In the Distant Singing Guts of the Moment

When we got to the cove she dove overboard. The beach was still an eighth mile ashore, hidden from the rest of the lake by a spit of rock and spruce. That beach a boomerang of sand to my eyes, gritty sand of my youth and fears, moving away from us, as we sailed through the cove, in two directions in the same moment: up under the spruce needles withered where the white sand sparkled like salt loosely broadcast over the pumpernickel, and back toward us through the shallow waves, as the eye returns, to where the lake sand ridged itself deeper out of sight below the waters in a pattern of split and loosened pieces of corrugated cardboard. Eighteen, her body nearly fatty, she jumped up on the gunwale, steadied herself there for a moment while the dingy heeled, tilting her body as a loon tilts up his tail before a dive, poising silently until the keel of the dingy had almost broken water, and then she dove deep, away from the overturning dingy, away from my shouts. She came up spluttering and laughing, swam until her feet hit the ridged bottom, and then ran in the waves toward the beach, ran fleetly. Dolphins of kicked water accompanied her.

You’ll have a time knowing her again, I thought.

She shook her head and body sideways as her feet kicked up smaller and smaller spurts of water behind her until she reached the dry sand where she bellyflopped down to let the sun dry her. By the time I had the dingy righted, moored, bailed, and the sail spread full to dry, the sun had warmed her back enough so that she had turned over and was flicking the crusted sand off her body.

“Hand me the towel,” she said. “I want to rub the sand out of my hair.”

Jesus, let’s not talk, I thought. Instructress, how are the old men who lance your moated bum for twenty-four bucks worth of swim lessons? How was your hay fever last fall? How was skiing?

“It’s not going to do you much good;” I said, “It’s sopping wet.”

“Well why’d you do that?”

“It wasn’t me, Sara, remember? It wasn’t me who made the grandstand play and tried to drown the poor, one-eyed dingy.”

“Well the towel was in the bag, wasn’t it? It’s plastic.”

“Yeah, but the bag was unzipped; just hanging there, open to every wave that fickled along. Open to every sailor.”

“You can say marin. It’s prettier than sailor anyhow. I bet the food’s soaked too then.”

“The pumpernickel is soggy. We’ll have to put him back in the tadpole class until he learns at least the dog-paddle.”

“Don’t make a mock of me. Is that what we came here for? At least I wasn’t always saying I wouldn’t be doing it this year. We’ll have to eat the herring without bread. We’ve got to get back early anyhow. You have to play and I’ve so many things to do I’ll go out of my head. I’m really snowed; I swear every bachelor over forty in Toronto’s up here poking at my butt and bobbing his head at my breasts when I bend over to show him how to keep his head under right.”

“What train’s he on?”

“Come on now, I was speaking of vast numbers. Why don’t you put some guck on my back?”

“It sunk, Sara. No more guck. Went down with the ship. You’ll have to take the sun straight. Old Sol, then old Scroppy. Unless you want me to dive for it; can’t be more than a fathom down. I could see bottom when you jumped. Here, I’ll get those. Those shoulders must really move him, all brown and soft.”

“No, I’ll do it myself. You know my shoulders are too big for a girl. I always mistrust you when you say you like them. The guck doesn’t matter; I guess I’m brown enough from last summer. I won’t burn if we don’t stay long.”

“You must really snow him, all brown and ripe, even in the winter.”

“January seemed the longest. I’ve been using a lamp since Easter. It never works out as well. Don’t. He doesn’t worry much about my body; he’s like my father. I could get as fat as a horse and he wouldn’t care as long as I was happy. He’s got different reasons though, he’s studying Indian philosophy. He doesn’t care about my stuhla because he’s concerned with my sukshma; he’s really very different from you. I’ve reformed completely for him.”

“With your what?”

“What?”

“What’s he only concerned with?”

“My sukshma. It’s the body that you feel is your body, the true body.”

“So quit not-talking me and come feel my sukshma.”

