Romance
The Lighthouse
She thought the lighthouse would bring peace. Instead, it stirred something restless and wild inside her, a hunger the quiet sea refused to let sleep. When a stranger stepped into her cove, everything she believed about herself, her marriage, and nature itself began to unravel.
She was amused when semen started showing up in her art — semen as an image in her poems to describe the stars that spread over the ocean at night, or in her paintings in the thick paint she used to show the foam of the breakers that surged around the rocks at the base of the lighthouse. It wasn't that she was horny or that Seth didn't see to her needs. It was metaphysical semen, poetic, and she supposed it meant something about nature. Nature had come to obsess her ever since they moved out to this old lighthouse and converted it into a bed and breakfast, and it consumed her in a way that she couldn't discuss with Seth--as some vague yearning that went beyond anything she'd expected when they'd bought this place. Sometimes in the late afternoon she would walk off the little island on which their property stood, cross the bridge and head down the highway to a little point from which she could look back and watch as the setting sun colored the white-washed lighthouse pink and then orange. Against the slate gray of the sea and the darkening sky, it was phallic enough to be embarrassing but still lovely, and it made her smile even as it stirred and excited her with emotions she couldn't explain. At such times, she had no doubt that moving here had been a wise choice.
Seth wasn't inattentive, but the kind of attention she wanted now had changed into something she couldn't understand or describe, let alone express. She couldn't make sense of the paintings and poems she started producing, but they'd lost that clarity and innocence they'd had when she was working in the city and that troubled her. It had been her vision of an idyllic country life as expressed in her paintings that had driven them to buy this place and set up their eco-friendly inn, and the fact that her work had now become confused and muddy might merely be a sign of the move's lingering turmoil, but it troubled her.
Seth, on the other hand, adapted surprisingly well. After working for a big corporation in the city, he found the simple exigencies of dealing with nickels and dimes to be wonderfully purposeful and refreshing, and he threw himself into it with an ecologist's sense of mission and a capitalist's fervor. Julia helped him as much as she could throughout the winter, fixing up the outbuildings and finding suppliers for their all-organic kitchen, but now that spring was here and guests were starting to arrive she was once again free to pack up her easel and paints and climb the rocky bluffs on the mainland and paint at the verge of the dark forest, or sit by the ocean and try to capture the incessant sounds of the sea in a poem.
It bothered her that what she so often heard by the water's edge was not the slow, reassuring sounds of the sea, but a kind of hostile and derisive snarling. When she painted near the woods, the raw spring wind would toss the pines and make them rock with what seemed like secret and perhaps contemptuous laughter. This wasn't the gentle and benign natural paradise she'd assumed it would be, and she felt like a stranger.
Still, in the early dawn when she'd sneak out, or as the sun was setting and painting the rocks with orange and pink, she could feel her heart lift in her chest at this place they now called home. It was later in the day, when she would help Seth unload the organic produce and see to lunch and dinner that she felt this strange sense of menace and unease. The wind was always blowing, sometimes in, sometimes out, but always blowing, and at times it grew quite irritating, like a playful dog that doesn't know when to stop.
She was painting down near the sheltered cove that served them as a beach, and struggling as usual with the sea and sky (why couldn't they stay the same for even a second? They changed every time she looked away, as if it were a joke) when she finally gave up. Clouds were moving in from the east and ruining the light, and the pines on the bluff looked sleek and expectant, as if they knew something she didn't.
She turned around to face the cove itself and saw a boat tied up to the old rotting jetty and a man in rubber boots wandering among the tide pools on shore with a net in one hand and a bucket in the other. There were signs clearly posted on the jetty warning people off. It was dangerous, and he was clearly trespassing.
Julia laid her easel and paints down so the wind wouldn't take them and clambered down the rocks. This wasn't a tourist boat or anything nice, but some old converted lobster tender, squat and ugly, with signs of hard use all over it.
"Excuse me!" she yelled, cupping her hands to her mouth. "Excuse me, but that jetty isn't safe! And you're on private property!"
The man didn't seem to hear her, but in the course of scanning the rocks he saw her and gave her a friendly wave.
Julia turned her baseball cap around so the brim protected her eyes, and scrambled down the granite rocks. It was early spring and the stone was warm where the sun had touched them, but dead cold in shadow. The man walked over to meet her, smiling easily.
"Sorry," she said as she dusted off her jeans. "But this is private property. Besides, that jetty's totally unsafe. No one's supposed to use it."
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry," he said. He had sandy hair and a clean, square jaw, and something about him made her believe he might be British. There was a kind of eager formality about him, and behind his yellow-tinted glasses, his eyes were honest and curious. He wore a thick, white fisherman's sweater that looked like he'd actually fished in it, and his green work-pants were rolled to the knees above a pair of thick rubber boots. "I'm Patrick Malone. I own Sea World Cannery back in Douglass? You must be from the lighthouse."
She knew there were abandoned canneries along the piers in town and their emptiness had given her and Seth a kind of grim satisfaction. She hadn't known that any still operated, but still, that didn't make him the enemy, not just yet. She saw no reason why not to shake his hand, so she did. "Yes," she said. "I own it. Me and my husband. I'm Julia Peavey. Seth's my husband."
"Glad to meet you, Julia." He seemed genuinely pleased. "I'd heard it had been bought, but this is the first time I've been out this year. I should have come around sooner to introduce myself, but I spend a lot of time in Boston these days. Don't get out to the factory as much as I'd like."
"Just what were you doing here, Mr. Malone? If you don't mind my asking."
"Oh, just puttering around, exploring." He lifted the bucket with some embarrassment, and Julia could see some dim creatures inside, moving with febrile urgency. They made her uneasy. "I like to get out on the water whenever I can, and your cove here is one of the few places where a little boat can still put in. Your tide pools here are excellent."
"Well, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you not to do that anymore. The jetty's not safe, and the cove is for use by our guests."
"All right," he said. "Fair enough. I hear you're running something of an eco-tourism place, is that right? All unspoiled and natural?"
Julia braced herself. They'd run into a lot of this from the locals when they first bought the place and their plans became known, but most of the merchants accepted them, welcoming whatever business they could bring to this rust-bound town.
"That's right," she said. "Is that a problem?"
"No, no. Not at all. I'm all for preserving the environment and all that. I think it's wonderful. In fact, that's what I'm doing out here, poking around in the pools to see what's what. Do you know what a nudibranch is, Julia?"
She stepped back, realizing he was about to stick his hand in the bucket and pull out one of these creatures, no doubt some sort of slimy, mucousy thing, but he saw her reaction and he stopped.
"A theoretical nature lover, eh?" He smiled. "That's okay. Not many people appreciate a sea slug or a northern comb jelly, but that's what you've got here. Lovely little buggers. And back you go now." He poured the bucket out into a large pool, and Julia saw she'd been right to refuse. There were some quivery, viscid things in there, as if people had blown their nose into the bucket, from what she could see.
"Just what kind of cannery do you run, Mr. Malone?" she asked.
"Oh, just pilchards. What you call sardines once they're all packed up."
"Sardines?" She just couldn't keep a contemptuous edge out of her voice, but it didn't seem to bother him.
"The Pilchards swim a million strong, In the bottom of the sea. And as they swim they sing this song, "There is no me but we"
Know that song? Kids used to sing it when I was growing up, but most of them are disappearing now. The pilchards I mean, not the kids. In all of Douglass there are only five pilchard boats remaining. We only can a few months a year now. It's almost all gone."
"And yet you continue to fish?" she asked. "Wouldn't it make sense to give them a rest and let them reproduce?"
