Leaving Lucy Pear(84)

It was a terrible lie she had told. It was cheap, and she had told it enough that she had come to a way of believing it: she had built in her memory his forcing, her resistance.

“When I think of Lucy,” she said (she had told Albert what Mr. Murphy did to the girl, just on the periphery of violence, just bizarre enough not to warrant straightforward punishment), “it’s like I’ve been mocking her.”

They had passed the yacht club and were nearing the end of the point. The lighthouse rose up before them, forever like a man to Albert, spreading its affections, one, two, three, four, until it shone for him, briefly, and withdrew again.

“It was what was expected of you,” he said. “To cry rape. Lillian practically fed it to you.”

“I never had any trouble refusing her food.”

“She cooked?”

“No, though that’s not my point and you know it. Estelle cooked.”

“Good. Then I’m only in for one surprise tonight.” He laughed, throwing an elbow at Bea, but she walked heavily, her eyes straight ahead.

“I’ve told worse lies, you know,” he offered.

Without pausing, Bea stepped out onto the first slab of the breakwater. She thought he meant their marriage, he realized—she thought he was exaggerating his sins for her benefit, making a joke.

“Really,” he said. “In college . . .”

“I’m planning to give her money,” Bea said. “To help her get to Canada.” She was taking the stones in large strides, though the moon was skinny, the night dark—apart from the intermittent sweeps of light, Albert could barely make out the gaps between the rocks, some as long as a man’s foot.

“You can’t do that,” he said.

“I told you, didn’t I, about her brother?”

“Still, you can’t do that.”

“I can.”

“What about Emma?”

“She’ll understand.”

“Bea. Think about this.”

“I have. The girl is stronger than she looks.”

“You think strength has served you well?”

Bea didn’t respond. Albert stopped walking. He let her get two stones, four, six ahead. “You think you can just step in with your money and be forgiven?” he shouted.

She was a shadow. The breakwater ended in a few hundred yards—she would have to return. He sat down to wait, the granite damp through his trousers, his fingers finding a snail that had been tossed up by the last high tide. He put his thumb in the hole, felt the thing retreat. He thought of last week’s party, at Lyman Knapp’s house. Like all of Lyman’s parties, it had consisted of small groups around cocktails, people spilling onto the terrace, mostly artists and musicians and poets who, thank God, didn’t bother to ask Albert what he did, the women in short dresses and the men without neckties. The talk was of travel and music and politics and, sometimes, in low tones, of baseball, as if Ruth and Gehrig’s home-run race should not be of interest to imaginative people. There was a general apathy at the news that Coolidge would not run again—what difference would it make? After the execution there had been a communal moment of silence, followed by a debate over whether the communist intelligentsia had really wanted them kept alive or whether they were worth more to the movement dead. But last week, the guests were raucous again, dancing and laughing. Albert, as usual, stood at the edges—he had been taught wit with different sorts of people—feeling stiff and too obviously handsome, watching as Lyman poured and greeted, waiting to see if he would be chosen again. He always was—each time, when all the guests were gone, Albert was the one Lyman chose, the one he brought to various bedrooms, each elaborately decorated in a different style, with angled ceilings and oddly shaped windows, Albert he laughed with about the name Knapp, for he loved to nap, and the name Lyman, and about Albert’s long ago hearing Lyman’s house described as “the homosexual house” (Albert didn’t mention whom he’d heard this from). Albert was attracted to Lyman’s boniness (like someone else’s), to the traveling knob of his Adam’s apple. But last week, hours into the party, he started to despair, for beyond filling his glass, Lyman had yet to acknowledge him. The decision, it seemed, had to be made again. The entire procedure—waiting to be picked, being in a place as himself, belonging (in the most unacceptable way) and not belonging at all (in more acceptable ones)—felt like a small chastening. It made Albert feel a little better. A little cleansed. But unhappy. Until at last Lyman brushed hard against him, and Albert flushed.

He hummed to the snail. Ira had taught him this, down at Mother Rock—it drew the things out. Ira said Vera had taught him, and one of her brothers had taught her. (Who had taught the brother?) Albert guessed the snail might mistake the humming for water, or maybe the company of another snail, something, in any case, to see or do or eat, which is why, half a minute after he’d started humming, he stopped, feeling guilty. His growing sense was that promises were almost impossible to keep, even if you seemed to have kept them, because by the time the thing panned out, whatever you had imagined and wanted when you had made or received the promise had changed. He and Bea had done what they had said they would do, they had borne each other up, they had loved each other, if one was flexible with terminology. Their vows had served them, to a point. But the point was behind them now—they had outgrown the arrangement. Bea would not ask him to tell her about his lie. She had barely heard him. And so they had failed, in fact, to do what they had promised, which was, if you stripped it all down, yanked off the pretty shell, to protect each other from themselves.