“I knew you’d say something like that. But you’re right for once, because the one you’ve got is the only one you ever think about; though it’s really just your stuhla.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, let’s go sailing.”

“Not now, Scroppy. Why don’t you tell me about your playing, if the conversation is beyond you. I thought you were going someplace else this summer.”

“Did I really ever say that? I must have been conning your sweet innocence. I’m glad to announce that I’ve made a new assessment of my revaluations of self in terms of potential potential, so I’m back.”

“Thanks, my little father. You said if there was one thing you weren’t going to do it was come back up here and play in the pavilion. Minus certain words which are unladylike.”

“Why don’t you roll over and play dead?”

“You said you absolutely refused to play with a mickey band like that ever again.”

“You roll over and I’ll guarantee you’ll be browner in one day than you were all last summer. Your pretty sukshma too, if you like.”

“Come on now, watch it. You said you’d walk into the lake and drown before you played one note for them.”

“Brown to the waist, so you’ll be more squaw than lady, a nice brown you can’t get in the stores, greybrown like a deer, with only your underbelly white too like a deer, and maybe the insides of your ears and a flicking tail.”

“I even did get the insides of my ears tanned. Remember it was so damn funny when they peeled in there, I thought I had leprosy. That long week when you weren’t practicing, even in the mornings. You were so nice to me after the first time I thought I’d cry. Even Squeaks said I’d cry — but not for that. We used to get here even before the sun was up some times and then just lie here all day in the sun and not worry about people until you had to go back and play at night. That was just real nice. Even the soles of my feet got brown out here and the boss said I must have had quite a vacation.”

“One last sail, Sara?”

“No. It wouldn’t be right now. Don’t make me.”

“Is he a good marin?”

“Come on now, Scroppy. That was the agreement. We said not to talk about him if I came out here with you.”

“He’s a lousy marin?”

“I don’t know, honestly. I’m only eighteen now. You know, Scroppy. It’s not impossible for me to be pure. He can’t tell from the way I act, so he never tries.”

“He must be blind. Is he old?”

“That was my mother’s mistake, not mine. He’s younger than you are. A war baby, eh? Stop it now, please. You should have come to Montreal. There’s lots of music there. We went to band concerts and symphonies and the city has its own singers; not just those brassy bars you have to play in, and those dirty cellars. The Silver Dollar Bar.”

“I had to stay in Toronto, you know that. Come on sailing, love. You’re right, I don’t really want to talk about your loves and lives.”

“What was it you used to say?”

“When?”

“When you were telling me how you were going to be in Paris this summer, or New York, or India.”

“You should never believe a nineteen-year-old boy. I used to say we made a nice old New Orleans band, you and me: two beats to every bar and a nice steady drive towards that last big chorus where we both could get polyphonic to our heart’s content.”

“No, I never believed that. This was something dirty, and then ‘and he really kicked down the stars.’”

“He really blows his ass, he really kicks down the stars. It’s not pretty, it’s a compliment. The right ones said I ought to go blow first bone for the Salvation Lassies.”

“You thought you were doing it all for me, didn’t you. You read too much Ivanhoe as a boy.”

“I did it for you and your stuhla, Sara. That was a mean thing to say, that I only thought about your bod. I worried about what you were thinking a lot; I still do.”

“I know. I’m really sorry things got so heavy between us. I’d have liked you to be famous and let me tag along around the world, like my mom did when dad was on the Olympics.”

“You have to be paranoid to make it today. Now when your father made the Olympic team, just because no one else in the whole damn country knew what a discus was, things were different.”

“That sounds like his kind of excuse. Half a joke, half a lie. I’d hate to think I helped make you not sure of yourself, like he is now. Don’t do that to me.”

“How is he now?”

“Oh he’s better; he’s always better in the summer when he can go fishing and just forget everything. I brought him a hundred flies from Montreal, little funny ones with French names and feathers of blue jays and what not.”

“Is he still making all those stainless steel things? Those pipes and tubes for Pepsi and those little nuts and valves for the milk companies that cost about forty bucks a throw.”

