“Hate to throw things away that will have a later use. I could buy cheap plastic for the kids when they’re old enough to use sand toys, the kind of things I sell and then have to clean off the beach every fall, already split and faded. Truth is, these old metal percolators will be perfect; you can use the coffee baskets as sieves. These will last for years—they already have.”
Of course, there was one small snag in this offspring fantasy; you had to have a mother first. And as far as women go, there hadn’t really been anyone besides Marti. Not exactly mother material.
He was holding the book again, had removed it from its cupboard nest without even realizing it. He’d been right to be spooked by the mostly empty cupboards, to leave them alone. They were haunted, he was suddenly sure, by the demonic powers of this seemingly innocuous thing he was holding in his hand just now. He dropped it in a hurry, shaking again. Damn. He needed something to keep from talking to himself, from thinking a cheap paperback called The King in Yellow was a dimensional portal activated by human touch. As he was thinking now. He needed an extra little job for the winter, when the marina was closed, as it was now. And it would help with the more conventional panic over the bills. Never mind the market gardening; that would be the wife’s thing.
He and Marti shouldn’t have had sex on the 5-5-5 bags. If they had gone to the house, she’d have stayed. “In our family we throw everything of value away.” Weren’t those the words he’d used, to his own father? Get into hopeless debt buying back the marina, throw Marti away, as though the property wasn’t useless without her. Wifeless. Kidless. Barren.
He’d thought she was that kind of girl, adventurous, finding odd locations a little thrill. And maybe she had; but sex in a store room is the kind you enjoy and then move on from. It was so stunningly clear; why hadn’t he seen it before? “There’s always a part of you that knows the truth, however hard you try to shut it up,” Peter told the book sadly. Perhaps, he thought, it was the haunting that had value in this place, and not the stony beach, the still blue lake, the loons calling from between the piney islands. “We always throw everything of value away in our family,” he whispered again. But not the marina, and not the book. He’d keep it forever now, treasure it for its moment of insight. He hadn’t asked her to stay because she was a mess, even though he’d known by then he loved her.
In the storage room there was a wheeled, folded up cot: kept there for the nights you have a fight with the wife, Peter thought, patting the book in his jacket pocket, but really, he didn’t know why the cot was there. He and Marti never had sex on the cot, in spite of it actually harbouring a remarkably mildew free mattress
“A bag of 5-5-5 doesn’t have a mattress, it just emulates one. Sort of,” Peter remarked. “Since the cot is for cottagers too drunk to drive their boats back out to the islands after wandering back from the bar.”
He’d never asked for anyone’s keys, even the few times he should have. He’d been too intimidated to take keys away from drunks larger than himself, drunks deeply invested in their own competence. Pissed. Blasted. Wrecked. “Note descriptive words,” Peter said, “They’re very accurate.” Every winter they were hauling frozen snowmobilers out of the lake. The sober frozen snowmobilers were often still slightly alive, at least alive enough to be rushed off to the county hospital. But the frozen dead ones had always, without exception, been pissed, blasted, wrecked. And never once a drunk dead female snowmobiler. Home with the youngsters they were, knitting and purling lavender worsted booties. Much too sensible to take the snowmobile out after consuming half a bottle of vodka, complete with exclamations about how well it made her drive. If a man would let anyone take his keys away, it would be his wife.
Peter knew, he’d seen it: the largest, drunkest, most obstreperous man giving his keys to the teeny, tiny, soft spoken, completely sober wife, wailing toddler in tow. Name was Josie. Got the kid out of bed, wrapped him in a blanket, and drove like hell just so she could snag hubby at the boat launch where Peter let him keep his ancient Snow Cat, said, “Give me the keys.” Why hadn’t she let him crash through the ice? He just drank the money anyway. Josie had been one hell of a driver, Peter remembered, used to race when she was young, and drive in demolition derbies. If anyone could drive the icy back roads to the marina in the dead of night on bald tires, with a screaming baby in the car seat, Josie could. If she wanted to have a couple of beers and take the snowmobile out on the ice, Peter was pretty sure she’d handle it. But Josie never felt safe enough to leave the baby home with Dad, go out alone on the lake at night, get some air in her hair. Daddy might drink half a bottle of vodka and drop the iron on the baby’s head. And not enough money for sitters; besides, he’d be insulted, think she was out of her mind hiring someone when he was in the house.
Would Marti do any of those things? Not bloody likely. Marti, with her bravado and love of self-medication of all kinds, was, like the big, drunk, egotistical man in question, the type who’d tangle herself and the Snow Cat around an island pine. If it was sense that men were after when they looked for a wife, to compensate for their own lack of same, Marti would’ve been exactly the bad choice Peter had so often told himself she was.
Years younger, she’d been a summer employee. They’d had an affair, and Peter had surprised himself by falling in love. He’d wanted to know her then, had gotten to know her, too, much more than he’d ever known anyone. Had ever wanted to know.
It was March; soon time to open the marina. Or at least, start preparing to open it. Peter discovered he could care less. All the details of management and maintenance he used to obsess over, even enjoy, seemed as turbid today as the water-coloured sky. “Even if I wanted to be like that again,” Peter said, “I no longer know how. That part of me is a lost shirt, gone overboard from an outboard, sunk to the bottom. Or gone with Marti, more likely.”
Marti’s liquid body, made out of stars, arching over him on the floor of the store room, the stars falling out of her body, a dark sea, stars floating in it, five pointed stars he could pick up and stick on the walls of the bedroom to entertain the children when they came: luminous, glow-in-the-dark stars. They jumped out of his hand, sat beside him and Marti on the bed, watched them make love approvingly. Smiled and told jokes to the lovers, in fact.
How terrifying it had been, the surrender required, the hard bitten edges of himself he’d have to give up to say, yes, I want this. Except that he hadn’t. He’d pretended it wasn’t real. And now he couldn’t go back to sleep, no matter how much he wanted to. And he couldn’t have Marti, either, because she was gone. A goner.
Faced with the unknown, there was only one thing to do. Ask it what it wanted, feed it. “What d’you want then?” he asked the book, “How do I get my real life back?”
Maybe she’d seen the stars too; he’d never actually thought of that. She’d played the reckless babe for him, lying beneath him on the stony shore of an uninhabited island, her skin smelling of pine woods and salt and wind in spite of the vodka they’d been putting away. Maybe it wasn’t a choice; perhaps portals opened each time Marti made love, funneling the lovers into more beautiful dimensions. And perhaps each and every one of her lovers, and he knew there had been quite a few, had closed his eyes to a beauty so much larger than he could fathom. I’d drink too much too, Peter thought, and remembered how, making love on their island, he’d briefly seen their future spread out before him, pretty and comforting as a star quilt. It was the last time, the time before she left without saying goodbye or even leaving a note. Leaving her few things behind. He’d thrown them away. Except for the book.