"We tried that," he said. "All through the nineties we slacked off to give them a chance, but they don't seem to want to come back. No one knows why. But hey, look, it's going to rain and get very cold. You'd better put your paints away."
She smiled. "So you saw me?"
"Oh yes. You were hard to miss. Water colors, right? I could tell from the way you worked."
Julia let him escort her up the rocks to where she'd left her stuff, and she watched him as he bent down and looked at some of her attempts. She could be very objective when it came to her painting, and she waited to hear what he'd say. He seemed to know what he was looking at.
"Very nice," he said politely.
"Be honest."
He laughed. "The rocks are fine, but you paint like you've never really seen the ocean or the sky. The water hasn't been like that all day. Last Sunday it was that color, but not since. But Jesus, come on! It's raining. Everything will be ruined."
It was only a drizzle really and Julia thought it odd that he should be alarmed, but almost as soon as he said it a gust of wind came up filled with cold, drenching rain, and the paintings were soaked before she could open the box.
"You should come by, Mr. Malone—"
"Patrick," he corrected.
"Patrick. Come by for dinner, on the house. Just phone first. We really should try to meet our neighbors. We've just been so busy."
Julia stood with her shoulders hunched up to keep the rain off her neck, but Patrick seemed not to notice it at all. He stood there smiling with the water streaming off his hair as if he were in his natural element. "Why thank you," he said. "I'd like that. Maybe I will."
He handed her the soggy paintings, slid down the rocks and turned and waved again. Julia collected her things but the whole block of paper was ruined. It was raining furiously and gusting, and the wind tried to rip her kit from her hands. She finally got everything together and as she began to trudge back to the lighthouse, she looked back and saw him back by the tide pools, totally unconcerned with the rain, his net at the ready, gazing into the water. The wet sweater clung to his fine, broad shoulders and his hair was plastered to his neck. The rain didn't bother him at all. She thought he must be mad.
The spring came bright and hard. When it didn't rain, the light was dazzling, and the grounds around the lighthouse—the woods and sea and even the rocks—seemed to hum with a kind of urgent impatience. Julia took her paints up into the old lighthouse itself where she had her dream studio. The light itself had been removed, but the windows gave a remarkable view of the surroundings, and maybe that was the problem. What she could see made any painting seem small and silly, and she spent most of the time leaning on the railing watching the ocean change colors under the clouds that raced with the constant wind. The grandeur and hurry of the sky spoke to something in her heart, something that wasn't as innocently pretty as she'd hoped it would be—a restlessness, almost a savagery.
She'd hoped she'd find a peace and tranquility at the lighthouse that would enable her to concentrate on her work and clarify things for her, but that didn't seem to happen. Rather than becoming clearer and easier to understand, things seemed to grow more nebulous and confused and she found herself spending more time just staring and listening, as if things were trying to speak to her. Rather than feeling more at one with her environment, she became aware of how separate she was. The sight of Patrick standing comfortably in the rain haunted her until she realized that she envied him. She wanted to feel that kind of comfort too.
The strange thing was, the more she felt detached and adrift, the more Seth seemed to get focused and involved. There were times when he reminded her of a puppet of some kind—a marionette. He'd always been very thin (sometimes she thought that stingy was a better word) but obsessed as he was now with the business end of the bed and breakfast, his movements took on a particular herky-jerky aspect, as if things were always pulling him around—reaching for the phone, clomping through the kitchen, arched over the desk at night going over invoices and his incessant spread-sheet budgets and projections.
She only seemed to be in the way when she tried to help, so she started doing the town errands, leaving him free to manage the place. She came to feel pretentious in her LL Beans and North Face clothes, so she started dressing down, like the townspeople she met. On this day, with the water calm and an almost summer-like smell coming off the rocks from the heat of the sun, she felt a need to adorn herself. She went into her bedroom and put on makeup, the first time she'd done that since they'd moved here.
Douglass was a sad town and dying, but in a leisurely, picturesque way. There was space and emptiness there, and that emptiness tugged at her now as she parked at the little post office by the docks to get the mail. Across from her, the long, red brick wall of a cannery basked in the weak spring sunlight, and Julia sat there looking at it for a long time as if it had something to tell her. The long rows of perfectly placed bricks had an almost hypnotic placidity and the light filled her with a kind of familiar sadness. Then there was the sound of men's voices and a commotion as some sort of machinery roared noisily to life down at the end of the pier. She jerked herself from her reverie and realized people were working—a trawler had come in, and above the commotion she heard Patrick's voice. Curious, she got out of the car and walked down the pier.
A gang of men was unloading the catch from the trawler, some in boots and slickers, others in flannel shirts or tee-shirts, all standing around joking and yelling. Patrick was in the middle of them, standing in a kind of vat or trough on the dock in hip boots, slicker and a yellow hardhat, holding a rake and shouting orders. A big, wide, flexible hose ran from a big machine on the dock and down into the hold of the boat, the other end emerging into the trough in which Patrick stood, which appeared to be a kind of spillway, running back into the darkness of the cannery. Julia watched as a man hit a switch and the roar of the machine changed pitch. The hose jerked and twitched like a snake, and then a stream of fish and seawater gushed from the end and spilled into the trough, rushing and foaming around Patrick's legs as he stood there shoveling them in with the rake.
It was an amazing sight, almost bacchanalian. Thousands, millions of little fish, a river of glistening silver, spilling out of the hose in a stream of frothing water, bouncing and swimming past Patrick and into the innards of the factory like a river of life. Patrick was bare-chested under the slicker, and beaming with joy as he worked, and the men were all happy and laughing as well, joking and calling out, and Julia realized this was a celebration, an occasion for joy.
There was a loud, hollow sucking sound and the engine roared anew as one bin was emptied and the tube was redirected by unseen hands below decks and sucked up another batch of fish and water from the hold, sending them gushing in another river of silver and white and green. Julia stood there in wonder. Such profligacy of life was amazing and thrilling in a vague and almost shameful kind of way.
Patrick saw her and gave her a wide smile. She couldn't hear what he yelled over the roar of the pump, but from the way he spread his arms and smiled like the lord of all he surveyed, she knew he was welcoming her to his world and mocking himself as some sort of master of sardines. He looked genuinely pleased to see her and his enthusiasm made her smile.
Another gush of fish and foam but Patrick ignored it, walking heavily to the side of the trough and clambering out. He stopped to shout some instructions in another man's ear, then pointed to Julia and stripped off the slicker and hardhat and climbed out of the waders. He fetched a flannel shirt from a bollard on the dock and came over, putting it on as he smiled broadly. He pointed to his ear, showing her it was too loud to talk, took her arm and walked her away from the roar of the pumps.
"It's good to see you, Julia," he said. "What brings you to town?"
"I was just at the post office and I heard this commotion. Is this your place?"
"Yes," he said, not without pride. "This is the Malone Empire, my kingdom by the sea. Built in 1911 by a Malone and in the family ever since. Want to see it?"
"No, really, I can't stay. I just heard the noise and..." Julia's eyes were captured again by the wall, the endless, hypnotic repetition of the bricks.
Patrick was buttoning up his shirt. He seemed to sense what she was looking at and said, "Kind of like life, isn't it?"
"I beg your pardon?" She looked at him to find him smiling at her.
"That wall. When I used to work here on summer break from college, I decided that wall was like my life—flat, featureless, each brick like another day. I was quite the poet back then."
"Oh," she smiled self-consciously. "I must be more urban than I thought. The bricks look like home to me."
He laughed. "Come on in. We're neighbors now. You should see how the other half lives. Ever see a cannery?"