“No, he lost that too. That was his last great deal. I wish you were more sure of yourself; that’s all you need.”

“One more sail then. That’ll build up my potential potential. You must be creaky after a whole winter’s layup. We’ll go slow as a herd of turtles in a sea of molasses at first, then just add sail slow and slow until you’re a bluenosed schooner bound for rum and the West Indies and those hot, blue seas. How’s that for assurance?”

“You were pretty sure about me, weren’t you?”

“When?”

“When I said I’d come out here today.”

“I always said that when a smart salesman gets his foot in the door he’s a damn fool if he pulls it out an inch.”

“Oh make a mock of yourself, damn you. I brought him those flies in, he looks about sixty now, and he didn’t even have them in his tackle box before he started asking me where I got them, how much, who from, did they look like they were smart enough to know what good national distribution could do for them? And he knows he doesn’t believe in it himself anymore, that’s what’s so damn sad. I could hear you laughing at things, but I would’ve cried if I were alone. They’re so strong and so right for so long, and then one day it gets like that. I felt like I wanted to love him back to life or never touch another man again, never raise children; I’m not sure which.”

“I’m sorry, love. Let me kiss you a penance.”

“I suppose so, I suppose so.”

“That better?”

“Maybe so.”

“Here?”

“Here.”

And so the sail went up once more.

What did I say to her?. Not much wind, baby, give her some jib? Come on baby let’s go downtown? Look here, I’m the one-eyed dingy and you’re Lake Temagoshka who’s going to wash me of a winter’s encrusted ice? Did you really see me, when he said, and I can hear him: “I bet I could make a million of these move in the big stores in a month, give me a good tourist season. Did you ever see a Royal Coachman like that? Fine, really fine.” I bet he tried to sell his way out of that rest home when he got better, out of the shaved head and the electrodes, out of the look on your face, his little lady, his sweet Sara, that look-I’m-happy-now face that couldn’t play poker behind the great wall of China without crying over every unfilled flush. Open your eyes, see me, sweet Sara, be mean to me at least as you were at first when the guilt was toughest. O wash me of something.

She pulls my mouth down to her breastbone, her body moving like a sunfish on a bobber. Her heart red as a summer zinnia. I too am eager. My palm on her cheek, waiting for the tears that this time stay behind the spillway so I drive and harrow my fingers dry into the damp, stringy bower of her hair and my body burns as I take the desired, groping, ingnawing measure of her being.

O wash me? Did I say that? Tide. Lava. Sunlight. Kurly Kate me? Of what could she? Spread some sorrow on me, Sara. Of the jongleur of performance? As when the walls, when the black and white table cloths, when the smoke, when the wrought iron drunks, when the girls with shut eyes and the old men with strong knees if nothing else, all come in through the silver bell, into the mouthpiece of silver, into my mouth in exchange for what, Sara? In exchange for the silver stomping that goes out to keep them straight up? If you gonna take me my advice, better make an ugly woman your wife? Could she wash me of that? When I was exchanging songs with the old men of the strong knees was I thinking of other times when she and I had gone sailing without any of these thoughts? In a singing and pure sensuality?

I slap a sand castle under her bum and her green, winter eyes are open and laughing at me and at the joke of the unspoken preparation I make for her, for us, before the log boom is unchained, before the trembling, before we reach together snapping at air with our teeth in the moment of hesitation before we snap at flesh.

And of what did she wash me, finally? For when I stopped throbbing in my blood I felt laved. When I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near? The nearness of her? The sand her sweaty brown hair picked up? Those fine sunaged hairs her belly wore, the burrow her body dug in the sand beneath her, the scent she transported from an apple orchard in Vineland somehow to this glacier-hewn lake, the timing of her eyes closing out the sun when she was tired of being happy and wanted to sleep? The knowing that before she had been as the wind that seems to come from beyond the circles with the sole purpose of vibrating our boat with inexplicable suddenness and pleasure like a cymbal struck unexpectedly beyond the beat, and now I watched her limbs tremble with exhaustion and her face powder itself again with nearly petulant grief and I wondered where was the drummer that would come to dismantle her. Or had I suddenly won the battle with the loosest of troops? Musicians are like ordinary people; when the job is over they want to go home to sleep, eventually.

