After two months of dating, she invited him to spend the night in her room, and as they made love, Robert moved carefully, as if he were trying on new clothes he didn’t want to spoil in case they had to be returned. Afterward, they lay quietly together in the dark, the faint sounds of a late-night television talk show coming from downstairs. When he had softened completely, he eased off his condom and was trying to lower it discreetly to the floor when she held out a white tissue for him to drop it in. He did, and she took his seed and placed it on her bedside table next to a copy of the New Testament and two Willa Cather novels she’d borrowed from the library. Outside, an October wind blew dead leaves against the house and across the yard. Her room was spare, no rug or carpet on the pine floor, nothing but a dresser, a cane chair, and at the foot of the bed an old trunk that had once belonged to her grandfather in Sparta. One wall held a framed poster of the Wyeth painting of the young woman sitting alone on the grassy hill staring up at a farm house, her hair lifting in the breeze. Robert could see just the shadow of it.
Althea kissed his shoulder. “Robert.” It sounded like more of a statement than an inquiry, as if she were assuring herself of who he was.
“Yes?”
“I haven’t done this with anyone I wouldn’t want to have a baby with.”
There was a slight itch in the hair at Robert’s temple, but he didn’t move to scratch it. He wondered what his heart sounded like beneath her ear.
“That’s good.”
She lifted her head and smiled at him in the dark. “For you? Or for me?”
“For both of us.”
She was quiet now. Robert’s cheeks grew warm, and he felt he’d just lied.
“You mean that?”
“Yes.”
“Completely yes?”
“Yes, completely.”
She kept her head up awhile, looking at him in the dark. Then she rubbed her nose against his and kissed him deeply, opening his mouth with her tongue. They made love again, this time without a condom. The wind picked up outside; it sounded cold to Robert, though here with Althea it was warm, almost hot. A lone leaf scuttled across the window and was gone.
Two days later, a Monday, the weather was warm, the orange and red leaves on the branches and ground like flames giving off heat. Althea carried the frame of a wingback chair from the basement to work on in the sunlit grass of her rented yard, and Robert had no shift later so he sat close by drinking beer and trying to read from an anthology of twentieth-century poems. But he kept watching her instead, the way she sat on her calves with her back straight, a long curved needle between her lips as she pushed a spring into the seat, then began to sew it down, her wild black hair tied back loosely with a purple scarf, and he had to look away because the word that kept tumbling through his head was bride. My bride. He said nothing to her, but in the days and weeks that followed, this knowledge began to transform her silence for him; sitting in the car or across the table at a restaurant, it now began to feel comfortable, like she had accepted him for who he was already, without him having to go on and on, the way a home should feel to a child, Robert thought, and he proposed to her the day after Christmas as they lay in bed watching it snow out the window. “I think I should marry you.”
She turned and looked at him, her eyes dark and moist.
“I know I should, actually.”
Her eyes were filling up now, but she said nothing. Robert took her hand in his. “Will you?” In the shadows of the room Althea’s eyes looked black, but she was smiling and she nodded and hugged him tightly, and they were married the first week of January in Portsmouth with their hands on the Bible of a justice of the peace.
They spent their honeymoon making love in an inn on the waterfront, the mussel-shell, freighter-oil scent of the Piscataqua River filling the room. They ate long dinners in restaurants, and though Althea wasn’t a drinker, they both drank too much and Robert would lean forward and recite the poems he could remember from William Butler Yeats, John Donne, and his mentor, Robert Frost. In the candlelight, he saw the moisture in his bride’s eyes at what Robert could only assume was her perceived good fortune at marrying a man of true romance and high calling. No one had ever looked at him like that and it stirred in him a low, animal calling, a central pull to the dark depth of her quiet womanhood, a nest in which to sink and blossom his own muse.
