The barrowfields, p.18
The Barrowfields, page 18
“You’re a genius,” I said, pulling out a Corona for each of us. She had an extra towel and helped me spread it out next to hers, then let her shorts fall and resumed her position on the beach.
Lying back now, I felt the warmth of the heated air and the wind from the ocean. Story was on her back and I turned and looked upon the length of her body. Her hair, still wet from the ocean, was folded in curls on the blanket. On her arms, her legs, her brown and sunkissed stomach, were soft honey-blond hairs, an almost imperceptible down. Her eyes were closed behind her sunglasses and her face was quietly content. Her breasts rose and fell as she breathed.
“What are you reading these days?” I asked her, sitting up to drink from my beer. She said she was reading a book about Africa called West with the Night by Beryl Markham, who was one of the first freelance pilots in Africa. I said I’d heard of it. She asked if I knew Ernest Hemingway and Beryl were friends in Africa. We talked for a while about literature and the books she’d read that had moved her.
From where we lay I could count at least fourteen people on brightly colored surfboards, most of them waiting patiently for waves to rise up out of the dormant sea. As I watched, a lithe, dark-haired girl in a wetsuit rose on a gentle swell and raced from right to left, but in an instant her flight was over and she was back in the water. The others sat passively on their boards, silhouetted in the ocean’s haze.
Just beyond the row of surfers by a distance of less than a hundred yards was a large group of pelicans—probably a hundred or more. They sat idly in the water facing the surfers and the beach. I imagined for my own amusement that they had gathered to serve as a makeshift audience for the hapless surfers. A plane passed low overhead, and then the birds were on the move, awkwardly at first, then gracefully, spreading their wings and sweeping low across the water.
At long last Story rolled over on her side to face me. “You know I’m seeing someone.” Execution by pistol at close range.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“I am.”
“I did not know that.”
“So you said.” She sat up and pulled her knees into her chest.
“Do I know him?” Please god, don’t let me know him.
“No. We’ve been dating since my junior year of college. He lives in Charlotte.”
I tried to act like I didn’t care. “Well, that’s good. I’m sure he’s a really great guy.”
“He is a really great guy. It seems like I’ve known him forever. My parents sure love him.”
“What’s he do?”
“He’s an investment banker. He works for one of the big banks. Last year I helped him pick out a condo in Uptown. The current plan is for me to move there after the bar. We’re taking a little break right now. We’re both trying to sort some things out before then.”
“I understand. I hope you’re able to work something out.”
Well, fuck. This was no good.
I could feel the sand beneath my body. The breaking waves in front of me rumbled distantly; the sound surrounded me and was nearly lost to my awareness. The sun was hot on my shoulders, but perceptive of my mood, it became fickle and clouds soon moved in and brought the whole of the beach under shadow. Thunder rolled in the distance above the hush and thrum of the crashing surf and I brooded in my misery. “We should get in before the rain,” I said, standing to leave. “Are you going to stay out here awhile?”
“Please wait.” She put on her shorts and I knelt down next to her. She said, “Will you just let me say this? I don’t know how to say this, or even why I’m saying this, but—it’s just not the right time for me.”
“Not the right time for what?”
“I don’t know the first thing about you, other than what you’ve told me today.”
“And I know nothing about you,” I said. “But you’re right. It’s not the right time. I don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
“We hardly know each other,” she said.
“We don’t know each other at all.”
“And why are we being so serious? We’re acting like it’s the end of the world. This is crazy.”
“It is crazy.”
“It is crazy,” she said. “I don’t understand it. We should be out here having fun.”
“I thought we were having fun.”
People up and down the beach were packing up and heading indoors as the sky darkened and lightning reached down into the water. An umbrella upended by the wind skipped down the beach, chased by a mother carrying half a dozen plastic toys.
“We should go in.”
“Will you look at me for a minute?” Story turned to me, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
“Will you take those off?” I said.
“Yes. Will you take off yours?”
“Yes.”
And there we were. Two people who had not had more than a half hour’s worth of conversation, and I felt as if I were losing the love of my life. It had to be madness. We sat there until the rain began to fall, neither one of us saying a word.
On Sunday, she and I were the last two of our crowd to leave the beach. I’d agreed to stay and clean up to help ensure the return of our security deposit, and she had kindly stayed to help me. We bagged all the empty bottles and drove the trash on the back of a golf cart to a garbage depot down the street. I straightened the furniture that had been haphazardly relocated to make room for an impromptu dance floor while Story swept the hardwood floors and mopped the tile in the kitchen. After about an hour of assiduous cleaning, it no longer looked like Page, Plant, and Bonham had stayed there for the weekend and I felt like we might have an outside chance of avoiding legal action by the owners. The sun was hot overhead, stealing color from everything.
“Do you have any idea what we’re supposed to do with the key?”
Story wiped her brow with her sleeve. “Yes, you just drop it back at the realty office on the way out. It’s on the right just before you turn left to leave the island.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I saw the drop box when we went into Charleston for dinner Friday night,” she said, “and the emblem on the building matches the emblem on the key.”
