Tom had now begun talking about “life-by-forecast”; the manner of leading life, he was saying, that made you pay attention to mistakes you’d made that hadn’t seemed like they were going to be mistakes before you made them, but that clearly were mistakes when viewed later. Sometimes very bad mistakes. “Life-by-forecast” meant that you tried very hard to feel, in advance, how you’d feel afterward. “You avoid the big calamities,” Tom said soberly. “It’s what you’re supposed to learn. It’s adulthood, I guess.”
He was talking, she understood, indirectly but not very subtly about Crystal-whatever-her-name-had-been. Too bad, she thought, that he worried about all that so much.
“But wouldn’t you miss some things you might like, doing it that way?” She was, of course, arguing in behalf of Tom fucking Crystal, in behalf of big calamities. Except it didn’t matter so much. She was at that moment more interested in imagining what this street, Noyes Street, would look like full in the teeth of winter. Everything white, a gale howling in off the bay, a deep freeze paralyzing all activity. Unthinkable in the late summer’s idyll. Now, though, was the time when people bought houses. Then was the time they regretted it.
“But when you think about other peoples’ lives,” Tom said as they walked, “don’t you always assume they’re making fewer mistakes than you are? Other people always seem to have a firmer grasp of things.”
“That’s an odd thing for a policeman to think. Aren’t you supposed to have a good grasp on rectitude?” This was quite a silly conversation, she thought, peering down Noyes Street in the direction of where she calculated she herself lived, hundreds of miles to the south, where she represented the law, defended the poor and friendless.
“I was never a very good policeman,” Tom said, stopping to stare up at a small, pristine Federalist mansion with Greek ornamental urns on both sides of its high white front door. The lawn, mowed that morning, smelled sweet. Lawn mower tracks still dented its carpet. A lone, male homeowner was standing inside watching them through a mullioned front window. Somewhere, on another street, a chain saw started then stopped, and then there was the sound of more than one metal hammer striking nails, and men’s voices in laughing conversation at rooftop level. Preparations were in full swing for a long winter.
“You just weren’t like all the other policemen,” Nancy said. “You were kinder. But I do not assume other people make fewer mistakes. The back of everybody’s sampler is always messier than the front. I accept both sides.”
The air smelled warm and rich, as if wood and grass and slate walls exuded a sweet, lazy-hours ether-mist. She wondered if Tom was getting around in his laborious way to some new divulgence, a new Crystal, or some unique unpleasantness that required the ruin of an almost perfect afternoon to perform its dire duty. She hoped for better. Though once you’d experienced such a divulgence, you didn’t fail to expect it again. But thinking about something was not the same as caring about it. That was one useful lesson she’d learned from practicing the law, one that allowed you to go home at night and sleep.
Tom suddenly started up walking again, having apparently decided not to continue the subject of other people’s better grip on the alternate sides of the sampler, which was fine.
“I was just thinking about Pat La Blonde while we were down at the chowder house,” he said, staying his course ahead of her in long studious strides as though she was beside him.
Pat La Blonde was Tom’s partner who’d been killed when Tom had been wounded. Tom had never seemed very interested in talking about Pat before. She lengthened her steps to be beside him, give evidence of a visible listener. “I’m here,” she said and pinched a fold of his sweaty shirt.
“I just realized,” Tom went on, “all the life that Pat missed out on. I think about it all the time. And when I do, everything seems so damned congested. When Pat got killed, everything started getting in everything else’s way for me. Like I couldn’t have a life because there was so much confusion. I know you don’t think that’s crazy.”
“No, I don’t,” Nancy said. She thought she remembered Tom saying these very things once. Though it was also possible she had thought these things about him. Marriage was that way. Possibly they had both felt the same thing as a form of mourning. “It’s why you quit the force, isn’t it?”