She hadn't, and she really had no desire to. Her car was right there, but for some reason she let him lead her over to a weathered door in the wall and into the building, up some concrete stairs and through another door until they emerged on a catwalk above the plant—rows of shadowy machines and boilers and conveyors, clanking and hissing as they processed the stream of fish she'd just seen unloaded, tended by figures in yellow and orange slickers.
"It doesn't smell," she said, raising her voice to be heard. "I thought it would smell."
He laughed again. "No. Not when they're fresh. Everything's clean and sterile for the most part. All mostly automated too. They come in at that end, and then they'll come out there, in cans. Ever have fresh pilchard?"
Julia shook her head. She was aware of being in a kind of slaughterhouse, albeit one for fish, but she felt no sense of horror or death. There was more of a feeling of purpose and excitement, as if a harvest was being gathered in.
Patrick studied her face. "You're a vegetarian, I suppose. A vegan?"
"Vegetarian, yes," she said. "But not that strict. Seth is, but I eat chicken on occasion, and dairy."
"Fish?"
She smiled. "It will kill our business if this gets out, but no. I don't like fish. Never have."
"Ever have fresh? I mean, really fresh?"
She shrugged dismissively, embarrassed to be answering that question in such a place.
"Come on," he said. "I'll show you our quality control department."
He led her back along the catwalk, and Julia was transfixed by the thrumming machinery and hissing steam. Occasionally she could see the fish going by on conveyors between gleaming stainless steel walls, and she wondered why she wasn't more upset.
At the end of the catwalk was a landing and an office, but Patrick led her through a door and up a flight of stairs. The building was old, almost antique, but smelled fresh, of olive oil and paint. He unlocked the door at the head of the stairs and stood aside.
"This is where I live," he said. "Owner-on-premises. When the boats come in, we go twenty-four hours, so I like to be on hand."
She stepped into a magnificent loft bathed in spring sunlight—exposed brick, polished hardwood floors with Turkish rugs. The furnishings were Spartan and undistinguished except for the kitchen, which had new industrial-quality appliances and was gleaming. There was a large aquarium in the living room—very large—in which she could see vague, translucent shapes swimming or pulsing about, and she remembered Patrick with his bucket and net. The place had the calm austere feeling of a monastery, a place open and uncluttered enough to allow the spirit to expand, and Julia had a moment of regret for the way she'd decorated the lighthouse cottages with all this New England nautical gimcrackery and French farmhouse touches.
Patrick walked over to a stainless steel bucket sitting on the sink. "I use the state lab in Bangor for the real analysis, but every batch that I process goes through me too. Have a seat. This won't take long."
Julia sat at the kitchen table as he turned on the industrial range and got out a large frying pan and threw half a stick of butter in, followed by olive oil from a gallon can. He was telling her about pilchards, about how no one eats them fresh anymore but only canned, and about what they're missing, but Julia was captivated with watching him work. His shirt was old and worn, and hung tenderly off his shoulders and back. She was aware that she was in another man's apartment alone, and that she didn't mind it. When he offered her a glass of wine though, she balked.
"It's not even noon," she said.
He smiled at her again, the cork already out of the bottle. "You are a city girl, aren't you? Out here the fish set the clock, and the fish say it's time to drink wine. The boys you saw on the boat have been sloshed since sun-up."
She let him pour her a glass, and then he turned to the sink. He pulled a fish from the bucket and deftly cut its head off with scissors, then slid the blade into its belly, cut it open, and let the guts fall into the sink. In a matter of seconds he had it butterflied and sizzling in the pan and he reached for another. Julia felt nothing watching him work—no squeamishness, no pang of conscience, no disgust—just a stunned admiration for his grace and efficiency, his artistry.
"Now taste that," he said, slipping a gleaming white plate of sautéed pilchard in front of her.
"No, really. I couldn't," she said. "Besides, I just had breakfast."
"Julia, don't insult me and don't insult my fish. They just gave their all for you. If I'm going to come to your restaurant and eat fried tofu, the least you can do is taste my sardines."
His eyes were gray, the same gray as the ocean when the clouds covered the sun. She remembered from somewhere the superstition that people whose eyes were the color of the sea could see into the depths.
She picked up her fork and tasted the fish.
It was exquisite—fresh and clean and just a bit salty, with the vague coppery taste of the ocean that evaporated on her tongue in a buttery memory—fleeting and evanescent. It yielded to her teeth without complaint, unlike any meat she'd ever eaten, as if eager to be swallowed. She felt like she was eating some memory of the sea.
"Oh my," she said. "Oh my, that is good."
He went to work on his plate and quickly and deftly boned half a dozen and gave them to her, then took hers and tasted each one, chewing thoughtfully and chasing each bite down with the wine.
He nodded with satisfaction. They are good, aren't they? The law allows us to call any of half a dozen species sardines once they're in the can, but pilchards are the best."
He raised his wine and they touched glasses without a word, Julia slightly embarrassed by the sensual, almost greedy pleasure she took from eating the fish. The wine was the perfect accompaniment—tangy, complex and quizzical against the simple elegance of the pilchard.
Satisfied that he'd made a convert, he refilled her glass. "They used to tell stories about your lighthouse. They decommissioned it when the fleet dissolved after the fish left, but even before then there was some controversy."
Julia listened to him, but only with half an ear. This was so unlike her—sitting with a strange man, eating and drinking wine at eleven in the morning, unanxious. She wasn't the person she was familiar with, and she wondered if Seth were waiting for her, but she doubted it. He'd be involved in his menu planning by now, or haranguing the local girls who cleaned the rooms. In any case, her cell was in her pocket, and he'd call her if he needed her.
"Oh?" she asked, calling herself back to the present.
"Pilchards are attracted to light. There's some evidence that they navigate by the light of the moon, and fishermen complained that the fish were attracted to the light from your lighthouse as it swept over the water. All night long, they said, the fish were swimming back and forth, great herds of fish chasing that infernal light. The fishermen wanted it shut down in favor of a mercury strobe—that's what they use these days—so they decommissioned it and put in the new strobe at Pennicott Point."
The image struck her with unusual clarity. There was life in the water—unseen, undetected—great currents of fish rushing back and forth like tides, chasing the light. The image gave her chills. This was all so unlike what she'd expected when they'd lived in the city.
"You'll excuse me for a moment?" he asked. "I really have to shower. I'm covered in scales. I feel like Poseidon."
"Oh, I really should go."
"No, stay. Really. I'll just be a minute. Finish your food. I have to get back to work myself, but it's nice to visit."
She excused him and sat in the sunny kitchen eating her fish, mopping up the buttery sauce with a crust of bread, strangely at peace. No, not at peace—more like filled with a sensual fullness. The room was so full of spring sunlight that it felt like it might float away, and right outside the big, sparkling windows she could see the aching blue of the sky and the more serious darkness of the ocean, the trails of lighter blue in the sea running out to the horizon. The machinery of the cannery hummed gently below her, a soothing industrious sound.
She knew it was odd that she should feel so comfortable here, and yet she had no desire to think about it. She finished her food and wine and walked to the tank in the living room. There were jellyfish inside, strange, transparent things no bigger than her fist, pulsing and trembling and propelling themselves randomly around with powerful contractions of their delicate translucent organs. There was something fascinating about them, and something vaguely obscene.
Patrick came out of the bathroom in jeans and a black turtleneck. He was barefoot and his dark hair was plastered to his head like seaweed, his smile was as bright as the sunlight. He was devilishly handsome, she decided in a kind of gut way, without really thinking about it. When she realized what she was thinking, she grew embarrassed and turned away, looking into the tank again.
