“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 bottom 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.