At the island they pulled their kayaks onto the pebble beach.
“But you’re rather a free spirit, aren’t you?” Hara said.
“Why am I the weird thing?” Lyric said. “What are other people? Unfree?”
“Yes. As a matter of course.” The haze was clearing. The silver sleeve of ocean ran from the fringes of brindled rock to the distant line where it vanished.
“Then I think everyone should be a free spirit,” Lyric said.
Hara laughed. “That does sound nice. When you’re older, though, it seems more like a question of having or not having insurance.”
“You’re not so old.”
“Oh, wow. Thanks.”
And Hara was about to say yes, but not all moments were like this, not seizures of the day’s latent glory but the dull, poor labor we did to permit moments of grace, though maybe that was a tired point, wasn’t it, and arguing with Lyric was to pretend she had access to some higher knowledge, which of course she didn’t. But Lyric was undressing, Hara saw, her jacket and sweatshirt, her pants, her undershirt, her bra. She slipped off her underwear and stepped back into her boots, and there she was — not an object of desire so much as a torrential immediacy, shallow nipples, pale skin, fawn ravel at her crotch. The wind caught her hair and blew it as thin as silken wheat. She gave Hara a smirk, her flamelike body reveled in tattoos flickering in the wind, and she was off into the woods.
* * *
It was that night Robert came to dinner. He arrived, rudely, on time, just a few minutes after seven and before Hara even had a chance to finish her first drink. He had his dog, Banjo, with him and a bag of clams.
“Thank you,” Hara said. “Am I supposed to know what to do with these?”
He gave her a look she had encountered before in the town. The look, perhaps, of boys dead set on being men. He hung up his coat, took the clams from her, and put them in the sink to wash. Lyric had flitted off somewhere of course — Hara could have strangled her — and now Banjo, after sniffing around the edge for a minute, was attempting to choke down the tasseling on the living room rug.
“I hate to be a bother, Robert, but I’m sort of fond of that very expensive rug your dog is mauling.”
“Banjo.” Robert spoke sharply to the dog. He finished rinsing the clams and shook the water from his hands, drying them on a dishcloth Hara gave him. “You’ve got a nice house.”
“Do you like it? I like it too.”
“I’ve been here before,” he said. “Not inside. I helped Gerry clear the yard this past spring.”
“Ah, you know Gerry.”
He nodded. “Lot of downed branches after the storms. We cleared the field and the beech grove you got.”
“Yes, Gerry said. You did a bang-up job. It looked lovely when I got up this summer.”
Hara saw Robert glance past her and felt Lyric there in his look.
“So you work with Gerry? Look after houses?” she said.
“Some. Work where I can. Preston’s in the off season”—he pointed his chin at Lyric—“where I met this one. Clam, lobster. Odd repair job … Steamer?”
“Oh, someplace.” Hara opened the nearest cabinet and closed it. “My husband was the chef, see. Or when it suited him.”
Robert looked at his palm. “The director.”
“Producer,” Hara said, “which can only be worse.” She held up a flopping armature she imagined to be a steamer. What pretentious nonsense cooking had become! “So you’re quite a jack of trades then?”
Lyric tongued an olive from its pit in her mouth. “Robert’s in a band,” she said.
“Ah, right. So day jobs to support the artistic habit.”
“Don’t know about that,” he said.
“Well, I think it’s perfect,” Hara said. “Lyric here wanders the earth like — like — some sublime nomad and stumbles on, oh, I don’t know, a Yankee handyman or some such. ‘The Townie Dreamer and the Vagrant Muse.’” She cleared a space in the air for the title. “It’s like a fable.”
Lyric didn’t look up from the joint she was rolling. She licked and sealed the paper and tapped it on the table. She lit up. Hara finished the vodka nestled among the ice shards in her glass.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m going through a divorce that has turned me into an absolute monster.”
“One thing for that,” said Lyric. She handed Hara the joint and Hara dragged on it twice before passing it to Robert, thinking how tiresome the courtships of young people were.
