“I’d buy a boat. Sail it around.” Tom extended his estimable arms and flexed his grip on the steering wheel. Tom was in dauntingly good health. He played playground basketball with black kids, mountain-biked to his studio, did push-ups in his apartment every night before climbing into bed alone. And since he’d been away, he seemed healthier, calmer, more hopeful, though the story was somehow that he’d moved a mile away to a shitty apartment to make her happier. Nancy looked down disapprovingly at the pure white pinpoint sails backed by blue water in front of the faultlessly green-bonneted island where summer people sat on long white porches and watched the impoverished world through expensive telescopes. It wasn’t that attractive. In the public defender’s office she had, in the last month, defended a murderer, two pretty adolescent sisters accused of sodomizing their brother, a nice secretary who, because she was obese, had become the object of taunts in her office full of gay men, and an elderly Japanese woman whose house contained ninety-six cats she was feeding, and who her neighbors considered, reasonably enough, deranged and a health hazard. Eventually the obese secretary, who was from the Philippines, had stabbed one of the gay men to death. How could you give all that up and move to Maine with a man who appeared not to want to live with you, then be trapped on a boat for the two months it wasn’t snowing? These were odd times of interesting choices.
“Maybe you could talk Anthony into doing it with you,” she said, thinking peacefully again that Islesboro was Nova Scotia and everyone there was talking French and speaking ill of Americans. She had almost said, “Maybe you can persuade Crystal to drive up and fuck you on your yacht.” But that wasn’t what she felt. Poisoning perfectly harmless conversation with something nasty you didn’t even mean was what the people she defended did and made their lives impossible. She wasn’t even sure he’d heard her mention Anthony. It was possible she was whispering.
“Keep an open mind,” Tom said, and smiled an inspiriting smile.
“Can’t,” Nancy said. “I’m a lawyer. I’m forty-five. I believe the rich already stole the best things before I was born, not just twenty years ago in Wiscasset.”
“You’re tough,” Tom said, “but you have to let me win you.”
“I told you, you already did that,” she said. “I’m your wife. That’s what that means. Or used to. You win.”
This was Tom’s standard view, of course, the lifelong robbery-detective slash enthusiast’s view: someone was always needing to be won over to a better view of things; someone’s spirit being critically lower or higher than someone else’s; someone forever acting the part of the hold-out. But she wasn’t a hold-out. He’d fucked Crystal. He’d picked up and moved out. That didn’t make her not an enthusiast. Though none of it converted Tom Marshall into a bad person in need of punishment. They merely didn’t share a point of view—his being to sentimentalize loss by feeling sorry for himself; hers being to not seek extremes even when it meant ignoring the obvious. She wondered if he’d even heard her say he’d ever won her. He was thinking about something else now, something that pleased him. You couldn’t blame him.
When she looked at Tom he was just past looking at her, as if he’d spoken something and she hadn’t responded. “What?” she said, and pulled a strand of hair past her eyes and to the side. She looked at him straight on. “Do you see something you don’t like?”
“I was just thinking about that old line we used to say when I was first being a policeman. ‘Interesting drama is when the villain says something that’s true.’ It was in some class you took. I don’t remember.”
“Did I just say something true?”
He smiled. “I was thinking that in all those years my villains never said much that was true or even interesting.”
“Do you miss having new villains every day?” It was the marquee question, of course; the one she’d never actually thought to ask a year ago, during the Crystal difficulties. The question of the epic loss of vocation. A wife could only hope to fill in for the lost villains.
“No way,” he said. “It’s great now.”
“It’s better living by yourself?”
“That’s not really how I think about it.”
“How do you really think about it?”
“That we’re waiting,” Tom said earnestly. “For a long moment to pass. Then we’ll go on.”
“What would we call that moment?” she asked.
“I don’t know. A moment of readjustment, maybe.”
“Readjustment to exactly what?”
“Each other?” Tom said, his voice going absurdly up at the end of his sentence.
