Lucy by the Sea (17)

And then Elsie Waters came to me in a dream. She was anxious, but very much herself. She had come to check on me, and when she saw I was okay, she nodded and turned around and went back through a door. I understood the door was death. But I had been so glad to see her!

When I told William about the dream he said nothing. It annoyed me that he had nothing to say.





Every night we watched the news on the television, and I read it on my computer during the day. This will end, I kept thinking. This will have to end. And every night it did not end, or indicate in any way that it would ever end.



—

I asked William to explain to me about the virus and why it had gone so out of control and why they couldn’t stop it and why they couldn’t come up with a vaccine right away, and he did explain it to me. He added that it seemed to him there had to be a genetic component to it, that a person’s genes determined whether the virus could get access to them in a serious way or not. This might be why it was affecting people so differently.

I went through the days— I don’t know how I went through them.





But I will say this:

There were times, as William would sit at the small table in the corner of the living room and work on that puzzle of Van Gogh’s self-portrait, when I would suddenly sit across from him—as I said, I hate doing puzzles—but I might find a piece of Van Gogh’s cheekbone, let’s say, and I would snap it into place in the unfinished puzzle, and William would nod, “Good job, Lucy,” and I would think to myself: I am not unhappy.

v

One morning as I started out on my walk, Bob Burgess was just pulling into the driveway. He stuck his head out of his car window and said, “How’s my negative friend?” And I said, Bob, come for my walk with me! And so he parked the car and he and I walked, and he walked more slowly than I did. He was not, as I said, a small man, and he walked with his hands in the pockets of his jeans; they were baggy, sad-looking jeans. There was blue sky, but clouds kept blocking out the sun, and then the sun would shine again, a bright yellow.

“Boy, I’m missing New York,” Bob said to me that day, and I said, “Oh, me too!” He said this was the time of year he’d usually make his annual trip down to see his brother, Jim, who lived there, and he’d sometimes see Pam when he was there as well. He told me he had met Pam at the University of Maine in Orono; she’d come from a small town in Massachusetts. He turned his face toward me and said, with his eyes laughing, “It snowed on September twenty-ninth of our senior year, and I said, Pam, we’re out of here. And so we left for New York right after graduation. Ah, Lucy,” Bob said, shaking his head slowly, “we were just kids.”

“I get it,” I said. “I do.”

And then Bob told me again how he had grown up poor. “Not as poor as you were, though.” He told me that day about his father’s death. Bob had been four years old, and he and his twin sister, Susan, and his older brother, Jim, had been in the car at the top of the driveway, and their father—while the car was warming up—went down to check the mailbox at the bottom of the driveway. The car rolled down and drove over their father, killing him. Bob said, “All my life I thought I had done it. I thought I was the one who fiddled with the gearshift. My mother thought so too, and she was super nice to me, I think, as a result of that. She even sent me to a shrink, and believe me, nobody went to shrinks back then, but the guy couldn’t do anything for me, I wouldn’t talk.” And then Bob told me how it had only been fifteen years ago when his brother, Jim, said to him—Jim was older and said he remembered the accident more than Bob could—that he, Jim, had been the one playing with the gears, that Bob had actually been in the backseat with his twin sister, Susan, and all his life Jim had never confessed this. Bob shook his head. “It kind of fucked me up when he told me that.”

I said, “God, I should think so!”

Oh, we had a wonderful time on that walk. I told him about David, and how he had played the cello for the Philharmonic, and how he had been kicked out of the Hasidic Jewish community when he was only nineteen, I told him all sorts of things, and he kept turning his head to listen to me, his eyes kind above his mask. When I said that some days I felt like a fresh widow, he stopped walking and touched my shoulder briefly and said, “Of course you do, Lucy. You are a fresh widow, my God. Lucy.”

We began to walk again.

I said, “It makes it all the stranger somehow for me to be up here,” and he said, nodding, “Tell me how exactly.”

So I told him it was weird to be with William—except that it wasn’t always weird, I said, which made it extra weird—and to be out of New York, and to not know when anything was going to change, and Bob glanced at me as he walked his slow walk and he said, “I hear what you’re saying, Lucy.”

We sat on the bench that looked out over the sweet cove, even though we were not quite six feet apart, but he sat on one end and I sat on the other, and the sun shone down with that yellow glory, and Bob said, “Do you mind if I have a cigarette?” He took one out of its package and pulled his mask down below his mouth. “I hope you don’t mind.” He added, “Margaret thinks I gave up years ago when I married her, but this pandemic—I don’t know—I guess it’s made me anxious, every so often I really want a cigarette.”