Waveland (21 page)

She turned and grinned. “Yeah, I guess so. You don't mind, do you?”

Well, he did mind. But then again, this was Gail, mercurial Gail. She was able to move in a big hurry. Gail had called Newton, after all. Maybe Vaughn wasn't the first to imagine the possibilities.

“I don't like him,” Greta said, when he got her up and they went downstairs to wave good-bye as Newton and Gail
headed out of the driveway. “I didn't like him the minute I laid eyes on him.”

“He's fine,” he said. “Wave.”

“He's a snot-nosed somebody,” she said, waving at the car. “He's real proud of himself. Far prouder than he need be.”

“He's done very well,” he said.

“He's a snot,” she said.

“He came all the way down here to get Gail,” Vaughn said.

“I know that,” Greta said. “So gallant. Couldn't she have sort of flown up there on her own? You don't care about her going off with him now?”

“It's odd,” Vaughn said. “It's very odd. But it's a load off. At least for the moment.”

“That's what you think of her—a load?”

“Quit it,” he said. “I love her, but you've been around her awhile, what do
you
think?”

“I think she's a load, but that's me. I never was in love with her.”

“No, you got it right,” he said. “I don't imagine it's over, though.”

“She's going to call and e-mail and have other problems and she's going to need to talk to you about them,” she said.

“Right,” he said.

“And she's going to get together with Newton, and they're going to live together. Something like that?” she said.

“Could be. Kind of looked that way, didn't it?”

“Looked like they were made for each other,” Greta said.

“I thought the same thing,” he said.

The beach west of Waveland was never developed, not before the hurricane, and not after. The land out there was marshy and mostly unused. One night about a week after Gail left, Vaughn and Greta drove out that way and found an abandoned beach house up on creosoted twelve-by-twelve wood pilings across the highway from the water. There wasn't another building for half a mile toward town, and west there wasn't anything at all except a shrimp-packing house that had been swamped by Katrina and the remnants of a casino that had failed out there where the highway dead-ended. They got out the flashlight and went up the stairs, sat on the deck of this beach house, which was a little delicate, being as most of the deck was gone and what was left was rotting and dotted with holes you could fall through. The rest of the place was equally torn up. There wasn't much of a roof, no glass, the doors were gone, and it didn't smell so good. They were outside, sitting with their backs to the front wall, watching the moon rise in the east. Small boats passed going east to west. Fishing, Vaughn presumed, running with as few lights as possible. Along the horizon in the distance there were gold lights on oil rigs. The sky was lit up with stars.

He pointed and said, “If you don't look at them you can see them flash.”

“That's what they're there for,” Greta said. “They're stars.”

“Amen,” he said.

“So, like, to summarize,” she said, “you failed your family—your mother and father and your brother—and now you've failed your wife. Your brother had to come in and successfully sweep her away, and so you've failed again. Is that about the size of it—you're sort of a failure birth to death? A cry in the darkness kind of thing?”

“Not exactly a cry,” he said. “A whimper?” she said. “A foul noise?” “Something,” he said. “You've got something there.” They didn't say anything for a few minutes and felt the breeze as it climbed over them. The moon was streaking up the water.

“You know what I think about your father? I think he loved you. I think he probably did the best he could, and he was probably hurt in the end, but I think he never stopped loving you. If he knew you at all.” “I don't know. How would you know that, anyway?” “You listen,” she said. “When people talk. And you read what they're saying, and you back out all their opinions, you try to figure what they're angry about, and worried about, and you add or subtract that from the picture they're giving you, and then you maybe get another picture from somebody else, and you paste that in, and then you get a report from somebody else about the person you got the first picture from, and that changes things a little, and after a while you get a pretty good idea about the person everybody else is talking about.” “Huh,” Vaughn said.

“He forgives you,” she said. “That's what I get. He loved you and he wanted to be better than he was.” “He would forgive,” Vaughn said. “That was him all over.” Each day after Gail's sudden departure with his brother, Vaughn felt a little better, a little cleaner, a little more relieved and comfortable. He was still surprised, too, but mostly he felt unlatched from a responsibility that he hadn't really wanted in the first place. Some kind of ease had settled on him and replaced everything that had been getting at him since the night of his birthday dinner at the Palomino Restaurant or maybe
before that, maybe even since the divorce. Maybe even before
that
. When you live with a woman for a long time, after a while you make a lot of excuses for what you don't feel, but unless you're a fool you don't believe the woman is at fault. It's that the world changes beneath your feet. Things go slow at first and the change is so small that it's almost imperceptible, and you pay it no mind. And then later, years later, the change seems huge and it seems to have occurred overnight. Suddenly you aren't the person you were. And then, where once you thought not wanting what you used to want was punishment, suddenly you think it may be a blessing.

And things stand still.

You watch the moon reflected on the swarming gulf water, and you think, That's enough. That's all I want. I just want to sit on this broken-down deck on this night in this cool weather with this breeze blowing over me and watch this moon lift into the sky—remarkably oval, remarkably pearly, remarkably aloft. And you want to think this in just these words, and you know the words aren't right, they aren't even close, and that doesn't matter. The deal is that it's just the moon in the sky reflected on the gulf, the water hissing and receding, and you're in the middle of it, and you're just a small part, an unimportant part, but a part nonetheless. Your job is to be there so the moon can hit something when it shines at the earth. You are something to hit. And that's the way it is for the rest of the world, too. What people say and what they think, who they are, what they think about you, what they ask of you, what you want, what you give them does not matter. It's that way for everything—the sounds of the night, the breeze on the back of your hand, on your knee, the shoe hanging off your foot, the pressure of the plastic chair against your elbow
or your forearm, the sound of the light waves falling on the beach, the twinkle of the lights on the oil platforms offshore, the smells, and all the stars in the sky, the shadows that crawl past—you're something to hit. You're a receiver. You're an antenna.

