Saturday evening
He hears her stirring, returns the clippers to the shed, and goes to the kitchen to chop asparagus to go with the cuts of grouper he plans to cook for supper. When she exits the bedroom and shuts the door, it sounds like the final click in something and the opening bell to something else.
She has changed from jeans into another flowing, ankle-length skirt and a black turtle-neck that sets off the reddish tones in her features, slightly puffy from sleep. Yet another set of finely crafted earrings dangles at the edge of her hair to catch late day light.
“You look nice,” he says.
She stops across the kitchen island counter from him. “Thanks, but I need to warn you that I wake up very slowly from naps, especially after a couple glasses of wine. I may be only partially coherent for a while.”
“That’s what beach houses are for. Want some more wine?”
“I’ll wait until I’ve emerged from the twilight zone. Why don’t you give me something to do? I promise not to cut off a finger.”
“Turn on the TV and check on the whereabouts of our friend, Freya. Channel 6.”
The channel blinks on to the governor of the state at a lectern, surrounded by first responders and National Guard officers dressed in combat fatigues and standing at parade rest.
“…could build to a monster storm,” the governor says, “…potential for serious damage and threat to human life. Do not take this storm lightly. Residents of the counties of Perkins, Holton, Pamunky, Bartow, and Secutan should be prepared to evacuate within the next twelve to twenty-four hours.”
“Aren’t we in Secutan?” J’nelle says.
“Yes.”
“So…?”
“So, if you leave tomorrow morning as planned, you should be fine.”
“When do you plan to leave?”
“Probably tomorrow afternoon, depending on how things go. I’ll need to pull in the deck furniture, batten the hatches, etc.”
The storm report continues with a return to the TV station’s map chart with an excited young man standing next to it, flicking his virtual pointer at possible areas of landfall. Pomeiooc Island is near the center of a purple shadow in the shape of a horn of plenty.
She watches for another ten minutes, then wanders out to the porch. The stiff breeze off the ocean slams the screen door shut behind her.
“Wow!” she calls. “Things have picked up.”
“Go up to the high deck,” he says. “You can get a good view of what the ocean is doing.”
He hears her feet on the steps to the upper deck and imagines her standing at the railing while the wind blows her hair off her neck and pulls it tight from her temples and forehead, flaps her long skirt and forms it tight around her hips and legs. He has not let himself imagine what she looks like under her clothes. Old like him, no doubt—saggy, wrinkled skin; things that grow on it; too many bones—but maybe in a special way that cheats age, like she has managed to do with the features of her face and her bare arms and slim fingers.
Once again, that feeling of the football tumbling, falling from his grasp.
“I’ve gotta stop this,” he whispers to himself. “Dial it back.”
He coats the grouper with garlic salt (his catchall, generic seasoning), pepper, and olive oil and places it in the oven while he grills the asparagus. Candles—should he light a couple? There are two small purple ones in the pantry, probably scented, and he hates scented candles. So did Pam, so he has no idea how they got in the pantry. Little nets around the base of them—probably a sign they’re “votive,” whatever the hell that means. Anyway, it smacks of spiritualism of some kind, and he’s had enough of that for the day.
He finally locates the stubby remains of two fat white candles in the back of a drawer, sets them on the table, and works the corkscrew on a bottle of pinot noir as he goes to the screen door to call J’nelle to dinner. And there he pauses, one hand holding the wine bottle with the corkscrew stuck in the top and the other holding open the screen door. In spite of the fact that he did most of the heavy cooking when Pam was alive and in spite of the fact that he is the host and J’nelle the guest, he has a nagging feeling of being the domestic manager between them, the server and tender—Come to supper; supper’s ready, dear—another version of that I Love Lucy scene that keeps rerunning through his mind. And J’nelle seems content to stand back and leave it all to him, though she did offer to help—half-heartedly. She’s not into it, the hands-on serving and tending part. Well, maybe if they were in her house. No, she’d be taking him out to dinner.
Anyway, why the hell is he letting this bother him?
He calls loudly to make himself heard above the wind.
“Coming,” she says, and appears at the top of the weatherworn flight of steps, where she pauses to look down at him.
“You’re taking very good care of me,” she says.
“Happy to do so.”
Yes, actually, he is happy to take care of her, and he hasn’t felt that way in a long time.
He waits with the screen door open as she descends the steps and passes through the door. A slight whiff of perfume comes off her. He usually doesn’t like perfume on women any more than in candles, but hers has a soft warm smell, like the powdery space of her teenage bedroom that he conjured for himself last night while she got herself ready for bed in the guest bedroom below.
Not really memories, though—images so strong, they seem like memories—the bureau, the smells, the waiting bed, the flex of her naked foot on the soft, plush rug. Images so strong he believes them.
She watches while he slides the fish and asparagus onto the plates and sprinkles slivered almonds and soft goat cheese on the asparagus.
“Nice,” she says. “A masterpiece.”
They sit and eat slowly, the talk wandering from her work and his days as a lawyer, to his kids. She eats heartily for a change. The silverware clinks loudly on their plates. The unlit candles sit before them on the table like the columns of a long-ago vanished temple.
Shit, he thinks, I should find some matches and light them.
J’nelle’s fork of grouper stops halfway to her mouth.
“What was Pam like,” she says, “if you don’t mind?”
He stares at a spot on the table between the two candles that seems vast and barren. The image comes to him of that icy crevasse on the Diamond Peak Glacier, where Seth took his fatal leap. Dark and deep, J’nelle had said, blue-gone-to-black. Exactly, except with Pam, there remains the slightest intimation of blue, of light not quite gone.
“She was smart,” he says. “She was a talented painter too, but most of all she was smart. She picked things up out of nowhere. And if it was something she was really interested in, like astronomy or birding, she was an expert at it. All that Jungian stuff about the creative side versus analytical side, right-brain/left-brain, masculine versus feminine—it was all one in her. It all worked together. She kept her hair in a bowl cut that looked sort of mannish, but she had a very female kind of wisdom.”
“She sounds like a very special woman.”
“She was.”
“And I’m guessing, athletic.”
“Outdoorsy.”
“And no bullshit.”
“Right, no bullshit.”
A tone enters his voice he has not heard since before Pam died.
“She too did not believe in terms of endearment,” he says, “or at least she didn’t practice them.”
“Did you?”
“It’s hard to do when they flow in only one direction.”
From the corner of his eye, he can see J’nelle turning the stem of her wine glass as if winding a small motor in her brain.
“For some reason,” he says, “she didn’t seem to trust them. I never knew why that was.”
He takes a sip of wine. “But it would have been nice.”
“Maybe,” says J’nelle, “they just didn’t come naturally to her.”
“Maybe.”
J’nelle sips her wine, sets her glass down, and continues to finger the stem. What does she fidget with, he wonders, when there’s not a wine glass around?
She looks at him. “You are still very much in love with her.”
“Yes.”
“And when you go alone to those lovely places like the marsh you took me to this afternoon, places where you sense the eternal, she is there.”
“Yes, I suppose she is.”
“I think she was lucky. I think you both were.”
“We were. And then our luck ran out, and she was gone.”