“Why not?”
“The gay thing. It makes them uncomfortable.”
“You don’t mind, though.”
She shook her head. “I like people who aren’t afraid of themselves.”
I would have asked her more, but another song started booming. Finally we took a break and got drinks; it was a little less noisy at the bar, which was behind the biggest speakers. It was then I noticed Marisol dancing with June, not wild like Diana and me, but slowly and sensuously, teasing each other, their eyes locked together. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t.
Diana was taking it all in. “Marisol is gay,” she said.
It wasn’t really a question, but I nodded.
“I read her zine, so I knew she was, but then the two of you … I thought there was something going on. I wasn’t sure.”
“We’re just friends,” I said, turning toward Diana and ripping my eyes away from Marisol’s gyrating body.
Diana smiled. “She’s pretty.”
I chugged the rest of my ginger ale. I was beginning to think this weekend could be hazardous to my health. “You know, I’m kind of tired. I think I’ll just go back and crash for the night.”
“Mind if I walk with you?” Diana asked. “I’m ready to cash it in too.”
“Sure. Just let me tell Marisol I’m going.” Okay, I admit it was an excuse to talk to her and to interrupt whatever was going on between her and June.
I wound my way between the dancers and stood next to them, but it took me a minute to get Marisol’s full attention. “What?” she finally screamed at me over the sound system.
“I’m going back. With Diana.” Wouldn’t hurt to let her know I wasn’t alone either.
“Okay. See ya.” That made a big impression. “Oh, Gio!” she called, and I spun around. “I think I’m going to bunk in with June and Sarah and B.J. They’ve got a big cabin and there’s room.”
“More the merrier,” June said, grinning this better-to-eat-you-with grin.
“So, if you don’t want me to wake you when I come in, you can just move my pack down to … which one are you in?” she asked June.
“Queen Victoria. It’s underneath Pumpkin and down one doorway,” June explained.
“That way,” Marisol began, then leaned in breathtakingly close to me so I could hear without her shouting, “if you get together with Diana, I won’t be in your way.”
“Diana?” I said, blowing my cover. “I barely know her.” I guess she was hoping I’d found somebody, too, so she wouldn’t feel so bad about deserting me.
“You could get to know her. She seems like she might be your type, Gio,” Marisol said, smiling.
“And how would you know that?” I said as sarcastically as possible. I’d had enough of her patronizing crap. Let her sleep wherever she wanted to. I turned around to stomp out, and would probably have forgotten Diana altogether, except she was waiting for me and fell into step as soon as we got outside the door.
“Marisol’s sleeping in the lesbian tent,” I announced, sounding crabbier than I meant to. “I have to move her stuff down to Queen Victoria.”
“I know which one that is. I’ll show you.”
You could hear the music from Butterfield’s for a good block down the street, but gradually it faded out. As we got away from the downtown area, the stillness surrounded us like liquid.
“Wow, it’s so quiet here, you can almost feel it,” I said.
Diana nodded. “It has something to do with begin surrounded by the water, I think. There’s no place like this.”
“You’ve lived here all your life?” I asked, remembering the details all of a sudden, how her mother had died when she was young. Ten, I thought I remembered. The same age I was when Dad split.
“We moved here when I was six. My dad’s a songwriter, which doesn’t bring in a lot of money, but you can live pretty cheaply in Truro. He does gardening for people during the season, then takes off to write songs all winter.”
“That sounds like a good life.”
“I think so. But my older sister and brother don’t. They’re more like Mom, I guess. They couldn’t wait to grow up and move away.”
“Your mother didn’t like it here?”
“She made a deal with my dad. She’d live here for five years so he could try out the songwriting thing, but then he’d have to move back to Boston with her and teach music theory again. She was a singer; she missed all the concerts and stuff in the city. But she only lived four out of the five years, and Dad never left.”
“So what happens to the songs he writes?”
“Sometimes he sells one. Mostly he plays them on the piano or I learn them on the guitar. He likes that.”
We’d reached the Bluefish Wharf by that time and stood looking out over the water for a minute. “I’m lucky we were here,” she said. “It would have been much harder to deal with her death someplace where I didn’t have quiet and water and dunes to keep me company.”
It was nice to just stand there in the dark, looking out over the harbor. By now I was pretty certain Diana wasn’t gay. As a matter of fact, I had the feeling she kind of liked me, which was nice, but nothing I felt like doing anything about. If I couldn’t have Marisol, I didn’t want anybody.
“So where’s Queen Victoria’s hovel?” I asked at last.
“I’ll show you.”
I followed Diana down the wharf and, sure enough, Queen Victoria was very near Pumpkin. I got Marisol’s pack down and tossed it in the door. “So much for that,” I said, whacking my hands together nastily.
“June can seem a little abrasive, but she’s really nice,” Diana said, reading my mind. “She lived in Provincetown a few years ago, before she moved to New York City. I know her because she worked for my dad one summer, in his gardening business.”
New York City? Well, that was good. Marisol wouldn’t be able to see her that often once we got home. “She seems okay,” I said magnanimously.
“You and Marisol seem very … close,” Diana said.
I shrugged. “Sometimes.” Diana was looking at me so intently, I had to turn away.