Within the first month of their marriage she became pregnant, delivering the news to him one morning after an exhausting and lucrative shift whose end he had celebrated with too much bourbon and beer. As he lay in bed, his face feeling like clay, the inside of his mouth so dry it had clearly cracked, Althea came into his room, kissed him firmly on the mouth, then held up the small white tab of the home-test kit, the pregnant end pink. She smiled at him, her dark eyes full of hope, and he sat up and hugged and kissed her, though his head pulsed and he had to close his eyes. Walking to the bathroom, he felt every bit of the floorboards beneath his feet, and it was an effort to lift his head; it was as if the earth’s gravity had just doubled.
In the shower he kept thinking of his father: his substantial shoulders stooped and rounded, his mouth always set in a grim line, even on Sunday afternoons when he would finally allow himself to rest if it were a day when no heifers or cows were giving birth, none were hurt, all the calves were fed and dry, if there was no equipment to repair or paperwork to catch up on. When all that had to be done was another three-hour milking at the end of the day, then Robert’s father would lie on the sofa in the living room with an Almanac or Yankee magazine, the television tuned to an old movie, maybe a bottle of Miller on the lamp table beside him. When he was a boy, Robert and his mother and younger sister would be there too. On Sundays his mother baked cookies or a cobbler and she’d let them eat a serving in front of the TV with a glass of milk. His father would have some then. He’d sit up on the couch to eat, quietly chewing and watching whatever was on the screen. Sometimes Robert would see him looking at him and his sister, studying them the way he did his holsteins, looking for any defects that might cost him even more farther down the line.
Althea’s visit to her doctor confirmed the home test, and Robert willed himself to try to rise to the occasion. He ordered his wife a dozen roses, and she placed them in three separate vases throughout the bedroom of the house they now shared with the two bank tellers until Robert found something better. On one of his nights off, Robert insisted they sit down and come up with a name, starting with a boy’s. If they were to have a son, Robert wanted him to have a strong name, the sort a boy couldn’t help but live up to, the way a poem must earn its title. He wanted to name him Ajax, Greek for eagle, after the hero in the Trojan Wars. But Althea had balked without a word, as was her way, simply showed him the scouring powder of the same name, then shook her head and pinched his cheek. But Robert was taken with the image of the eagle, his possible son a lone and majestic bird whose natural surroundings would be life’s peaks and precipices.
So they settled on a variation of the Old German for eagle, Adler, a name Althea thought was softer, more gentle and reflective, the way she viewed Robert herself.
For a time.
During the months of her pregnancy, they moved to a place of their own, a one-room motel cabin on a salt marsh across the boulevard from Hampton Beach. It had a sleeping loft, a hot plate, sink, refrigerette, and a shower-stall bathroom with a toilet that flushed its contents into pipes whose smell did not seem to make it out of the reeds. Built on short creosote piers, there were five of these cabins alongside one another, each identical to the next. In front of them, across a crushed-shell parking lot, loomed The Whaler Restaurant, Bar & Hotel, a four-story fifty-two-room attraction open only five months out of the year when its manager rented the marsh cabins to its best waiters, waitresses, and bartenders. The hotel’s clientele were mainly dentists’, bankers’, and architects’ families from the Midwest and upstate New York, and Robert—with his literary charm and quick reflexes, his ability to light a cigar
ette for one while serving a drink to another, all while giving the punch line of a joke to a third—was head bartender and worked the restaurant’s bar six nights a week. At the end of his shift, after storing the leftover garnish and mixes, after restocking the beer chest and rotating older bottles to the front, after wiping down the speed rack and soaking all the pourers in a hot rinse, Robert served himself a cold draft and a jigger of Maker’s Mark bourbon. He drank off a third of the draft, then dropped the full jigger into the mug, the bourbon spreading up and out into the beer like armed reinforcements.
