A Marriage Made at Woodstock (31 page)

“Who bought it?” she asked.

“A nice young couple just starting out,” he said. He wondered how long
that
fairy tale would last, and hoped that it did.

Gulls had discovered the new arrival and now they gathered near her feet, thinking she had something for them. As Frederick watched, he realized that he'd been a bit like them at one time. But Chandra didn't have any crumbs to give the gulls, either. Poor buggers. He knew how they felt.

“How's Mr. EPA?” he asked. “The man with a natural forest of hair.” The tip of her nose had turned reddish with the evening chill. She had buried her hands deep into her sweater, clutching it to herself.

“It fizzled out,” Chandra said.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” said Frederick.

They sat quietly, the sound of traffic in the background, the screeching gulls at their feet, the bay unfurling before them in the gathering dusk. He wondered what it would be like to touch her, this stranger sitting next to him, this newly established entity:
a
divorced
woman
. He had never even dated a divorced woman before, although he had certainly dallied with one. Was Chandra now more experienced and understanding? Was she wiser than ever before? He'd even pulled
divorce
up, on his
American
Heritage
Dictionary
III, Software Edition
—310,000 words at his computer fingertips—and discovered that it came from the Latin
divortium
,
to
turn
different
ways
.

“Back in our courting days,” Chandra said now, “I always knew that you hadn't written those poems you sent me. Even at Woodstock, that very first night. I knew.”

Frederick spotted the Peak's Island ferry crossing Casco Bay, a tiny well-lit country moving toward shore, the Enterprise, even. He could make out the silhouettes of people aboard, tiny blips. She was in the wrong line of work, his ex-wife was, if she was that well versed in the poets of the twentieth century, not to mention those easily forgotten poets laureate.

“I see,” he said. “And you went ahead and married me anyway. So much for your ability to judge character.” She giggled, the kind of thing that one might refer to as a
cackle
, after forty or fifty years of marriage. But to Frederick's ears just then, it still sounded sweet and innocent.

“I thought it was charming,” she said. “It meant you cared and you wanted the words to be as good as possible.”

Frederick kept his eyes on the ferry. It was just coming to shore. But he had nodded his appreciation for her assessment, or so she would think. What else could he do? Should he tell her the truth, that many times during those long nights in the Victorian house when he had lain in their marriage bed or on the hellish settee, when he had contemplated the numbers on the clock and waited for time to carry him toward another day, on those nights of crucifixion, nights of impalement, nights of self-flagellation, he had found comfort in the only constant in his life, that at least his estranged wife thought him an excellent poet? Well, it was good this knowledge had come to him at the last, and not the beginning. He wondered why it had come to him at all. What was she doing there? Granted, she had reason to be curious about the FOR SALE sign disappearing. She did have bills to pay in her new life as a divorced woman, a woman who has
turned
a
different
way
. Or had she come to unmask his plagiarizing as a way to expose his last shred of dignity? Well, he had
turned
a
different
way
himself in these many declining weeks, these days rushing past as though he were on a fast-moving train and staring helplessly from the passenger window.

Frederick stood and brushed the seat of his jeans as a safety measure. He had dropped down onto seagull shit more than once in his current life as a bench person.

“I've got a dinner invitation from Herbert and Maggie,” he said. “I'd better be running.”

“Herbert and
Maggie
?” Chandra asked. “I'll be damned.”

Well, let her be damned. Not all the male Stones had been skipped out to sea, flat, useless rocks, never to be retrieved by the sirens who had tossed them there. Some were worth the saving. Although, why
Herbert
Stone
was among the salvageable was still a mystery to Frederick.

“It was nice seeing you again, Chandra,” he said. “If our lawyers ever surface, I suspect they'll have some money for us.” He turned away to follow his well-worn trail along the bay.

“Freddy?” There seemed to be wind in her voice, lifting the word, a youthful vitality that the years could never diminish. What had he thought of her, that first night after they'd made love, when she stood before the window of his old Boston apartment and watched the rain beating against the pane? He had wondered then if he could ever hold on to something so free, so ephemeral, so like the rain as this illusive, fanciful creature.