He started to say something, then saw her change of mood and stopped. He went to the kitchen and put the plates in the sink, finished his wine, then came back into the living room.
"Fascinating, aren't they?" he asked softly.
"Everything is fascinating lately," she said, not taking her eyes away from the jellies. They seemed to move like dreams, like ghosts, or memories of old feelings, and yet there was that urgent, almost sexual thrust as they moved. "I don't know what to make of it. I don't seem to be capable of doing anything anymore but just staring."
Without looking at him she could feel him smile. He sat down in the old leather sofa and she heard it sigh under his weight.
"I got very sick some years ago," he said. "They thought I was going to die. I didn't, but ever since then I've been the same way—just looking at things, fascinated. Famished. It isn't so bad in the city, but out here, it's like my eyes are just starving, or my heart."
Julia looked at him. The mention of the word "heart" should have embarrassed her, but it didn't. People didn't talk that way anymore, but she understood. "What did you look at?"
He laughed. "Everything. The sea, the sky, the rocks. Fish, trees, the wind in the grass, snow and rain. The world. I'm still looking. You caught me the other day."
"The jellyfish?"
"Yes. Jellyfish too."
She raised her arms and hugged herself. "Why do you keep them?"
"Why do you think?" he asked.
Julia watched one creature, shaped like a bell. Little tentacles around the opening whirred with mad life while the body of the creature pulsed with slow, regular contractions. It was mindless, she knew, without brain or nerves, but it throbbed with an urgency that made her ache in some deep, unknown part of herself. It felt like a part of her, like she had that very thing inside her too.
"Do you kill those fish here?" she asked. "The pilchards you were unloading."
"A lot of them are dead when they come in, but the rest of them are killed, yes. They're put into a parboil vat before processing. Cooked."
"Don't you think that's horrible?"
He sat forward. "I don't know," he said seriously. "I've thought about it a lot, and the more I think about it the more I have to say I just don't know. I don't know what they think or what they feel, and to assume that they fear and feel like we do is kind of silly, don't you think? Almost arrogant?"
"And killing them's not?"
"Everything dies," he said. "You just pray that they do it peacefully and without fear. I don't know what those fish feel or think about swimming down there in the deep water with no light and no sound, feeling things through their bodies. Pilchards seem to want one thing, and that's to surround themselves with more pilchards, to get inside the middle of the school. Do they fear death? Do they know what it is? Do they fear the net? Or are they just reacting, the way they chase the light of the moon through the water?
"With all the looking and studying and watching I've done, the one thing I know for sure is that things aren't what we think. We insult nature when we pretend we understand, because it's a mystery, Julia. It's all a fantastic mystery."
At another time and another place she might have laughed at his talk, but now, looking into this tank of blind, pulsing life, his words were just what she wanted to hear. When she took her eyes from the tank and turned them to his windows to the long lines of white surf battering the rocks on this scrubbed and perfectly blue day, she ached. She ached in a way she couldn't describe, for the sheer beauty of it, the majesty of the world in which she lived.
He seemed to know what she was feeling.
"When I thought I was dying, I went through all the stages," he said. "Just like on some TV docudrama. I just couldn't believe all this would be taken from me, that I'd have to leave it all, and I went through my rage and resentment and self-pity and all that. But you know what I discovered? What being so sick taught me? Should I tell you?"
She looked at him and waited for him to continue.
He smiled. "You'll never understand, but I discovered that when I died I wouldn't have to be trapped in my body anymore. All unconscious things are the same, and that's what I'd be too—unconscious. So Patrick Malone might no longer exist, but I'd be part of all that out there—the great out-there—part of the rain and the wind and the rocks, and the surf that beats upon them. I'll be the sea and the fishes in it. I'll be free of myself and free to be everything. Being nothing's the same as being everything, do you see?"
She looked at him sitting there smiling at her, his hair still plastered in curls to his handsome face. The light in his eyes told her there were fires burning back there, and the amusement told her he didn't expect her to understand, although strangely enough, she did.
"Let me get this straight," she said. "You run a sardine cannery, right?"
Patrick smiled at her and then exploded with laughter. "Yes. I think I'm probably the only mystic in the world with a fish factory and a payroll to meet, but yes, I run a sardine cannery." He laughed again. "That's all right. Don't mind my bullshit. I get carried away sometimes. But I should get down there and you probably have to get back home."
She was about to tell him no, there was no hurry, when her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She reached into her jeans and turned it off.
"That'll be Seth. Yes, I suppose I'd better go." She cast a longing glance at the wine bottle, but it was empty. "But do come out for dinner, Patrick, please? Would you believe it, but you're the only one I've talked to in weeks who seems to make sense."
He smiled in understanding, stood up and walked her to the door.
"Really," she said. "I mean that. I need to talk to you."
She was alarmed by the edge of panic in her voice, and he seemed to notice it too. He opened the door and leaned against it and his eyes were deep yet gentle.
"Of course I will. But there's something else that near-death experience did to me that you should know about. Made me totally immoral. Husbands, wives, they mean nothing to me anymore. I function on an animal level." He smiled at her. Perhaps it was a joke.
It didn't feel like a joke to her, and his words sent a sharp thrill knifing through her stomach and between her legs. She looked up into his gray eyes but couldn't read them, and she realized with a kind of soft horror that what he was saying made sense to her too, that in the face of what they were talking about, formalities like marriage seemed very trivial.
For a moment they stood there, their heads almost touching. Julia felt herself drawn forward as if by some tidal force, pulled towards him and about to fall— and then her cell phone abruptly buzzed in her pocket again quite audibly, making her jump.
She tried to laugh—"Seth again"—but it came out as a quivering sigh. The mood was broken, though, and Patrick straightened up as if awakening from a trance.
He smiled, then laughed nervously. "Better get going then. Let me finish this batch—should take a couple days—and then I'll come out and see you for dinner."
"That would be nice." She was ashamed at how warm his smile made her feel.
"I don't know much about organic food," he said. "But it would be my pleasure. As long as we don't have sardines."
She left his place buzzing with excitement. The road back from town ran along the coast, with the rocky shore on one side and weedy, untilled fields fronting the other. Beyond the fields stretched the forest that seemed to extend forever as far as she knew, a lacey tangle of black and gray twigs, the trees just coming into leaf this time of year and dotted with tiny green buds.
The first flowers were coming up now, snow-drops and crocuses, and when she rounded a bend in the road she was struck with the sight of a field of wild daffodils in full bloom, yellow against the soft green of the new grass. She pulled the car over on impulse and turned off the engine and sat there, stunned. She opened the door and stepped out into the gratefully warm sun, crossed the cool asphalt and headed for the woods, not sure of where she was going. The sound of the surf faded behind her and was replaced by the sleepy buzz of the trees, a sound as warm as sunlight. The daffodils seemed to reach for her as she passed and nodded their approval, like a crowd of tiny, importuning lovers.
She crossed the field and walked into the woods, pushing aside the scrim of thin branches with their lime green leaf buds. She wasn't sure where she was going. It was just some stubborn refusal to go back coupled with an urge to explore, and she walked on as if something was calling her. At the same time, she almost felt as if she were intruding, as if she were upsetting the sleepy tranquility, but she walked on until she stopped in her tracks.
There in front of her was a wild crab apple tree, covered in white blossoms, and beyond it another, and another—a whole stand of them. They stood out from the gray twigs and the misty green of the woods like blazing torches, beautiful and strangely masculine, and the rest of the woods seemed to back off and make space for them, the trees drawing back to form a clearing, as if to give them space for their grand moment.
