I took a sip of my beer; should have considered it longer before speaking, but I asked the question anyway: "Is that why he's the only one you told why you left Ohio?" Saw the reaction in her face—a nervous, stricken look—and instantly regretted my words. Reached out, patted her hand. Said, "I'm sorry. It's none of my business. I had no right to ask."
She sat there for a moment—at least she hadn't pulled her hand away—head down, staring at the table. Finally, she lifted her face to me— the cloudy expression of shell shock had returned—then asked in a small, small voice, "Tomlinson told you?" as if she had been betrayed.
There have been times in my life—too many times, I'm sad to admit— I have spoken or acted so unthinkingly that I do not doubt that civilized people would be better off if I simply returned to the jungles where I spent so many of my years. Build myself a bamboo hut. Hang a sign over the door: Beware the Big Dumb Shit. Use a stick to bang a hollowed-out log if I absolutely have to communicate.
I took her hand in both of mine, and squeezed. "No, Tomlinson wouldn't do that. All he told me . . . the only thing he told me was that you and he had had some long conversations. Because I know Tomlinson, I assumed the rest. It's one of my eccentricities—prying into other people's business just to remind myself how rude I really am. Which is a nicer way of saying that I'm way too nosy. I'm sorry. Please believe me, Janet."
It was a while before she spoke. I sat there feeling helplessly big and clumsy. Finally . . . finally, she patted my hand . . . looked at me with cool, remote eyes and said, "Of course I believe you. I'd . . . like to tell you about it. But it's not easy for me. It's taken a long time to—"
"Forget it," I interrupted. "When you're in the mood, I'm ready to listen. A couple of weeks from now ... or after we finish the tarpon procedure. Or not—you decide." I glanced around at the busy waitresses. "Jesus, where is that food?"
A gusty sound of laughter burst from her lips—an emotional release. She said, "No one would ever say that you have kind eyes. But you're kind. I used to watch you around the marina, and you seemed ... so remote. Like you're there, but you're really someplace else. When I first saw you? That's what I'm talking about. You actually seemed kind of scary."
"I scare myself," I put in helpfully. Didn't add: Beware the big dumb shit.
"But then I saw the way you treated that poor man. From the explosion? And the way you are with the others around the marina. Mostly, though, I know you're kind because you let me do all the observations today, and I know—don't tell me otherwise, either—I know you really wanted to do it."
"Baloney," I said. "I took advantage of you. I lazed around on the beach and did other childish things while you worked. Which is why I'm paying the tab." The food was coming. I was more grateful for the opportunity to change the subject than the chance to eat.
We ate in silence for a time. Good raw conch salad, good sandwich. When we did talk, I was careful to keep the topic within safe borders. Fish, biology, running. She spoke of trying to lose weight—I could hear the frustration in her voice. These are modern times. All men and women are required to fight hard to maintain the preferred Prime-Time American uniform: thin. But it's harder on the women because they must not only be thin, they must be fashion model-gaunt. Television commercials, like certain poisons, have to have a cumulative effect. So Janet was one of the ones who battled daily in an attempt to match the images they saw in the mirror with the images pressed upon them by the television screen.
As she picked at her Caesar salad, she said things like, "If I just had more willpower . . . exercise till I drop, and things still don't seem to change much . . . have you heard of that new powder diet?"
I said things such as "Genetic coding . . . the effective storage system of wandering Nordic tribes . . . think in terms of fitness, not fat."
When we were finished, I walked her outside toward my old Chevy pickup truck. I'd had the engine overhauled recently, the brake pads and brake lines replaced, then had the truck painted a very handsome—I
believed—shade of navy gray. I liked the pearlike shape of the cab, and the fact that its six-cylinder engine was so simple that even I could work on it. The color seemed to match the functionality of the truck.
That was what I was explaining to her—why I maintained an old truck rather than buy a new one—when, as I reached for the passenger's-side door handle, Janet suddenly took me by the elbow and said, "Let's walk." She used her chin to motion toward the beach across the road.
So we walked. It was a good night for it: blustery January sea wind pushing surf onto the beach, making a surging, waterfall roar. Black night with a new moon drifting down the western sky; winter stars gauging the velocity of scudding clouds. Tropical Mexico and the jungles of Yucatan were somewhere out there, beyond the far range of horizon. But here, on Sanibel, a Canadian wind culled sand from the beach and stung us.
We were walking south, away from Blind Pass. Probably walked five minutes or so before she pulled my arm tight to her—an attempt to conceal herself, I sensed, rather than a gesture of affection—and she said in a steady, controlled voice, "I want to tell you about what happened. It would be good for me to talk about it, they . . . That's what I've been told. But it's not easy, and I want you to understand that I'm getting better. I don't want you to think I'm the kind who goes around whining about poor me me me. But there are things—I know this now—there are things that you can't keep bottled up inside."
I said, "Then you probably need to talk about it."
She sighed. I could feel her body shudder involuntarily. "Okay, what happened was, the reason I left Ohio was ... I had what you would call a nervous breakdown. Those words—nervous breakdown—you hear them all the time, so they don't seem like much. You know, so-and-so had a nervous breakdown? But when you go through it . . . it's not so simple. I was convinced that I really had gone . . . gone completely insane. Only I hadn't. The doctors, it took them a long time to convince me. I spent nearly a year under their care, and it was several months before I finally began to believe that I wasn't really crazy, I was just reacting to . . . what I'd been through. I was suffering severe depression and what they called anxiety attacks. These things, the attacks, would seem to just descend on me—in the classroom, at the store, anyplace. Like poison gas almost, and it was the most terrifying experience. . . ."
She paused, trying to wrestle her emotions into control. I said, "You don't have to go on with this. You became ill. Human beings are susceptible to illness—there are emotional viruses just as there are physical viruses. So now you're in Florida recuperating, and things are going better—"
She tapped my arm, hushing me. "That's not it," she said. "I'm avoiding it again. I started to tell you what happened, and that's what I'm going to do." She cleared her throat. . . made a brave attempt to continue, then completely broke down. I patted her, I made little clucking noises. She told me what she could in little spurts. Over the next hour and several miles of beach, the whole story came out. She kept saying, "I know worse things have happened to people."
Sadly, it was true. But not much worse.
As early as grade school, Janet had known that she was not, and would never be, drop-dead attractive. But she grew up with enough good people, and enough self-esteem, that it didn't matter much. At one point she said, "You've seen those women—women who are smart and talented but, because of the way they look, they end up with men no one else would have? I wasn't going to let that happen to me."