They were nearing a town. BELFAST, MAINE. A black and white corporate-limits sign slid past. ESTABLISHED 1772. A MAINE ENTERPRISE CENTER. Settlement was commencing. The highway had gradually come nearer sea level. Traffic slowed as the roadside began to repopulate with motels, shoe outlets, pottery barns, small boatyards selling posh wooden dinghies—the signs of enterprise.
“I wasn’t conscious I needed readjustment,” Nancy said. “I thought I was happy just to go along. I wasn’t mad at you. I’m still not. Though your view makes me feel a little ridiculous.”
“I thought you wanted one,” Tom said.
“One what? A chance to feel ridiculous? Or a period of readjustment?” She made the word sound idiotic. “Are you a complete stupe?”
“I thought you needed time to reconnoiter.” Tom looked deviled at being called a stupe. It was old Chicago code to them. An ancient language of disgust.
“Jesus, why are you talking like this?” Nancy said. “Though I suppose I should know why, shouldn’t I?”
“Why?” Tom said.
“Because it’s bullshit, which is why it sounds so much like bullshit. What’s true is that you wanted out of the house for your own reasons, and now you’re trying to decide if you’re tired of it. And me. But you want me to somehow take the blame.” She smiled at him in feigned amazement. “Do you realize you’re a grown man?”
He looked briefly down, then raised his eyes to hers with contempt. They were still moving, though Route 1 took the newly paved by-pass to the left, and Tom angled off into Belfast proper, which in a split second turned into a nice, snug neighborhood of large Victorian, Colonial, Federal and Greek Revival residences established on large lots along an old bumpy street beneath tall surviving elms, with a couple of church steeples anchored starkly to the still-summery sky.
“I do realize that. I certainly do,” Tom said, as if these words had more impact than she could feel.
Nancy shook her head and faced the tree-lined street, on the right side of which a new colonial-looking two-story brick hospital addition was under construction. New parking lot. New oncology wing. A helipad. Jobs all around. Beyond the hospital was a modern, many-windowed school named for Margaret Chase Smith, where the teams, the sign indicated, were called the solons. Someone, to be amusing, had substituted “colons” in dripping blood-red paint. “There’s a nice new school named for Margaret Chase Smith,” Nancy said, to change the subject away from periods of readjustment and a general failure of candor. “She was one of my early heroes. She made a brave speech against McCarthyism and championed civic engagement and conscience. Unfortunately she was a Republican.”
Tom spoke no more. He disliked arguing more than he hated being caught bullshitting. It was a rare quality. She admired him for it. Only, possibly now he was becoming a bullshitter. How had that happened?
They arrived at the inconspicuous middle of Belfast, where the brick streets sloped past handsome elderly red-brick commercial edifices. Most of the business fronts had not been modernized; some were shut, though the diagonal parking places were all taken. A small harbor with a town dock and a few dainty sailboats on their low-tide moorings lay at the bottom of the hill. A town in transition. From what to what, she wasn’t sure.
“I’d like to eat something,” Tom said stiffly, steering toward the water.
A chowder house, she already knew, would appear at the bo
ttom of the street, offering pleasant but not spectacular water views through shuttered screens, terrible food served with white plastic ware, and paper placemats depicting a lighthouse or a puffin. To know this was the literacy of one’s very own culture. “Please don’t stay mad,” she said wearily. “I just had a moment. I’m sorry.”
“I was trying to say the right things,” he said irritably.
“I know you were,” she said. She considered reaching for the steering wheel and taking his hand. But they were almost to the front of the restaurant she’d predicted—green beaver-board with screens and a big red-and-white MAINELY CHOWDAH sign facing the Penobscot, which was so picturesque and clear and pristine as to be painful.
They ate lunch at a long, smudged, oilcloth picnic table overlooking little Belfast harbor. They each chose lobster stew. Nancy had a beer to make herself feel better. Warm, fishy ocean breezes shifted through the screens and blew their paper mats and napkins off the table. Few people were eating. Most of the place—which was like a large screened porch—had its tables and green plastic chairs stacked, and a hand-lettered sign by the register said that in a week the whole place would close for the winter.
