“Exactly.”
“We’re together all day, and with our kids at night. Nothing goes unseen. Nothing goes unmeasured, unmentioned. Nothing is secret. Nothing is hidden.”
“That’s true.”
“Quantity versus quality.”
“But we like it,” I said, “because it takes out the guesswork.”
“That’s marriage, measuring everything, like a speed trap. Your speed is communal property. Your kids belong to the community. Your tendencies will be noted.” She had one hand tucked under her armpit and the fingers of her other hand pressed to her lips, as though she’d forgotten and then remembered some terrible news. I felt her body’s energy, felt it flashing and beaming. She said, “I shouldn’t take it for granted.”
“I’m trying to stay positive and think of the nice parts.”
“I find I’m often faking it.”
“Sure.”
“Is that sure like ‘whatever,’ or sure like ‘me too’?”
“I know what you mean.”
“I pretend to care about whether to save leftover chicken. I pretend to like hip-hop with disgusting lyrics when we’re alone in the car.”
“I pretend to snore so my kid will fall asleep, but then I really do fall asleep.”
“Maybe you don’t know what I mean.”
“I probably do.”
“You have it easy. Some people do.”
I just kept looking. Something stood up in me. It had a mean grin, and a chip on its shoulder from a cynical, isolated, cutthroat victimhood. Looking at her body, at her face, was like pulling up to the curb with my U-Haul. Then I’d say, “Do you want to see the eighteenth-century barn I’m staying in?”
I couldn’t do it. She talked about her husband a little more. I pretended not to listen. She got up.
I saw that ugly little walleyed dog, Piccolo, coming up the paved path to the windmill. He scampered around the tent, licked my shoe, and pissed under a side table before following Alicia through the door of the windmill. He gave me a last goggle-eyed look. I couldn’t bring myself to flirt with him, either.
The theater performance let out, and the crowd came across the lawn. Winston walked slowly, heavily, with Ingrid behind him, and Charlene, Roberta, and Nada Klein. A clot of faculty assembled. I went over there. Carl came out of the building, his long gray hair plastered to his neck, with Barney Angerman leaning on his arm, and said it was too crowded in the windmill, the stairs were too steep, and asked if I would walk Barney home. I introduced myself, and bent down as Barney’s other arm hooked around mine. I wasn’t sure if he’d been given any say in the matter. He was entirely deaf and looked up at me and smiled. We prepared to descend, and carefully took the first step down the paved path to the lawn.
He stared ahead, his hair glowing white, in a kind of pompadour, his stride short and uneven, his eyes steady. His shirt had stains all over it. His ears looked like something that had grown in the black dirt at the base of a hobbit’s tree, his nose resting against his upper lip. As we descended, I didn’t say a word for fear of distracting him. We navigated a dark wooden staircase, and he paused to catch his breath, pulling hard on my elbow, and when we started up again I tripped, almost yanking us both down the stairs, and he let out a creepy, warbled laugh.
We exited the campus gate and crossed Main Street. He was staying in a salt-stained cottage on the bay. We went around back, where some men and women were sitting in the dark, drinking and talking.
Barney pushed past me on his own power and lowered himself into a patio chair. A candle burned in a jar. Someone handed him a cup of wine and he took a sip, letting out a sigh, and someone else politely asked me to sit except there weren’t any chairs. The average age here seemed to be nearing the triple digits. They talked about places they’d rented or owned around town over the years, and who owned them now, a house that caught fire one Fourth of July, and recalled their first trip out here decades earlier in a white ’73 Eldorado convertible. It felt good to be young among them. There was a raft lying on the patio and I lay down on it. I could pretend I was nothing, or anything, depending.
Barney explained how, one summer forty years ago, on an empty floor of some factory in Manhattan, two men whose names he couldn’t remember invented disco. “We thought it was paradise.” He took a long drink. “Dancing until dawn, barely able to stand, stoned on ethyl chloride.” It ended when he fell in love with a guy named James and moved out here, to a one-story shack on Route 7 while he wrote The Dancer, his best-known play.
I lay there on the raft, looking at the stars. I thought about outer space and how we’re in it, wondering what it is and where it ends, because it has to end, and what’s over the roof of space, who made it, and what if I stood on my roof back home, would I be able to see stars? I missed the night sky, a heaven above me in which things occurred. This was my world, my universe, it had been given to me, and I lay there, amazed, and tears streamed out, quietly, like rain down a window.
Air flew weightlessly across the sea, against the crisp blackness, in the beauty of this night. The stars were so big. Beneath them bits of fog puffed by, and the bigger stars winked behind the veil, and then it was clear again, and the heavens were so huge, and the Milky Way so bright, a path of spilled breadcrumbs, an explosion of particles frozen in the sky. We’re particles of the same particles, we eat each other, we are stardust. I was so small, and raw from the blowing wind, and I started to feel good, and wondered how I could ever feel bad again.
The bay was wide and dark. I could see TV sets glowing inside motel rooms and an airliner overhead. I heard the shushing of the bay, the sea slapping pebbles, rattling stones, and saw, bathed in the ugly orange glow from a streetlight, a condo where a student had hosted a cocktail party years earlier. Shoosh. Woosh.
I woke up on the raft on the tiny brick patio at sunrise, six A.M. The steel cable of a catamaran whanged against the metal mast in a steady breeze as it sat in the yard next door. A loud horn, the final boarding call, blared across the harbor from the ferry terminal.