It is so beautiful, she says, and her eyes take in the view. I can’t imagine being anywhere else. She lifts a glass of iced tea and plucks at it. The men are far away though, she says, and surveys the men around us. Which, this being Provincetown, is mostly what’s here. Single men, she adds. Of a particular kind.
She tells me that she’s become the swim-team coach. I can’t believe it, I tell her. You hate and abhor athletics.
No. I hated and abhorred me, she says. And the tone is so sad, the phrasing so alien, I realize it is both true and something someone else has told her about herself. Like a check mark on a calendar, the ten years since our first meeting is duly noted. Penny, who had red hair and smoked and hated athletes now has brown hair, coaches swimming, smiles, and, she now begins telling me, wants to have a baby. Wants me to be the father.
The lunch arrives: fried fish sandwiches and fries, sparkling water. I am trying to place all of this. You want me to donate the sperm, I say.
Fee. I want to have a child, and when I think about what man I want the child to resemble, considering the amount of time I’ll be with him or her, I thought of my oldest friends. I’ve not known anyone as long as I’ve known you, besides my family. She smiles and scratches behind her ear. I’ll be with the child so long, and it only gets harder as I get older. I don’t want to wait to meet some guy I’ve not yet met. I’ve got a good job, secure, with housing, at a nontraditional school. I’ll be able to have the baby with me. How’s a baby at swim practice? Fine. There’s every reason to think it’s a good time for me. I’ve been healthy now for years, my gene plasm repaired, I hope, from the hard years.
I’ll think about it, I say. The hard years of course means the years when we first knew each other. And in the bright light of the patio, where everything seems to have a sharper harder edge and color, I can see that she will have her way in this, as she had her way in other things, that of what has changed about her, her ability to get me to do what she wants is not included in that.
You’ll be my replacement, she says. At the school. I’ve already told them I think I’m pregnant and that I know of someone. What? I say. You did what?
It’s not like it’s not going to happen, she says.
And so it is decided, and soon Penny is telling me all the details. Bridey, too. In the attic room of the apartment we have taken for the summer, Bridey tells me he has decided, if I will have him, to accompany me on the move, as I’d asked. I’ll be the faculty wife, he says. I’ve always wanted to grow roses. When I tell him northern Maine isn’t much for roses, he tells me he will show me how it can be done. Sure of each other, we go to tell some friends from New York, here for the week, who are frankly confused by my decision, and further by Bridey’s.
Well, says one, when we announce the news before getting dressed for a party on the other side of the village, That will mean you guys are off in the middle of nowhere with nothing but each other.
Delightful, Bridey says. Imagine all the lack of interference. The absence of sweet young things looking to poach a husband. This last is a pointed comment to another, silent friend, who walks the house naked until it is time to leave for the beach, where he takes all his clothes off again. Bridey takes my eyefuls in stride, punishing me later by moving all my bookmarks. I’m trying, he says later upstairs, to make sure your attention is properly occupied.
You made me read the same forty pages of Ulysses over again, I say, and clap him with it lightly on the head.
You’re the one who didn’t notice, he says.
I’m practicing, I say, in case I get dumped.
Wedgies tonight, Bridey says.
Bridey. What is he made from? A secret, apparently. He meanders the party that night, looking through everyone there like dresses on a sale rack. I don’t know why he comes. I’m the one who likes parties. This one is loud, lots of New Yorkers, the same people we see all year but here they are sunburned, thinner, in bathing suits and T-shirts and Adidas sport mules. Ropey, gleaming bronze flesh alternates with the occasional pale, hairy limb of a newcomer or midweek visitor. I watch Bridey’s neck, where his white coral necklace hangs like a wide smile on a string.
I don’t remember, Bridey confides, that people used to get this sunburned. Ozone layer really is going. Look at her! She looks like a radiation victim.
When I go to put my arms on his sides he draws them away with his hands. Holds them. Kisses me once on the lips. You really want this shirt, he says. I’ll leave it on the bed for you later to look at. While I go buy some more.
And then at the party, someone talks of something, another of another, and then this.
…It’s amazing, isn’t it. How people just tell you about it.
Aren’t you tired of it? I am so tired of it. “Oh, my father raped me.” So? Why tell these things?
I see two women talking to each other at the food table, dipping chips into a guacamole bowl and scooping it out. Empty beer bottles fill the table and so I start picking them up, as a politeness to our host, gone missing now for about an hour.
These people are just crawling out of the walls these days. It seems like this shit was just invented for the end of this century.
Well, if you read John Boswell’s book about foundling children in medieval times, he talks about how early prohibitions against prostitution were in place in order to avoid having sex with children you’d abandoned, sold to brothels. And here she breaks her chips with her tiny teeth, You realize, she continues, that children have always had a lot of sex. I smile at them across the now-clear table, and head out the back door to the porch, where I sit down, a bottle on every finger. I set them down next to the recycling bin, and notice that several are partially full. Unable to move, I begin finishing them. Like tongue kissing strangers.
Crawling out of the walls. I think of the catacombs on Judgment Day. I think of Andrew Hunter and my tunnels, still waiting for me. Why am I still alive? I light a cigarette. Look across my hand to the pinkie nail I still keep silver. Bridey asked me about it a long time ago. When I told him the story of it he kissed the tiny nail. He said, It’s beautiful. I think of Freddy.
Did you drink all these? I hear from behind me. Bridey sinks down then and his knees cover my ears. What are you doing out here by the trash, anyway?
I had help, I say. When do we move to Maine, I ask.
Come on, he says. Inside. Right away.
6
Up in east Knot on one of the first nights in our new house Bridey calls me into the yard. Look, he says, and there’s the Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis, pieces of the sun striking the outer surface of the atmosphere and exploding. We stand there and watch. They’re magnetic pulses. When Penny has her baby, I decide, I will tell him or her that the Aurora Borealis is her great-grand-aunts, dancing with each other, for us. The colors their fiery fox tails.
My grandparents died within several months of each other. Theirs had been a long marriage, arranged for them at their births. That they died near each other in time was no surprise. Both deaths happened while I was in California, near the end of my time there, and both times, I was awake late at night and found by something near to a hallucination. Or a vision. It reminded me of the mudang trying to call my ghost to me, and what I saw that time. My grandmother went first. On that night, my room filled with a huge shadow cat, eyes as big as lamps. She regarded me for some time and then left. When my grandfather followed her, the ceiling light fixture in my room became the center of an enormous face, ancient beyond belief and exhausted. He seemed to be trying to speak, and then he didn’t, and was gone soon after.
My grandmother had been a Christian, my grandfather an animist. Chongdokyo, Korea’s oldest religion. He remembered his sisters by placing a bowl of water by the window, and a lit stick of incense. When we went to the family temple in Moolsan-do he had done the more traditional observances, but every day, the bowl and the incense. Chongdokyo is an attempt to mirror the ways of heaven, which flat water does effortlessly, reflecting the sky. The incense is meant to symbolize that aspiration. I’d made a bowl for this purpose recently, and so after we come inside I look for it among the boxes we are still unpacking. I find the bowl, a simple thing made to look like my grandfather’s bowclass="underline" eggshell on the outside, sea blue on the inside. I light incense, and set them out, by the back kitchen window.