Lucy by the Sea (39)
I thought of Charlene Bibber living alone, afraid she would lose her mind, and my ping-pong ball touching hers just briefly.
—
I had a sense then of being old, and William is even older; I thought how our time was almost done, and I had a real fear that William would die before me and I would be really lost.
In the middle of the night, William suddenly snorted after a snore, and he woke up, and he said “Lucy?” And I said “What?” And he said “Are you there?” And I said “I’m right here.” And he went back to sleep immediately; I could tell by his breathing.
But I did not go back to sleep. I stayed awake and I thought: We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.
A few weeks later I found out that William did not like watching me floss my teeth. He did not say this, but slowly it came to me that every night—or many nights—when we were talking in the living room I might floss my teeth and a certain look went over his face, I mean he became extra closed down, and I suddenly said, “William! Do you hate to see me floss my teeth?”
And he said, “Kind of.”
“Why haven’t you told me?” I asked.
And he just shrugged.
I felt really embarrassed. And part of this was remembering how I had not liked seeing his shoes when we were young and married.
One night during this time Margaret and Bob and William and I went down to the marina for dinner. They did not let people inside the restaurant, there was only one section of the porch that was open, but it was a very popular place, a lot of people from New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts were there. You could see by their license plates, and also I could tell from just seeing the people themselves, how they were dressed, differently from the locals, and I was surprised the whole summer by this, how people continued to come to Maine in the middle of a pandemic. Even while I, myself, had done the same thing.
But the point is this:
They had picnic tables nearby, and this is where the four of us sat. William went to the front door to pick up the food we had ordered earlier by phone, and this is where we had sat with Katherine Caskey that night, only tonight we were closer to the porch area of the actual restaurant, and this is what I saw:
A really well-dressed woman, I mean she was wearing black jeans and a blue shirt and her hair was really well done, blond but not brassy—this woman, who was maybe fifty at the most, sat with a man, I could not see him as well, but he seemed her counterpart—and this couple sat there, and I watched them, and they did not speak once during the entire meal. The woman’s face was a pretty-enough face, but it was a sad face, and as I watched she had four white wines, one after the other. They brought the wine in a plastic cup, I think because of the pandemic, and that woman sat there, and I watched her drink four cups of white wine while her husband—or whoever he was—never spoke to her, nor she to him.
I have finally seen enough of the world to know that they were well-off, or certainly much better off than the people who came from this town, and yet there they were. And I am only telling you that I understood—which of course I have understood before—that money makes no difference in these kinds of things.
You may say: Well, she was an alcoholic. But I saw her differently, even if she was an alcoholic.
—
I felt that I had seen a private terror I was not supposed to have seen. And so I did not speak of it to anyone, not to William or even to Bob. But I will never forget that woman’s face. Her sadness. Her pain. Her fear. It’s funny the things we remember, even when we think we are not remembering well anymore.
Five
i
“I am in mourning for my life,” William said to me cheerfully after breakfast one day a few weeks later as we sat on the couch and watched a summer rain come down.
“That’s a line from Chekhov,” I said. “How do you know that? I’m surprised you know that. It’s from The Seagull.”
He shrugged. “Estelle and her endless auditions.” And then William repeated, “I am in mourning for my life.”
It took me a moment. We were sitting on the couch facing the water, watching the rain pelting down. “You really are?” I said. I turned to look at him.
“Of course I am.” His hair had grown in abundantly, and with his mustache back—but it was not all the way back, and his scalp had spots of baldness on it—he looked both familiar to me and yet a version of a man much older than I thought of William. I thought he must mean because of his prostate that he had said that. But I just said, “Tell me.”
“Oh Lucy, come on. I sit here and think over my life, and I think, Who have I been? I have been an idiot.”
“In what way?” I asked him.
And interestingly he answered first about his profession. “I have taught student after student after student, but did I make a real contribution to science? No.”
I opened my mouth, but he held up his hand to stop me.
“And on a personal level, look how I have lived my life.”
I thought he must have been talking about his affairs. But he was not. He said, pointing out the window, “Look at that tower, Lucy. My father’s father—that horrible old man we met when we went to Germany so many years ago—my grandfather was making money on World War II.” He looked over at me. “He was making money on these submarines that were coming right into this harbor. He was a huge industrialist, and all he cared about was making money, and he did—during the war. And he stuck it all in Switzerland.” He hesitated for a long time, looking out the window.