At dinner they were good and stoned. They left the dishes when they were finished and took a bottle of whiskey down to the shore. Hara and Zeke had done this when they had guests up, gathering driftwood for a bonfire and sitting up late into the night drinking and smoking. The groups were always the same, people Zeke knew from the industry and a few old friends, putative adults who because they ate mushrooms once in a while and bore the tattoos of some lapsed rebellion thought they deserved medals of nonconformity or abiding hipness. Well, Hara got it. It was a pleasing notion to entertain and simple enough to encourage when you were drunk and high, tuned in, or so it seemed, to the deeper channel of communication that bound your life to the mantling commerce of heaven and earth. Possible, for instance, to see the sparks the driftwood sent up answering a call, passing up, up, and out of sight to cool and settle as the irony points high above. Possible, if you cared to, to see yourself outlined in their grid. Really though, no one was passing out medals in the end. People knew this, didn’t they?
“So who gets the house?” Robert said.
Hara laughed. “Robert,” she said, a hand to her chest. “My!” Not that she of all people minded a little bluntness. “Oh, who knows. I hope I do. My husband’s such a shit.” She took a sip from the bottle and passed it along. “I feel like some shrill hausfrau complaining, but you know the distance you travel — I mean, mentally — it just kind of shocks you. You spend so long assuming it will all just fall into place, successful doting husband, kids, the whole tableau.” She gazed out at the sea, the furnace of the sky taupe and livid with moon. “And when it doesn’t just happen you start to compromise — a little here, a little there — and slowly, bit by bit, any sense you had of what was supposed to happen falls away, just slides off into the ocean, until there you are, alone, on the tiny island called your life.”
They stared at the fire for a minute, then Robert knocked his head back toward the cottage. “Nice island.”
Right, Hara was spoiled, dreadfully spoiled, not that it made a bit of difference.
“It’s like the frog,” Lyric said. “You know, put it in boiling water and it jumps out. But heat the water ever so slowly…”
“Yes, people are always saying that,” Hara said. “But how do they know? Who has all these frogs and pots and no lids and, like, this pressing need to boil frogs alive?”
“I guess I’ve known some people,” Robert said.
“Perhaps you have met my husband,” Hara said.
Banjo barked to be petted and Hara saw Robert catch Lyric’s eye. She should leave them, she knew, that was the decent thing to do. Only she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to go to bed and wake up and have it be tomorrow, and then the next day. She didn’t want to go inside and be alone. If she ever had to be alone again she thought she might disembowel herself with a reciprocating saw. When had she become like this? Or, that was euphemistic, wasn’t it? The question was when had she become this? It was very easy to blame Zeke or the divorce, but hers was a condition, was it not? This desperate need for people, all of whom she loathed. Even the ones she liked she loathed. And that was the maddening thing about people. Yes, she had her friends from college, a few, and her law school friends, four or five women spread around the country and globe, busy with their jobs and children, and yes, they could speak to one another like sentient creatures and every so often wash up together for an hour on the shores of lucidity. But only a lunatic would call that companionship. Or the fifty-minute phone sessions with her therapist, because Lord knew she was too busy to physically go there, and drinks with colleagues that ended at 6:45 after chattering on with the absentmindedness of watering a garden, waiting your turn to offer some idiotic little discourse on the numbing fiction of your public life. Marc and I just started kitesurfing. Oh, you don’t say. Yes, we picked it up in Mauritius over the holidays. How remarkable — I can’t think of a single thing I give less of a fuck about! And Zeke or the equivalent threading some conversational déjà vu with that rote inattentive teasing, his mind clearly elsewhere, until you managed to get upset enough to exact maybe twenty minutes’ careful listening to expressions of how things make you feel and apologies roughly as nourishing as swine flu, and those twenty minutes, it turned out, for a surprisingly long time, were just enough to build back the hollowed little Jenga tower of your collapsing marriage.