I wanted more than anything to stay with her all day. I wanted to preserve the moment and delay our inevitable return to our respective and disconnected realities in Chapel Hill, but I knew this was an impossibility. It’s just not the right time for me, she had said. This stuck in my gut and burned in my throat. I reached out to shake her hand goodbye, but she smiled and gave me a friendly hug instead. I knew I had to leave this behind. I told her goodbye and in response she said, “I’m thinking about sticking around here for a while. I might get some beer and go back out on the beach. It’s early and it’s a gorgeous day and we missed part of yesterday because of the rain. I don’t have to be back for anything that I can think of.”
Was this an invitation for me to stay? She had made it clear that she had a boyfriend, so it couldn’t have been. I might have asked, but I didn’t. Stupidly, defiantly, still stinging from being told that it wasn’t the right time when I hadn’t made a single romantic overture, I only managed to say that I had to “get on back,” but that she should stay and have fun on the beach. She might have waved as I pulled out of the driveway, but I didn’t look. Rain caught me just outside Charleston and followed me all the way home.
—
A lot of us stayed in Chapel Hill for the summer to study for the bar exam, and this included Story. Her remote proximity to me became an unmitigated torture. She was in my mind every waking moment of the day and every dark minute of the night. Leaves had long since returned to the trees, but in my soul it was the dead of winter. The one time I saw her, in the atrium of the law library late one evening, it appeared she would walk right by me without saying a word. I called to her and she turned and looked at me without expression, as if we had never met. The gulf between us had returned and widened. I asked how she was doing and she said, “I’m well. Busy, though.” I started to walk toward her, but she retreated with my advance. I allowed her to walk away. I could think of nothing else to say. I had my chance and I’d lost it.
That night I walked out onto my back porch with Buller and saw the full moon rising over the trees. I was sick with love. I wrote to her but never mailed the letters. I thought of calling her, but each time I went to the phone I couldn’t dial the number. I wrote down every detail I could recall from our time on the beach, but it seemed a separate universe and a lost time to which I could not return. I tried to read to distract myself, but everything I picked up strangled me with pain.
I was consumed. I drank to excess. Sitting in the diminishing light of candles in my sparse living room, I felt as if I were the only inhabitant of the universe. There were hours on end when I couldn’t get out of my chair. A millstone lay upon me and swung about my neck. I closed my eyes and saw her skin beneath the sun and the boundless blue sky. I saw the starlight on her pensive face.
I’d bought an old piano from the music department the previous year and I played it day and night in the grips of some absurd fantasy that she would come to my house and, stopping at the door to listen, would hear me playing and at once realize the depth of my passion. Late at night I would walk to the Chapel of the Cross and play the grand piano there to no one. Schumann’s Kind im Einschlummern. Schubert. Liszt. Chopin’s nocturnes, again and again. The Fantasie-Impromptu! I was lost in some abstract romantic ideal. My brain would not turn off. The mazurka in A minor. I would play the dolce with sadness. Occasionally people would wander into the church upon hearing the music outside and I would continue to play, hunched over the piano in delirium, unable to resurrect myself even to pass a cordial greeting through my eyes. One Saturday night a caretaker for the church found me in the dark at 1:00 A.M. with two bottles of wine beside me and had me escorted out by the police.
Walking to the law library in the cool mornings amidst the running stone walls, I saw myself as a stranger to the world. I talked to no one. I would unconsciously recite Yeats’s “The Sorrow of Love,” a dead man among the living.
And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world’s tears…
And so finally the day came that I saw her yet again. I had gone to He’s Not Here to meet J. P. and Tyler to try to shake myself from my blackness, and I found her there sitting on top of one of the picnic tables with her friends. For a long while we didn’t speak. In the interim, I took the high road and started slamming blue cups. (One He’s Not Here “Blue Cup” = 32 oz. of beer.) At last, she got up to leave and, in walking by me, stopped briefly to say hello. She asked how I was doing.
“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?” I was a portrait of stoicism.
“Oh—” She seemed a little surprised by my answer.
“So I take it that you’re fine as well?” I said.
“I am fine. Ready to get through the bar exam.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it. Me, too.”
“Good,” she said.
Our mutual friends talked and we stood in silence. Story noticed my stack of three blue cups and raised her eyebrows. I asked why she wasn’t drinking and she said she was running in the morning. We turned our backs on each other. I heard J. P. telling one of Story’s friends that he hadn’t been studying all that much. Story walked around in front of me.
“How are you really?”
“I don’t understand why you’d ask me that,” I said.
“I don’t understand why you won’t answer me.”
“I’ll answer you,” I said, biting my lip.
“Well, then answer me.”
“Honestly, you don’t want to know.”
“Then why would I have asked?” Her eyes searched my face. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I?” I raged inside. “To hell with all this.” I turned to leave, but she grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me back. Our friends stopped talking.
“What is wrong with you?” she whispered.
I just shook my head. I wasn’t going to say it. She took my stack of blue cups, forced back a drink of lukewarm beer, and made a face.
“Gawd, how long have you had that?”
“About half an hour. I wasn’t going to finish it.”