Vaughn said something about this to Greta, who nodded and threw something that she'd been playing with off the deck—maybe it was a chip of wood she'd picked up, he didn't know; but he saw her throw it and admired the motion of her arm, a remarkably wooden motion, as if her arm was not connected to her body in any way, as if her arm, peculiarly white and almost translucent in the decaying moonlight, had a mind of its own.

Vaughn and Greta spent the next few weeks on the deck at the hijacked beach house, shuttling back and forth between the beach house and her house on Mary Magdalene and Gail's house. They were at sixes and sevens. They ate a lot of Chinese food. They ate barbecued ribs, pulled pork, Key lime pie. They ate steamed gyoza. They ate hamburgers in cars in parking lots and French fries and onion rings and chocolate shakes. They ate fried oysters, calamari, redfish, flounder, and pine nuts. They spoke softly.

They'd spent a lot of time on Gail, taken her on as a project, a community project—something they might figure out, even repair—and it wasn't entirely fair, insofar as Gail wasn't exactly clued in on the deal. But now that Gail had departed they were free to do whatever without worrying too much about her, who she was talking to, who she was meeting in
the middle of the night, where she might be sitting in her car at dawn scribbling notes to her friends on the backs of business cards. Now, in hindsight, Vaughn wondered if moving over there had been foolhardy. Ex-spouses were never quite ex enough, and weeks, months, years later they were still close by, attached to your world. You had to pay attention to them. And in this case there was the more immediate need: protection. Tony was around. He had beaten her silly, and maybe it wouldn't happen again if they were at the house with her. In fact, it hadn't happened again, but Tony was still very much in the picture throughout, even if he and Gail saw each other only on the sly, as if Greta and Vaughn were the parents and Gail the bad-girl daughter, sneaking out late at night to meet up with her too-rough friends.

So when Gail pulled out, Greta and Vaughn didn't know quite what to do. They sat out by the sea night after night watching the flounder fishermen, watching the moon, listening to the sound of the surf, leaning their backs against the tattered walls of somebody's given-up beach house, a house torn apart in the storm a year before, but also in who knows how many previous storms, and now, finally, recognized as more trouble than it was worth.

On one night when the sky was just speckled with stars, a thin haze around the perimeter, the half moon rising in the east with its reflection trailing toward them over the surf, moving sidewinder style, like a bright snake moving across a dark desert floor, Greta asked him what they were going to do, and he said he did not know. He said he hadn't the slightest idea. He said, “Why don't we just do what we used to do?”

“What's that?” she said.

“I don't remember,” he said. “Go to dinner, watch television. Remember that big-screen television we used to watch all the time over at your house?”

“Eddie's watching that one now,” she said.

“Maybe we can get another one,” he said. “We could stay at Gail's house and move the TV, put it at the foot of the bed, and get into bed every night and watch it. We could watch all the tripe they serve up, the cop shows, the
CSI
shows, Court TV, all that cable stuff like National Geographic's
Explorer
and
Extreme Machines
, and reality cop shows like that one from the files of Dayle Hinman, and we could watch news and sports and those incredible game shows and
Lost
, which seems to have a lot of sex in it, and HGTV, all those house-buying shows, and design shows, and stupid reality shows, all the gory excess of this stupid and vulgar culture, the idiot news every night, with a blown-up building one night and a mother killing her children the next, and with women disappearing off the streets and guys who sit in the Wal-Mart parking lot the better to watch the women, and guys who will tell you that and do it, too, and the cooking shows, the British TV shows, the high-definition shows, the HBO specials, and the sex shows. We could do that every night, and while away the hours.”

“Uh, no,” Greta said.

The surf that night was a sort of silvery green, a green that was barely perceptible as green but which was nevertheless green. They watched the lighted fishing boats slide across the water, listened to the groan of trees pushed by wind, caught out of the corners of their eyes the giant birds that flew inland every once in a while, dark shadows against a lighter sky. Pelicans, maybe, off schedule. Sea birds.

“Is she coming back?” Greta asked.

“Don't know,” he said. “But if she is, we don't have to do what we've already done. If she comes back she's on her own.”

“Until the first time somebody beats her up. Or when she calls with some crisis, or when she says she loves you and wants you back. Then what?”

“I'm going to hide behind you,” Vaughn said. “I'm going to be direct and honest and forthright.”

“So you're quitting her? For real?”

“You're all about the movies, huh?” Vaughn said.

“I don't buy it,” Greta said.

“Wait and see.”

“We should bring peanut butter sandwiches,” she said. “Tomorrow. Are we coming tomorrow? Let's bring peanut butter sandwiches. Do you want to make them or should I?”

“Does it have to be decided right this minute?” he said.

A motorboat with a red light on the front of it and a white light at the rear, lights the size of Christmas lights, trolled across their vision left to right. The lights reflected in the surf, the sound of the motor constant—a drone, an ache, like a door opening, opening, opening, like someone saying
Ahh
endlessly.

“What about money?” Greta said.

“We have money,” he said. “If we don't move fast or travel to distant lands, we'll be fine. We'll live the small life.”

“Hmm,” Greta said, as if considering the virtues of this.
“La petite vie.”

The boat with the lights came across again, going in the other direction now, now shining a spotlight up on the house where they were sitting, shining the light right in their eyes, heading toward them and then crossing in front of them, very close to the beach.