“Probably.” Tom stopped, put his hands on his hips and took in an estimable yellow Dutch colonial sitting far back among ginkgos and sugar maples, and reachable by a curving flagstone path from a stone front wall to its bright-red, perfectly centered, boxwood-banked front door. “That’s a nice house,” he said. A large black Labrador had been lying in the front yard, but when Tom spoke it struggled up and trotted out of sight around the house’s corner.
“It’s lovely.” Nancy touched the back of his shirt again, down low where it was damp and warm. The muscles were ropy here. She was sorry not to have touched his back recently. In Freeport, last night.
“I think,” Tom said, and seemed reluctant, “since that time when Pat was killed, I’ve been disappointed about life. You know it?” He was still looking at the yellow house, as if that was all he could stand. “Or I’ve been afraid of being disappointed. Life was just fine, then all at once I couldn’t figure out a way to keep anything simple. So I just made it more complicated.” He shook his head and looked at her.
Nancy carefully removed her hand from the warm small of his back and put both her hands behind her in a protective way. Something about Tom’s declaration had just then begun to feel like a prologue to something that might, in fact, spoil a lovely day, and refashion everything. Possibly he had planned it this way.
“Can you see a way now to make it less complicated?” she said, looking down at her leather shoe toes on the grainy concrete sidewalk. A square had been stamped into the soft mortar, and into the middle of it was incised PENOBSCOT CONCRETE—1938. She was purposefully not making eye contact.
“I do,” Tom said. He breathed in and then out importantly.
“So can I hear about it?” It annoyed her to be here now, to have something sprung on her.
“Well,” Tom said, “I think I could find some space in a town like this to put my workshop. If I concentrated, I could probably dream up some new toy shapes, maybe hire somebody. Expand my output. Go ahead with the website idea. I think I could make a go of it with things changing here. And if I didn’t, I’d still be in Maine, and I could find something else. I could be a cop if it came to that.” He had his blue, black-flecked eyes trained on her, though Nancy had chosen to listen with her head lowered, hands behind her. She looked up at him now and created a smile for her lips. The sun was in her face. Her temples felt wonderfully warm. A man in khaki shorts was just exiting the yellow house, carrying a golf bag, headed around to where the black Labrador had disappeared. He noticed the two of them and waved as if they were neighbors. Nancy waved back and redirected her smile out at him.
“Where do I go?” she said, still smiling. A brown-and-white Belfast police cruiser idled past, its uniformed driver paying them no mind.
“My thought is, you come with me,” Tom said. “It can be our big adventure.” His solemn expression, the one he’d had when he was talking about Pat La Blonde, stayed on his handsome face. Not a death’s face at all, but one that wanted to signify something different. An invitation.
“You want me to move to Maine?”
“I do.” Tom achieved a small, hopeful smile and nodded.
What a very peculiar thing, she thought. Here they were on a street in a town they’d been in fewer than two hours, and her estranged husband was suggesting they leave their life, where they were both reasonably if not impossibly happy, and move here.
“And why again?” she said, realizing she’d begun shaking her head, though she was also still smiling. The roof workers were once more laughing at something in the clear, serene afternoon. The chain saw was still silent. Hammering commenced again. The man with the golf bag came backing down his driveway in a Volvo sta
tion wagon the same bright-red color as his front door. He was talking on a cell phone. The Labrador was trotting along behind, but stopped as the car swung into the street.
“Because it’s still not ruined up here,” Tom said. “And because I know too much about myself where I am, and I’d like to find out something new before I get too old. And because I think if I—or if we—do it now, we won’t live long enough to see everything get all fucked up around here. And because I think we’ll be happy.” Tom suddenly glanced upward as if something had flashed past his eyes. He looked puzzled for an instant, then looked at her again as if he wasn’t sure she would be there.
“It isn’t exactly life-by-forecast, is it?”
“No,” Tom said, still looking befuddled. “I guess not.” He could be like an extremely earnest, extremely attractive boy. It made her feel old to notice it.
“So, am I supposed to agree or not agree while we’re standing here on the sidewalk?” She thought of the woman pinning clothes to a line, wearing white gloves. No need to reintroduce that, or the withering cold that would arrive in a month.
