It was raining again, a pulsing hard-driven rain that sheathed the car and ran slick over the pavement till the parking lot gleamed like the sea beyond it. He didn’t want to go back to the cottage in the motor court, not yet anyway — the thought of it entered his mind like a closed box floating in the void, and he had to squeeze his eyes shut to make it disappear — and he wasn’t much of a drinker, so there wasn’t any solace in the lights of the bar across the street. Finally, he decided to do what he’d known he was going to do all along: drive out to the house and have a last look at it. Things would have to be sold, he told himself, things stored, winnowed, tossed into the trash.
As soon as he pulled into the dirt drive that dropped off the road and into the trees, he could see he’d been fooling himself. The place was an eyesore, vandalized and vandalized again, the paint gone, windows shattered, the porch skewed away from the foundation as if it had been shoved by the hand of a giant. He switched off the ignition and stepped out into the rain. Inside, there was nothing of value: graffiti on the walls, a stained mattress in the center of the living room, every stick of furniture broken down and fed to the fire, the toilet bowl smashed and something dead in the pit of it, rodent or bird, it didn’t matter. He wandered through the rooms, stooping to pick things up and then drop them again. For a long while he stood at the kitchen sink, staring out into the rain.
The summer the Rastrows drowned, he’d lived primitive, out on the water all day every day, swimming, fishing, crabbing, racing from island to shore and back again under the belly of his sail. That was the year his parents had their friends from the city out to stay, the Morses — Mr. Morse, ventricose and roaring, with his head set tenuously atop the shaft of his neck, as if they’d given him the wrong size at birth, and Mrs. Morse, her face drawn to a point beneath the bleached bird fluff of her hair — and a woman who worked with his mother as a secretary, a divorcée with two shy pretty daughters his own age. And what was the woman’s name? Jean. And the daughters? He could no longer remember, but they wore sunsuits that left their legs and midriffs bare, the field of their taut browned flesh a thrill and revelation to him. He couldn’t look them in the face, couldn’t even pretend. But they went off after a week to be with their father, and the Morses — and Jean — stayed on with his parents, sunning outside in the vinyl lawn chairs, drinking and playing cards so late in the night that their voices — murmurous, shrill suddenly, murmurous again — were like the disquisitions of the birds that wakened him at dawn to go down to the shore and the boat and the sun that burned the chill off the water.
There was something tumultuous going on amongst them — all five of them — but he didn’t understand what it was till he looked back on it years later. It was something sexual, that much he knew, something forbidden and shameful and emotionally wrought. He lay in his bed upstairs, twelve years old and discovering his own body, and they shouted recriminations at each other a floor down. Mr. Morse took him and Jean out fishing for pollack one afternoon, the big man shirtless and rowing, Jean in the bow, an ice bucket sprouting a bristle of green-necked bottles between them. He fished. Baited his hook with squid and dropped the weighted line into the shifting gray deep. Behind him, Mr. Morse slipped his hand up under Jean’s blouse and they kissed and wriggled against each other until they couldn’t seem to catch their breath, even as he peered down into the water and pretended he didn’t notice. He remembered a single voice raised in agony that night, a voice caught between a sob and a shriek, and in the morning Mrs. Morse was gone. A few days later, her husband got behind the wheel of Jean’s car and the two of them pulled out of the drive. Nobody said a word. He sat with his parents at dinner — coleslaw, corn on the cob, hamburgers his father seared on the grill — and nobody said a word.
He was back at the motor court by five and he called Ruth just to hear the sound of her voice and to lie to her about the old lady’s offer. Yes, he told her, yes, it was just what he’d expected and he’d close the deal tomorrow, no problem. Yes, he loved her. Yes, good night. Then, though he wasn’t a drinker, he walked into the village and sat at the bar while the Celtics went through the motions up on the television screen and the six or seven patrons gathered there either cheered or groaned as the occasion demanded. He let two beers grow warm by the time he got to the bottom of them and he had a handful of saltines to steady his stomach. He was hoping someone would mention Mrs. Rastrow, offer up some information about her, some gossip about what she was doing to the island, about Rose, but nobody spoke to him, nobody even looked at him. By seven-thirty he was back in the cottage paging through half a dozen back issues of a news magazine the woman at the desk had given him with an apologetic thrust of her hand, and she was sorry they didn’t have any TV for him to watch but maybe he’d be interested in these magazines?
He was reading of things that had happened five years ago — big stories, crises, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember how any of them had turned out — when there was a knock at the door. It was Rose, dressed in a bulky sweater and blue jeans. The black patent-leather pumps she’d been wearing earlier had been replaced by tennis shoes. Her ankles were bare. “Hi,” she said. “I thought I’d drop by to see how you were doing.”
Everything in him seemed to seize up. How he was doing? He was doing poorly, feeling trapped and bereft, pressed for money, for luck, for hope, so worried about Ruth and her doctors and the tests and prescriptions and bills he didn’t know how he was going to survive the night ahead, let alone the rest of the winter and the long unspooling year to come. Mrs. Rastrow — her employer, her ally—had cut the heart out of him. So how was he doing? He couldn’t even open his mouth to tell her.
They were both standing at the open door. The night smelled like an old dishrag that had been frozen and defrosted again. “Because I felt bad this afternoon,” she said, “I mean, not even offering you something to drink or a sandwich. Alice can be pretty abrupt, and I wanted to apologize.”
“Okay,” he said, “sure, I appreciate that.” He was in his stocking feet, his shirt open at the collar to reveal the T-shirt beneath, and was it clean? His hair. Had he combed his hair? “Okay,” he said again, not knowing what else to do.
“Do you have a minute?” She peered into the room as if it might conceal something she needed to be wary of. Her shoulders were bunched, her eyes gone wide. The night air leaked in around her, carrying a sour lingering odor now of panic and attrition — a skunk, somebody had surprised a skunk somewhere out on the road. Suddenly she was smiling. “I guess I’m the potato peeler salesman now, huh?”
“No,” he said, “no,” too forcefully, and he didn’t know what he was up to — what she was up to, a young woman who lived with an old woman and wore tight silk Chinese dresses on an island that had no Chinese restaurants and no need of them — and then he was pulling the door back and inviting her in, their bodies pressed close in passing, and the door shutting behind them.
She took the chair, he the bed. “I’d offer you something,” he said, “but—” and he threw up his hands and they both laughed. Was he drunk — two beers on an empty stomach? Was that it?
“I brought you something,” she said, snapping open her purse to remove a brown paper bag and set it on the night table. There were oil stains on the bag, translucent continents, headlands, isthmuses painted across the surface in a random geography. “Tuna,” she said. “Tuna on rye. I made them myself. And these”—lifting the sandwiches in their opaque paper from the bag and holding two cans of beer aloft. “I thought you’d be hungry. With the diner closing early, I mean.” She pushed a beer across the table and handed him a sandwich. “I didn’t know if you’d know that — that they close early this time of year?”