And yet, she realized, as spring came on and Tom remained in the Larchmere Apartments — cooking his miserly meals, watching his tiny TV, doing his laundry in the basement, going to his studio in the co-op — the entire edifice of their life was beginning to take on clearer shape and to grow smaller. Like a valuable box lost overboard into the smooth wake of an ocean liner. Possibly it was a crisis. Possibly they loved each other well enough, perhaps completely. Yet the strongest force keeping them together wasn’t that love, she thought, but a matching curiosity about what the character of their situation was, and the novelty that neither of them knew for sure.
But as Tom had stayed away longer, seemingly affable and well-adjusted, she indeed had begun to feel an ebbing, something going out of her, like water seeping from a cracked beaker, restoring it to its original, vacant state. This admittedly did not seem altogether good. And yet, it might be the natural course of life. She felt isolated, it was true, but isolated in a grand sort of way, as if by being alone and getting on with things, she was achieving something. Unassailable and strong was how she felt — not that anyone wanted to assail her; though the question remained: what was the character of this strength, and what in the world would you do with it alone?
“Where’s Nova Scotia?” Nancy said, staring at the sea. Since leaving Rockland, an hour back on Route 1, they’d begun glimpsing ocean, its surface calm, dense, almost unpersuasively blue, encircling large, distinct, forested islands Tom declared were reachable only by ferries and were the strongholds of wealthy people who were only there in the summer and didn’t have heat.
“It’s a parallel universe out there,” he said as his way of expressing that he didn’t approve of life like that. Tom had an affinity for styles of living he considered authentic. It was his one conventional-cop attitude. He thought highly of the Mainers for renting their seaside houses for two months in the summer and collecting fantastic sums that paid their bills for the year. This was authentic to Tom.
Nova Scotia was in her head now, because it would be truly exotic to go there, far beyond the green, clean-boundaried islands. Though she couldn’t exactly tell what direction she faced out the car window. If you were on the east coast, looking at the ocean, you should be facing east. But her feeling was this rule didn’t apply in Maine, which had something to do with distances being farther than they looked on the map, with how remote it felt here, and with whatever “down-east” meant. Perhaps she was looking south.
“You can’t see it. It’s way out there,” Tom said, referring to Nova Scotia, driving and taking quick glances at the water. They had driven through Camden, choked with tourists sauntering along sunny streets, wearing bright, expensive clothing, trooping in and out of the same expensive outlet stores they’d seen in Freeport. They had thought tourists would be gone after Labor Day, but then their own presence disproved that.
“I just have a feeling we’d be happier visiting there,” she said. “Canada’s less crowded.”
A large block of forested land lay solidly beyond a wide channel of blue water Tom had pronounced to be the Penobscot Bay. The block of land was Islesboro, and it, too, he said, was an island, and rich people also lived there in the summer and had no heat. John Travolta had his own airport there. She mused out at the long undifferentiated island coast. Odd to think John Travolta was there right now. Doing what? It was nice to think of it as Nova Scotia, like standing in a meadow watching cloud shapes imitate mountains until you feel you’re in the mountains. Maine, a lawyer in her office said, possessed a beautiful coast, but the rest was like Michigan.
“Nova Scotia’s a hundred and fifty miles across the Bay of Fundy,” Tom said, upbeat for some new reason.
“I once did a report about it in high school,” Nancy said. “They still speak French, and a lot of it’s backward, and they don’t much care for Americans.”
“Like the rest of Canada,” Tom said.
Route 1 followed the coast along the curvature of high tree-covered hills that occasionally sponsored long, breathtaking views toward the bay below. A few white sails were visible on the pure blue surface, though the late morning seemed to have furnished little breeze.
“It wouldn’t be bad to live up here,” Tom said. He hadn’t shaved, and rubbed his palm across his dark stubble. He seemed happier by the minute.
She looked at him curiously. “Where?”
“Here.”
“Live in Maine? But it’s mortifyingly cold except for today.” She and Tom had grown up in the suburbs of Chicago — she in Glen Ellyn, Tom in a less expensive part of Evanston. Their very first agreement had been that they hated the cold. They’d chosen Maryland for Tom to be a policeman because it was unrelentingly mild. Her feelings hadn’t changed. “Where would you go for the two months when you were renting the house to the Kennedy cousins just so you could afford to freeze here all winter?”
“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.”