Elsie was nettling him, but she was also jostling him out of his sense of oppression.
“You know,” Elsie said, “Miss Perry sold me my five acres at way below market value. Why can’t you be as cheerful and grateful as I was?”
Dick said, “Passing money from rich to rich isn’t the same.”
Elsie laughed at him. “I wish I was as rich as you keep thinking I am. Get it straight, will you? I’m not rich, I’m privileged.” Elsie cracked herself up over that.
Dick didn’t laugh. He still hadn’t made his good reasons clear to her. “Look. I’m as fond of Miss Perry as anyone, but there’s a mockery in it. Whether she meant to or not, it mocks me. For four years I tried to borrow money from the bank. We didn’t eat red meat but once a week and that was hamburger. An awful lot of fish, which none of us like all that much. I was hauling pots, building boats for other people when I couldn’t afford to work on my own … and that whole time, all those years, one of my kids has some … storybook … worth five thousand dollars! Goddamn. I built a whole catboat and didn’t get five thousand gross.”
“I understand,” Elsie said. “I agree that what some people get paid is crazy, how people get money is crazy. Miss Perry thinks the whole thing is crazy too. She sold an old painting she’d never liked much — she was horrified at what it brought in.”
Dick said, “Horrified. Yup.”
“She knows that people get rich by chance. At least she’s a rich person who admits it. And at least she’s generous. I admire what she’s done, and I think you should too. If she’d said straight out to you, ‘I’m going to help send your kids to college,’ you might have given her a flat no. She’s given your kids some things she owned. It didn’t cost her anything. She let them catch a ride on this crazy inflation. If you weren’t such a prickly bastard, you’d be generous about it. You could be a perfectly nice man, you know. You are a perfectly nice man when you’re not being a tightwad.”
Dick said, “I’m no tightwad.”
“Yes, you are. It’s just as stingy and graceless to tighten up when someone’s being generous to you as it is to be a miser. It’s just as unsympathetic, just as defensive. It’s all the same old Yankee vice.”
Dick let what she said lie on him. It wasn’t just one of her nettles.
She got up from the armchair, hoisting herself on the arms. She stood in front of him. “I’ve gone too far,” she said. “I don’t know why I do. I’m sure you and Miss Perry are nicer with each other than you and I are.” She took his head in her hands, ran her thumbs across his forehead until they met. She laughed a little and said, “At least in some ways.” She parted her thumbs slowly. “Models of comportment.”
He scarcely felt her fingers and thumbs, but he felt her presence. It concentrated around them, began to tug him up from a depth as though he and Elsie were being hauled together, thrashing in the same net, not touching the weave yet, still darting this way and that but feeling everything lift — what was there, what was around them — feeling the water bulge upward, the turbulence push on their lateral stripes.
He thought maybe Elsie wouldn’t notice, would just go on talking. He closed his eyes, opened them, saw her puffy bare feet. As she swayed a little, her feet spread at the edges.
He was still sitting on the sofa. Maybe she was still talking, maybe she still had her hands on his head. Elsie and he were all alone now, submerged together. No old light falling from a single star, not this time. It was all undersea, briny and blind. He felt her as though he were a fish, no hearing, just flutters of her disturbing the water. He felt them on the stripes along his flanks. Flutters on one side, then the other. Then flutters pressing equally on both flanks, running from gills to tail — that’s how he felt her dead ahead.
He was baffled by feeling. He was deep and dumb as a fish. He felt the pressure this way and that as she moved. Maybe she wouldn’t notice his hulking attention, hovering and swiveling in the stream of presence she sent out.
“Are you tired?” she said. “You must be tired.”
He looked up at her face. Maybe he would just sink. Maybe he could just give up and sink.
“I suppose you’ve been up since dawn.” She put her palm on his forehead. He felt her palm and leaned into it. He pushed himself up from the sofa. When his face came up to hers and up a little higher, she let her hands fall along his shoulders and arms. She said, “Oh my.”
He kissed her. He held the sides of her belly. “Oh my,” she said, “I ought to talk you out of this.” He kissed her again, moved his hands to her shoulders to steady himself.
“Well, yes,” she said. “But listen.”
He looked at her face until he saw it clearly. His sense of sight helped him veer off. Part of his imagination told him this would be a disaster, would shackle him to trouble for the rest of his days. But most of him was for going on, for finding her. He was touching her, his hands on her belly.
She put her hands over his, held his hands tightly while they rested on her belly. If she raised him too quickly, he might burst.
“I’m glad, I really am glad,” she said. “But listen.…”
Years ago he’d dived down to wire the bolt of a shackle on a mushroom anchor. One of the workers at the boatyard had screwed it shut but forgotten to wire it before he chucked it in. Not far down, maybe fifteen feet. He’d gone in in his skivvies, over the side of the yard skiff. He’d hauled himself down on the chain. Just five feet down in the silty water it was dark. Fifteen feet, not even a memory of light. He’d reached the shackle, got the wire in the eye, and twisted it round, his legs hooked around the stem of the toppled anchor. When he was done, he panicked. He’d forgotten which way was up. Dumb, dumb as could be, all he had to do was let go and he’d go up. Plenty of air in his lungs. But he’d gone dumb for a bit — it seemed long but it was probably just a few seconds. He’d clutched the stem of the anchor, couldn’t get himself to turn it loose. Didn’t even know he was holding on. He was all blank mind. Lost his body. In his blankness he couldn’t imagine anything, let alone what was holding him down there. Then he was loose. He saw dim brightness where he was headed, and that seemed to take a long time too, the brightness getting brighter.
The relief hadn’t been air or light. Or, after a jumbled second, being able to hear the two guys in the skiff talking to each other; nothing was going on for them, they were just passing the time, no time at all. The relief had been finding his fingers and toes, he’d been as dumb as that.
Now he popped up in front of Elsie, saw the corners of the room, the lamp, the fire. Amazed. Amazed at what he’d wanted, amazed at how completely.
Elsie was talking still. He pieced it together now — she’d been explaining in her seesaw way why they weren’t going to, but how glad she was, how nice he was, how funny it was.… He’d caught some of it. She’d been interrupting herself, but her voice had been steady and soft.
She held on to his hands while they sat down on the sofa. They slumped back. She was amazed too. She unbuttoned his shirt cuff and peeled it back, shoved back the loose sleeve of his union suit. She kissed his forearm, then put her hand on it. His arm lay between them. A plank lodged between two rocks after a big tide. He was relieved after all to be inert, glad she was soothing him.
Elsie lifted her head to speak. Dick said, “Don’t say any more, not just yet.”