6

Saturday morning

He cooks eggs and bacon and mulls over last night’s conversation, like a lawyer reconstructing a case. What exactly did he commit to? What led him to do it? And how did all of that talk and reminiscing lead to those fantasies he had later of the young J’nelle in her bedroom with its shadows and smells, doing those things girls do to get ready for bed? It all flowed so seamlessly, but now it does not seem seamless. It seems scattered and twisted, stretched between different realities.

The older J’nelle is no doubt performing an early morning version of that bedroom routine right now, the things women do to stop age in its tracks and revive suggestions of youth. It’s tough, he knows, watching it go. There’s a horror in it, like the horror he felt yesterday when he caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror. Does she have those feelings? She didn’t like her looks in high school, but by any measure she was attractive, and she had a lot more to lose in that category than he did. So, perhaps it’s more brutal for her, watching herself shrink and evaporate at the same time.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe the “in search of my true past” routine she laid on him last night is just another gambit to escape the great evaporation.

Her deck sneakers squeak on the floor as she enters the room from the hallway. Whatever she has done in the makeup shop of her bathroom has worked. The beauty she brought with her yesterday is back in a bright-new-morning kind of way and chases away the shadows lingering from their evening’s talk. He pours a mug of coffee and holds it out to her. She accepts it, rests her backside against the counter, and takes a first sip.

“Good morning,” she says in a burry, slightly bemused voice.

She’s wearing jeans and a chartreuse top under a loose cotton flannel shirt, a step down from yesterday’s dressier linen. Or maybe a step up, depending. Or maybe just, well, neither. He needs to relax, not overreact to the startling radiance she has brought into this usually very empty room.

“G’ morning,” he says as he pops a couple of slices of bread into the toaster oven.

“There are ghosts here,” she says. “I can feel them. I guess you know that.”

“Yes. Sinclairs too stubborn to leave. Not untypical, but harmless.”

“How about the hurricane?”

“I checked on it. Not harmless, Category 2, headed north-northeast, which would be roughly where we are standing. Could be throwing rain our way by late tomorrow.”

“What about landfall?”

“Few days at the earliest. Nothing to worry about; you’ll be on the road home by then.”

“Probably you should be too.”

“Maybe. I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“What do you do about the house?”

“Shut it up. Those old pine shutters on the windows have worked for a long time. Once a fallen tree damaged the roof. I’ve cut some of them back since then.”

She pushes herself off the counter next to him and moves around to the other side of the island to face his back as he works at the stove.

“So when did you become such a risk-taker,” she says. “I never saw you that way, then I heard you joined the marines and went to Vietnam.”

“Not quite the way it happened. I was about to be drafted, so I joined the army, went to OCS, and my artillery unit got assigned to the marines.”

“How did that work out?”

He gets these questions from time to time, at gatherings—cocktail parties, family reunions—from people who have no clue. “I was lucky,” he always says, “I’m still here,” and thinks, How the fuck do you think it worked out?

“‘Fun, fun, fun,’” he says to J’nelle, “till our daddy takes our T-bird away.’”

“Where were you?”

“I Corps, near the DMZ.”

“When?”

“’68 and ’69.”

“That was the big Tet Offensive, right?”

“Right.”

“Seth was there,” she says, “twice—then and later.”

“Marine?”

“Yes, infantry.”

“Jesus, he probably had even more fun than I did.”

“And what kind of fun did you have?”

Ace’s fingers tighten on the spatula.

“I got hit in the leg and chest by shrapnel from a Russian-made rocket.”

“Seriously?”

“I can show you the scars.”

He lets go of the spatula, grabs the cooking fork, and jabs at the frying bacon, flipping it about.

“I’m open to hearing about it,” she says, “if you feel like telling me.”

He has never spoken about it before, except to Pam and a VA shrink who was trying to treat him for PTSD.