She felt something like a chill rise up the back of her neck and flood down her body, and suddenly she could see Patrick as he was when their eyes had locked at his door. She felt a pang of guilt but it could not find a purchase and slipped easily away, and she was left with the image of him and the certainty that he at least understood her, that he knew. She turned around to look for him—the feeling was that strong—but there was nothing but the stillness of the budding branches, a feeling of secrets being kept.
She turned back to the crab apple as if expecting an explanation, but there was nothing. It stood there in its private, blazing glory, and Julia felt tears welling up, something lifting and tightening in her chest. Yes, she knew what he meant. Her heart was hungry and famished too, and it was almost as if what she was now feeding it was too much, too rich for it to digest.
She turned away from the tree with the same feeling she'd had when she'd left Patrick, and reluctantly made her way back to the car. She'd have to remember this place. She knew she'd finally connected.
Patrick showed up for dinner the following night, wearing a charming but ill-fitting suit. "You know, you'd get more business if it were easier to find your phone number."
Julia laughed. "My fault. I was supposed to have us listed with the chamber of commerce and it slipped my mind. We're on the internet though. Seth just finished the site."
Thank God she'd worn a nice dress tonight to hostess the dining room, a long velvety thing that set her apart and flattered her form, something she didn't have much cause to wear for going to town. She took the flowers from him with a smile she hoped didn't betray how moved she was by his little gesture.
He noticed her gratitude, though, and tried to joke it off. "When flowers go to visit each other, do you think they bring bouquets of human sex organs on sticks? Or is that something unique to our species?"
Seth greeted him effusively, the way he did with all visitors. He knew Julia had met an interesting sardine canner from town, and that's all he knew, and he was too busy supervising his new Guatemalan chef, who was having trouble with the whole concept of sushi and roasted root vegetables. He left them alone. They had only six couples for dinner that night, tourists all, and so there was nothing wrong with Julia sitting with her new friend as he ate clams and lobster steamed in kelp, though she knew their food was nothing compared to what he'd given her. Afterwards she showed him the grounds and the renovated guesthouses, and then took him up into the lighthouse.
It was a long climb up the spiral stairs and he didn't mind when she wanted to stop and rest. They were both winded when they reached the top. She didn't want him to look at her poor paintings, but he insisted, genuinely interested. He didn't have to say anything for her to know what he thought, but she was gratified by his honesty and even proud of him for not trying to flatter her as others often did. She led him outside.
"Is it safe?" he asked. "This light was put up in the teens, I think."
"Oh, yes. They had to reinforce everything when they removed the lamp back in the '80's, and we had it inspected when we bought it. Come on. Don't you want to see?"
There was a parapet with an iron rail, and from here they could see several miles down the coast and out to sea. It was just evening, and the sky in the east was velvet blue and thick with stars. The breeze was off the land, cool, yet with the scent of earth and pine. For a while they watched the strobe at Pennicott Point flashing in groups of three, its assigned signal. Julia felt like she was bursting to tell him and ask him things, but now that they were out here in the breeze and high air, she found she had nothing to say. This view always stirred her in ways she couldn't describe, and for a long moment they just stood there together drinking it in. She was aware that he was watching her, staring at her face as her hair blew in the wind.
"So this is where the light made the fish chase it under the water?" she asked.
"That's what they say. Lovely image, isn't it? These poor fish chasing something they can never have?"
"Why are they attracted to the light?" she asked.
"Why?" He laughed. "I have no idea. Here—" He led her around the light and out of the wind. "This is what the sailors call the lee side, the sheltered side."
She smiled, feeling foolish. Not enough sense to come in out of the wind.
From here they could just see the long swell of the dark sea, the breakers rearing up and dissolving into foam on the rocks along the shore.
"I saw a tree in the woods yesterday," she said awkwardly. "It was covered in white blossoms. Absolutely covered. I've never seen anything so beautiful."
"A flowering crab," he said. "Yes."
She could have said more but she didn't have to. She realized he'd seen it too—maybe not that very tree, and maybe not this year, but she knew he'd seen it and he understood and that her feelings in the woods hadn't been mistaken.
He laughed. "You're like me. You look around you and see beauty, and you don't know what to do with it. You want to suck it up, don't you? Absorb it and fuse with it and take it inside. But you can't, can you? None of us can. All we can do is yearn for it. And so we yearn for it, don't we Julia? We just ache and yearn."
His words trailed off, seemingly blown away by the breeze. Julia pulled her hair back from her face.
"Patrick, I love my husband. I really do. I don't know what's happening to me."
She spoke as if in a trance, as if he weren't there, although she knew he was. She was aware of his eyes on her face, his expression unchanged.
"I know you love him, Julia. Why wouldn't you?"
"But I can't talk to him anymore. He seems to think I've gone a little crazy, and sometimes I wonder whether he might not be right. That tree in the woods... It's like there's something I want, something I need. To just pull all of this inside me and keep it there. To be it." She laughed at her own words. "I just feel like I'm so filled with questions."
"There are some questions that don't have answers," he said. "Not in words. They're feelings, really, aren't they? Things we can't say."
"Yes. It's like that. But what do you do about them?"
He laughed gently. "Damned if I know. You meet feelings with feelings. With sensation. The fish know what to do. They swim. For us it's more complicated."
She turned to him and waited.
She wanted it so much. Here in this high and windy place suspended between sea and sky and earth, she wanted him to kiss her and answer her questions, but Patrick kept his eyes out to sea, leaning on his forearms.
"The moon," he said, gesturing to the horizon. "She sees everything."
Things did not get better and things did not change. If anything, they got worse, and Julia found herself beset by tears or feelings of unexpected elation at the strangest times. At night, when he wasn't too tired, Seth made love to her and she lay there looking over his shoulder at the sky. She closed her eyes and saw the crab apple in the woods or Patrick standing with his arms spread expansively above the gushing river of fish, and she was ashamed.
She went into town and didn't know whether to see him or not, though she almost always did. There was no doubt in her mind that she wanted him now and that he wanted her, but she was tormented by her own lack of guilt. They had coffee, or he took her down by the docks where he knew all of the fishermen, but he didn't invite her to his place and of course she wouldn't suggest it herself.
On the way back from town she often stopped by the crab apple in the woods, and approached it as if it were some oracle, something much wiser than she. She was dismayed one day to see that the blossoms were dropping, the white petals falling with heart-breaking sadness into the grass and mud at its feet. The sight upset her so much that she rushed home with tears in her eyes, frantic for something to do. She changed her clothes, grabbed some gardening things from the shed, and busied herself with planting bulbs outside the cottages.
It was a cool day and misty, and the mist soon grew to a fog as the sun lost its way and faded from sight. It was so foggy she couldn't see the ocean or the cottages across the way and the foghorn from Pennicott Point was like the moaning of a blind man. She worked in the earth as if in a cemetery, in the piles of loam and leaf mold they'd had delivered, working it in deep to the stingy soil, then got down on her knees and dug in the rich, friable earth with her bare hands, seized by something hot and feverish inside.
It was some combination of sense and image that did it. The feel of her hands thrust deep into the earth, the sound of a screen door slamming behind some departing guests, and the image of the shedding crab apple that did it. The fog was wet and cold—it chilled the back of her neck
Julia stood up and brushed off her hands, threw her tools and bulbs into her basket and went into the house.
She showered and washed and dressed. She put on a skirt and brushed out her hair and did her face. She got in the car and drove off, leaving Seth deep in conference with the cook, his new ally and protégé. When she passed the spot on the highway near the tree, she tightened her grip on the wheel and kept on going.
