“Can I try?” she asked.
“Sure,” Vance said. They moved farther down the shore. It was the perfect Nantucket summer evening-light breeze, piping plovers and oystercatchers, the sinking sun.
Vance wrapped his arms around Love from behind and spoke softly into her ear. “Hold your hands like this and push down. There you go, push.” His lips grazed her ear, sending a warm buzz through her body.
Love brought up six clams.
“Show me again,” she said. She loved the feel of his arms around her.
They collected a bucket of clams, and then Vance laid a blanket out in the sand. He showed Love how to hold the clam knife, how to slide it between the tight halves of the clam to pry it open. Unlock the clam. They ate the sweet, salty clams right out of the shell, drank a bottle of wine, and watched the sunset.
The more Love discovered about Vance, the more he impressed her. Around work, he skulked and moped and bristled with negative energy. But away from work he was sincere, kind. He had interests: he clammed and fished, and scalloped in the fall; he could play rag tunes on the piano. He’d traveled all through Southeast Asia and he knew fifty Thai words. He taught Love to say hello, sawadee kah!
The first two weeks there was No Sex, because Love was ambivalent about entering a relationship. Vance told her he didn’t want children, but Love had hoped for a complete and total stranger-someone like Arthur Beebe-who would impregnate her and be gone. Relationships could get sticky.
The night she gave in, they were sitting in the driveway of Love’s house on Hooper Farm Road after an evening at Mitchell’s Book Corner (Vance loved to read; he kept a list of books and checked them off when he finished, something Love did as well). Before Love got out of the car, Vance asked her to touch his head.
“You always look at my head like you’re afraid of it. So I want you to touch it.” He dipped his chin, and the bare, brown expanse of his skull pointed at her, a blank face. Love hesitated; Vance’s head did scare her.
“You want me to touch your head?” she said.
“Yes.”
She expected it to be cool and smooth, like a marble. But it was warm, and she felt the beginnings of stubble. She ran her hands over it the way one might rub a pregnant woman’s belly: what was in there? Something mysterious, unknowable.
Love invited Vance inside.
Now, two more weeks had passed and they’d made love eleven times. Vance frequently spent the night at Love’s place; they developed a routine, a way of being together.
Love was lying with her feet on the headboard dreaming of a tiny brown baby when Vance asked her to read his published short story.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to know what you think.”
“Okay,” Love said. “I’ll read it.” There was still time before they had to go to work, and the story had been on her nightstand since the Fourth of July. Love was wary, however. Her job at the magazine in Aspen taught her all about writers and their hypersensitivity to anything that might be construed as criticism.
“Thank you.” Vance whipped the story off the nightstand and handed it to Love. A ring from her water glass marked the first page.
“Are you going to watch me while I read it?”
“I’m not going to watch you,” Vance said. “I’ll read, too.” He picked an Atlantic Monthly off the floor.
“Fine,” Love said.
“Fine,” Vance said.
“The Downward Spiral” by Vance Robbins
There was little hope left for Jerome. His life was closing in on him like the walls of a cramped tunnel. Jerome needed to break out before the walls crushed him, but he knew that wouldn’t happen. He was filled with hate.
Jerome’s life of misery began when his mother, Lula, threw his father out of the house when Jerome was in kindergarten. His father had just lost his seventh job in a row. Lula herself had had the same job since before Jerome was born. She was a car mechanic. Fiats and MGs were her speciality.
Love looked up from the story. Vance flipped through the pages of the Atlantic. He caught her eye over the top of the magazine, like a spy at a bus stop.
“What do you think so far?” he asked.
“It’s good,” Love said. “I like how the mother is a car mechanic. Is your mother a car mechanic?” Here was one thing about their newly established routine that baffled Love: Vance never talked about his family or his home. He seemed to be without a past. When Love asked where he grew up, he said, “Here and there. The East mostly.” He had majored in American literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, which he called “Fairly Ridiculous.” But there was no mention of parents, siblings, or a hometown; the one time she’d been over to his cottage, she saw a picture of two people she thought might be Vance’s parents standing arm in arm in front of a split-level house with aluminum siding. When she asked him. “Are these your folks?” he didn’t answer.
Vance didn’t answer the question about his mother either. No surprise there.
“Keep going,” Vance said. “A lot happens.” He went back to the Atlantic and Love continued reading.
Lula worked at Hal Duare’s Garage until six in the evening, and then she stopped at JD’s Lounge for a bloody Mary or two before she made her way home, smelling of motor oil and Tabasco sauce. Jerome was in charge of making dinner-bologna sandwiches mostly-and he fell asleep in front of the TV. Some mornings he woke up still in his clothes, his back stiff from the floorboards. Jerome always brought home A’s from school, but Lula wasn’t impressed. She glanced at his papers briefly before letting them waft into the trash can.
Love looked up. “I can’t believe the way some people parent.”
“Tell me about it,” Vance said.
Love laid the pages over her bare breasts. “Parenting is such a daunting job,” she said. She pictured her egg: a girl waiting for a date.
Vance closed his magazine. “I imagine it will be.”
“Will be?” Love said. “But not for you. You don’t want children.”
“I never said that.”
“Yes, you did,” Love said. “I asked you when we were on the roof on the Fourth of July, did you want children, and you said no.”
Vance maneuvered his arms around Love so he was holding her. He had muscular arms and nice hands with blossom pink palms. He kissed the corner of her eye. “You know I’m crazy about you.”
Love’s skin itched, as if she were about to break out in a rash. “I thought you definitely didn’t want children. You hate all the children at the Beach Club.”
“That’s an act,” Vance said. “My reputation as a grump must be upheld.”
“So all this time I thought you hated children, you secretly wanted some of your own.”
“I could see having a kid someday,” he said.
“You’ve changed your mind, then. I can’t believe this. Men aren’t allowed to change their minds.”
“I think it might be nice to have a kid someday.”
“You think it might be nice,” Love said. “Having children isn’t nice, Vance. It’s an enormous responsibility that lasts for the rest of your life.”
“I know,” Vance said. “Listen, I’m not saying I want to have a baby in nine months.”
“You don’t want to have a baby in nine months,” Love said. “Of course not. Ridiculous thought.” Her voice was reaching its upper registers, its screechy tones. She wondered if he thought this was a pleasant surprise, like the ragtime piano. Surprise, I love children!