“Yes?” He stopped and turned again to face her.

“Tell Maggie and Herbert hello.”

Frederick felt a crisis emerging and was horrified to be tested so soon, so close to his having arisen like a phoenix from the ashes of his marriage. But a crisis was winging close by. He felt his lips tremble with the question they longed to ask:
Would
you
like
to
join
us
for
dinner? Oh, please, join us for dinner. Join us forever.
He could almost see the pinwheel starting up again, the streamers turning slowly, then faster and faster until they were a colorful blur.

“I'll tell them,” he said.

“And, Freddy?” He waited. “I need to tell you that I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart. I'm sorry that the fairy tale didn't last. I hope we can learn to be friends.”

“I wrote two of those poems myself,” he said.

“I know,” Chandra said. “‘Ode to Woodstock' was one of them.” The gulls rose up at the noise of her words, their wings full of wind, floating above his head now like old metaphors. She was right. “Ode to Woodstock” had been one of them:
Here
on
this
bounteous
field, we reap the first harvest of our youth.
Or had it been the
last
harvest? They were reaping
something
, was all he could remember now. He saw her hair rise in strands with the wind, her baggy sweater hiding those breasts he had touched so many times in his career as her husband, the skirt hiding her graceful thighs. Would he ever touch her again? Maybe if he agreed to become her friend? After all, they had started as friends, that night at Woodstock, when she had looked up at him with eyes that held a thousand protests in their pupils.
Chandra
, she had told him.
It's Sanskrit for moonlike.

“What was the other poem I wrote?” he asked.

“You wrote it about me the first night we made love,” she said. “The one that begins ‘Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.'” He heard her laughter rising above the strident cry of the shore birds. So he could still make her laugh, could he? That was a poetic art in itself.

“You nailed it,” Frederick said. “That was me, all right.”

He turned back down the beach. He felt his feet moving beneath him, eating into the sand, taking him away from her. Poor E. E. Cummings. Poor uncapitalized bastard. Well, it was no skin off his nose now, was it, if
Frederick
Stone
got credit for the poem? Frederick wondered where the poet's ghost was hovering these days. Maybe he had ended up in Sesame Street Hell where all the letters of the alphabet were huge capitals, poking at him with hot tridents. He heard the Toyota start up, the muffler giving itself away again. And then she was gone. He stopped to watch her taillights disappear into the blue of evening. Seagulls came in quickly and lit upon the gravel where the Toyota had been, scratched among the grit, as if certain there had been a gift in her having been there.

The lights on Peak's Island were just blinking on. He paused at the edge of the strand and stared across at that swell of land emerging from the ocean, as though some huge sleeping creature had allowed a few people to live on one of its humps. Maybe he would write a children's book. He would call it
The
Mystery
of
Dragon
Island
, about a prehistoric beast who fell asleep for a million years, only to waken and find that people are now living on one of its exposed humps. They have built houses, a school, a church. They are very serious about their little knoll of land. Now the dragon cannot move beneath the sea because moving would wash the island people away. So he floats, his limbs growing weak and stiff, his scales crystallizing. But no one on the island suspects the truth. No one knows of his Great Sacrifice. Or is it a sacrifice? Frederick decided that the dragon did the selfless act because he had been lonely before his long nap. Now he can feel the scuffle of feet across his back, the soft caress of picnics, the tickle of baseball games. Every now and then, he is stung by the pinprick of someone's dying, the puncture of the spade, the scraping coffin. But he is not alone. He is never alone.