“No, no,” Tom said haltingly. He seemed almost ready to take it all back, upset now that he’d said what he wanted to say. “No. You don’t. It’s important, I realize.”
“Did you plan all this,” she asked. “This week? This whole town? This moment? Is this a scheme?” She was ready to laugh about it and ignore it.
“No.” Tom ran his hand through his hair, where there were scatterings of assorted grays. “It just happened.”
“And if I said I didn’t believe you, what then?” She realized her lips were ever-so-slightly, disapprovingly everted. It had become a habit in the year since Crystal.
“You’d be wrong.” Tom nodded.
“Well.” Nancy smiled and looked around her at the pretty, serious houses, the demure, scenically-shaded street, the sloped lawns that set it all off just right for everybody. If you seek a well-tended ambience, look around you. It was not the Michigan-of-the-East. Why wouldn’t one move here? she thought. It was a certain kind of boy’s fabulous dream. In a way, the whole world dreamed it, waited for it to materialize. Odd that she never had.
“I’m getting tired now.” She gave Tom a light finger pat on his chest. She felt in fact heavy-bodied, older even than she’d felt before. Done in. “Let’s find someplace to stay here.” She smiled more winningly and turned back the way they’d come, back down the hill toward the middle of Belfast.
In the motel—a crisp, new Maineliner Inn beyond the bridge they’d seen at lunch, where the room offered a long, unimpeded back-window view of the wide and sparkling bay— Tom seemed the more bushed of the two of them. In the car he’d exhibited an unearned but beleaguered stoicism that had no words to accompany its vulnerable-seeming moodiness. And once they were checked in, had their suitcases opened and the curtains drawn on the small cool spiritless room, he’d turned on the TV with no sound, stretched out on the bed in his shoes and clothes, and gone to sleep without saying more than that he’d like to have a lobster for dinner. Sleep, for Tom, was always profound, congestion or no congestion.
For a while Nancy sat in the stiff naugahyde chair beside a table lamp, and leafed through the magazines previous guests had left in the nightstand drawer: a Sailing with an article on the London-to-Cape-Town race; a Marie Claire with several bar graphs about ovarian cancer’s relation to alcohol use; a Hustler in which an amateur artist-guest had drawn inky moustaches on the girls and little arrows toward their crotches with bubble messages that said Evil lurks here, and Members Only, and Stay with your unit. Naughty nautical types with fibroids, she thought, pushing the magazines back in the drawer.
There was another copy of the same Pennysaver they’d read at breakfast. She looked at more of the “Down-East In Search Of”s. Come North to meet mature Presque Isle, cuddly n/s, sjf, cutie pie. Likes contradancing and midnight boat rides, skinny dipping in the cold, clean ocean. Possibilities unlimited for the right sjm, n/s between 45 and 55 with clean med record. Only serious responses desired. No flip-flops or Canucks plz. English only. Touching, she thought, this generalized sense of the possible, of what lay out there waiting. What, though, was a lonely sjf doing in Maine? And what could a flip-flop be that made them so unlikeable? Cuddly, she assumed, meant fat.
She wished to think about very few things for a while now. On the drive across from Belfast she’d become angry and acted angry. Said little. Then, when Tom was in the office paying for the room while she waited in the car, she’d suddenly become completely un-angry, though Tom hadn’t noticed when he came back with the key. Which was why he’d gone to sleep—as if his sleep were her sleep, and when he woke up everything would be fixed. Peaceful moments, of course, were never unwelcome. And it was good not to complicate life before you absolutely had to. All Tom’s questing may simply have to do with a post facto fear of retirement—another “reaction”—and in a while, if she didn’t exacerbate matters, he’d forget it. Life was full of serious but meaningless conversations.