“It was the night before Christmas, and all through the house … well, not exactly. But it was Christmas Eve, and the cooks had brought a chocolate cake to the bunker where I was fire direction officer. I sat down on a foot locker, where we stored our maps and slide rules, and raised my cooking mess fork to dig into a big slab of that cake when I heard an ear-splitting bang right overhead and felt something big and hot tear into my chest. It was like being hit with an axe. I was off the foot locker, on my back on the dirt floor, deaf from the sound, and there was dust everywhere from where the rocket had shredded the sandbags on top of the bunker, and my first thought was that the bastards had ruined my cake, the only piece of chocolate cake I’d seen since we left the States. My legs were jerking. My arms were twitching. The wounds in my chest and leg felt like they were on fire. And then I kind of woke up and thought, I’m going to die, right here in this godforsaken bunker in the middle of this surreal life created for me by the dark forces of my own country. And then I thought, No, worse: I’m going to be paralyzed, ’cause a marine officer I’d made friends with had had his spine severed in an ambush a few days before. I tried to get up to see how bad others in the bunker were hurt but couldn’t make myself move. People were shouting from outside, and I heard another rocket scream in and hit nearby, and then another, and someone ripped my blouse open and pressed a bandage to my chest, and the medic jammed the needle in, and the next thing I know, I’m being off-loaded from a chopper onto this hospital ship called The Sanctuary, and this Navy surgeon is standing over me telling me to hang on and he’ll have me screwing every nurse on the ship in less than two weeks. And then everything went blank, and I came to after surgery, and over the course of the next year, I found out the two weeks was bullshit and so was the nurse part, and there began a life-long distrust of doctors that carried over into my legal career. And so, that’s the size of it: bang, hurt, down, restored, but no nurses and no chocolate cake.”

He takes a deep breath. The toaster oven emits a sharp ding.

“Everybody in the bunker was killed except the cook who brought the cake and me.”

He turns his head slightly to speak over his shoulder in her direction. “Does that take care of it?”

“Sorry,” she says in a slightly tremulous tone.

“Why?”

“For what happened, for asking.”

“It’s OK,” he says.

She blows steam off her coffee and takes a long, slow sip. “Ace…”

“Yes?”

“Are you sure you’re restored?”

That tremor in his hand and wrist again. He tightens his grip on the fork, suspended and dripping over the frying bacon.

“What makes you ask that?”

“It matters to me.”

He turns from the stove and looks at her. She takes another sip of coffee and looks back.

“Really,” she says, “it does.”

Against the dark oak beams in the ceiling at the far end of the room, the sandy sparkles in her hair look brighter than the day before, almost mesmerizing. A new set of earrings, discs of aqua stone rimmed in gold, remind him of the ocean two days ago before the clouds moved in—deep limitless blue under a peekaboo sun. Her look comes at him straight out of their conversation of the night before.

He turns back to the stove.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Hard to tell about those things.”

“Seth was wounded too, but he was shot in the chest.”

“How the hell did he survive that?”

“Same way you did, I guess. They took him to that same ship, The Sanctuary. He wouldn’t talk about it—any of it. It was like a darkness settled over those war years of his life and from there a shadow spread slowly over the rest of it. He was never restored.”

“You think that’s what his disappearance was all about?”

“Yes. The physical disappearance and the mental and emotional one that began long before that. By the end, he was a ghost on a Harley motorcycle.”

She pauses. “And a drugged-up, drunken ghost at home.”

He forks out the bacon onto a paper towel, drains grease from the skillet, and pours in the blended eggs. While they are cooking, a quick spread of butter on the toast. Fat, cholesterol… ta-da, ta-da. Pearlman would have a fit, devout medicine man that he is, but he doesn’t approve of wine and Scotch either. The eggs hiss and bubble on the hot iron, and Ace has a flash memory of a picture he saw of Seth at one of the earlier Oneonta High reunions he did not attend, a thin, gaunt-looking guy, with a rock-hard chest and wrists and forearms that looked like they could deliver a handshake that would clamp your whole body. But at the fiftieth reunion, Seth had changed into someone almost unrecognizable, puffy face and cheeks that seemed to squeeze shut his eyes, a body straight off the beer and hot dog line at a football game.

“I’m sorry it turned out that way,” he says, “for you both.”

“It was killing me too,” she says. “If he hadn’t disappeared, I would have found a way to disappear myself, at least from him.”

“And you still don’t know what happened?”

Her cup scrapes in slow rhythm as she swishes it back and forth over the countertop.

