I see you everywhere (9 page)

The rear entrance led into a small room that felt dank and medieval. The walls and floors were stone, so the air was always surprisingly cool. In the center stood a long wooden table, rough and gouged, a drain in the floor underneath. Along one wall hung raincoats, ragged elongated sweaters, umbrellas, and scarves. Below these were stacked several cases of wine. I imagined it had once been an icehouse or a larder for onions and turnips.

The rush of cool was a shock. I closed my eyes and felt dizzy. I am going to swoon, I thought, but I didn’t. I began to cry, woefully sorry for myself. I went into the kitchen, set down my glass, and rested my head on the telephone.

Don’t call him, don’t call him, don’t call him, I warned myself then. You will have a cup of tea. You will write Clem. You will go to bed. I stood up, stoic, and followed my orders. I’m good at following orders. Not that I was falling apart. Several evenings, I took advantage of Mars’s technospectacular kitchen and made myself elaborate dinners. I used the mortar and pestle, learned to grind my own spices. On sunny days, I biked to the town beach and worked on a new batch of essays. I put a dictionary and half a dozen very sharp red pencils in my knapsack, along with my towel and sun hat. I worked on my lap, Mars and Leah’s latest
New Yorker
serving as a blotter beneath the manuscript of the moment. “Articulata” was a piece on the proliferation of text in photography.
Might we see this as a symptom of visual insecurity, or is it the strident,
declarative end to our long-running romance with lensmen such as Adams,
Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 55
I See You Everywhere

55

Weston, and even Walker? Might we venture so far as to interpret this trend—
nay, this turning point—as an invigorating divorce of sorts?
I looked up to see a gull eyeing my knapsack, venturing so far as to interpret its bulk—

nay, its grease-stained belly—as a food station. “Well,” I said loudly to the gull, “might we indeed?” I squawked, and the gull scuttled away. I lay back and put the essay aside, weighting it down with my sneakers. I fell asleep in the sun. I dreamed that the author of the pompous essay turned out to be Sam. “That
we
is not royal,” he told me angrily. “It’s entirely actual. Look in your
Chicago.
” It turned out that somehow I had the wrong edition of
The Chicago Manual of Style,
that my copy was way out of date. I would lose my job. When I woke, the gull was back, standing at the edge of my towel and staring at me. The obvious question on his mind was
Is she edible?

I rode back to the house by the longer, scenic route—past the shoreline estates, shingled mastodons waving bright flags—and stopped at the fish market. I love eating fish, but I hate buying it, the raw smell, the iridescent flesh. At Woods Hole, when Clem gave me a tour of the marine biology labs, I said no when she opened the door marked pathology. Eviscerated dolphins, I said, were not my cup of tea. “Sometimes I think they are
precisely
mine,” said Clem.

But here, at this market, I would linger and pretend to be indecisive. It meant I’d get to flirt, quite harmlessly, with the teenage boys at the counter. Jimmy was my favorite. Arms akimbo, he’d make a John Travolta dance of wrapping the fish, then of taking my money and making change. On his days off, I’d see him at the beach with his girlfriend, an au pair who worked in one of the big shingle houses by the water. He smiled and waved whenever he saw me. At twenty-seven, I must have looked middleaged to him, so I liked the way he humored me. Often, in a single day, the banter I exchanged with Jimmy and the other boys was my only conversation. Me and those boys; Clem and her seals. I wrote to her,
Celibacy is
the pits. Mind if I borrow Luke for a month or two?

∞

Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 56 56

Julia Glass

Sam called in the middle of August. Next Saturday, if the weather was fine, he planned to check out a lake north of where I was staying; could he drop by for dinner? What could he bring? “Just yourself,” I said, as my mother had taught me. Bring your earthquakes, I thought as I hung up the phone, hands shaking.

We would have filet mignon, I decided, with parsnip purée and haricots verts à la Marrakesh. I had been browsing through Mars’s recipe file in the study off the master bedroom. (Was this a crime? Were a chef ’s private recipes, I wondered, like a playboy’s little black book?) For dessert, nothing too heavy: compote? granita? sorbet? These were fantasies I could fulfill. Friday night, having put in a good six hours on Hilton Kramer’s blowhard protégé and my perfect tan, I was melting chocolate on the stove when the phone rang.
NO,
I practically shrieked aloud. (Three times that day I had called weather, to recheck the forecast: reassuringly, always sunny and clear.)