Tonight, a Thursday in mid-August, the main restaurant’s lights were off save for the ones over the bar. The kitchen staff was gone. The barback and busboys and wait staff had all gone, too, and the manager had left Robert and Jackie, the head waitress, to lock up. She sat a few stools down from the register inhaling deeply on an unlit cigarette she didn’t want to light. She had thick red hair, gold in places from the late mornings and early afternoons when she would lie on a chaise lounge in front of her cabin in a bikini that barely covered her ample breasts, wide hips, and round buttocks. Sometimes, when Althea was reading or washing the dishes, her back turned, Robert would allow himself a peek out the window. Once, he looked just as Jackie was turning over onto her stomach, her breasts swaying, and he imagined his face nestled in the sweaty freckled crevice there. Now Jackie’s breasts strained against her white Whaler blouse, the top three buttons undone, her skin a deep pink, and Robert felt a surge of guilt that he felt no real guilt about viewing Jackie in this way, his pregnant wife sleeping in the tiny loft of their cabin behind the hotel.
On days with no sea breeze the cabin filled with the smell of sewage from the marsh, and Althea would usually feel nauseated and they would leave for a walk down the boulevard, which was almost worse with its canned rap and rock blaring from the shops, the sidewalks crowded with sun-beaten tourists, the smells of fried dough and teriyaki steak from the fryolators and grills, the roar of a Harley-Davidson out on the street, a gang of seagulls shrieking from above. Althea would squeeze his hand, holding her protruding belly with the other, and soon Robert and his wife would have to go into a restaurant for a bathroom where she might throw up and Robert would sneak a quick tequila shot or two at the bar while he ordered two Cokes, one to hide the tequila—a fiery friend and confidant in his gut—the other for her. They would sit in a booth or at a small table in the shadows away from the bright street, and she would sip her Coke stoically, staring at the rug or sometimes just at Robert’s hand or chest, which left him feeling she was a bit simple, taking her pain in an unquestioning and almost bovine way. He would think of the heifers on his father’s dairy farm, the vague indifference in their eyes as his father loaded the breeding gun with thawed bull semen, his entire arm covered with a lubricated plastic sleeve. But other times, the surreptitious tequila shots spreading out in his belly like a purging grass fire, Robert would feel moved at her silent suffering and he would lean over and kiss her clammy hand, this pregnant woman he was beginning to bronze in a maternal cast only.
Because she was quiet, Robert knew some thought her aloof. Often on a Monday night, the slowest night at The Whaler, the waitresses would throw a party at one of the cabins. They’d prop their Bose speakers in open windows and play loud rock while they barbecued hamburgers on one of the tiny front porches. Other off-duty waitstaff would join them with coolers of beer, hard lemonade, and sometimes a blender, ice, and a bottle of rum. Robert and Althea joined them, too. As head bartender, Robert enjoyed his place of leadership, and he would mix up a batch of frozen piña coladas or daiquiris and drink three in twenty minutes while Jackie and two of her best waitresses cackled and howled about getting revenge on bad customers, like the chronic butt-pinching doctor whose béarnaise sauce they spiked with a tablespoon of urine every time he came in. There were other stories to fall into, and while they did, Althea sat quiet and pregnant in a lawn chair in the parking lot apart from the smoke of the cigarettes and barbecue, and Robert would sometimes feel her presence the way some felt the ghosts of disapproving ancestors. Jackie or another woman would become a waitress for her, asking if she wanted another cup of ginger ale, or did she want to put her feet up on something. But Althea would shake her head no, no thank you, and sometimes Robert would finish laughing at the tail end of another story or joke, then go sit next to her awhile, watching his restaurant friends laugh and drink and smoke, flipping hamburgers and bobbing their heads to the music, and he would feel he was missing something sitting there with his expectant wife who was always so quiet, a quality which, when they were alone, he’d actually come to admire. It seemed to him she was waiting for something only she knew about, something transcendent and holy that would be good for all of them. Alone with her, this woman who had chosen him and was carrying his child, Robert felt believed in, felt called once again to great and important things—namely his poetry, becoming a published poet.
