like the ocean now before him. And then she would emerge and smile, and the hallway, full of milling, murmuring people, would suddenly have a center moving toward him like the star of a play had walked onstage. She’d say something like, “Don’t be such a grouch,” as if waiting on her was part of his job and he might as well get used to it, because someday it would become a fact of life.
The bedroom door shuts, and she emerges from the hall and walks toward him. He notices—or perhaps allows himself to see for the first time—her shape in a cotton, ankle-length wraparound skirt. The saucy bounce of old is gone. Now she glides like Venus on the water or King Arthur’s Lady of the Lake, with an airy quietness that seems almost solemn. A loose blouse of linen or something similar is tied at the waist, and on her long, slender wrist, below one of the floppy sleeves, is one of those flat-faced Apple watches or something similar with a pitch black dial and mesh stainless-steel band. A stack of loose bracelets circles the other wrist, hooped and silver, except for one of hammered copper that he recognizes, from one of his and Pam’s trips, as African.
She offers a crisp smile, as if officially declaring her arrival. “Where’s the ocean?” she says. “After a morning in cars and airports, I could use some fresh air.”
“Follow me.”
He leads her to the upper deck. She walks past him to the railing and takes a deep breath.
“It feels so good to be here,” she says. She turns to face him and rests her backside against the railing. “I can see why you love this place.”
“How about a proper welcome?” he says, pushing through his uncertainty to step forward and open his arms. She responds tentatively, circling her arms lightly about his waist only after he has encircled her in his. Her body does not feel weak, but lighter, thinner and less tensile, the eager physicality gone and in its place a nervous hesitation, like a sparrow perched to fly. He wonders what his body feels like to her: his soft middle, growing softer year-by-year; his slack, toneless arms; the roll of extra flesh about his waist where her arms rest, barely touching.
She lets go, rests against the railing, and throws her head back.
“I love this early fall weather! How often do you come here?”
As they stand and stare out at the corrugated surface of the sea, the small talk begins: the story of the house and the five acres around it; how by the process of attrition, uncles and aunts, father, older sibling, the place came to be his.
“Old places have an aura,” she says at least twice as he answers her questions about the house’s structure, the old beams and floors, the slatted shutters and dry-stack, hand-chipped stone in the front porch steps. With each tidbit of the house’s history, with each recitation of structural detail, he can feel the tone in his voice go flatter.
She brushes a breeze-loosened lock from her forehead. “You don’t sound very enthusiastic about all of this.”
Out beyond the dunes, gulls squawk over slow-moving swells that slosh with metronomic regularity on the beach.
“It’s doomed.”
“Why?”
“The ocean,” he says, “is growing very hungry.”
Her gaze rests coolly on the side of his face.
“You know,” he says, “global warming, the rising sea level.”
“Well, sooner or later, yes. But not for a while, at least. Not in our lifetimes.”
He leans forward, elbows resting on the railing. “There’s a storm brewing out there right now that could do it. The next nor’easter could do it. The whole island is doomed.”
She turns back to face the sea. The breeze lifts her hair, wing-like, off her shoulders, ruffles her loose blouse, and presses it against her upper body. There is a good foot between them, but what would it be like now, after all these years, to feel the press of her shoulder against his?
“We grew up,” she says, “with the end of the world hanging over us, remember? I used to have nightmares over those images of mushroom clouds they kept throwing at us. It’s kind of like that now, except now I feel responsible.”
“For the end of the world?”
“Don’t you? I could have reduced my carbon footprint a little over the years—smaller house, smaller car, bought less of everything, instead of bingeing on life. It’s like an habitual sin.” She pauses and takes a deep breath. “Against the universe, no less.”
There it is, he thinks, the class president side of her who watched her footprints very carefully.
“As I recall,” he says, “you were always big on sin—guarding against it, that is—but not so big on guilt.”
He has tip-toed so carefully until now, hasn’t he, but there is that throat-tightening feeling of having stepped over an edge.
She drops her words on him slowly, one-by-one, like weights. “What the hell does that mean?”
“When we did something forbidden, like the night we drove across the state line to Meridian to the air force base and bought that fifth of gin that tasted like formaldehyde, or the day we slipped off into the woods from that church picnic to make out, you saw them as big steps over the line, but once we’d done them, you didn’t seem to worry about it.”
She turns and looks him straight in the eye. “You may not have seen everything.”
He is suddenly conscious of the uneven boards beneath his feet, an uneasiness in his legs, the hint of a tremor up his calf to behind his knee.
“Maybe I got it wrong,” he says. “I got a lot of things wrong back then.”
Far out over the water, an osprey that for some reason has not yet migrated south for the winter, plunges straight down onto a fish, and there is that split second of wonder at how a bird that descends from the sky that fast and hits the water that hard can ever rise, until the wings spread and the bird slowly rises with the fish gripped in its talons, adjusted to face its line of flight.