Lucy by the Sea (3)

These are the things I did not know that morning in March while I was walking to William’s car with my little violet-colored rolling suitcase.

v

As we drove out of the city, I looked at the daffodils that were out by the side of my building and the trees blossoming near Gracie Mansion; the sun was streaming down with a gentle warmth, and people were walking along the sidewalk, and I thought: Oh, what a beautiful world, what a beautiful city! We got on the FDR, there was a lot of traffic as usual, and over to the left a group of men were playing basketball on a court surrounded by a chain link fence.

Once we were on the Cross Bronx Expressway, William told me that he had rented a house in a town called Crosby—it was on the coast—and that Bob Burgess, Pam Carlson’s ex-husband from years ago, lived there now and had found it for him. Pam Carlson is a woman that William had an affair with on and off for years, it doesn’t matter. Anymore, I mean, it doesn’t matter. But Pam is still friendly with William, and also with her ex-husband, Bob, and apparently Bob was a lawyer in that town and the woman who owned this house had recently put it on the market: Her husband had died, and she had gone into assisted living and she had asked Bob to manage the property. Bob said we could stay in the house; the rent was not even one quarter of the price of my apartment rent in New York, and William has money anyway.

“For how long?” I asked again.

He hesitated. “Maybe just a few weeks.”





What is strange as I look back is how I simply did not know what was happening.





I had been kind of disheartened in the previous months. This is because my husband had died a year earlier; also I am often despondent at the end of a book tour, and this had been made worse because I no longer had David to call from the road. That was the hardest part of the tour for me: not having David to speak to each day.



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Recently a writer I know—her name is Elsie Waters and her husband had died right before my husband David had died and so we were especially close because of that—had asked me to dinner and I had told her that I was too tired right then. That’s okay, she had said, as soon as you are rested we will get together!

I always remember that as well.





At one point William stopped to get gas, and when I glanced into the backseat I saw what looked like surgical masks in a clear plastic bag and also a box of plastic gloves. I said, “What are those?”

“Don’t worry about it,” William said.

“But what are they?” I asked, and he said, “Don’t worry about it, Lucy.” But he put on a plastic glove to hold the gas nozzle, I did notice that. I thought he was really overreacting to all of this, and I kind of rolled my eyes, but I did not say anything to him about it.





So William and I drove to Maine that day, it was a long sunny drive and I don’t remember that we spoke that much. But William was upset that Becka was staying in the city, in Brooklyn. He said, “I told her I would pay for them to go to a house in Montauk, but they won’t do it.” He added, “Becka will be working from home soon, you’ll see.” Becka is a social worker for the city, and I said I didn’t see how she could possibly work from home, and William just shook his head. Becka’s husband, Trey, teaches poetry—he is an adjunct—at New York University, and I didn’t see how he’d ever be able to work from home either. But I did not say that. In a way, I think it did not feel real; I mean because—oddly—I was not all that concerned.

vi

As we finally got off the highway in Maine and drove toward the town of Crosby, it was suddenly very overcast; I took my sunglasses off and everything looked really brown and bleak, and yet in a way that was interesting: There were many different shades of brown in the grasses that we passed by; there was a quietness to this. Then we drove into the town and there was a big white church at the top of a small hill, and there were brick sidewalks and white clapboard houses, and some brick houses too. You could see that the town was pretty in a certain way, if you care for such things.

I do not.



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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.