The town seemed deserted, immobilized in fog. The streetlights were on and cast fuzzy spots of light in the gray cloud, and the wall of the cannery dripped with quiet moisture. Her footsteps on the cobbles barely reached her ears. The downstairs door was open, and she walked up the stairs as the foghorn sounded. There were wisps of fog even in the stairway going up to his apartment.
There was no doubt that he'd be there. He had to be there. She tried the front door and it opened just as she knew it would, and she walked in to find him standing right there in the living room fresh from his shower with a towel in his hand, as if he'd been waiting for her. He looked up when she came in and she dropped her bag and he dropped his towel and then without a word they were in each other's arms, without a question or curious look, without a trace of doubt.
She bore him down. She bore him back on the strength of her own need, pushing him back onto the leather sofa and climbing on top of him, her mouth an open wound looking for healing. His hands were in her hair and then on her shirt and he pushed it up over her bare breasts and took them in his hands. She wanted to be squeezed, crushed, pierced and destroyed, and that's just what he gave her, grabbing her ass beneath her skirt and standing up, turning them both around and falling back onto the sofa so that he ended up already between her thighs.
She couldn't stop kissing him, sucking at his mouth and biting him as she felt his hands fumbling with the fly of his trousers. She raised her knees high for him and then felt his hand at her panties, gathering the fabric over her crotch and pulling it to the side.
"Hurry!" she breathed. "Hurry!"
She should have been ashamed. She should have been contrite. She should have thought of Seth, but all she could do was feel the hard, blunt dome of his cock press against her open flesh and push her resistance aside as he slid into that wet cavern. She reeled as she felt his body entering hers, and then he thrust deep and hard, pulled back, and did it again, like a fisherman setting a hook.
"Oh, God!" she cried, captured and taken.
Patrick rested, his cock throbbing inside her, his forehead pressed against hers as he tried to calm his breathing. Julia felt hooked—gaffed—held on the spear of his cock as the world stood still. Her dress was pulled up around her waist and held crushed in her fist to keep it out of the way. Her knees were up against her breasts as she leaned half-sitting on the sofa and she waited to see what he would do with her, how he would fuck her. It could only be one way. There was only one way that would satisfy her, and Patrick seemed to know it. Of course he knew it.
He planted his feet on the floor and spread them as far as his pants around his ankles would allow. He put one hand on her ass and pulled her to the edge of the sofa and rested his other against the wall, then started to fuck her with long bestial plunges, swinging his hips from his waist and stabbing her deep with each thrust. Julia cried out. It was just what she wanted, to be fucked like an animal, and Patrick's hips moved with the shuddering urgency of an ape in the zoo, savage and primeval and obscenely sexual. This wasn't love and this wasn't caring. This was the primitive pulsing of life, crude and spasmodic and deliciously violent, and Julia threw her head back against the sofa in rapture, her tits, her pussy, her whole body reaching for his masculine roughness.
Patrick's feet got a better purchase on the floor and he leaned his knees against the sofa. He put both hands on her ass and held her tight as he thrust into her with brutal intensity. Julia put her hand on the back of his neck and pulled his face down so she could whisper in his ear, her breathless words punctuated by animal grunts as his loins slammed into hers. "—Ugh!— Fuck me! Fuck me! Hard, Patrick! —Unh!— Give it to me! —Nngh!— Hard, Patrick! Hard! Ugh! Unh! Yes! Yes!!"
In the silence of the apartment with the fog dripping from the windows she gave voice to her feelings, yelling and gasping as he plunged into her again and again. She was not a vocal lover but now she wanted to be loud, crying out as if to tell the world what he was doing to her—that like the flowering crab and the surf on the rocks she was here too and had her part to play, taking his big prick into the squelching wetness of her cunt. She kissed him and tried to look into his eyes to see if he understood as his cock worked at her, but his expression was more than she could stand—the savage lust, the unredeemed obscenity of his desire. It thrilled her as his hips moved with animal brutality, making the entire sofa bang against the wall as if he would smash it to pieces in his need to have her.
Julia clung to his neck, her knees up and her feet twitching against his hips with each jarring thrust. All the beauty and anguish of the past weeks and months gathered inside her into one huge ball, one suffocating bubble of feeling that rose slowly to the surface as he pumped inexorably in and out of her, his tempo increasing with his rising urgency till he was buffeting her like a rag doll. His thrusts became more urgent, his fingers clawed more desperately at her ass. The muscles twitched in his set jaw and she felt the dome of his shoulder like rock beneath her hand.
"Oh God!" he growled suddenly. "Are you safe, Julia? Are you safe!"
"Fuck! Yes! Yes! Come inside me! Inside me, Patrick! All of it! Every fucking drop!"
And then he was there, throwing his head back and crying out. Julia's eyes sought his face, drinking in his look of ecstasy and letting it carry her up into a place she'd never known, a rapturous place of total sexual fulfillment, primitive and biological, thirsting for his semen. She wanted to swoon as she felt him quiver and start to pulse blindly within her and she let go of that bubble and felt it explode through her, just as she felt the rich spill of his essence inside her like a flood of light and life, a gush of male fecundity that spread through her like a river of stars and took her breath away.
She arched up from the sofa, giving in to her body's demands and pulsed on his spurting rod, holding him hard and deep, answering his shattering ejaculations with clenching spasms of her own. There was a feeling of the fish finding the light at last, of moonlight shattered on the heaving face of the sea—and a world afire with untold ecstasy.
The fog pressed close against the windows, sealing them in. Patrick was leaning back against the wall and Julia's head was against his chest, the sheet drawn up under her arms. She lay there staring into space, as if she could see the very air. She'd been trying to explain to Patrick her feelings about Seth but had given up, realizing that at the moment she didn't have any. She felt no more guilt for what had happened with Patrick than she would have for getting caught in a rainstorm. It hadn't been betrayal—it had been a force of nature.
"You don't have to explain," he said. "If you want to talk about it, I'll be glad to hear it, but you really don't have to."
The foghorn mourned in the background, and Julia let the back of her fingers slide across the soft hair on his chest. "No," she said. "I really don't want to either. But then, what am I doing here? What are we doing?"
He shifted around, turning her over so that she was on her back and sliding her down so that he was leaning over her on his elbow. In the silence of the fog-shrouded world, the sound of their movements in bed seemed loud.
"Fucking," he said, tugging at the sheet that covered her breasts. "Fucking like animals. Glorious, isn't it?"
"Patrick!" she admonished. His language offended and excited her, and she tried to hold the sheet over her but he was too strong, and he pulled it down so that her breasts were exposed. She covered herself with her arms but he grabbed her wrist and pulled it away and fastened his lips on her nipple.
"Oh God!" she moaned, writhing beneath him. "Patrick, stop!"
"Fucking," he said again, his tongue circling her areola. "Screwing. Coming all over each other and scratching and biting—mindless, primitive..."
He bared his teeth and took her nipple between them, pulled her breast up like a dog with a bone, then let it slip slowly from his teeth. Despite herself Julia shuddered and felt her skin prickle with goose bumps. This man had some power over her. He reached inside her to the dark places and filled them with light.
"Don't joke, Patrick. This is serious."
"I know it's serious. Why can't sex be serious? It's serious as hell. That's what we're for, isn't it? Fucking, reproducing, multiplying."
Julia got her arm free and covered her turgid nipple with her hand. "There's more to it than that. It's not that easy."
"I never said it was easy. It's not easy. But this is who we are. I learned that in biology and I learned it when I got sick. We're sperm and eggs with brains, not the other way around, not brains with gonads. Our minds and our emotions and imaginations, they're all just our gonads' way of getting us around and letting us do what we have to do. Our deepest feelings and connection to the world are sexual, don't you know that? That's how it is for me, and you're the same way. It's all sexual, Julia. Everything."
