Last Bender

10.3

Sally flew back to NY on Metro International, a charter out of Boston. She had spent the night there and was coming into LaGuardia. I was to pick her up alone and drive her out to the Island house for a weekend with the family. I parked the car with confusion and doubt and walked across the lanes of traffic to the terminal. We met at the carousel. I saw her backpack, now battered, tumble down and go around before I saw her. We were on opposite sides, and our eyes met when she reached out to grab the bag that I was watching go around. She smiled and dropped the bag back on the belt and ran towards me. I held her to me and it was like the first time we had met all over again. How could I have ever doubted it? Tears pricked at my eyes. I could not hold her tight enough. She touched my hair and kissed me and smiled so sweetly. She was thinner and had gotten enough sun to bleach her hair and color her skin bronze. The white of her eyes was brighter and the bridge of her nose was freckled.

“Where is everyone?” she asked when we had grabbed her bag and matched the tags.

“We’re meeting there.”

We drove through heavy traffic and talked. She was manic with enthusiasm, sputtering out names and theories, and things she had done in a jumble made straight by emphasis.

“I’m just nuts about Raymond Williams. I looked at Marx’s chair in the British Museum. And read Williams, and E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill. I can’t stop thinking. There’s so much to read. The French Marxists–”

We pulled into the driveway. It was late afternoon and shimmering hot. Joseph was dressed entirely in black and talking to his father, who was in a pair of cut off shorts wearing a cap with leaping swordfish embroidered on the visor and the words, Ed’s Ice & Bait. They were sitting at a picnic table shucking corn and talking. A pair of muddy muck boots was next to the table and he was stretching out his toes and flexing his feet. He looked at us and rose. Cynthia came out. We stood around a heap of cornhusks.

“So, tell us all about it,’ Cynthia said.

“Yes,” said Joseph. “I want to hear everything. Even slides.”

Everyone laughed.

We had time to get a swim in before dinner and drove to the access point, parking behind a dune about a quarter mile back of the water. The sand covered boardwalk down to the beach was hot as was the path along it. Every step brought the smell of the ocean closer. I held her hand and carried a little cooler with water and a towel. It was a clear day. Gulls circled overhead and we mounted the top of the last dune. The beach sloped down to the water. There was a heavy surf and the air was full of spray. We dropped our things and ran to the water, catching the tall waves and riding them in or letting them dump over us. The water carried us about like unmoored buoys.

On our towels, the low sun coloring the sand and the pampas grass, crooked dune fences casting lattices of shadow, she said, “We went to Wordsworth’s house, Coleridge’s cottage. God is it beautiful there. Have you read Frost at Midnight?”

“Only Kublai Kahn and The Rime of the Auncient Mariner.”

“Oh, we have to read it when we get home. Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit/By its own moods interprets! Puny Flaps and Freaks!”

“Simon was in Rome. He saw the graves of Keats and Shelley.”

“I was there too. I want to see the Bay of Lerici one of these days. Oh yes, and Skelton. I met a grad student at Oxford who was studying Skelton, felt he was very underrated. It’s wild, way beyond what you get in the Norton Anthology.”

“Can I just kiss you?” I said. I could not think of anything else than the taste of ocean on her lips. I was enthralled to the colors and flavours and heart of the world. I wanted to drink it down I wanted to keep want alive all the time I wanted to live forever suspended between getting and giving with all the open and the close of it gone. Sally…. we kissed and lay back on the towels. A wind blew, a hot wind. People walked by. I lay on my stomach. “I was jealous.”

“You were? Of Christopher?”

“Mostly Sylvio.”

“He wasn’t there long. I was alone a lot of the time. I missed you so much. All I thought about was us. Christopher always went chasing after boys if we were anywhere for more than a few days. Italy was impossible. It was so Suddenly Last Summer. He met a Somali dancer of all things, maybe the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

“More than Simon?”

“Simon excepted.”

“I misread your postcard from Florence about the offal.”

“How so?”

“I took organ meats for cock.”

She looked puzzled and then started to laugh. “Yes, I can see how you’d think that.” She kissed the back of my neck and let her hair run over my shoulder. “But I am innocent of all charges. You have nothing to fear from me my liege lord.”

“Nor you of me sovrain ladie.”

Back at home Raph’s industry continued as he laid seaweed on the gas grill and the lobsters on top of that. The picnic table was spread with an old oilcloth and there were nutcrackers and picks and forks lined up alongside plates. In the middle of the table were two plastic tubs for shells. There were bowls of lemon butter, local salad greens, and iced tea in pitchers. Citronella candles in glass balls in white plastic webbing were out around the lawn and on the table. Cicadas seesawed in the trees. As twilight came the first few crickets started to quirk in the leaves. The lobsters steamed on the grill. Cynthia brought out a platter of corn and Sally brought a bowl of potatoes roasted with rosemary and garlic and sea salt. Then they brought out a pot of steamers and bowls. After the clams, we avidly ripped apart our crustaceans, sucking out the meat from spiked chambers. I pulled off legs and feelers and stared at two black eyes in a red carapace.