“Collect to anyone from Carmen. Thank you for using AT&T.” Followed by a cascade of mellifluous tones.

“CLEMENT,” I heard her yell, impatience loud and clear across the miles of crackling. “I’m in Bar Harbor,” she said. “I’m driving down there, can you give me directions?”

“Here?” I said. “To this house?”

“No, to Cape Canaveral. Of course to there.”

“I thought you were in Labrador until October.”

“Look, Lou, I’m in this handicapped space and I can see the meter maid prowling the lot. I’ll explain when I see you.”

“Clem, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Lou. Now’s not the time. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I have to tell you, tomorrow’s not the greatest—”

“Just get me there from Stamford, okay?” This was Clem’s businesslike voice, stubborn, unswayable. I’d heard her use it on Luke. I gave her directions. I hung up. I scraped out the burned chocolate and started all over again.

Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 57
I See You Everywhere

57

∞

Clem’s car is her trademark. It’s a green 1968 Alfa Romeo convertible, rebuilt from a virtual junk heap by one of her high school boyfriends. The car had been garaged in Bar Harbor before she took the ferry up north. She pampered that car like a lapdog. When our parents asked her to sell it, to raise money for graduate school, she told them she’d sooner work as a go-go dancer in the Combat Zone.

About three the next afternoon, I heard it roar into the driveway. I walked onto the verandah and waited. I was deeply annoyed by then. I’d assumed she would drive overnight and arrive by morning, giving me plenty of time to get rid of her, at least temporarily, by dinner. She heaved a duffel bag out of the trunk and started up the hill. She waved when she saw me. At the top of the steps, she threw her bag down and said, “I left without telling Kurt. I’m in deep shit. Got any aspirin?”

“I’m just terrific,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

Her laugh sounded oddly compliant.

When I came back from the medicine chest, I found her in the kitchen pouring herself a shot of vodka.

“To you. Port in a storm,” she said, and downed it. She took the Tylenol bottle, shook out two, and swallowed them.

“Are you going to explain why you’re suddenly here?” I said. “Because in about two hours Sam is arriving for dinner.”

“The fishin’ magician? Him?”

“Stop being so clever and sit down,” I said. She was pacing. She paced into the living room and sat on the sofa. “I’m in deep shit.”

I was not going to play this game. I sat down across from her and waited. Clem closed her eyes and ran her hands again and again through her hair, combing it. In the humidity of summer, her hair goes feral. She ties it back in a knot and leaves it like that for days.

“What I need most is a shower.”

“That’s fair,” I said, and I showed her upstairs. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 58 58

Julia Glass

The water was still running twenty minutes later, and I was in the kitchen peeling parsnips, when I heard the front door open.

“Wow, some place! Hey you!” Here he was, just like that. I was stunned. In the two months since he’d fallen asleep in my living room, Sam’s hair had turned almost blond, his skin dark as tea. He set down a compound bucket and kissed me on the cheek. I looked down; the water was silver with fish. He grinned. “More in my cooler. Oh man what a day! What an incredibly, fantastically illimitable day.”

“Trout!” was all I could manage to say.

“Cool car. That come with the house?” The front door stood open behind him. His pickup truck was parked behind Clem’s Alfa Romeo—

right up against its backside, like one animal sniffing another. Don’t get paranoid, I told myself.

“That’s my sister’s. She’s here sort of out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting—”

“Well hey, there’s plenty to go around!” He tossed his Mets cap onto the hat rack, where it landed on a silk-flowered pillbox. Then he carried his bucket to the kitchen. I heard him set it in the sink. “Somewhere I can clean up? I smell like a trawler!”

I led Sam upstairs and gave him Mars’s study to change in. Clem’s belongings were strewn in a wanton meander all the way down the hall from the bathroom to the guest room: red sneakers, black lacy briefs, a beat-up copy of
Arctic Dreams.
“Hey,” she said, passing us on her way downstairs. She gave Sam a quick smile. I wish I could describe precisely the way Clem greets men; she sort of inhales her hello, in a terse, shy voice as if she’s run out of breath. Offhand but riveting. (Oh go ahead:
be
paranoid, I told myself.)

