In his vision Marti had been leaving to go grocery shopping, Peter’s list in hand, getting into her rusty little yellow car, her blonde hair tied in two long pigtails. She wore silver dream catcher earrings, a plaid car coat she’d made out of the same material as the worst couches in existence, a knee-length red and white striped skirt, black tights, black ankle boots, a black rolled-brim hat. Somehow, on Marti, this didn’t look dreadful but fetching: a country punk chic that managed, impossibly, to be stylish as well as original. Smiling, sure of herself, as he’d never once seen her, she waved goodbye to Peter and Julian, who didn’t squall at his mother’s departure, solemnly sieving sand through a dented percolator coffee basket, knowing she’d be bringing home treats.
She reversed down the driveway, tires screeching, and Peter sat on the edge of the sandbox with Julian and played with percolator parts, until the real Marti interrupted, asking, “What are you thinking about?” And he hadn’t told her, had run his fingers through her hair and smiled. Maybe she’d been afraid to tell him about the little stars, afraid he’d say she was crazy. It had never even occurred to Peter, how his silences might have hurt her.
He’d closed his eyes again and watched as future-Marti hung laundry, drove Julian to daycare, started tomatoes in flats to grow and sell to the island cottage folk. She invented cookie recipes from scratch, mainly successful, although there was one problematic experiment containing canned pineapple that exploded in the oven. When they put it outside the back door, even the usually indiscriminate stray dogs didn’t touch it. Peter, who had taught himself how to cook over the years, perhaps also, like saving the aluminum percolator parts, in anticipation of the children, made most of the dinners.
He shuddered with longing. But what if it was her self-destructiveness that he found seductive? The doomed Marti, the Marti who fucked everything in pants and then laughed at them. The one who was as surprised as he was, to find herself loving Peter. The erstwhile coke head, the brilliant drunk? Maybe she didn’t share his vision of their lovely possible future at all. Maybe that had been his job, yet another he’d neglected, like taking the keys away from Josie’s husband himself, and growing tomatoes, and inviting Marti to stay in the house no matter what people said, and picking a smiling yellow five-pointed star out of the crumpled sheet and putting it in her hand, saying, “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”
Peter knew he’d never find her, not unless he gave something up, some preciously adhered to delusion or illusion, as much a part of him by now as his hair, which, truth to tell, was less a part of him than it used to be. For some reason this gave Peter hope. If he could lose his hair, perhaps he could lose his self-importance, his stubborn pride. Delusions could fall out each morning, come out in clumps in his comb. Marti had once said he looked cute balding, that he was lucky he had the right shape of skull for it. As she shared her peanut butter sandwich with him, told him the names of wild flowers he’d never learned.
The Dark Lake
I’M SITTING AT MY DESK, writing in a ledger. Aromatic geranium, anise hyssop, flowering amaranth. The moon is blue. I keep writing poetry in the margins of the ledger. Of course, the order sounds like poetry, too. Perennial geranium, hyssop, love-lies-bleeding; the moon is blue, its soft blue night time shadows; night sounds, cat prints, whispering into this office like stringed instruments, cellos, moon shadows. Everyone is sleeping and sometimes I can almost hear the sounds of their breathing through the walls. Katya will have her arm flung over her head, her head turned sideways, facing the damp curling tendrils of her armpit hair. At night her skin releases its scent, like a flower. Katya’s flowery vapour fills the room. She likes her smell, too. Her white sleeveless nightgown is covered with small flowers.
I want tea. Katya is not awake to make it for me. I long for her nurturing but I’ll have to make it myself. My name is Jim. I am in love. But not with Katya. I have been in love with Katya before and will be again, but just at this moment, it’s the dark swamp song of sex I want from her. I don’t wake her; I know she went to bed tired.
Plums and tea. I go down the stairs into the dark ticking kitchen, plug in the kettle. I bring my ledgers down with me, to write while I wait for it to boil. It’s hot, even at night, in July. In the daytime the bay glisters turquoise. Snake Station. Places here there’s still nothing but rattlesnakes and poison ivy.