Tom maintained a moodiness after their car-argument, and only reluctantly came around to mentioning that Belfast was one of the last “undiscovered” towns up the coast. In Camden, and farther east toward Bar Harbor, the rich already had everything bought up. Any property that sold did so within families, using law firms in Philadelphia and Boston. Realtors were never part of it. He mentioned the Rockefellers, the Harrimans and the Fisks. Here in Belfast, though, he said, development had been held back by certain environmental problems—a poultry factory that had corrupted the bay for decades so that the expensive sailing set hadn’t come around. Once, he said, the now-attractive harbor had been polluted with chicken feathers. It all seemed improbable. Tom looked out through the dusty screen at a bare waterside park across the sloping street from the chowder house. An asphalt basketball court had been built, and a couple of chubby white kids were shooting two-hand jumpers and dribbling a ball clumsily. There was a new jungle gym at the far end where no one was playing.
“Over there,” Tom said, his plastic spoon between his thumb and index finger, pointing at the empty grassy park that looked like something large had been present there once. “That’s where the chicken plant was—smack against the harbor. The state shut it down finally.” Tom furrowed his thick brow as if the events were grave.
An asphalt walking path circled the grassy sward. A man in a silver wheelchair was just entering the track from a van parked up the hill. He began patiently pushing himself around the track while a little girl began frolicking on the infield grass, and a young woman—no doubt her mother— stood watching beside the van.
“How do you know about all that?” Nancy said, watching the man foisting his wheelchair forward.
“A guy, Mick, at the co-op’s from Bangor. He told me. He said now was the moment to snap up property here. In six months it’ll be too pricey. It’s sort of a last outpost.”
For some reason the wheelchair rider she was watching seemed like a young man, though even at a distance he was clearly large and bulky. He was arming himself along in no particular hurry, just making the circle under his own power. She assumed the little girl and the woman were his family, making up something to do in the empty, unpretty park while he took his exercise. They were no doubt tourists, too.
“Does that seem awful to you? Things getting expensive?” She breathed in the strong fish aroma off the little harbor’s muddy recesses. The sun had moved so she put her hand up to shield her face. “You’re not against progress, are you?”
“I like the idea of transition,” Tom said confidently. “It creates a sense of possibility.”
“I’m sure that’s how the Rockefellers and the Fisks felt,” she said, realizing this was argumentative, and wishing not to be. “Buy low, sell high, leave a beautiful corpse. That’s not the way that goes, is it?” She smiled, she hoped, infectiously.
“Why don’t we take a walk?” Tom pushed his plastic chowder bowl away from in front of him the way a policeman would who was used to eating in greasy spoons. When they were college kids, he hadn’t eaten that way. Years ago, he’d possessed lovely table manners, eaten unhurriedly and enjoyed everything. It had been his Irish mother’s influence. Now he was itchy, interested elsewhere, and his mother was dead. Though this habit was as much his nature as the other. It wasn’t that he didn’t seem like himself. He did.
“A walk would be good,” she said, happy to leave, taking a long last look at the harbor and the park with the man in the wheelchair slowly making his journey around. “Trips are made in search of things, right?” She looked for Tom, who was already off to the cashier’s, his back going away from her. “Right,” she said, answering her own question and coming along.
They walked the early-September afternoon streets of Belfast—up the brick-paved hill from the chowder house, through the tidy business section past a hardware, a closed movie theater, a credit union, a bank, a biker bar, a pair of older realtors, several lawyers’ offices and a one-chair barbershop, its window cluttered with high-school pictures of young-boy clients from years gone by. A slender young man with a ponytail and his hippie girlfriend were moving large cardboard boxes from a beater panel truck into one of the glass storefronts. Something new was happening there. Next door a shoe-store space had been turned into an organic bakery whose sign was a big loaf of bread that looked real. An art gallery was beside it. It wasn’t an unpleasant-feeling town, waiting quietly for what would soon surely arrive. She could see why Tom would like it.