It wasn't a question of whether or not he could live life without her. Frederick knew now that he could. The question, instead, was
how
he would do it. He picked up an abandoned seashell that lay at his feet. It was not just on Ellsboro Street that homes were being left behind. He put the shell to his ear and there it was, the sound of his blood rushing to and fro, the sound of his heart curled up safely in his ear. His life was beating away by seconds. He tossed the shell far into the night sky and saw it rotate in midair, a universe spinning, Triton's horn airborne. Maybe he should move to an island. There was something clean about the people who inhabited islands, people who kept themselves at a distance. From shore, no one could peer into their windows with cameras. Their entire lives appeared to be lights flickering on the horizon. Their unabridged language, the foghorns one hears in the mists of dawn. To people who are landlocked, even the screams of islanders sound like the sweet songs of dolphins. They sound like fairy songs to those people who have pressed their ears to the sea.
Come
away, O Human child, to the waters and the wild.

On Peak's Island, one solitary light caught his attention, and he wondered whose light it was. He thought of Jay Gatsby, staring at the green light on Daisy's dock. Maybe the light on Peak's Island belonged to a woman he could love, and who would love him back. They would spend the rest of their lives happily together. Or maybe he wouldn't feel the
need
for love if he lived on an island. Perhaps a daily ferryboat ride, a Sea Change per diem, would help fill up the empty spaces. He could rent a room at some boarding house, one that would offer the safe perimeters of his old college room.
Because he had felt safer in those days
, with four walls, with Webster's dictionary on his desk, a radio, a clock, and a teakettle that worked. He would find a boardinghouse run by a big, robust woman with a swaying bosom, who whipped up home-cooked meals and dished out folksy advice. He would live at a place called Emma's Boarding House, and Emma would keep a watchful eye on the type of women he dated. The muscles of her large, maternal arms would tremble as she weeded her summer garden. She would scold him about his shirts not being freshly ironed, the ponytail inching down his back. He would cut all her firewood, an ideal tenant in Emma's opinion. In the early evenings, he would take his dinner at a local restaurant, commenting now and then on how fast the proprietor's children were growing. He would spend late nights in the parlor of Emma's Boarding House, sipping Pernod before a raging fire, listening to the old fishermen tell stories of vessels wrecked at sea, of gold coins swirling in underwater currents, of silver goblets being sucked up by whales. He would politely oblige the unscrewing of a wooden leg in order to gape at where the real leg had once lived. During the day, he would sit before his computer up at the single window in his room, the window overlooking the ocean, the window looking back to landlocked shore. All he'd ever really wanted was a job he could do from the privacy of his own home. He used to think that writing poems would be one way, but there was no money in poesy. The only other way he had, or so it seemed, had been through his accounting degree and his beloved computer. Was that so wrong? He wished now that he'd asked Chandra that very question.

But he didn't
want
to live on a goddamn island. He knew that tears had formed in his eyes, against his permission. He dug a Kleenex out of his pants pocket, the little plastic packet such as they sold at Cain's, and blew his nose. And then, there it was! Above the play of the waves, a familiar voice, barely audible now.

“Listen, Freddy,” Mr. Bator said. “Stop the whining. Nobody likes a loser. Nice guys finish last because they can't bear to hang out with the assholes who finish first. This isn't Auschwitz, son. This isn't Dachau. Pull your chin up and point it at the future.” Frederick stuffed the Kleenex back into his pocket. That was the speech Mr. Bator had given him the day Frederick knew he'd never play football for Portland High. He put his hands into his pockets, for they were growing numb. Down the stretch of beach the melancholy silhouettes of late-feeding gulls rose, then dipped above the surface of water. A few boats bobbed against the skyline. He would shape his new life slowly. Things would look different, come spring. What
had
those Pilgrims been thinking of? He would wait for symbolic spring and for the birds to come winging back up the coast. He would wait for those dark specks of migrating hawks from his car window. Until the trees were green again with leaves, as though the neighborhood men had gone out to their yards and stapled them back on with Home Depot staple guns. He thought of Herbert, waiting for him at Panama Red's, his brother, his family. And Maggie's pretty face rising above a glass of white wine. He felt the immediate need to be with them, to be close to them, to share with them the aging photos of Polly's children. He speeded up his pace, walking past the stop sign where he'd received his first traffic violation, walking toward the cluster of lights he knew to be Panama Red's.