They were also not able to tell exactly how far anything was from anything else. The map was complicated by quirky peninsulas extending back south and the road having to go up and around and down again. The morning’s drive from Freeport had seemed long, but not much distance was covered. It made you feel foreign in your own country. Though they’d always found happiness inside an automobile — as far back as when Tom played drums in a college rock band and she’d gone along on the road trips, sleeping in the car and in ten-dollar motels. In the car, who they really were became available to the other. Guards went down. They felt free.
“There’s a town called Belfast,” Tom said, back to his map. “It’s not far up. At least I don’t think it is.” He looked back at where the floating dredger was making its slow turn in the river, beginning to ease back toward the ocean. “Did you see that thing?”
“I don’t get what ‘down-east’ means,” Nancy said. Everything in the Pennysaver that wasn’t a play on “Maine” had “down-east” somehow attached to it. The dating exchange was called “Down-East In Search Of.” “Does it mean that if you follow one of the peninsulas as far as you can go south, you get east?”
This was a thing Tom should know. It was his idea to come here instead of the Eastern Shore place they liked. Maine had all of a sudden “made sense” to him — something hazy about the country having started here and the ocean being “primary” among experiences, and his having grown up near Lake Michigan and that never seeming remotely primary.
“That’s what I thought it meant,” Tom said.
“So what does Maine mean? Maine what?” she asked. Nothing was in the Pennysaver to explain anything.
“That I do know,” Tom said, watching the barge turning and starting back downstream. “It means main land. As opposed to an island.”
She looked around the crowded diner for their waitress. She was ready for greasy bacon and buttery toast and had wedged the Pennysaver behind the napkin dispenser. “They have a high opinion of themselves here,” she said. “They seem to admire virtues you only understand by suffering difficulty and confusion. It’s the New England spirit I guess.” Tom’s virtues, of course, were that kind. He was perfect if you were dying or being robbed or swindled — a policeman’s character traits, and useful in many more ways than policing. “Isn’t Maine the state where the woman was shot by a hunter while she was pinning up clothes on the line? Wearing white gloves or something, and the guy thought she was a deer? You don’t have to defend that, of course.”
He gave her his policeman’s regulation blank stare across the table top. It was an expression his face could change into, leaving his real face — normally open and enthusiastic — back somewhere forgotten. He took injustice personally.
She blinked, expecting him to say something else.
“Places that aren’t strange aren’t usually interesting,” he said solemnly.
“It’s just my first morning here.” She smiled at him.
“I want us to see this town Belfast.” He reconsulted the map. “The write-up makes it seem interesting.”
“Belfast. Like the one where they fight?”
“This one’s in Maine, though.”
“I’m sure it’s wonderful.”
“You know me,” he said, and unexpectedly smiled back. “Ever hopeful.” He was an enthusiast again. He wanted to make their trip be worthwhile. And he was absolutely right: it was too soon to fall into disagreement. That could come later.
Early in the past winter Tom had moved out of their house and into his own apartment, a grim little scramble of white, dry-walled rectangles which were part of a new complex situated across a wide boulevard from a factory-outlet mall and adjacent to the parking lot of a large veterinary clinic where dogs could be heard barking and crying day and night.
Tom’s departure was calculatedly not dramatic. He himself had seemed reluctant, and once he was out, she was very sorry not to see him, not to sleep next to him, have him there to talk to. Some days she would come home from her office and Tom would be in the kitchen, drinking a beer or watching CNN while he heated something in the microwave — as though it was fine to live elsewhere and then turn up like a memory. Sometimes she would discover the bathroom door closed, or find him coming up from the basement or just standing in the back yard staring at the hydrangea beds as if he was considering weeding them.
“Oh, you’re here,” she’d say. “Yeah,” he’d answer, sounding not entirely sure how he’d come to be present. “It’s me.” He would sometimes sit down in the kitchen and talk about what he was doing in his studio. Sometimes he’d bring her a new toy he’d made — a colorful shooting star on a pedestal, or a new Wagner in brighter colors. They talked about Anthony, at Goucher. Usually, when he came, Nancy asked if he’d like to stay for dinner. And Tom would suggest they go out, and that he “pop” for it. But that was never what she wanted to do. She wanted him to stay. She missed him in bed. They had never talked about being apart, really. He was doing things for his own reasons. His departure had seemed almost natural.
Each time he was there, though, she would look at Tom Marshall in what she tried to make be a new way, see him as a stranger; tried to decide anew if he was in fact so handsome, or if he looked different from how she’d gotten used to him looking in twenty years; tried to search to see if he was as good-willed or even as large and rangy as she’d grown accustomed to thinking. If he truly had an artisan’s temperament and a gentle manner, or if he was just a creep or a jerk she had unwisely married, then gradually gotten used to. She considered the possibility of having an affair — a colleague or a delivery boy. But that seemed too mechanical, too much trouble, the outcome so predictable. Tom’s punishment would have to be that she considered an affair and expressed her freedom of choice without telling him. In a magazine she picked up at the dentist’s, she read that most women radically change their opinions of their husbands once they spend time away from them. Except women were natural conciliators and forgivers and therefore preferred not to be apart. In fact, they found it easy, even desirable, to delude themselves about many things, but especially about men. According to the writer — a psychologist — women were hopeless.
Yet following each reassessment, she decided again that Tom Marshall was all the things she’d always thought him to be, and that the reasons she’d have given to explain why she loved him were each valid. Tom was good; and being apart from him was not good, even if he seemed able to adjust to being alone and even to thrive on it. She would simply have to make whatever she could of it. Because what Nancy knew was, and she supposed Tom understood this, too: they were in an odd place together; were standing upon uncertain emotional territory that might put to the test exactly who they were as humans, might require that new facets of the diamond be examined.
This was a very different situation from the ones she confronted at the public defender’s every day, and that Tom had encountered with the police — the cut-and-dried, over-dramatic and beyond-repair problems, where things went out of control fast, and people found themselves in court or in the rough hands of the law as a last-ditch way of resolving life’s difficulties. If people wouldn’t overdramatize so much, Nancy believed, if they remained pliable, did their own thinking, restrained themselves, then things could work out for the better. Though for some people that must be hard.
She had been quite impressed by how she’d dealt with things after Tom had admitted fucking Crystal d’Amato (her real name). Once Tom made it clear he didn’t intend to persist with Crystal, she’d begun to feel all right about it almost immediately. For instance, she noticed she hadn’t experienced awful stress about envisioning Tom bare-ass on top of Crystal wherever it was they’d done it (she envisioned a big paint-stained sheet of white canvas). Neither did the idea of Tom’s betrayal seem important. It wasn’t really a betrayal; Tom was a good man; she was an adult; betrayal had to mean something worse that hadn’t really happened. In a sense, when she looked at Tom now with her benign, inquiring gaze, fucking Crystal was one of the most explicable new things she knew about him.