From up the town hill, more of the harbor was visible below, as was the mouth of another estuary that trickled along an embankment of deep green woods into the Penobscot. A high, thirties-vintage steel bridge crossed the river the way the bridge had in Wiscasset, though everything was smaller here, less up-and-going, less scenic—the great bay blue and wide and inert, just another park, sterile, fishless, ready for profitable alternative uses. It was, Nancy felt, the way all things became. The presence of an awful-smelling factory or a poisonous tannery or a cement factory could almost seem like something to wish for, remember fondly. Tom was not thinking that way.
“It’s nice here, isn’t it?” she said to make good company of herself. She’d taken off her anorak and tied it around her waist vacationer-style. The beer made her feel loose-limbed, satisfied. “Are we down-east yet?”
They were stopped in front of another realtor’s window. Tom was again bent over studying the rows of snapshots. The walk had also made her warm, but with her sweater off, the bay breeze produced a nice sunny chill.
Another Conant tour bus arrived at the stoplight in the tiny central intersection, red-and-white like the ones that had let off Japanese consumers last night at Bean’s. All the bus windows were tinted, and as it turned and began heaving up the hill back toward Route 1, she couldn’t tell if the passengers were Asians, though she assumed so. She remembered thinking that these people knew something she didn’t. What had it been? “Do you ever think about what the people in buses think when they look out their window and see you?” she said, watching the bus shudder through its gears up the hill toward a blue Ford agency sign.
“No,” Tom said, still peering in at the pictures of houses for sale.
“I just always want to say, ‘Hey, whatever you’re thinking about me, you’re wrong. I’m just as out of place as you are.’” She set her hands on her hips, enjoying the sensation of talking with no one listening. She felt isolated again, unapprehended—as if for this tiny second she had achieved yet another moment of getting on with things. It was a grand feeling insofar as it arose from no apparent stimulus, and no doubt would not last long. Though here it was. This beleaguered little town had provided one pleasant occasion. The great mistake would be to try to seize such a feeling and keep it forever. It was good just to know it was available at all. “Isn’t
it odd,” she said, facing back toward the Penobscot, “to be seen, but to understand you’re being seen wrong. Does that mean …” She looked around at her husband.
“Does it mean what?” Tom had stood up and was watching her, as if she’d come under a spell. He put his hand on her shoulder and gently sought her.
“Does it mean you’re not inhabiting your real life?” She was just embroidering a mute sensation, doing what married people do.
“Not you,” Tom said. “Nobody would say that about you.”
Too bad, she thought, the tourist bus couldn’t come by when his arm was around her, a true married couple out for a summery walk on a sunny street. Most of that would be accurate.
“I’d like to inhabit mine more,” Tom said as though the thought made him sad.
“Well, you’re trying.” She patted his hand on her shoulder and smelled him warm and slightly sweaty. Familiar. Welcome.
“Let’s view the housing stock,” he said, looking over her head up the hill, where the residential streets led away under an old canopy of elms and maples, and the house fronts were white and substantial in the afternoon sun.
On the walk along the narrow, slant, leaf-shaded streets, Tom suddenly seemed to have things on his mind. He took long surveyor’s strides over the broken sidewalk slabs, as though organizing principles he’d formulated before today. His calves, which she admired, were hard and tanned, but the limp from being shot was more noticeable with his hands clasped behind him.
She liked the houses, most of them prettier and better-appointed than she’d expected—prettier than her and Tom’s nice blue Cape, the one she still lived in. Most were pleasant variations on standard Greek Revival concepts, but with green shutters and dressy, curved, two-step porches, an occasional widow’s walk, and sloping lawns featuring shagbark hickories, older maples, thick rhododendrons and manicured pachysandra beds. Not very different from the nice neighborhoods of eastern Maryland. She felt happy being on foot where normally you’d be in the car, she preferred it to arriving and leaving, which now seemed to promote misunderstandings and fractiousness of the sort they’d already experienced. She could appreciate these parts of a trip when you were there, and everything stopped moving and changing. She’d continued to feel flickers of the pleasing isolation she’d felt downtown. Though it wasn’t pure lonely isolation, since Tom was here; instead it was being alone with someone you knew and loved. That was ideal. That’s what marriage was.