Passing the time was excruciating without painting. There was the hour-long morning walk, in the late afternoon there was twenty minutes of working out with his light weights and a half hour of doing easy laps at the pool – the daily regime his cardiologist encouraged – but that was it, those were the events of his day. How much time could you spend staring out at the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy? How long could he watch the tides flood in and flow out without his remembering, as anyone might in a sea-gazing reverie, that life had been given to him, as to all, randomly, fortuitously, and but once, and for no known or knowable reason? On the evenings he drove over to eat broiled bluefish on the back deck of the fish store that perched at the edge of the inlet where the boats sailed out to the ocean under the old drawbridge, he sometimes stopped first at the town where his family had vacationed in the summertime. He got out of the car on the ocean road and went up onto the boardwalk and sat on one of the benches that looked out to the beach and the sea, the stupendous sea that had been changing continuously without ever changing since he'd been a bony sea-battling boy. This was the very bench where his parents and grandparents used to sit in the evenings to catch the breeze and enjoy the boardwalk promenade of neighbors and friends, and this was the very beach where his family had picnicked and sunned themselves and where he and Howie and their pals went swimming, though it was now easily twice as wide as it had been then because of a reclamation project recently engineered by the army. Yet wide as it was, it was still his beach and at the center of the circles in which his mind revolved when he remembered the best of boyhood. But how much time could a man spend remembering the best of boyhood? What about enjoying the best of old age? Or was the best of old age just that – the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow's shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells and pulverized sea-shells at the edge of the shore and he hustled to his feet and hurriedly turned and went lurching through the low surf until it was knee high and deep enough for him to plunge in and begin swimming madly out to the rising breakers – into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future – and, if he was lucky, make it there in time to catch the next big wave and then the next and the next and the next until from the low slant of inland sunlight glittering across the water he knew it was time to go. He ran home barefoot and wet and salty, remembering the mightiness of that immense sea boiling in his own two ears and licking his forearm to taste his skin fresh from the ocean and baked by the sun. Along with the ecstasy of a whole day of being battered silly by the sea, the taste and the smell intoxicated him so that he was driven to the brink of biting down with his teeth to tear out a chunk of himself and savor his fleshly existence.
Quickly as he could on his heels he crossed the concrete sidewalks still hot from the day and when he reached their rooming house headed around back to the outdoor shower with the soggy plywood walls, where wet sand plopped out of his suit when he kicked it off over his feet and held it up to the cold water beating down on his head. The level force of the surging tide, the ordeal of the burning pavement, the bristling shock of the ice-cold shower, the blessing of the taut new muscles and the slender limbs and the darkly suntanned flesh marked by just a single pale scar from the hernia surgery hidden down by his groin – there was nothing about those August days, after the German submarines had been destroyed and there were no more drowned sailors to worry about, that wasn't wonderfully clear. And nothing about his physical perfection that he had any reason not to take for granted.
When he returned from dinner he would try to settle in and read. He had a library of oversized art books filling one wall of the studio; he had been accumulating and studying them all his life, but now he couldn't sit in his reading chair and turn the pages of a single one of them without feeling ridiculous. The delusion – as he now thought of it – had lost its power over him, and so the books only magnified his sense of the hopelessly laughable amateur he was and of the hollowness of the pursuit to which he had dedicated his retirement.
Trying to pass more than a little time in the company of the Starfish Beach residents was also unendurable. Unlike him, many were able not merely to construct whole conversations that revolved around their grandchildren but to find sufficient grounds for existence in the existence of their grandchildren. Caught in their company, he sometimes experienced loneliness in what felt like its purest form. And even those among the village residents who were thoughtful, well-spoken people were not interesting to be with more than once in a while. Most of the elderly residents had been settled into their marriages for decades and were sufficiently connected still to whatever was left of their marital felicity that only rarely could he get the husband to go off by himself for lunch without the wife. However wistfully he might sometimes look at such couples as dusk approached or on Sunday afternoons, there were the rest of the hours of the week to think about, and theirs wasn't a life for him when he was on top of his melancholy. The upshot was that he should never have moved into such a community in the first place. He had displaced himself just when what age most demanded was that he be rooted as he'd been for all those years he ran the creative department at the agency. Always he had been invigorated by stability, never by stasis. And this was stagnation. There was an absence now of all forms of solace, a barrenness under the heading of consolation, and no way to return to what was. A sense of otherness had overtaken him – "otherness," a word in his own language to describe a state of being all but foreign to him till his art student Millicent Kramer had jarringly used it to bemoan her condition. Nothing any longer kindled his curiosity or answered his needs, not his painting, not his family, not his neighbors, nothing except the young women who jogged by him on the boardwalk in the morning. My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No "otherness" to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.
There was one particular girl whom he never failed to wave to when she jogged by, and one morning he set out to meet her. Always she waved back and smiled, and then forlornly he watched her run on. This time he stopped her. He called out, "Miss, miss, I want to talk to you," and instead of shaking her head no and breezing by with a "Can't now," as he fully imagined her doing, she turned and jogged back to where he was waiting, by the plank stairs that led down to the beach, and stood with her hands on her hips only a foot away from him, damp with perspiration, a tiny creature perfectly formed. Until she fully relaxed, she pawed the boardwalk with one running shoe like a pony while looking up at this unknown man in the sunglasses who was six feet three and had a full head of wavy gray hair. It turned out, fortuitously, that she had been working for seven years at an ad agency in Philadelphia, lived here at the shore, and was currently on her two-week vacation. When he told her the name of the New York agency where he'd worked for nearly a lifetime she was terrifically impressed; his employer was legendary, and for the next ten minutes they made the kind of advertising talk that had never interested him. She would have to be in her late twenties and yet, with her long, crinkly auburn hair tied back and in her running shorts and tank top, and small as she was, she might have been taken for fourteen. He tried repeatedly to prevent his gaze from falling to the swell of the breasts that rose and fell with her breathing. This was torment to walk away from. The idea was an affront to common sense and a menace to his sanity. His excitement was disproportionate to anything that had happened or that possibly could happen. He had not just to hide his hunger; so as not to go mad he had to annihilate it. Yet he doggedly continued on as he had planned, still half believing that there was some combination of words that would somehow save him from defeat. He said, "I've noticed you jogging." She surprised him by responding, "I've noticed you noticing me." "How game are you?" he heard himself asking her, but feeling that the encounter was now out of his control and that everything was going much too fast – feeling, if it were possible, even more reckless than when he'd draped that pendant necklace costing a small fortune around Merete's neck in Paris. Phoebe the devoted wife and Nancy the cherished child were home in New York, awaiting his return – he'd spoken to Nancy the day before, within only hours of her getting back from summer camp – and still he'd told the saleswoman, "We'll take it. You needn't wrap it. Here, Merete, let me do it. I teethed on these clasps. It's called a tubular box clasp. In the thirties, it would have been the safest one around for a piece like this. Come, give me your throat." "What do you have in mind?" the jogger boldly replied, so boldly that he felt at a disadvantage and did not know how forthright to make his answer. Her belly was tanned and her arms were thin and her prominent buttocks were round and firm and her slender legs were strongly muscled and her breasts were substantial for someone not much more than five feet tall. She had the curvaceous lusciousness of a Varga Girl in the old 1940s magazine illustrations, but a miniaturized, childlike Varga Girl, which was why he had begun waving to her in the first place.