“I know what happened,” she says. “About a year ago, I was going through some of his things: boxes of papers, magazines, and books. He was keeping a journal—not a diary, more a stream-of-consciousness narrative full of his own writing and excerpts from magazines and newspapers, poems he liked, stories. It filled several boxes and his writings raved at times, but also dazzled, the way his mind jumped from one thing to another and yet somehow brought it all together—not logically but on an emotional level like poetry.

“Anyway, the last forty or so pages of it were about glaciers, particularly the Diamond Peak Glacier in southwest Alaska. It was breaking up. Giant crevasses were forming, and one of them was estimated to go down at least two hundred feet. There were photos looking into it: sunlit, translucent jade at the top, then deepening into blue-green, then into a blue so blue and deep it seemed part of another world, then into blackness, absolute nothing. And in this part of the journal, Seth made no entries of his own. The dancing prose that connected the rest of it went silent. It was as if he’d arrived somewhere, and there was no more to say.”

The cup stops scraping the countertop. Her eyes focus on it as if she has found a centerpoint.

“So,” he says, “you think he went to see that glacier and the crevasse and fell in.”

“No,” she says, “he didn’t fall. He jumped. It’s perfect: that hard-ass marine thing that followed him out of the war would sooner or later demand he do something to escape the confusion and pain—not just end it all by shooting himself or taking pills, but escape it, make the leap into whatever, even if it was a dark, icy oblivion.”

“Jesus,” Ace says.

Her lips are tightly set with tiny creases at the corners, her eyes flashing and adamant.

“Did they search the glacier?” he asks.

“No. And if they had they wouldn’t have found anything. I know Seth; when he leaped into oblivion he would have been sure not to leave a trace.”

Ace feels another tremor coming on and tightens his grip on the spatula handle. But it is not a tremor this time; it comes from somewhere else. An image of himself frozen in place on the vast plain of that glacier, desperate to reach out and grasp the shirttail of a ghost—Seth’s, his own, the ghost of some other nameless, faceless vet—to keep it from going over the edge into that deep blue night.

“How do you deal with that?” he says. He means it as a general question—how does anyone deal with something like that?—but it comes out sounding as a demand to know.

“I was so tired of it by then, so utterly worn out with his shit and Anna’s, that I let myself label what he did as pure selfishness so I could dodge yet another round of guilt and what ifs—if I had only done this or that, seen how bad it was, nagged him into therapy one more time.”

“How did that work out—the dodge?”

“How do you think it worked out?”

Touché, he thinks.

He scrapes the eggs onto two plates, adds the bacon and toast, and holds her plate out to her. She is resting with her elbows on the counter, staring down at her coffee cup as if reading the dregs. He sets her plate on the counter before her.

“Let’s eat.”

He pours them more coffee. They take their seats at the old walnut dining table like awkward birds settling into a lakeside nest. She taps a finger on his wrist before he can pick up his fork.

“When I asked you to join me on a journey into our pasts last night, I didn’t intend for us to dive right into the darkness.”

“Yeah, I assumed it would be only about the happy, carefree days of youth—parties, rock-and-roll, and teenage sex.” He clears his throat. “Or the lack thereof.”

She gives him a teasing smile. “Maybe we can visit those memories later, or, as you say, the lack thereof.”

She nibbles at her toast, takes up her fork and begins to pick at her eggs.

“But now that we’re there, in the darkness, I need to say a bit more about my part in it.”

“More stuff like Mason.”

“No, larger than that.”

“The abortion.”

“After the abortion,” she says. “What happened next.”

“Is this another confession?”

“It’s just something I need to say.”

Ah, yes—that must-do personality, the straight-A student who did all her homework every night and hugged it to her chest when she walked in the door to school. He was not a do-all-your-homework-every-night kind of guy.

“And why do you need me to hear it?”

“It’s about you, indirectly, and about Seth, because of your roles in the military. I never had the nerve to tell him about it. But during our talk last night, I felt some of that warmth from the old days seep back. I feel safe.”

She takes a squirrel-sized nip of toast and continues to pick at her eggs with her dangling fork. For God’s sake, he thinks, eat something!

“During my last year of college and the early days of grad school, when you and he were in Vietnam, I was heavy into the protest movement.”