“Go get the sail,” she said. “We’ll curl up and nap on it.”

She turns from me and reaches her left hand back up around for me, for my hand to curl inwardly in the rainforest of her breasts. You’re the boss of this camp, she says and the blood carrying vessels along my forearm laugh and joy at the softness of her supple and fleshed contentment.

And then there was nothing really for her to wash me of; as though the act and the acceptance of sleep had not only fulfilled the need but smashed the fetishes of demand and even their shadows in time gone, destroyed even their records of birth. So I could feel that some of her old loose happiness was mine and longed to return it to her, as she had perhaps longed to share it with me, flies of bluejay and pheasant feathers to outcast her father’s misery. I felt that long-armed joy, that fine-shotted, pure-toned, taut sail deepness, that elemental melodic strength of the redeemed, that jointure of tenseness and pride which any good audience leaves to its jongleur, plus a shade of that cynical joy which comes to those well-versed in making young dancers come in their fanciest pants. Ooo! Went the little girls, ooh! There! Went the young men, see! There! And if I felt a small letdown when she scurried away from me to stand silent and more embarrassed than ever before in the lake waters, it was of nothing harsher than seeing the dancing-people clutch their coats and depart. Tomorrow they would return. I had a contract again. Get her to come hear me play tonight and old Mr. Sukshma would be out of this union forever. I chased after her into the lake. Dolphins followed me also.

And the water ate at the nudity of her body as though the water were a field of hay riffling and rippling beneath the blossom-casting tree of her movement.

“Don’t ever go right into cold water immediately after strenuous exercise,” she said. “One’s liable to catch polio.”

We moved further along the beach, more behind the protection of the spit, before we slept. Not until the sound of the jukebox in the pavilion had crept across the silent lake to us did we awaken.

“Don’t be mad at that now,” she said. “It’s not bad coming from real far away like that.”

“It’s those damn kids that get there early and can’t keep their pants on one damn minute.”

Drifting across the lake from another country:

Annie had a baby,

Can’t work no more,

No, no, nonononono,

When she starts in working . . .

We sang it to keep warm as we dashed through the darkening cold water with the sail over our shoulders to where the dingy rode softly at anchor. We sailed towards the light which the pavilion cast over the lake. Her back was to it; she faced the cove.

It would have been cold enough on the lake to freeze my enthusiasm, if sadness hadn’t been so obviously overtaking her. If happy lover A is sad, I considered, then sad lover B is perfectly at ease to be happy. She dragged her hands in the water to keep them warm, but I felt no need to imitate her. I handed her the jacket I had stowed and leaned back to watch her with my arm draped loosely around the rudder. I felt as if all the itches and portents of sadness which had bothered me during the early summer of her virginity and happiness were transferred now to her, so that I could lie safe in the calm centre, where virtuousness and sensuality bedded together, and it was she who had to walk out on the street and imagine there was nothing to love beyond sexual advantage, beyond the virtuous battles won and lost. Enjoy, enjoy, she had said all that summer; both when she was drunkenly shaving my head as an Iroquois brave, and when she was finally accepting her decision. Enjoy, enjoy. If I hadn’t been watching her face, not entirely petulant in its sadness, I would have flipped the words back at her now. It’s later than you think, I would have sung. As my father always says, I would have said, the happiest days of a young girl’s life are those just after she’s been married. And who can add? (I would have added), that exact note of fear and wistfulness with which he would say that. We drew much nearer to the dock. She sat silently, ignoring my gangling presence, with her mind in what dank mere I knew not.

“A young man at eighteen is at his absolute most dangerous, daughter, you can’t trust him;” I said aloud, “when he’s learned neither patience nor prevention. Yet here I am, twenty-one, and my danger has not diminished.”

“So you know some times he’d like to be eighteen again. Great discovery. Your perception’s really something.”