“And hey to
you.
A pleasure.” Sam gave her his wide glinty smile in return.

Clem had changed into shorts and a T-shirt. She wore three necklaces, thin gold chains with dangling gilt-edged seashells. “Something else I better tell you now,” she said when I came down. “You promise not to blow up.” A statement, not a plea.

Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 59
I See You Everywhere

59

I gave her a look that promised nothing. I dropped the naked parsnips into a bowl of cold water.

“Sometime probably in like the next half hour, Luke’s coming.”

“Gosh,” I said, “a party.”

“I need you to be serious.”

“I’m trying hard. But what I need is for you to tell me what’s going on.”

“I’ve got to meet him on neutral ground, we’ve got to talk.” Luke was in New Jersey that month, visiting his parents.

“Neutral ground.” I thought about that. “Well, I hope we all like trout.”

“I’ll clean them,” she said. “I’m fast.”

“Clem,” I said, “what aren’t you fast at?”

At five o’clock, we rode to the beach in the Alfa Romeo, Sam and I squashed in the back with a hamper of wine and hors d’oeuvres, Clem driving, Luke beside her. Luke strained at cheerfulness. He had arrived looking queasy and, toward me, embarrassed. He could barely look me in the eye as he presented me with a purple begonia plant.

“Me—bait all the way,” Sam was saying, “and no apologies. I’m too high-wire to stand around in some tempid river up to my neck in mosquitoes.”

“Oh,” said Luke, “I don’t mean to say that the other kinds don’t take skill.” He’d been describing how he once tried fly-fishing, how it seemed more like an art than a sport.

“Now deep sea—that’s the big challenge for me,” said Sam, and then he began to tell what I realized must be his signature story, the time he’d been marlin fishing down in the Keys. This was the second time I’d heard it.

Clem’s jaw was set. She drives fast, on the hormones of a teenage boy, right down the middle of the road. She handles the wheel like a baker handles dough: easy, flip, loose.

Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r2.qxp 7/28/08 7:55 AM Page 60 60

Julia Glass

“Clem,” I said, leaning forward, “we’re not trying to make a plane or anything.” Sometimes this sort of remark will make her drive faster.

“Sorry,” she said, and slowed down a hair. “I tend to forget about the battery. It’s held in for now with a coat hanger, very makeshift.”

Luke frowned, and Clem saw his look. “Lazy, what can I say?”

“Jesus,” he said. “One
day.
”

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“If you knew the first thing about cars,” she said, “you’d know that, at the speed I’m driving over these funky roads, we’re in danger of being blown off the face of the earth.”

“Oh come on.”

“Hey,” she said, raising both hands from the wheel, a habit I hate. “It’s like this: Car rams through pothole, battery crashes loose. Battery hits road and makes sparks. Sparks fly up and enter gas tank.
Kapow!
”

“Then GO SLOW,” I yelled.

“I am.” She let up on the gas again. “Some people make such a big deal about dying.”

“Ah. James Dean,” said Luke, “as we live and breathe.”

Sam laughed loudly, then dove back into his marlin safari.

“Are those the World Trade towers? You can see them from
here
?” said Luke. He screened his eyes and pointed toward the far right horizon.

“Don’t be silly,” said Clem.

“Could be,” Sam said. “You can see for eons on a day like this.”

“Nah. You couldn’t see New York City from here,” said Clem.

“The coastline does strange things,” I said. “You’d be surprised.”

“Strange how?” teased Clem, making an eerie Halloween noise. Luke insisted, “I’m sure it’s New York.”

“Probably oil tanks in New Jersey.”

“Clem, honey, your geography’s warped.”

Luke and Clem stood side by side, glumly staring at the ocean, which glittered with the clarity of a gem. Except for two couples walking their dogs, we had the beach to ourselves. I shook out a large bedspread. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 61
I See You Everywhere

61

“This is heaven, man!” cried Sam, who seemed unaffected by the quarreling lovers’ general gloom. He romped around like one of the dogs, then stopped and crooked his hands into a frame. He looked up through it, as if to shoot a portrait of the sky. “Know what I’d like to be able to capture?” he asked me. “Those incredible amazing blue distances—Titian, van Eyck . . .”