“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 station 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.