“I was really good friends with a gay guy in my school for a while. It was kind of confusing though. I mean, he was nicer to me than any straight guy had ever been, so, of course, I really liked him. But he’d tell me all about the guys he liked, and what they said to each other—all the details—and after a while I felt kind of … hurt. I couldn’t help it. I guess I wanted him to feel that way about me, even though I knew he wouldn’t. Finally we stopped hanging out together.”
A parable for our times? “Listen, I’m really bushed. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“Oh, sure.” She looked embarrassed, and I felt a little guilty for not responding to her story. But what was I supposed to say? Oh, me too! Boo hoo!
“Breakfast is at nine o’clock on the beach as long as the weather holds,” she said.
“Great.” I started up the stairs for Pumpkin.
“If you need anything, I’m in Bullwinkle,” Diana yelled up to me. “The farthest cabin down on the end.”
Of course, I wasn’t really tired; as a matter of fact I was so agitated, I doubted I’d be able to sleep at all, alone in my pretty yellow cell. I realized I should have gotten a zine or two from the stack in the office, but the energy required to get up off the bed and walk down the wharf again was more than I could muster. Instead I dumped stuff out of my pack until I came up with the old copy of No Regrets I’d brought along. Of course, both issues of Escape Velocity were in there too, but I wasn’t that desperate for reading material. No more Marisol tonight.
I opened Diana’s zine to her autobiography. Now that I’d actually met her, I could hear her saying the words, not all in a rush the way I’d first imagined these run-on sentences would sound, but slowly, as though the words were just resting quietly until she let them out. I read the last paragraph over and over. “When you live on Cape Cod like I do, the natural elements become important
to you … they help you to forgive people for hurting you … people including yourself can never be as trustworthy as nature because people … don’t understand how much they need each other. …”
Just a half hour before she’d said to me, “I’m lucky we were here,” as though the water itself had healed her after her mother’s death. I didn’t know if I could really buy it, that nature had so much power, but I thought I might be willing to learn what Diana knew.
I lay quietly then for a long time, listening to the breakers lap at the beach, then turn on themselves and run back out to the sea. I imagined Diana in her cabin at the wharf’s end listening to the same mesmerizing sounds. I hoped I could hear what she was hearing.
After a while I got up and wrote a poem.
* * *
The sun beating in the windows of Pumpkin woke me early. I’d put the sleeping bag on a bed the night before, not realizing I’d wake up with a view. If I just sat up a little, I could look down the sandy curve of Cape Cod as Provincetown turned into Truro, and Truro into Wellfleet, and on down to the bridge back to the mainland. It made me feel far from home, far from my neurotic mother and my self-centered father, and far from the boredom of Darlington. Not only had I escaped, but I’d escaped to paradise!
Of course, thinking about my parents gave me more than a few uneasy pangs. By now they’d read my letters and were probably busy removing me from wills and changing the locks on their front doors. But there was no looking back now; bridges had gone up in smoke.
I didn’t read the poem over; I was afraid daylight might rip to pieces what had seemed complete last night. I’d heard Queen Victoria’s handmaidens returning from the bar around midnight, but I concentrated on the rhythmic waves and their laughter barely bruised me.
I slept better than I had all week and was starving after my measly banana dinner of the night before, so I got dressed to go out foraging. As soon as I opened the door I could hear somebody playing a guitar down on the beach and several voices singing an old folk song. It was chillier than I thought it would be; the wind was whipping over the water, so I went back for a sweatshirt.
The singers were on to a Peter, Paul, and Mary song as I went toward the office, searching for grub. Bill Murdock must have gotten up earlier than any of us, because the thirty-two-cup coffeemaker had already finished its job, and he was drawing himself a hot mugful.
“Hello there!” he greeted me. “John, isn’t it? Just in time to help me scramble fifty eggs.”
“Can I get a cup of that stuff first?”
“Be my guest,” he said, handing me a mug from the cupboard above his head. “Couldn’t sleep with all that singing going on?”
“They didn’t wake me; the sun did.”
“Her voice is great, don’t you think? She’s good on the guitar too.”
“Who is it?”
“Diana. You didn’t know that was her?”
I shook my head. “I don’t really know her. We’ve just written a few letters back and forth.”
“Hey, don’t knock letters. Sometimes people say more to each other in letters than they’d ever get around to saying in person.”
This, obviously, was not news to me, the preeminent hate-mailer in the greater Boston area. “Diana is a terrific person. If she likes you, you’ve got a friend for life.” Bill poked his finger at my chest, which seemed just slightly threatening.
“She’s got a nice voice,” I said, which I realized was a pretty lame compliment. Then I started to actually listen to it as it came ringing in the open door. She really was good. She has the kind of voice that has something more to it than just hitting the right notes, something that makes you want to hear her sing your favorite song the way she would do it.
He handed me a bowl and a fork. “The eggs are in the fridge. Start cracking.” From under a counter he extracted a large carton that seemed to be filled with boxes of English muffins. “Donated,” he explained. “I’ve got connections.”
“Shouldn’t we wait until everybody gets up?” I asked. “If they were out late, they might want to sleep late.”