His talk irritated her and she made a motion to get up, but Patrick was lying on her and she couldn't budge him, and really she didn't want him to let her up.
"Very romantic," she said. "You don't know much about loving a woman, do you?"
"No," He moved her arm again, holding on to her wrist as he lowered his head and returned to her nipple, which stood up for his mouth with embarrassing eagerness. "No. I only know about fucking. About the dirtiest, filthiest, greediest, most abject kind of fucking."
He held her wrist down and found her mouth and she couldn't deny him. His words thrilled her almost as much as his strength as he kissed her and held her down and their thighs worked slowly in the sheets to press against one another.
"Oh God!" she gasped, breaking the kiss and pressing her hips against his leg. "What are you doing to me?"
He let go of her wrist and grasped it with the hand that was behind her head. Her other arm was trapped beneath him, leaving her defenseless, and Patrick ripped the sheets from her body so that she was naked on the bed. He kissed her again and caressed her breasts, then his hand slid slowly down the center of her body, between her breasts, over her sternum and belly, down over her navel, heading for her sex. Julia's hips jerked up in reflex as if to capture him. She felt him smile as he kissed her and she might have smiled back if she weren't so overcome with pure erotic heat. The way he held her and used her made her faint with lust. Her need was so strong and so obvious there was nothing she could do to hide it.
"Ohhh," she moaned. "Oh, yes!"
His finger slipped over the burgeoning bud of her clit and parted her lips. He played with her like she was a toy, dipping into her sodden sex and arousing her so that she dug her teeth into his lip and bit down in warning, telling him that if he kept it up, he'd have to pay the consequences. He was entirely willing, and she was helpless to resist him.
"It's good, isn't it?" he whispered. "Just to be like this? No shame, no reservations."
His finger pumped slowly in and out of her and she heard the shameful sound of her own sticky wetness.
"I can feel my come in you," he said. "I love it. Like I own you. Like you're mine."
He pushed her thighs apart and she let him, looked down at her own naked body as open and exposed as a whore's. Against her will she found herself planting her feet on the mattress and lifting her cunt up onto his violating finger with the slow, regular undulations of the sea, and the sight of her own lewdness made her groan aloud.
"It's better when it's dirty, isn't it?" he said. "More honest, more real. More what we want. Fuck me, Julia. Fuck me just like you're doing."
"Oh God!" she hid her face against his chest in shame, but she couldn't stop. Never in her life had she been so consumed with such intense sexual fever.
Patrick got up. He knelt on the bed and pulled her up as well, turned her around and arranged her so that she was on her knees, facing away from him. Julia was no prude, but she'd never liked the idea of being taken from behind like a dog. It was too lewd and too disrespectful, and even as he arranged her she felt ashamed and humiliated and wildly excited. She wanted him to do things to her that she couldn't even imagine. She wanted nothing between them, not even her sense of self-respect.
Patrick pushed her legs apart to expose her sex and Julia felt herself blush, yet swell with a fierce and unfamiliar pride. All her life she'd been ashamed of showing herself, but with him it was different, and his excitement kindled hers as if it were her own. She reached behind her neck and pulled her long hair over the opposite shoulder so she could look back and see his face as he stared at her privates, so obscenely revealed. There was nothing in his look to make her feel ashamed—just raw lust and undisguised desire, feelings so pure and basic that there was no shame in them. There was no part of her he didn't want, no view of her that didn't arouse.
Her head jerked up and her eyes opened wide as he entered her, and he groaned with relief like a man plunging his burning hand into a pitcher of water. He was even harder than before and he felt like a bar of steel in her melting pussy as he pushed hard into her. Julia held herself up on her hands and closed her eyes in selfish pleasure as she felt his strong hands encircle her hips and pull her back, impaling her on his thick cock. He held her like that, then began to work her back and forth, up and back, rocking her on her knees and using her like a toy, and Julia hummed in her throat, encouraging him, content to be his ship of pleasure.
He stopped. He let go of her and stood still, his prick buried inside her.
"Fuck me, Julia. Be my whore. Show me how you love it. Show me what you want."
At first she didn't know what to do, or she was embarrassed, or both. But he felt so good inside her and her need to please him was so strong that she found a way to move, pushing back against him. She lowered herself to her forearms, spread her knees and ground her hips at him, stirring him around in her, burning with desire. She pushed back, and then she began to bend at the waist, rolling her ass against him, making him slip in and out and touch her all over, and as she heard him groan she realized she could do this. She could use him as well as he could use her, and she could slide herself all around his invading pole using her stomach muscles and her back to give him what they both wanted.
"Oh Christ!" he moaned. "Oh, you hot bitch!"
She should have been offended, but instead she swelled with pride, clamped her teeth into her lip to keep from smiling and fucked him like the lowest whore, squeezing his cock and flexing her ass and driving herself mad with her own obscene behavior.
Yes, he was right, he was right. There was something so honest here and so pure, so deeply gratifying in a way that went straight to her feminine soul, the pure pleasure of animal instinct, of acting without thinking and feeling without judging. It was freedom, and with that freedom came the sheer eroticism of what she was doing, taking her lover's body into hers and milking him for his fluids, for his biological essence. She let her pussy tell her what to do and followed its lead, and in return she felt at last the bliss she'd been seeking, mindless, endless, the sheer sensation of life.
"Oh God, Julia! Oh fuck! Oh my God you're going to make me come! Fuck me, baby! Fuck me, you gorgeous cunt!"
She squealed with excitement, her face burning with shame and victory, and on impulse she reached back beneath her legs to feel his balls tighten and pull up into his body as he throbbed again inside her and ejaculated yet again. A bliss as deep and dark as the ocean rose up and covered her with goose bumps, surrounded her and drew her down, claiming her as its own.
They were lovers now, and Julia glowed with health and a kind of vitality she'd never known in her life. Every day her long legs took her skipping down the stairs and across the lawn, into the car and away to town and Patrick, and try as she might, she just couldn't stir up any guilt regarding Seth. She didn't know whether he knew or not, but if he did, he didn't seem inclined to mention it, and his indifference only served to justify what she was doing. Seth was content to work on his menus and housekeeping schedules and advertising campaigns, and Julia went into town and fucked Patrick with a slutty enthusiasm that was the closest thing she'd ever felt to absolute freedom.
She was cautious and circumspect, but no one seemed to care. The factory manager came to know her and would say good morning when he saw her, and the town had more important things on its mind than gossip. They were free to walk around the docks or picnic by the sea or visit the woods, and Julia even started painting again.
But it was the sex, the late mornings or early afternoons in bed that did it. The windows of his living room had no shades and faced the sea, and the light poured in like sweet honey. On overcast days or days when the storms came, the racing clouds cast shadows and bars of light that swept over their bodies as they lay tangled in the sheets, their long, deep kissing a contrast to the animal-like urgency with which he thrust his hips, working his cock inside her and bringing them both to a boil. At such times Julia was able to let herself go, to let the prison of her personality slip away and emerge into a world where she was the wind whistling through the blue corridors of the sky or the green shoots pushing through the earth and exploding into obscene and glorious bloom. She felt the scend of the sea on her body and the crashing foam of the waves on her flesh, and she would often put her hand over her womb when she felt her lover come, as if she could feel the live writhing of his semen inside her like fish in the sea.
Sex with him was mindless, guiltless, and so intimate that she found herself fantasizing constantly about ways to take him deeper and more fully, to fuse with him in ecstasy. The feel of his body moving inside hers, whether in her pussy or her mouth or her ass, between her breasts or beneath her chin and in her hair, was like communion—religious and deeply fulfilling in a way she could never understand but only experience, and she experienced with a part of herself that had been neglected for far too long.
