Rubicon Beach (33 page)

The old man lived in a stone house that had been built a hundred years before by a farmer who grazed cattle on wild moorish grasses. Some in Penzance speculated that maybe the old man grazed on wild moorish grasses too. He was going on seventy but looked eighty-five: stooped and utterly white, with a long beard, like a troll that lived beneath a bridge. He didn’t say much when we came with the groceries, just nodded to Anne, but we heard him talking up a storm when we left. He obviously believed the only person who understood what he said was himself and no one would have contradicted it. He had been in the house alone nearly thirty years, since the day in 1923 when I was probably standing in the dirt road waiting for Pop and Bart to return from out west and the old man, then about my age now, was washing up on the beach near Land’s End where there’s barely any beach at all. They found him caught in a thicket of trees bashing back and forth against the coast, not a few trees but a whole woods of them, as though someone had sailed the forest to shore, guiding it from the highest perch. Though they found him alone, they said he constantly called through a fevered night for a nameless girl with a deathless face. 

Lake and Anne borrowed a car one Saturday and, at her suggestion, drove out to the tip of England. Also at her suggestion, they took the old man with them. “He’s a fellow American, after all,” she said, “you two can have a grand talk.” Lake answered that the old man seemed to have his grandest talks with himself, to which Anne replied, “Then you may each have your own grand talk.”

In fact the two men did have an interesting talk, but only after an hour of riding in silence, when they got out of the car and slowly made their way to the edge of the rocks that over looked the blue sea, not far from where the old man had been found among his tangle of trees on the beach three decades before. Clearing his throat and expecting nothing, Lake said to the old man, “I was born in America as well, you know.” For a moment he thought he hadn’t been heard.

But the old man slowly turned to look up at him, a wild comic look in his eyes and his mouth parted in both skepticism and anticipation. Then he said something curious to Lake. “America One,” he asked, “or America Two?”

“I’m sorry?”

“America One or America Two?” the old man said again.

Lake shrugged in confusion. “Uh . . . just America.” He tried to smile, and shrugged again.

“I never could get that straight either,” the old man said, nodding confidentially. He added, “I was also born in just America.”

Lake looked past the old man to Anne, who was trying to keep from laughing. “Exactly where in America,” he said, “are you from?”

The old man waved at the sky. “Beyond it,” he said.

“Where the annexes run out.” He turned to Lake. “You been out there?”

Lake shook his head. “No, I don’t believe so,” he said slowly. He thought for a moment and said, “I’m from Illinois,” with the sinking feeling this would explain nothing. For a moment the old man narrowed his eyes as though Illinois was a name so unremembered as to be alien, but then he nodded and just looked at the sea. In the distance was a lone lighthouse and for a while the three contemplated it, Anne pointing out that it had been deserted for many years, unmanned and unlit. Sometimes the old man seemed unsteady where he stood; there was always a gust from the sea against which Lake and Anne had to support him upright, taking him by his arms. When they were ready to go Lake said, almost whimsically, “So this is the end of the Old World. What will the end of the New World look like?” And the ancient by his side raised his white face to the younger man and whispered, “I know what it looks like. I’ve been there. I’ve
been
there.”

I watched autumn pass. The Penzance winter was surprisingly mild. There were the constant sheets of rain but not the marrow-chilling cold of Chicago. The tide was in nearly all season, sealing off St. Michael’s from the rest of the city and keeping the boats docked. I’d go down to the water to do the books twice, maybe three times a week, and the rest of the days I’d sit in the guest room by the fire looking out to the Channel. Sometimes Anne would sit with me. She was waiting for something from me. She never regarded me with reproach, but the hope was unmistakable. 

Sometimes I would nap in the afternoons, up in my room under a quilt Anne’s mother had given me, with a candle burning on my table. More and more I was drifting away from myself; beneath the lids of my eyes I could see out the window the black smoke and blazing green grasses of the moors and the dazed barricades of rain. I barely heard her when she came in one day, standing at the foot of my bed; only at the last moment did I find the presence of mind not to call out Leigh’s name. She was shaken and breathing hard; she thought I was sleeping. She slowly pulled off the sweater she wore, looking at it in her hands for several moments before she laid it down and unfastened the rest of her clothes. As though just thinking of it, she went to the door and locked it, but with no haste; she didn’t actually expect to be interrupted. The whole inn was quiet. There were no sounds from the kitchen below, nothing from outside, just the falling walls of rain. Soon she was naked and standing at the foot of the bed. Her body was fuller and browner than I would have expected of an Englishwoman. It was a long time since I’d seen a woman this way but now it didn’t seem so long, it didn’t seem long enough. A distant part of me wanted her but the heart I lived with these days couldn’t find its own door to beckon her in. I knew that for her to have done this was courage beyond fathom; she was struggling to continue looking at me, to not lower her eyes, though to have lowered her eyes would have been to confront her own nakedness, which was another courage too. I could not find the door for her. I sat up and tried to explain it to her.

“I’m thirty-eight, thirty-nine,” she heard the mathematician say with his usual imprecision concerning personal statistics. He pulled back from the light of the candle on the table as though to hide behind his dark lndianness in the darkness of the room. “I look in the mirror sometimes,” he said, “and I think I’m fifty or fifty-five.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how I got so damned tired. When I was younger I despised anyone who gave up so easily, but that was when the world sang to me, that was when there was a number for everything. I couldn’t imagine I’d ever feel this old and this tired.” Now he leaned into the light of the candle. “It isn’t your fault. It isn’t that you’re unbeautiful, it isn’t that you don’t deserve what you want. The humiliation is mine, not yours. In a musicless moor at the end of a numberless world all I can manage now is to grieve for what I once felt and for how much I felt it. How is it I’m so old now and I don’t hear the music anymore, I don’t find the numbers anymore?” He said, “Please.” She watched him pull the quilt from around him and offer it to her; fighting back her tears, she picked up her clothes and put them on. It seemed to take her forever to pick up her clothes and put them on as he sat watching her. Then she went from the room, taking curious care not to slam the door behind her; she was the kind who would never slam even the doors that others were closing to her. She got her daughter from the hearth in the guest room below and the two made their way through the drizzle back to their cottage on the other side of town. Sometimes she would see him in the weeks and months that followed but they didn’t speak anymore and they didn’t walk on the moors. In the spring she sold the cottage and moved to a town in Devon.

After that the long distant part of who he had been drifted so far it was out of sight. He held to it in the way of a man who holds the string of a kite that is so high he can’t see it any more, knowing that any moment it may break and the only way he will know it has broken will be by the sudden ripple of the string as it dances slowly groundward. Then he stands watching a fragile white line winding across the country before him and wondering if the end lies in a pool or a bush. There seemed no way to draw back in the long distant part of who he was. He was terrified by the prospect that some current in the air would thwart him, he was terrified he would draw it in and nothing would be on the other end. Better to risk a sudden collapse of the line on its own. Of course something in the cordiality of Penzance changed when Anne Bradshaw left; though no one blamed him directly, the people of the town couldn’t help the sense of violation, the sense that this dark Yank had divided the town’s present life from its future life, England and events having already divided present life from earlier life. Mrs. Easton became flustered in his presence. Lake considered leaving the Blue Plate Inn and then wondered if this would compound the insult. If I had compromised her, he thought of Anne, I’d be wildly popular; he told himself this with sardonic indignation. But lie knew the sardonicism was false and uncalled for, let alone the indignation.