“If I hadn’t been otherwise engaged, I probably would have been too.”

“No. I mean really heavy—screaming obscenities at cops and guardsmen, sitting in at public buildings, pouring blood on the steps of induction centers, getting arrested, calling people like you and Seth child murderers. For about two weeks, I was in SDS until I found out that the group I was with cared more about sex and drugs than saving the world from American imperialism. But I was such a believer, so chock full of moral certainty.”

“You were young.”

“I was an arrogant shit, another version of that intellectual arrogance I affected in high school. It was a cover.”

“For what?”

She drops her fork and stares at her plate. “Insecurity, uncertainty, fear of something, sort of like that fear I told you about in high school before I met you.”

She raises her eyes to his. They seem imploring, hesitant.

“Does what I’ve just told you about my role in the protests piss you off?”

“No,” he says. “Does what I just told you about Vietnam scare you away?”

The question pops in his brain: scare her away from what?

“No,” she says, “it doesn’t.”

She braces her elbows on the edge of the table, rests her chin on her fists.

“I’d heard you were over there, and the more I got into the counterculture protest stuff, the more you began to haunt me, like the Ghost of Christmas Past that used to scare me as a kid. You’d come near dawn, which was about the time I went to bed. It seemed weird. I thought I’d left us behind.”

“I’ve never been a ghost before. What did I look like?”

“You didn’t look like anything. You were just there.”

“You sure it was me? Maybe it was guilt.”

“I thought you said yesterday that I wasn’t into guilt.”

“It could be that maybe, perhaps, just possibly, I was wrong.”

She forks a quick bite of eggs. “You’re right; that’s exactly what it was.

“By then I’d seen a doctor, and I knew what the abortion had done: I’d killed not only the fetus but my youth and my secret, tender hopes for the future. It seemed like a punishment. And maybe it was the look in your eyes in that haunting, a look of complete, unknowing blankness, that showed me that the road that led me to where I was ran all the way back to that night in high school, after the botched cotillion, when I lay in bed and decided with such conviction to break free of my old life and rush off into, where? I had not a clue. But off I went, and this is where it had led: a woman who had destroyed her most cherished dreams and was now staying up all night, screaming at cops, taking LSD, and pouring blood.”

She lays down her fork and stares at the table beyond the edge of her plate, then once again raises her eyes to stare into his. In high school, her temples seemed translucent and vulnerable, veins running like tiny rivers just out of sight. Now the veins braid their way beneath the weathered landscape of her face.

He says, “Is this the point where I’m supposed to say, ‘You’re too hard on yourself’?”

“You are pissed off.”

“No. Well, yeah maybe. But not so much at you. Back then the war, drugs, protests, the whole scene was a mess.”

“When all is said and done,” she says, “I think that’s why I married Seth, as some muddle-headed effort at redemption.”

“For what?”

“My excesses. That thing in me that caused me to commit them: abortion, SDS, drugs, running off with Mason. Leaving you.”

“How did Seth redeem that?”

“He showed up at UVA, fresh out of the marines, the spring semester of my second year in grad school. He’d left after his sophomore year. I was sitting with a friend on the front steps of The Rotunda when I saw him get off the bus at the stop on Rugby Road. He had on a marine tee shirt and combat fatigues tucked into worn-out combat boots, and he stepped off that bus and started across Main Street toward the Alderman Library as if he had just stepped out of that war I’d been so worked up over and knew nothing about, including the people in it. You could see it in the way he walked, more of a slog than a walk, and the way he moved—something cautious and alert about it. He seemed starved in some way that was more than physical. His body was small, hardened, and tense, and he looked so alive, and so conscious of being alive. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was different from all the people around me. He was real.”

In her voice is a hint of excitement, not heard since she first stepped into the house.

“And so…,” he says.