But when the Doucettes were not alone, Robert was beginning to feel Althea’s abstinent quiet like the penetrating gaze of a chaperone, and he wanted to flee. Once, when he was in The Whaler’s walk-in cooler, the door ajar, he heard Jackie and two of the younger waitresses at the coffee machine talking about his wife, using words and phrases like conceited and holier-than-thou. Robert did not agree: he had never heard Althea utter an ugly word about anyone; she was simply quiet. But as he left the walk-in cooler carrying his bucket of lemons, limes, and oranges, he said nothing in his wife’s defense and instead smiled at them, hoping he looked friendly and handsome as he passed. He was immediately ashamed of himself for abandoning Althea like that. His shame soon turned to resentment, though—not at Jackie and the girls, but at his wife for putting him in the position where he would have to defend or fail her on so many subtle fronts.
Now Jackie was switching from her Melon Ball to a Mount Gay on the rocks with a splash of Coke. Robert made himself another boilermaker, set it down on the stool next to Jackie, then joined her there with the register drawer and night deposit bag. She was copying the week’s schedule onto a clean sheet of paper, still sucking on the unlit cigarette, and as he sat next to her she reached over and gave his leg a friendly squeeze, leaving her hand there a second or two as Robert sat up and began to count, log, and bag the night’s receipts. Her fingers slipped away and he could smell the coconut lotion she used on her skin during the day. He took a long drink off his mug, the shot glass clinking inside it like a badly kept secret.
“My grandfather drank those, Robert. That’s an old man’s drink.”
“It does the job.”
“A lot of things do that, honey.” She was looking right at him, her bright green eyes mischievous and kind. Robert and Jackie had been locking the place up together all summer. There had always been an easy camaraderie between them, an oiled, lubricated quality that came from coming off the same shift together, from working in close proximity with one another. But the last few weeks it had been harder for Robert to look into her face directly, his eyes sure to betray the fact that he simply wanted to kiss her, to feel her freckled breasts up against him. So now he shook his head, smiled, and looked down at his hands on the bar, hoping this gesture of genuine shyness would endear him to her. It was after two now, the restaurant and hotel so quiet he could hear the surf out on the beach across the boulevard. Some nights, when Jackie finished her work before he did, she’d leave first, blowing him a kiss from the door before she closed it, and after she was gone Robert would turn off all the lights and sit in the dark with his drink and watch the ghostly phosphorescence of the waves breaking on the night sand, white breaking over and over again in the darkness.
Jackie got up and made herself another Mount Gay, then surprised Robert with one, too. “Nobody does shots and beers anymore, Robbie. Get with it.”
Robert laughed. She was the only one who called him that. She sat back down and they drank and finished their night work; the bourbon and beer had already opened up the veins in his head, rela
xing and widening the possibilities, and now the rum was a tight ball of fire rolling through without an obstacle to stop it. He wanted to see the night surf; he wanted Jackie to see it, too.
“Hey, Jackie, I want to show you something.” He hopped off the stool to go hit the light switch behind her, but then he felt her at his back, her confusion about where he was going to take her to show her something when all he’d wanted to do was turn off the lights. And when he turned to tell her Wait right here, what I want to show you is out the window, his hand brushed both her breasts, their cotton-covered give and release, and she giggled, then smiled, her eyes pleasantly alert, and she lifted her chin and there was nothing to do but lean forward and kiss her. Just this, he thought. Only this. But she opened her mouth, her tongue warm and yielding, and soon they were on the gritty carpet that smelled of sand and ketchup and ashes, Jackie lifting her black Whaler skirt up around her waist while Robert fumbled with her mint green panties, leaving them around one of her ankles as he pushed himself inside her. She gripped his buttocks with both hands, her face hot against his, her hair smelling of coconut oil and kitchen smoke. Outside, the surf pounded, then was silent till another wave rolled in, then another, and now Jackie was moaning, and soon, too soon, he could no longer hear the surf, could only feel the next wave as it began to build and gather, then roll itself out of him and into Jackie.