I write. The ledger is full of blue lines, blue lines that become soft and blurred when wet. I know this because if I leaf back several years, there are places where my tears have fallen and stained the page. Those are the places where I have written letters to Katya in the margins. “Plump beloved, when will you come?” When I’d finished my weeping I blew smoke rings to amuse her. They were only tears, after all. In the morning there was still an order to fill out, to get ready for shipping, although it’s been years that I like to work at night. Other places the blue lines are blurred from the sweat splashing down off my forehead, because it was so hot, like today. I think of Katya, upstairs asleep, curtained in flesh and flowery fabric, her long hair tumbled across the pillow. She fascinates me because she is so fat. All that flowered flesh contains secrets, coded in another language. Sometimes, when we are making love, or even when she is just sleeping beside me, her body imparts one of its secrets, almost in spite of itself. Sometimes the flood of orgasm or the pull of a dream softens the edges of her skin so that the secrets slide out like puddles. Out of an arm, a thigh or a knee. And a secret slips into me, my contours softened also from love or dreaming. Because it is only through the skin that these secrets can come. It is nothing you can read in a book, or, say, a seed catalogue. Even if they’d print it, which they probably wouldn’t, it couldn’t be written. It is an alphabet that only lodges in the flesh.
The dark lake. It is summer and everything smells. It smells of strawberries and flowers and hay and pollen and sand and rocks and rattlesnakes. I want to be happy. I want a bath. I want the house to be clean, which it never is, unless I do it myself, at two in the morning, before I settle down with my plums and tea, my ledgers and packing slips. After filling my orders I go down to the dark lake and walk around it. Spring fed, it’s not much more than a pond really, cut off from the bay proper by a densely wooded hollow. It takes maybe ten minutes to go all the way around. A rocky basin, cut out by a glacier a million years ago. I sit on my rock, looking into the lake. A dragonfly comes and settles on the rim of my coffee mug. I look in and see my face, framed by the mug’s rim, decorated by spun gold insect wings. Another face greets me from the lake. The face of a benevolent water monster; I always see her in my mind’s eye when I’m here, looking quite inappropriately cartoony and Disneyesque. I feel her presence, always sense she wants to speak to me, but I’m still afraid. I lie on the rock and feel it heat up, feel how the sun warms my back even when I’m face to the heavens on stone. Today I will not swim either, although she calls, and I am almost in love.
“Plump beloved, when will you come?” Katya reads aloud from my ledger, smiling. Both Katya and my accountant are always entertained by my daydreams, my inability to leave a ledger crisp with numbers, to always muddle it with poetry in the margins, love letters to my wife. He’s my therapist, too; he better be, the amount he gets paid. Katya is forty now, tells me she has already been healed of everything that made her small and pithy and outspoken. She reads my notebook, smoking. Now she wears huge flowered tent dresses, reads, tends our children, plays baseball, grows her hair long and extremely curly, and makes weather. She makes the weather for my business, although she doesn’t have to do it too often, just once or twice a year. She makes a cloudburst in the summer, when it hasn’t rained for three weeks. I could just run the hoses, but I’m a miser for my electricity bill, and besides, I think it’s so cool to have a weather-making wife. More importantly than rain in July, she can put off the first killing frost by a day or two so I have time to mulch the delicate perennials or bring them in. She has her store, which I rarely go to; she too: it’s only open Thursday and Saturday afternoons, and can only be approached by boat. It’s on a river, the same river, Katya says, where she used to eat blue crab with her mother and uncle, childhood birthdays. The river moves through her life, a page at a time. It is always there. To Katya it is not the bay that is important, or the lake, but the river. At the store she plays with the children, and arranges her merchandise. She sells vortices, through which one may enter other worlds at will. No one knows this except Katya and the children and me. I used to think it was a crafts store, full of hand-painted cushion covers, grapevine wreaths, dried flowers, potpourri. Katya’s body whispered the truth in a dream: each wreath is a threshold; each person who buys one opens a door to their own possibilities. My wife drives to IGA for steaks and to Stedman’s and Bi-Way for an endless stream of things the children need: sunscreen, new sand shovels, ointment for cuts and bruises, hats, sneakers, sandals, UFO shorts, swimming pools, Band-Aids. I stay home and nap on the shield rocks by the lake.