“So I latched on to him, I mean right there. I walked up to him and said something goofy like, ‘Welcome to campus; I haven’t seen you before.’ And I walked him over to the engineering school where he was already a week late to register, and then we met later for coffee. He didn’t say much, but that attracted me to him even more, because all I’d heard for the past two years was people arguing, talking over each other, and shouting. And so we tried another way of communicating, which was being as close as we could get physically, lying next to each other and hugging, and almost endless sex, and that seemed to ease the guilt I felt over my protest behavior except for those nights when he would thrash about and shout in his sleep and I would lie awake and stare into the darkness and realize it was nothing like the darkness he was in. I’d never seen terror before. He’d shout and thrash until the only way to make the terror go away was to wake him up and have more sex. It was kind of like a drug for us, a quick fix that was sure not to last.”

“What was the phrase?—‘whatever turns you on.’ At least it worked for a while.”

“I look back on all of that now and realize that while I thought I was helping him, what I was really doing was getting out of my own head.”

“The universal condition of youth,” he says. “In high school, I used to look in the mirror, and the last person I wanted to see was staring back at me, the person I was trying so hard not to be. I kind of panicked and all sorts of shit started to happen.”

“Like Allison Winslett and the cotillion debacle.”

“Probably—and a bunch of other stuff, like a couple of nights in a Pickens County jail for liberating ten cases of beer from a Miller High Life truck.”

“When did that happen?”

“My senior year, after you quit writing me. Also, dynamiting an old man’s pile of cans he’d collected from beside the road, because he’d taken a shot at Bobby, Ellis, and me; and lighting a string of cherry bombs and throwing it under Mrs. Patton’s desk in the library the last day of school. You remember her, the Battle-Axe of the Books. That one almost closed the show. They weren’t going to let me graduate.”

“That’s how you ‘got out of yourself’?”

“I wasn’t very good at it.”

“Neither was I.”

She looks down at her cold eggs, takes a sip of coffee, then lowers the cup and hangs her head.

“The truth is, I ache over Seth. He was a good man, and before the war, he was a good boy, and that boy was still there hanging on when we were together. I didn’t see it, or I didn’t know what to do with it, except to give him more sex. He kept a three-by-five American flag pinned to the wall above our bed. His high school track trophies were perched on our bureau and bookshelf, all around the room. On the floor next to the bed was his old Hopalong Cassidy throw rug. I didn’t have a clue. It’s just another example of Miss Know-It-All screwing up. I thought because I made A’s in high school and college, I could handle anything in spite of all the evidence I had accumulated to the contrary. And before it was over, of course, I’d just made it worse.”

She shakes her head slowly back and forth. The ends of her hair brush along her jaw and the back of her neck.

“Seth needed a deep, special kind of love,” she says. “He wanted open displays of affection, terms of endearment: sweetie, sugar, darling. Impromptu hugs and kisses. I gave him sex and indulged my usual compulsion to try to fix everything and make it right.”

“Well, you tried,” he says, “and I’m guessing the sex wasn’t all that bad.”

Her head stops shaking, but remains bowed, her eyes still staring at her plate.

He rests a finger on her arm.

“J’nelle, it was a crazy time. We all screwed up. The world was screwed up. And the best way to go with it now is to try and forget it.”

She wipes away a tear and looks at him.

“I don’t believe that. I think we have to fight and at least try to keep those horrors from happening again.”

He rises quickly from the table, tosses his plate and silverware in the sink with a clatter, and turns on the tap.

“Oh really—and what the hell would that mean exactly for people like us, here in our peachy, beachy, comfy upper-middle-class lives? We claim lofty ideals, but we’re too comfortable or lazy to fight for them. Just like our counterparts in the ’50s and ’60s who let a bunch of ignorant bastards lead us into a useless war…”

He shuts off the tap turns to face her.

“…that killed and maimed a shitload of people. One thing about you has not changed: you still want to make it all right, everything—past, present, and future. And, you know, that’s really not possible. So, why don’t you just give it the fuck up?”

He turns back to the sink, runs hot water to make suds, and begins to scour the skillet and cooking fork. He hears her chair scrape, and then she is beside him at the sink. She lets her plate and silverware slide into the water, then takes his arm, pulls him away from the sink, and encircles her arms about his waist, pressing him close, resting her wet cheek against his shoulder. Her hair is full of that honey-warm smell he remembers from past times, a mysterious confection of young girl’s air-dried locks and shampoo.

He starts to mumble something, but it is cut off by a tremor that sends the cooking fork he is still holding into a rat-a-tat-tat against the sink.

