—
We stopped at Bob Burgess’s home—a brick house in the center of town. The trees around it were gray and twiggy, without leaves, and the sky was grim too—and Bob came out and stood in the driveway a distance from the car. He was a big man with gray hair, and he wore a denim shirt and kind of droopy jeans, and he stood there leaning down to see us—William had the window open—and Bob said that the keys were on the front porch of the house, and he told us how to get there, and he said, “You will be quarantining yourselves for two weeks, right?” And William said Yes, we would. Bob said that he had put enough groceries in the house to last us that long. He seemed awfully nice as I tried to look past William to see him, but I did not fully understand why William did not get out of the car and why they did not shake hands, and as we drove away William said, “He’s afraid of us. We just came from New York. In his mind we’re toxic. And we could be.”
* * *
We drove down a narrow road that went on and on; there were a few evergreen trees, but all the other trees were bare, and suddenly, as I gazed out the window of the car, I was amazed at what I saw. On both sides of the road was the ocean, but I had never seen an ocean like this one. Even with the overcast sky, it was unbelievably gorgeous to me; there were no beaches, just dark gray and brown rocks and spiky evergreen trees that seemed to grow right on the rocky ledges. A dark green water curled up over the rocks, and seaweed that was a brown-gold color, almost deep copper, lay wavy-like on the rocks as the dark green water splashed up. The rest of the ocean was dark gray and there were very small white waves farther from the coast, just a huge expanse of water and sky. We drove around a turn and right there was a little cove where many lobster boats were; and there seemed to be so much air, with these boats sitting in this little cove all pointing in the same direction and the open ocean behind them—and, honestly, I did think it was beautiful. I thought: This is the sea! It was like a foreign country to me. Except, in truth, foreign places always frighten me. I like places that are familiar.
* * *
The house we were to stay in looked large from the outside, and it was on the very end of a point, high up on a cliff, with no other houses nearby; it was wooden, and unpainted: weather-worn. A really steep, rocky driveway took us up to the house; the car tilted side to side as we drove up it. As soon as I stepped out I smelled the air, and I understood that it was the ocean, the sea. But it was not like Montauk, on the eastern point of Long Island, where we had gone when the girls were small, or Grand Cayman; this was a bitingly salty smell, and I did not really like it.
The house should have been lovely, I mean you could see it had been lovely at one point, it had a huge glassed-in porch that was right above the water; but as I walked inside I felt what I always feel about being in someone else’s house: I hated it. I hate the smell of other people’s lives—this smell was mixed in with the smell of the ocean—and the glassed-in porch was actually thick plexiglass, and the furniture was strange, except it wasn’t—I mean it was traditional stuff, a sagging dark red couch and various chairs and a wooden dining room table with lots of scratches on it, and upstairs were three bedrooms with patchwork quilts on each bed. Something about those quilts really depressed me. And it was freezing cold. “William, I’m so cold,” I said, calling to him from the stairs, and he did not look up at me but he went to the thermostat, and after a few moments I could hear heat coming through the vents on the floor by the side of the rooms. “Turn it up really high,” I said. The house was not as big as it looked from the outside with the huge porch, and it was fairly dark inside because of the porch. And because it was overcast. I walked around and put on almost every light in the house.
There was a slight dampness to everything. The kitchen and the living room looked out at the water, and as I stood there I thought again how astonishing it was, just open water; there were rocks, and the dark water was swirling over them in waves with a whiteness as they hit the rocks, it was something. Farther out I could see two islands, one was small and the other was bigger, and they had a few evergreen trees on them, and you could see the rocks that surrounded them.
There was a sweetness I felt at the sight of these two islands, and it reminded me of how when I was a child in our tiny house in the rural town of Amgash, Illinois, in the middle of fields of soybeans and corn there had been one tree in the field, and I had always thought of that tree as my friend. Now, as I looked at them, these two islands felt almost like that tree had once been to me then.
* * *
—
“Which bedroom do you want?” William asked me this as he put stuff from the car onto the living room floor.
The three bedrooms were not especially large, and the one in the far back had trees that came right up to the window, and I told William I did not want that bedroom but either one of the others, I didn’t care. I watched him from the bottom of the stairs as he pulled my suitcase up, along with a canvas bag of his own stuff. “You get the skylight,” he called out, and then I heard him go into one of the other bedrooms, and after a minute he appeared on the staircase with his winter coat, which he tossed down to me and said, “Put that on until you warm up.” So I did, but I have always hated sitting inside a house with a coat on. I said, “I’m impressed that you knew enough to bring your winter coat. How did you know to bring this?” And he said, walking down the stairs, “Because it’s Maine, which is northern, and it’s March, and it’s colder than New York.” He did not say it meanly, I thought.
* * *
—
And so we settled in.
“We can’t be with anyone for two weeks,” William said.
“Not even to take a walk?” I asked.
“We can take a walk, but stay away from anyone.”
“I won’t see anyone,” I said, and William, glancing through the window, said, “No, I suspect you won’t.”
* * *
—
I was not happy. I did not like the house and the cold, and I did not know how I felt about William. He seemed alarmist to me, and I do not like to be alarmed. We ate our first meal at the small round dining room table, pasta with tomato sauce. In the refrigerator were four bottles of white wine, and I was surprised when I saw them. “Bob got these for us?”
“For you,” William said, and I said, “Did you tell him?” And he shrugged. “Maybe.” William seldom drinks.
“Thank you,” I said, and he raised his eyebrows at me then, and I felt a bit as I had on our trip to Grand Cayman that we had taken, months ago now, that William was a little odd to me, and he still did not have his full big mustache, and I could still not get used to it.
But I could do this for two weeks, I told myself.
* * *
—
Upstairs, I went into the back bedroom where the trees pressed up against the window and I saw then—I had not even noticed this before—that there was a big bookcase on the wall opposite the window with many books: mostly novels from the Victorian times, and history books especially about World War II. I took the quilt from that bed and put it over the one on the bed in my room. And when I fell asleep, I stayed asleep all night, which surprised me. It was a Thursday night, I remember that.
* * *
We got through the weekend, taking walks together and separately. It was so cloudy and there was no color anywhere except for the tiny patch of green lawn near the house at the top of the cliff. I was restless. And I was cold all the time. I cannot stand being cold. My childhood was one of tremendous deprivation, and I was always cold when I was young; I stayed after school each day just to be warm. Even inside this house now, I wore two sweaters of my own and William’s cardigan over them.
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