“The corn’s so sweet this year,” Cynthia said, biting into an ear.

“It’s the breed,” Raph said.

Joseph laughed. “Breed?”

“The white. It’s always sweeter. What, you want me to call it the race? ‘This race of corn is the sweetest…’”

“Oh for god’s sake,” Cynthia said. “Isn’t it ‘variety’?”

“Variety is the splice of life,” Sally said, dipping a forkful of tail meat in the bowl of melted butter and lemon.

“I’ll let that pass,” said Raph, smiling.

The bib made Joseph’s head looked like a turnip. “Tribes, as in tributaries.”

“And deltas,” I said.

“That’s where they disperse,” he said.

“And sometimes gather,” I said.

When we were done we scraped our plates into a garbage bag outside and went in to wash up and get dessert. I loaded the dishwasher, eyes dazed a little by the change in light. I couldn’t stop looking at her, the way her ass shook a bit when she scraped the plates. Her cleavage as she bent forward over the garbage. The faint blond hair on her arm. Her neck exposed as she rinsed the dirty dishes.

It seemed like the small talk would never end. We would be sitting on the couches for an eternity, or lawn chairs to look at the stars.

Finally that’s where we ended up, after Cynthia and Raph went to bed.

“So,” Joseph explained. I tried to hold her hand across the lawn chairs but it painful. “Judy agreed and Alex agreed and we did a gig at Maxwell’s in Hoboken and Pyramid Lounge.”

“You never said,” Sally said, looking at me.

“I had so many other things going on. What can you say in a postcard? How to give such a great undertaking its due.”

“So you sang?”

“Yes–” he said.

“Back up. Tra la las.”

“After the Pyramid gig we went to Hosaki, that new place and they were incredibly rude, full of attitude, and I was so drunk I pulled down my pants and wiped my ass with the check.”

“How charming,” she said. “And you? Did you do something to the check too?”

“No, I behaved.”

“Yeah, he held out. But Judy was sure trying hard to seduce him.”

“She had a what with who?”

“With Alex. Tell her.”

“I–she liked me, yes.”

“She must have really liked you an awful lot for you to be so upset,” Sally said, adopting a tone she used primarily for polemical analysis.

“An awful lot was evident at times. Nothing constant or anything.”

“Nah, nah, not constant, no,” said Joseph, flicking the ashes of his cigarette.

But she brushed that off. “You didn’t have yourself a little adventure, did you Alex?”

“She tickled me once. We had to wait on the couch for Joseph to set up. It was interminable.”

“That it was,” he agreed, turning his head towards us in the chair, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Moths twisted in the yellow light by the kitchen door. Our faces were dimly lit and the sky was awash in stars and the moon had just begun to rise.

“We watched TV and she told me funny waitress stories.”

“That was our summer,” Joseph said.

“Doesn’t seem like I missed much, but I did miss it. I couldn’t believe I had to spend the night in Boston. It was so close. I almost went out and rented a car.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

“I didn’t think I could drive it. It was braggadocio, an empty threat.”

“Self-serving rhetorical excess. Bluster.”

“Yes.”

I took advantage of the silence and said, “Should we not–”

“Go up? I thought you’d never ask. Good night sweet prince, see you in the morning.”

“Ciao,” Joseph said, without moving or even turning his head to look at us.

We climbed the pull down stairs into the attic. Fans whirred the hot air around. We opened the windows in the eaves. Sally lit a candle and put it on top of the dresser and we sat down on the futons to undress. We kicked off our shoes and wiggled out of our shorts. It was a race to naked. The stale air was exchanging for fresh. I loosened the sand in her hair with my fingers. We touched and torrentially did what I would do again tomorrow if I could. The kisses were beyond recognition. The waxing crescent moon filled the room with blue light and shadow. She stood naked at the dresser. I watched her pick up a blue pack of French cigarettes and light one off the candle and smoke it. When she was done, I watched her come all the way back to the bed from the window. The smoke smelled good drifting in and out of the room, like distant burning tar, against the sea and air like cut hay and apples.

We awoke to the sound of birds and sun rising on the walls and made love again and slept again, and got up at noon. Cynthia served us French roast coffee in a Chemex and croissants and chocolate brioche at the iron table with an umbrella and chairs they had in the garden outside the living room, where we had taken our drinks at Passover. The roses that looked like lifeless, thorny masses in the spring were now sparsely in bloom with pink or white or dark red flowers.

 They were the only people I knew who used their Chemix. Thinking about it makes me want to go out and buy one. I don’t even know if they still make them. If I were downstairs in the store I would Google it. But the Google would be too much of an imposition at home.

Maybe Tammy was right. At that moment, standing in the kitchen, the same kitchen as always, and remembering Sally in that attic room, I wanted her back so badly I felt suddenly sick in the stomach, like 15 year old boy. It was the old lust. It was not a form of loneliness, where you desire something you lack. This was not about having someone about to talk to or balance the checkbook.