When they dropped the kids off at the sister’s house, the sister was friendly enough but the girl didn’t know what to make of the way the sister held her thin smile just a bit too long in place. Maybe it was pity for her, the girl who was sleeping with her brother without even realizing that he was a ghost. She could tell it was a running joke when the sister called after the kids as they tromped into the house, “Did you take good care of your uncle Stan?”
Then the second weekend they took the ferry to Canada and headed west along Vancouver Island’s tip, the sun making the tongues of surf look silver where they lapped on the shore. He drove while the girl rolled from his stash of good Humboldt County weed, the MG’s top down, the girl holding the joint up to his lips. Where the road dipped close to beach, they stopped and clambered down the rocks. There the girl squatted behind a clump of grass to put on her two-piece bathing suit (this is what astounds her now, this idea of her in a bikini) and went running down the sand while the man watched her getting smaller as she receded. That’s how she pictured herself, in terms of how she looked to him, and on her return she made a point of arcing her legs, her impossibly thin legs that she tried to make look graceful and fluid, hyper-real.
He knew of a bed-and-breakfast on the outskirts of some obscure fishing town, a cabin that sat in the side yard of someone’s house, perched on a bluff that dropped to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There was a hibachi on the deck, and they drove into town for charcoal and red wine and steak, which the man grilled along with thick slabs of potato. Not having steak knives, they had to tear the meat with their teeth, their hands gripping the rind of fat. Afterward, he took her (what a bizarre expression, “took her”) as she bent over a chair while he stood watching in the bureau mirror. And when, under their collective weight, the legs of the chair inched apart and sheared off, they continued while she lay facedown on the pile of spindles in the narrow space afoot the bed.
“Hair of the dog,” he said in the morning, uncorking another bottle. The owner’s practice was to leave breakfast outside the door on a tray, rapping lightly to let the guests know it had been delivered. The girl opened the door with the hem of her T-shirt yanked down in her fist, and the owner, having paused in her retreat to inspect the flower boxes along the drive, made a sour face when she glimpsed the girl’s outstanding disarray.
The weather had changed sometime in the night, and the ocean vista that had been so brilliant was packed now with gray vapors. By the time they finished their eggs, the drizzle had escalated into full-blown rain, so they played backgammon and got drunk on the complimentary sherry, draining the decanter while the day grew fuzzy on their tongues. To make something memorable of it, they played out the marquis and the maiden, the stupendous groupie in the bathtub, Margaret-Trudeau-not-wearing-any-underpants-when-she-meets-Leonid-Brezhnev, etc. He lapped the last of the sherry off her chest while she strained at the sheet he’d torn in strips to bind her, though the straining was largely a charade. In fact her tethers were loose enough that as soon as he finished the girl worked herself free.
“You liked it,” he said. And she thought: Okay, so she liked it, so what? Is it so wrong to be twenty-three years old and to want a man to ravish you in a strange room by the sea? She wanted many things that she was too ashamed to say.
Then he gathered the hair at the base of her neck and pulled tight enough to bare her throat. “And how about if you’d known I’d spent some time in jail, huh? Some women are attracted to men who’ve been hauled in once or twice.”
The girl was thinking of the college boys she’d known when she asked what for. Chaining themselves to things in protest or growing marijuana in the woods.
“Aggravated assault,” he answered, looking away, letting her hair drop.
The girl figured he wouldn’t have started if this were not a moment that he took some relish in arriving at with women, this cathartic moment of his getting the story out. Turned out it was a former girlfriend, with a subplot involving her waving around a kitchen knife. Of course, aggravated assault was just the plea deal he agreed to, and she didn’t need him to explain what aggravated assault turned into when you decoded it backward through the courts. She didn’t say the word, but she did ask why he pled guilty.
“She was the one who’d come over, drunk out of her skull. She was the one who sucked my dick, but how do you prove that?”
The girl didn’t know what to say after this; to suggest another game of backgammon seemed like a backward step. More wine appeared to be the only option, more dope to unravel the seam that he’d just stitched. They slept for a while, and when they woke the rain had slacked. So they stumbled down the trail to the beach, just because the beach was there and they were paying for it to be there and had not felt it underfoot.
Way down below, a small cove scalloped into the woods, hemmed by a mound of driftwood that the ocean had tossed up. There were only a few houses whose windows glinted atop the bluff, so they took off their jeans and waded in until their legs began to buckle from the cold. Then the man staggered off to sit with his back against a rock, and with his legs outstretched and his jeans hanging like a stole around his neck he hollered for her to come get on top. When she did, she could hear the crunch of shells beneath him, and their sharp edges egged her on — she wanted the shells to make little cuts on the backs of his legs, so he would see them in the mirror tomorrow and know for sure that they were real. That she was real. She did not want to be a ghost.
“I thought so,” he said when they were finished, him sitting there in the lee of the rock looking humpbacked and old, his underwear snagged around one knee.
“You thought what?”
“What I told you. It did turn you on.”
The girl thought about saying no, then she thought about saying yes, before striking what she thought would be an enigmatic pose. But the spell she was attempting to cast was undermined by a strong scent, which these two in their theatrics had not noticed. On the other side of the rock they found a dead dolphin, its black and white markings too stark to be real, its eyehole full of flies.
By the time they limped back up the trail, sand spackling the wet between the girl’s legs, the owner of the bed-and-breakfast was waiting for them at the cabin. Checkout time was an hour ago, she said in her tight-lipped Anglo-Canadian brogue. Quickly they cleaned the room as best they could, stuffing the broken chair and torn sheets and bottles and greasy bones under the bed, before stopping at the main house to settle up. The man paid with a credit card that was in his brother-in-law’s name, and when the girl asked about this as they sped back toward the ferry, he said that his brother-in-law was just doing him a favor because he’d been bankrupt and couldn’t get his own credit.
Then he laughed at the wrinkled expression on the girl’s face, told her not to get her panties in a knot. Bankruptcy was just another rite of passage, like getting married and divorced. “And I bet you haven’t experienced those yet either,” he said. “Just wait a few years. Your disaster machinery’s barely had the chance to get itself warmed up.”
STANFORD STRICKLAND, that was his name, a name with the ring of a movie star from the forties. Or a famous highbrow murderer who has all but been forgotten. I could tell my mother was reading it off a small scribbled sheet when she phoned the other day to say that a man with this name was trying to get in touch with me.