We had run all the way to the end of the beach where there was a jetty of piled stone, and in a hollow at the land end of the jetty bodiless eyes in multiple array glowed out from the darkness. Briony said it was a clutch of feral cats who’d lived here as far back as she could remember. They skulked and hissed. We had come too close and the hiss enveloped us like the spun web of a spider. Maybe that was when I began thinking once more about something besides myself.
Like what?
Like this country of eternal sun and midget populations and sky police.
The next morning, when we were about to leave, I was standing out by the car and saying goodbye and Betty was holding my hands, gently bobbing them up and down as indication of her fondness. We’re so happy she has found you, Andrew. We want everything for our girl. We love her beyond words. She is the triumph of our life.
I admit I was hoping these were Briony’s adoptive parents. Why do you suppose that was? I was still recovering from the night on the beach, and standing now under the oppressive sun I had a sick feeling trying to accommodate the bizarre facts of my true love’s life. These were her founding circumstances, they marked her, they were hers, she had been made from them, and what I had made of her before now — my glorious student in the long sunlit frock and running shoes — had been incomplete if not illusory. Yes, she was, in the great American tradition, working her way through college — a financial aid package here, a bank loan there — obviously Bill and Betty were not of much help and so Briony was truly out of the nest, her own person. But I didn’t want her to have grown up in this household, in this town, among these people, and walking out of the front door every day of her girlhood to see this unchanging street of the little stucco homes and seashelled flower pots in the little front yards, and with the pale paved streets with no shadows. Everything so clearly the life to bake away a functioning brain. I imagined her as a child going down to that beach and playing in the sand, and picking shells at the water’s edge, day after day, year after year. It was the shameful feeling of just a moment, before I drove it from my mind — that all this of California was a fraud. Briony came out the door with her backpack and smiled, gorgeous as ever, and I felt that somehow I had been taken in.
Well, I’m reassured. For a while there, love was making you a dull fellow.
Try to understand. I know it’s hard for you, but pretend you are me. This whole thing had been a shock. Wouldn’t you feel somehow negated? Was it me she loved, or something about me that was all too familiar to her? Had she intuited it the first day of class when I was writing my name on the blackboard and the chalk broke in my hand and I knocked my books off the lectern? She had picked up everything and smiled with understanding. Grown in this endless sun, amid these awful flowers, her parents, face it, freaks of nature, she’d been nurtured to the weird, the unnatural. It was what she knew, her normal social reality. So who would she find for herself, whom would she be morbidly attracted to, but someone as adorable as a freakishly depressive cognitive scientist klutz, whom she was soon enough comforting after the nihilistic despair of his lectures?
I hear self-loathing.
You do?
Another version of your unworthiness as the lover of this girl. First there was Andrew the anachronism on the football campus, and now the opposite, the all too appropriate proto freak fitting right in.
I said this was the feeling for a moment. We have momentary feelings that don’t turn into action, don’t we?
We do.
You don’t think I’d be stupid enough to give up the love of my life because of some momentary suspicion that was actually a ritual self-denigration do you?
I guess not.
She had gotten away, hadn’t she, and now as we drove off, her parents waving from their front door, she wept. It was as if she’d said goodbye to them for the last time. I suppose I was responsible.
Why?
With me there she couldn’t pretend anymore that she hadn’t grown away from them. She could love them, be grateful to them, but not deny that they were from a world no longer her own.
What had you done?
I had met them.
Briony was a superb athlete but without the sinew, the female musculature. She was a slim slip of a thing. Her limbs were firm and shapely but not tightly knotted, as even a dancer’s are. So that all this physical life seemed to me not natural, given her build, but more in the nature of a determination, a self-invoked discipline. So where it came from, why she had found it necessary to top a pyramid of cheerleaders, flip herself around on the high bar, run, jump, train for a purpose other than an intensely physical joy of being, I doubt if she even knew. When she had the baby she did her jogging while pushing the carriage. [thinking]
Yes?
Only one time did her determined athleticism fail her. Back in the shadow of the mountains. To show her I was not totally foreign to sports I bought us a couple of tennis racquets and we went over to the college courts to hit. I had played a bit at Yale — not for Yale, at Yale. I never took any lessons but I somehow knew what was involved and in my loose-limbed ambling way I could run around and get to the ball, I had a pretty good forehand and a less reliable backhand, I could hit a topspin lob and I had a nice drop shot if I needed it. The game was new to Briony, but when I offered instruction, how to grip the racquet, how to position your body to hit a forehand, a backhand, and so on, she wasn’t interested. She thought she could get the hang of things by herself. When she couldn’t — overhitting, knocking the ball over the fence, or netting it, or missing the ball completely, running frantically this way and that — though I tried always to hit where she could hit it back — she finally lost her temper, slammed the racquet down, and walked off the court, sulking. It was the first time in our life together that I saw her lose her composure.
There were others?
Carrying the baby. I forget what month. She was staining, and that frightened her. She was biting on her knuckles as I called the doctor. It turned out to be nothing. But that one time on the tennis court — I’ve since wondered if, to show off, I hit some shots I knew she couldn’t get to.
[thinking]
I’ve never told you about my time in the army. When I was in the army, at the end of basic training there were nighttime maneuvers. I fell asleep in my foxhole while I was supposed to be guarding the perimeter. A cadre officer woke me up. I was given a hundred push-ups with an M1 on my back, but my platoon sergeant, who was responsible for me, was RA, Regular Army, and he lost his stripes. He was two months from retirement. [thinking] I was once at an academic cocktail party expressing myself effusively in this crowded room, flinging my arms out to make some point or other. The back of my hand slammed into the jaw of a woman professor standing off to the right of me. She screamed and sank to the floor. All conversation stopped. I ran to the host’s kitchen, and was feeling around in the refrigerator freezer for some ice, lifting aside and holding a couple of liters of vodka. The woman’s husband had come after me, shouting, and when I turned I was so startled that I dropped the vodka bottles and broke his foot. In the space of a minute I had taken out an entire family. [thinking] I was an undergraduate biology major at Yale. One day in the lab we were doing an experiment with sea anemones—
Andrew, stop.
What? Stop what?