On the silent TV a golf match was under way; elsewhere a movie featuring a young, smooth-cheeked Clark Gable; elsewhere an African documentary with tawny, emaciated lions sprawled in long brown grass, dozing after an offstage kill. The TV cast pleasant watery light on Tom. Soon oceans of wildebeests began vigorously drowning in a muddy, swollen river. It was peaceful in the silence—even with all the drownings—as if what one heard rather than what one saw caused all the problems.
Just outside the window she could hear a child’s laughing voice and a man’s patient, deeper one attempting to speak some form of encouragement. She inched back the heavy plastic curtain and against the sharp rays of daylight looked out at the motel lawn, where a large, thick-bodied young man in a silver wheelchair, wearing a red athletic singlet and white cotton shorts—his legs thick, strong, tanned and hairy as his back—was attempting to hoist into flight a festive orange-paper kite, using a small fishing rod and line, while a laughing little blond girl held the kite above her head. Breeze gently rattled the kite’s paper, on which had been painted a smiling oriental face. The man in the wheelchair kept saying, “Okay, run now, run,” so that the little girl, who seemed perfectly seven, jumped suddenly, playfully one way and then another, the kite held high, until she had leaped and boosted it up and off her fingers, while the man jerked the rod and tried to winch the smiling face into the wind. Each time, though, the kite drooped and lightly settled back onto the grass that grew all the way down to the shore. And each time the man said, his voice rising at the end of his phrases, “Okay now. Up she goes again. We can do this. Pick it up and try it again.” The little girl kept laughing. She wore tiny pink shorts and a bright-green top, and was barefoot and brown-legged. She seemed ecstatic.
He was the man from the park in town, Nancy thought, letting the curtain close. A coincidence of no importance. She looked at Tom asleep in his clothes, breathing noiselessly, hands clasped on his chest like a dead man’s, his bare, brown legs crossed at the ankles in an absurdly casual attitude, his blue running shoes resting one against the other. In peaceful sleep his handsome, unshaved features seemed ordinary.
She changed the channel and watched a ball game. The Cubs versus a team whose aqua uniforms she didn’t recognize. Her father had been a Cubs fan. They’d considered themselves northsiders. They’d traveled to Wrigley on warm autumn afternoons like this one. He would remove her from school on a trumped-up excuse, buy seats on the first-base line and let her keep score with a stubby blue pencil. The sixties, those were. She made an effort to remember the players’ names, using their blue-and-white uniforms and the viny outfield wall as fillips to memory thirty years on. She could think of smiling Ernie Banks, and a white man named Ron something, and a tall sad-faced high-waisted black man from Canada who pitched well but later got into some kind of police trouble and cried about it on TV. It was too little to remember.
Though the attempt at memory made her feel better—more settled in the
same singular, getting-on-with-it way that standing on the sunny street corner being misidentified by a busload of Japanese tourists had made her feel: as if she was especially credible when seen without the benefit of circumstance and the encumbrances of love, residues of decisions made long, long ago. More credible, certainly, than she was here now, trapped in East Whatever, Maine, with a wayward husband on his way down the road, and suffering spiritual congestion no amount of life-by-forecast or authentic marriage could cure.
This whole trip—in which Tom championed some preposterous idea for the sole purpose of having her reject it so he could then do what he wanted to anyway—made her feel unkind toward her husband. Made him seem stupid and childish. Made him seem inauthentic. Not a grownup. It was a bad sign, she thought, to find yourself the adult, whereas your lifelong love-interest was suddenly an overexuberant child passing himself off as an enthusiast whose great enthusiasm you just can’t share. Since what it meant was that in all probability life with Tom Marshall was over. And not in the way her clients at the public defender’s saw things to their conclusions—using as their messenger-agents whiskey bottles, broom handles, car bumpers, firearms, sharp instruments, flammables, the meaty portion of a fist. There, news broke vividly, suddenly, the lights always harsh and grainy, the volume turned up, doors flung open for all to see. (Her job was to bring their affairs back into quieter, more sensible orbits so all could be understood, felt, suffered more exquisitely.)