The one cloud on the horizon was the transitoriness of life, the impermanence, and one day when she went to the bathroom in his flat she stopped and opened his medicine chest and looked inside. She knew that a crisis had almost killed him, but they'd never talked about it. Now, when she opened that cabinet she saw the grim rows of medicine with their frantic, hurried labels—emergency medicines with the instructions for use printed in loud capitals, names she didn't recognize on plastic bottles that seemed suddenly ominous and threatening.
She came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway. "Patrick? That time you were so sick? You never told me about it. What it was, I mean."
They'd already made love twice that day, and he was lying in bed, relaxed and unconcerned. "It was a kind of stroke. They called it a cerebral event. I always liked that. It makes it sound like a party."
"Patrick, don't joke." She was naked, wearing one of his tee-shirts like a dress. She felt suddenly cold. "But you're so young."
"They run in my family, unfortunately," he said. "A natural propensity. Blood clots." He looked at her and smiled. "But don't look so grim. I take medicine now, so I'm good. And I learned more in those three days than I ever have in all the rest of my life. I saw it all, Julia. All this stuff I'm always telling you about. I saw it then, and it's all true."
She went to the bed and lay down next to him, on top of him, pressing herself close and kissing his chest, inhaling him. He put his arm around her and held her, and not for the first time she wished she could somehow dissolve into his body. Just the other day he'd been telling her about a kind of algae that reproduced by fusing cells, by injecting the contents of one cell into another and mixing themselves up and then separating like lovers going back to their own beds, only now with their very protoplasm all scrambled up and conjoined. She wanted something like that.
"Tell me," she said.
"It just happened," he said. "Eight years ago. I was working on the docks, and I just keeled over. Miguel called 911 and they took me to the hospital and I was out for a couple of days, or they said I was out. But I remember. I remember the feelings, the thoughts if you can call them that. I was nowhere and everywhere, nothing and everything. I was the rocks, the clouds, the fish in the sea and the sea itself. All those mystical things you read about in books, I experienced all of it, and I saw it was all true. I saw it and felt it and it was just as real as I am to you right now—even more. We're nothing, Julia, and we're everything."
She hardly heard his words. "And it could happen again?"
He was silent, and she could hear his heart beating, a precious sound, suddenly frightening.
"It could," he said. "And someday it probably will, if we don't fuck to death first. We all have to go some time. But I'm not afraid of it anymore. That little event showed me so much, that little brain twitch, that I started wondering what other truths are in there that we only realize at the moment we let go. Our egos, our ideas of who and what we are—that's the prison, Julia. If and when I go, I'll still be here as the rain and the wind and everything out there, all that mushy stuff. The pilchards too, and the boats that catch them. That's what I realized and I've never forgotten it, and I wouldn't trade that knowledge for all the health in the world."
She sat up and looked at him. "You're scaring me, Patrick."
He smiled at her. "It's not for a while yet, Julia. And meanwhile there are certain advantages to being trapped in a body, aren't there? But look at us, spending all our time trying to fuck and sucking and trying to fuse and crawl into each other's bodies. Wouldn't it be lovely to just be everything at once? Ultimate sex, as intimate as it can possibly get. That's what it was like."
"But you'd had a stroke. You were hallucinating."
"No," he said as he rolled her over onto her back. "No, darling. I'm convinced. This is the hallucination. This is the illusion. In reality, we're all of us everything. Everything that's out there. We're all in heaven right now, every one of us. We just don't know it."
Then came the high blue skies of summer, and with them, the tourists. The little pilchard boats were scrubbed down and repainted and became party fishing boats. The town and the lighthouse buzzed with guests and diners, and both Seth and Julia had their hands full.
Seth must have known by now, and he probably even knew who, but he still refused to confront her. They were making money and being written up in magazines for the quality of their inn and their eco-consciousness, and he was very pleased. At night the parking lot was filled with big shiny SUVs from the city and in the morning there were the maids and maintenance staff to supervise and Julia found it harder to get away.
It was easiest on the rainy days, the days when the clouds covered the sun and the guests stayed in their cottages, and so it was on a cloudy Wednesday when she was already looking forward to running into town to surprise Patrick that Seth came by as she was having her coffee and said, "Julia—there was a call for you, just now about your friend, Malone. He's in St Joseph's hospital at Bangor. I guess he collapsed and they just found him last night."
Julia sat with her cup poised at her lips, looking from the surface of the black liquid to the steely gray of the sea. She felt cold all at once, as if a squall passed over her as the rain passes over the sea, a coldness like no other, as if the heavens had been removed and all the darkness of space had poured down on her.
"I've got to go. Oh Seth, oh my God. I've got to go."
He nodded. "I understand."
She looked at him, this man she no longer loved, and she loved him anew. She picked up her note and her bag and ran from the room.
He caught up with her in the parking lot, "Don't forget your coat, for Christ's sake! It's raining, Julia! Take your phone. Call me when you get there, if you need anything."
"It's a stroke again. I know it. Oh, Seth, he's so young."
His face was grim. "Call me, Julia. Just call me."
The road ran along the coast and then hooked inland, and all the way was the gray spattering of early summer rain. It was no one's fault, she knew, and there was nothing to be done, but still, halfway there she had to pull over and sit by the edge of the quiet road and weep. The fragility of the body, the horror of these minuscule processes that kept us alive and made our worlds what they were.
She lifted her eyes to the trees and saw horror, indifference, the strangeness of the world and its silent mystery—the branches entwined as ever, the leaves in bloom. How could this be? The very air should be rent with the news. The trees should be on fire with his sickness, the sky red with terror. A gust of wind came from nowhere and rocked the car, and Julia knew in her bones he was gone.
She got there too late. She rushed to the desk, to emergency, to the nurses' station, begging and wheedling, almost hysterical, and finally found what room he'd been in on the fourth floor, but when she got there, it was empty—the beds made, the linoleum spotless and shiny. Not a wrinkle, not a scrap of paper or used tissue.
He was gone, the doctor said. Standing under the fluorescent lights, his face looked blue, his tie was perfect. They'd brought him in last night and the doctors thought he'd stabilized. They sent him up to a room, but then it happened again, Massive stroke. There was nothing that could be done. He was dead by the time they got him back down into emergency. Some Latin name for the disease, words he'd never said to her. The family had been there, had already claimed the body and transported it to a funeral home. Yes, there'd been family—a sister, a niece and nephew, an ex-wife who still cared, no children. There'd been no note, no last words, no goodbyes. There hadn't been time.
There hadn't been time. There hadn't been time.
Julia walked down the stairs, afraid to take the elevator and be boxed in. She recalled what he'd said about what he'd learned from his last stroke, about what he'd tried to teach her. She stood in the lobby as if waiting for someone, looking out at the gray skies, turning his words over in her head. It seemed so unright that there was no sign of him, that a person could just disappear from the face of the earth like that, without so much as a hole in the clouds or a wisp of something on the wind. What was this world that it let things go so easily? She stood there waiting, and waiting.
It began to rain. Big rain—purposeful—and she watched it through the revolving door and smiled despite herself. She smiled, and then, when the rain was at its most fierce and falling with steely determination, she pushed through the door and walked out into it. She took off her coat and hung it over her arm, stood in front of the hospital with her face to the sky and her mouth open as the rain splashed over her throat and chest and soaked her to the skin. Stood there and let him wet her completely, let him pour himself all over her and over the earth, the woods, the sea and everything that was in it.