“You should have warned me.”
“You didn’t give me a chance.”
When our friends resumed their conversation, she said, “I thought about you the other night.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“The other night?”
“Yep.”
That was all she was going to tell me. I tried to leave again, but she said “Wait,” so I stopped and my throat closed, and I realized at that precise moment that I was going to say something I shouldn’t say and could never take back, and all I could think about was that fucker Andrew Marvell and how I’d let one opportunity go by and I wasn’t going to do it again, the consequences be damned.
“Story—”
“Yes—”
“Story—”
“Yes?”
“I—”
“I’m so afraid of what you’re going to say right now.”
“Story, I’m miserable.”
“You’re miserable?”
“I’m in agony,” I said. “I can’t concentrate. I’m dying. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You obviously have no idea,” I said, and turned to leave. “Ladies, gentlemen—good to see you all. Let’s do this again sometime.”
I stormed out to Franklin Street smoldering with agitation and strode along until I’d burned off some of the angst. As I walked farther I let myself feel the warm night air and slowly began to feel strangely elated. I’d said it—more or less. At least I’d said something. I was alive. There was a quickness to all things. I noticed everything around me—every movement, every sound. As people disappeared into clubs and doors were pushed open and closed, music escaped into the street and covered me, slowly retreating. In the bars, people danced in the hot enclosed air to heavy backbeats that you could feel in your chest. I saw bodies closely joined and moving rhythmically and sexually together. The smell of their sweat and perfume was in the street. Undergraduates moved in excited, huddling groups from place to place. A taxi stopped near me and four well-pressed guys with moussed hair piled out into the street in a fog of cologne. They appeared to have dressed from the same closet. They were nice-looking boys and I imagined they would do well out on the town. I hoped they were not headed to He’s Not Here. One said, “Man, I’m fucking annihilated.” Another got out of the cab holding a red Solo cup of some intoxicant. Looking around for police, the boys took turns pounding it back. In three long, indelicate drinks, the mixture had been consumed. They were headed to Players. I walked past as they produced their IDs for inspection by a thick-necked sedentary bouncer with biceps as big as my head.
Farther down the street a kid sat on the sidewalk facing the street playing guitar in earnest. His guitar case was open in front of him and someone had thrown in a couple of crumpled dollar bills. Long hair of a single length fell half over his face; he had expertly cultivated the look of a traveling bard. I paused to listen and then dropped my last five dollars into his guitar case.
“Thanks, man.”
“Keep at it,” I said. “Ars longa.”
“Ars longa,” he said.
Avoiding the lunatic ravings of a man holding a homemade sign (Leviticus 20:13) and proselytizing in front of the post office, I left Franklin Street and turned toward home. A stone wall ran along the road on one side. It was crumbled in places and failed to conceal several attempts at repair, reminding me of the stone walls of the courtyard just down the hill from the vulture house, but all that was now so far away. At a cross street I came across a girl and a boy sitting on the wall under the cover of night, talking in that sweet, solemn way that people who are falling in love talk to each other. I could hear him whispering earnestly to her, not about love, but about life and his view of it and all his dreams that he could see so vividly. He was still young enough to believe in them; this was stealing her heart. I walked by them and a swell of longing passed through me. It was the feeling of Story.
My house—Charlie’s house, rather—was a thousand-year-old bungalow with a shaded front porch on a small lot with two live oaks crowded into the front. I had forgotten to leave a light on for Buller, and I felt terrible that the poor dog was having to wait for me there in the gloom of the empty house. After struggling with the damn lock for half a minute, I went in and found that he had destroyed the houseplants left by the previous tenant and spread the dirt and dismembered plant material over three different rooms. He sat in the mess ecstatically happy, as if he couldn’t wait to show me what he had done.
“Jeez, Buller,” I said. “What the hell?”
He ran to me and threw himself into my legs sideways, his favorite move, the one I always referred to as the “flying burrito,” and afterward I had to check myself to make sure I hadn’t torn an important ligament in my knee. We wrestled for a minute on the one area of clean floor space I could find until he had thoroughly defeated me and left me with several painful bite marks on my forearms. I wiped off his saliva and grabbed a beer and my notebook, and Buller and I went outside to sit on the front porch to savor the incomparable night.
We had been so situated for an hour when a car came haltingly down the street and stopped about fifty yards away. After a few moments, it pulled forward and stopped in front of my house. I could see faces looking out as if they were lost and assumed it was a group of drunk college kids. A door on the far side of the car opened and Story stepped out. She came around to the driver’s side of the car and an intense discussion ensued. I could hear what I thought to be four or five distinct voices. After a full two minutes of debate, Story turned toward the house and the car drove away, leaving her there looking uncertainly into the yard. Buller, who never met a stranger, launched off the porch and ran to greet her in the usual way—by knocking her violently to the ground. I tried to grab his collar to restrain him, but I wasn’t quick enough. She knelt down to greet him and he leaped into her arms at about thirty miles per hour, like a cheetah taking out a Thomson’s gazelle. Story wound up on her bottom in the dirt and Buller stood over her, licking her excitedly. It was love at first sight.