“Ah Christ, he’s a good man, but he never said a word about the anger of an eighteen-year-old girl.”

“That was a stupid thing we did,” she said, as if finally enjoying her anger. “I’ll always be sorry for that.”

The drummer. My hand slips into the moving water. Warmth is simply the denial of cold.

“You’ll never be always for anything. You haven’t got it.”

“You can’t expect to shame me too; you’ve had enough. I’ll be always when I want to, and who cares about before. That wasn’t perfect; it wasn’t even fair.”

“We’ve done worse.”

“Last summer was worse I suppose? I wanted you more all the time then, even if my stuhla didn’t.”

“Oh, come off that dung, Sara.”

“Last summer was just great, really. My sukshma and my stuhla wanted you just the same, like twins.”

“Like an old lady with toy poodles. Come on, Sara. You get over feeling like that. Call it your body, even your bod.”

“I never got over it, even after I met him. That first morning here was so great.”

“It wasn’t, you know that. Some of the others weren’t bad, but that first one was funny. That’s all it really was, funny.”

“No. I don’t know about you. But for me it was like what he calls jivamukti, which means union with the whole world or something. It’s the closest they get to the idea of heaven. He gets very excited when he talks about it.”

“Come on, come on. Any two kids, aged anywhere between three and thirteen, could have done better out of pure instinct.”

“I wouldn’t know; I’d only read books before.”

“That’s better, poke at me for awhile. I was thinking before that I should tell you to enjoy yourself more. You’re getting to be sadder than I ever was.”

“I really like to talk to you, you know. You’ve been around so much you really give me a different slant on things.”

“Poke away, love. Come on to the dance and I’ll show you I’m better in other ways too. Bigger gaskets for a longer ride.”

“I’ve got to get to the train.”

“Turn around then; we’re at the dock.”

“Here? Not this dock, damn it. Then I’ll have to climb the hill to the station and be late and everything. Shit.”

“Never be unladylike. The happiest days of a young girl’s life are when she’s swearing at her husband. Take the paddle and keep us from bumping.”

“What time is it? You’re really cutting yourself off from me. The train’ll be here and me in a wet bathing suit and your jacket.”

“You said you’d stay.”

“I never did. What time is it?”

“That train’s always late. Go home, change into something pretty, snow him, then bring him down here to the pavilion and let him see the competition. Kick up your heels. We’re going to be good this summer.”

“You’d make a worse salesman than my father, Scroppy. Don’t push it, eh? I feel bad enough. He doesn’t like dancing and you know I wouldn’t bring him here. Just play something for me. I’m so late.”

I lay in the dingy while she hopped out and tied it up; my back feeling the heft of the rudder, my feet sopping in the bilge; feeling the night air getting colder around me, watching her run across the creaky pavilion dock, whose boards whistled white with that soft patina of silver pine wood attains only after years of winter snow, years of the sun of summer, of its wind and waves. She started up the iron stairway to the road. The wind billowed in my jacket.

“We’re really going to kick down the stars, beautiful. I’m really going to blow my ass.”

Her voice came back down the hill from the road like the ending of a rock-and-roll record, where nobody can think of an idea for the end so they just play the last phrase softer and softer until the sound man can fade them out.

“I’m really going to kick them all down, beautiful.” I said softly. “I’m really going to blow my ass.”

“Glad to hear it.” The drummer was standing on the dance deck of the pavilion above me, Bobby Grimes, a negro from Hamilton, whirling a pair of drum brushes from his fingers. “Nothing like a little loosening to make a man scramble.”

“You just try and keep up with the rest of us tonight, eh?” I said. “You’re forever speeding things up. I thought I learned you how to count to four once.”

“Sorry, man,” he said, “didn’t know you didn’t get socked out there or I wouldn’t have put you down so easy.”

He walked back inside the pavilion, swinging the wire brushes slowly, one on either side of his thighs, of his dark-suited, slow-moving body. And cold is simply the acceptance of the need of warmth.