She raises her face to him, a look he has not seen in a long time, of soft, soulful interest. He used to see it when they were close, say after a hug when she stepped back to study him in a way that hung a giant, invisible question mark.

He glances down at the fork and stops the shake by pressing it against the stainless-steel sink.

“Getting old is not worth a shit,” he says.

“I know,” she says, “it sucks. But so far we’ve survived, and I’m so glad.”

• • •

They drive down the island to a stretch of beach away from the crowds, park in a space tucked in among the dunes, and walk along the sand. Fishermen have driven four-wheelers and pickups onto the strand and sit in folding chairs drinking beer, or stand in waders and fish the surf. The day is cool. The sky hangs above them in strings of octopus gray. An offshore wind whips the heavy air in thick gusts. Waves heave themselves against eroding cliffs of sand that break and slosh into the water.

“See, doomed,” he says. “Nature is coming for us.”

“Don’t think about that now,” she says. “Let’s just be for a change.”

He identifies the shorebirds for her, the same ones they saw yesterday: willets, plovers, oystercatchers, sanderlings, and a new species, a curlew, plodding on its skinny legs, holding at the ready its long, curved bill, as it searches the washed-over, bubbling sand.

“He seems pickier than the others,” she says.

“Very patient and careful,” he says. “I could learn a thing or two.”

Once they are past the fishermen, the beach is deserted. The thud and hiss of waves and the calls of circling gulls fill the silence between them. They find a sea-sculpted driftwood log to sit on and watch the surf.

“What is it about the ocean,” she says, “that soothes and heals?”

“It speaks from the realm of the deep unconscious.”

“Wow. Quick answer.”

“It’s from Jung,” he says. “I studied him in the agony of one of my mid-life crises. A lot of it rings with new age bullshit, but I think there’s something to it.”

“You’ve had mid-life crises?”

“Some would say I’m still in one.”

“I sort of picked that up between the lines of your emails,” she says.

“What did I say that told you that?”

“I guess it takes one to know one.”

“I would not have imagined that about you before today—that you are someone who might have mid-life crises. You always seemed so together. Even at the reunions, you seemed like the line from Bob Dylan’s song, ‘forever young.’”

“I love that song, but it’s a dream, and sometimes a fairly cruel one.”

“Yes, it is.”

They sit for another half-hour then start back toward the car. When they reach the wet sand near the water, their hands come together and lock in a light touch of crooked fingers. His throat clogs with lumpy questions. At the higher stretch of beach, chunks of sand continue to break off into the water. “Thump!” go the waves, then leave seconds of silence before the next one hits. A line comes to him from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand?”

“I am not ready for that,” he whispers to himself, and then realizes that, as he often does when he’s alone, he has said it out loud.

She lets her hand slip away.

“No, not your hand,” he says. “I didn’t mean that.”

“What, then?”

“I guess where my life is heading.”

“To that ‘undiscovered country,’” she says, “‘from whose bourn no traveler returns.’”

He stops and looks at her. His hand feels suddenly empty.

“Thank you, Prince Hamlet,” he says. “I didn’t know you were a Shakespeare scholar.”

“We read it in high school,” she says. “Remember? Lately that line has been popping up.”

Ah, yes—that unerring, near-photographic memory.

“Thanks,” he says, “for reminding me. Always a welcome thought.”

Back at the car, she wonders out loud about the hurricane, and when they are on the road and pick up a cell signal, he gives her his phone and shows her the weather app. She checks on the forecast as they drive.

“Still Category 2,” she says, “still headed toward the coast, may increase to Category 3 or higher, may not; may reverse course and hit Cuba, may not; may veer out to sea, may hit the eastern seaboard. In other words, they don’t have a clue.”

“Probably the latter option,” he says, “about where we are now—just a hunch.”

“When did you become such a pessimist?” she says.

“Pam used to ask that question.”

“And?”

“Somewhere along the way,” he says. “Maybe when the shell hit that bunker, or maybe when what we had in high school fell apart, or maybe even before that.” He pauses. “But you’re not a pessimist.”

“No,” she says, “I just move on.”

“Yes,” he says, “indeed you do,” and says to himself, from just about everything.