People on the beach were often in pairs, two divers in suits weighed down with gear occupied with buckling or unbuckling their things, or two hefty bearded men in shorts exercising side by side, or a middle-aged man and wife with straight brown legs and spotless sweatshirts and shorts walking at a brisk pace, or a muscular blond student, glasses pushed back on his head, in a chair reading a heavy leather-bound book while his blond girlfriend lay near him on a towel. If I was not in the car but down on the beach, from a certain spot I could look up and see the little seaside train station, trains coming in with ringing bells, thick crowds edging the platform.
* * *
There is a train near here, too, a freight train that takes so long to go by that I have forgotten all about it by the time it has passed. It, too, is easier to hear late at night, when the road is quiet and the rhythmic click of the wheels bounces off the hillside behind it. Or in wet weather, when the tracks seem so near they might lie just out of sight beyond the trees.
This morning I ache all over because I worked so hard yesterday cleaning the house and preparing a complicated meal for one guest, a lone man who seems all the more lone because he is so tall and thin and has such a simple name, Tom, and who, maybe for the same reason, always gives the impression of being a quiet man though he talks quite readily. The dinner went off fairly well despite the fact that Vincent’s father was such a distraction to us, sitting in an armchair to my right and asking for pieces of my food.
So much time has gone by since I started working on this novel that first I left my city apartment and moved in with Vincent, and then his father moved in with us, causing extra work and bringing a succession of nurses into the house to care for him.
During the same time, a meadow I used to pass on my walks was replaced by a small townhouse development. The meadow had many wildflowers, and at least four different varieties of grasses. It had a small grove of spindly saplings at one end, and at the other a great oak tree set back against the rocky hillside near a trolley shed. Now the oak is gone, and the row of townhouses sits back against the hillside. In front of it, where the meadow lay, is only the fresh black asphalt of a new driveway and a considerable stretch of bare lawn.
On another empty lot outside our village, a car wash has been built. And only a few months ago, a large project of residential housing and offices was approved despite the opposition of almost everyone in the town. It will occupy some wild acres down the road from here where the chicken farmer used to roam around when he was a boy. The chicken farm has also closed down its operation and the farmer makes birdhouses to sell in his roadside store. These are only a few of the changes.
We have a new nurse for Vincent’s father, and she is on duty downstairs now. She seems responsible and a hard worker, and more cheerful than the last, though something of a hypochondriac. She wears a tattoo on her upper arm that I haven’t yet dared to examine. At the moment, the old man is demanding a different lunch from the lunch I wrote down for him. The whole time I am up here I am also listening to them with one ear. The old man accepted her very sweetly this morning, and put his arms around her when she came, though it is only her second day. She whispered to me, “I think he likes my hair.” If she does not keep him distracted, though, he will begin asking for me.
I have had almost constant problems with these nurses. Although they like the old man, they don’t last very long. One came only half the time, came late when she did come, and offered a different excuse each time — illness, car trouble, a heavy menstruation, the change to daylight saving time, etc. Another contracted to work the whole summer and then, after a few weeks, abruptly told me she was going off to the Caribbean Islands to teach cooking. When I protested, she became indignant and disappeared altogether without even coming to say goodbye to Vincent’s father, who continued to be puzzled by this no matter what we told him.
In the living room below me now, the nurse is coughing and picking out a tune on the piano, maybe to let me know it is time for me to stop work and relieve her. One of them used to come up and announce the time if I was five minutes late going down. Another just let the old man begin climbing the stairs, though it was so hard for him.
* * *
He told me, after several days had gone by, that he had left at daybreak after the first night because he did not know if I would want to wake up with him. Later that morning he went to see Ellie in the library. He wanted her advice. He wanted to know if she thought he should wait for me to come out of my class, if he should stand by the path to my classroom building and meet me. Ellie said of course he should. He wanted to know if it would make me uncomfortable. She said of course it would not. So it was with Ellie’s encouragement that he waited for me later, carefully posed, holding or smoking his pipe. Ellie told me all this months after.
The second time he came, he stayed on into the morning and spent the day with me. We went walking on the beach. As he climbed down to the sand over the rocks I could not look at him, though I was not sure why. We walked a long way past the rocks and over the drifts of broken seashells without talking. I was uncomfortable. I thought he was silent out of timidity. I made efforts to talk to him, but it was hard. The silence between us was so thick that words were not so much spoken as forced through it. I stopped trying.
* * *
I did not know what his last name was, and I was not sure of his first name. If it was what I thought it was, it was unusual and I had never known anyone with such a name. I was embarrassed to ask him. I hoped I would see it or hear it somewhere.
I wonder, now, why I did not call someone up and ask. There were at least two people I could have called. But I did not know them very well, as I would later. It is easier for me to see why I did not ask him directly. The moment had passed long before when I could have done that without feeling foolish.
I did not find out what his name was for several days, because during these days I was almost always alone with him. And because I did not have a name for him, he continued to seem like a stranger, even though he was very quickly becoming so close to me. When I did learn his name, I was learning the name of someone like a husband, a brother, or a child to me. But because I learned it only after I knew him so well, his name also seemed strangely arbitrary, as though it did not have to be that one but could have been any other.
* * *
Two days after I met him, I came home late and went to bed and lay there in the dark, nervous, thinking about him, wishing he were with me, then sleeping lightly for only a moment or two before waking again to think about him. Suddenly, after two in the morning, a car roared up the hill past my window, headlights swam over the room, the engine died, and the headlights went off. I looked out the window by my bed and saw the white hood of a car parked beyond the big cedar in front of the house. I heard a voice speaking, and I could distinguish some of what it said: “I want you … I can’t … this carousel … this old carousel … into the city…” I was sure he was the one talking to himself out there, because the car was white, it roared, and it had stopped outside my house. I thought that if he did this, it might mean he was a little crazy. But I did not yet know him very well. I did not know if he was crazy. I only knew he became distracted from time to time, and forgot what he was doing and where he was. At this point, I was willing to accept whatever I might learn next, though it frightened me a little.
I put on some clothes. I walked out by the side of the house and under the cedar tree along the driveway to the edge of the street. But now I saw that the car was smaller than his. It was not his car after all. Now I was frightened for a different reason — this was a stranger out of control, even more unpredictable. I turned back toward the house, the headlights came on again and caught me, and the voice said, “Are you all right?” I stopped walking and asked, “Who are you?” and the voice said something like “I’m just trying to sort myself out.”