“Are you kidding? Those bedbugs would waste this whole gorgeous day, if you let them. They’ll get up all right, and they’ll be happy they did.”
That was how Bill was, easygoing, but determined at the same time. He had the whole day arranged for us, and we damn well weren’t going to mess up his plans. After he roused the whole place for breakfast (with a personal trumpet volley at every door), he explained how the rest of the day would go: In the morning Dean Gunnison, who was kind of a local zine hero, I guess, would talk about how he got started and why he’d decided to put his zine, Domestic Circus, on-line. Then we’d get some exercise—a walk out on the breakwater before lunch—followed by everybody reading excerpts from his or her zine. Then we’d take a rest-and-read break (as Bill called it) and get ready for a cookout on the beach. Finally another campfire, and then we could all do as we pleased for the rest of the evening.
The morning wasn’t bad. Gunnison was pretty interesting, although a little smug about his computer savvy. The weather was warm by the time we got to the breakwater, and everybody tied their sweatshirts around their waists to hike out to a little spit of beach on the very tip of the land. (If you think of Cape Cod as an arm with a bent elbow and a cupped hand, we walked from the large knuckle to the tip of the pointer finger across a long rock bridge.)
Marisol walked close to June as they picked their way across the rocks, but if I stayed far enough ahead of them I didn’t think too much about it. Besides, she was just trying to make a point, wasn’t she? I looked for Diana, but she was talking to a woman I hadn’t met, and I didn’t feel like making another new acquaintance at the moment. Lunch was more peanut butter, although a crate of oranges had also appeared to stave off scurvy.
The sun was hot by early afternoon, and most of us changed into summer clothes before reassembling on the beach to read from our zines. I’d been looking forward to this part, getting to hear the work and finding out who these people really were.
Sarah went first with a poem about a car accident she’d been in with her mother years before. It was so good people clapped afterward. I was looking forward to reading her zine during rest-and-read.
June was next. I wasn’t impressed, but then, I was having a few problems with June. Hers was a long, silly thing about reading horoscopes. I didn’t even get it. (Although, I admit, it was hard to hear her around the pounding in my ears.)
Anyway, we went around the group like that, and I really appreciated most of the work. Diana read a couple of very funny poems. Marisol read her “Escape” piece (because June begged her to, in front of everybody). I had brought down several pieces to read, things that would be in Bananafish #2, but that was just to fool myself, so I wouldn’t get nervous. I knew what I intended to read. I also knew there was a good possibility I’d regret it later, but this seemed to be a time in my life when I made reckless choices. When it was my turn, the new poem just happened to be on top of my pile.
I’m Not Lying
I am lying in a clapboard shack the wind blows through. It has followed me all the way from Boston to this sheltered harbor where I am less protected than I’ve ever been. Invisible as a fish in the ocean I’ve tried to listen, to understand the mystery of two people who could almost touch, except they have in common trusting no one. I’m not lying when I say I tried.
I’m not lying next to you and I never will. There was a night we needed more than affection, though neither would admit it. To tell the truth it couldn’t matter less who wears the pants or the dress, but only who becomes visible to whom. You saw me truly, and I saw all you let me; I’m not lying now, and I hope I never will.
When I finished reading, almost everybody clapped except, of course, Marisol. She sat cross-legged in the sand, her thin, brown legs tucked together so neatly, and stared, poker-faced, out to sea. June was looking at me, though. June looked like she wanted to grab my neck in her teeth and
give me a good shake.
Bill heard the phone before the rest of us; he was up and running for the office immediately. While he was gone, the guy sitting next to me, Michael Something, started asking me about imagery, and complimenting my style. He was a real poetry lover.
“Marisol!” Bill yelled. “It’s for you!”
She went running past me, kicking up miniature sand storms behind her bare feet. I started to get up; a call for Marisol seemed like a call for me too. But Michael put a hand on my arm.
“Not you. It’s for the skinny girl from the dyke den.”
I froze. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, that’s what we were calling the room where the lesbian contingent assembled last night. You probably didn’t hear them, but I was right next door. Kept me up half the night.”
I hesitated for a minute and then sat down. “Right, the lesbian contingent.” It hurt my throat to say it.
Chapter Sixteen
The last readers had finished before I saw Marisol again. She was waiting outside the office, leaning against the wall when I climbed up from the beach.
“Who was it?” I asked as I came toward her. Better to put aside for the moment our poetic differences, I thought, unless she brought them up.
She didn’t. “Birdie. I gave him the number here in case of emergency.”
“So, what’s the emergency?”
“What do you think? My parents are freaking out. Their baby’s disappeared.”
“Did he tell them you were on the Cape?”
“Yeah. My mother apparently wants to call out the National Guard to search for me.” She sighed and banged a bare foot against the building. “By the way, my mother called your mother. She went through my room and found your phone number. I guess she figured we took off together.”
It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that made me feel so good; obviously I must be a significant part of Marisol’s life if her mother assumed we’d be together. “Oh, well,” I said, “my mother would have figured out something was up by tomorrow anyway, when Dad didn’t drop me off at the appointed hour. What does she care? She’s got the house to herself all weekend.”