Lucy by the Sea (7)

He hesitated and then said, “But, Lucy, I just wanted to tell you your memoir really knocked me out.”

“You read it?” I asked.

“Oh yeah.” He nodded. “Knocked my socks off. Margaret read it and she liked it too. She thought it was about mother-daughter stuff, but I thought it was about being poor. I came from—” Bob hesitated, then said, “lesser means myself. Margaret didn’t, by the way, and I think maybe if you didn’t come from—well, from poverty—your mind just goes over it, and you think it’s about mothers and daughters, which it is, but it’s really, or it was to me, about trying to cross class lines in this country and—”

I stopped him. “You are exactly right,” I said, leaning forward a little bit. “Thank you for getting what that book was really about.”



—

I couldn’t stop thinking about Bob Burgess. Oh, he had made me feel so much less lonely! He had been worried about Becka and the refrigerator trucks outside her apartment; he had once lived in Brooklyn for many years and he had been so concerned about her. He told me how he had never had kids; he didn’t have a high enough sperm count; he just told me that like he was talking about the color of the sky, but then he said it was the only thing in his life that made him sad, that he had never had kids, and I said I understood.

And then we had spoken of New York City. “God, I miss it,” Bob said with a real shake of his head, and I said, Oh, I do too! I told him how the flowering trees were out when we left, that the city had looked so beautiful in the sunshine. Bob looked around. “Awful up here in March,” he said. “And April,” he added. “Just awful.”

Bob had grown up in Maine, in the town of Shirley Falls, less than an hour away, and when he came back to Maine after spending all those years in New York with his first wife, Pam, where he had been a public defender, he had lived again in Shirley Falls with his current wife, Margaret. They had come to Crosby only a few years ago. Then Bob told me about the Winterbournes, the old couple whose house we were in. He said that Greg Winterbourne had taught at the college in Shirley Falls for years, that he was really an asshole, and that his wife was okay, a little crisp but better than Greg. I told him how I had been asked to give a reading at that very college years earlier and not one person showed up. I said that I’d realized the chairman had never advertised the event.

Bob could not get over that. He said he didn’t know who the chairman of the English Department had been, but he shook his head. “Man,” he said. I felt I could have talked to Bob for hours, and I thought he felt that way too. I wished I had told him to please come back. When he left he said, “Call if you need anything,” folding up his lawn chair and walking away with it. And I only thanked him. I did not say: Please come back—!





William spoke frequently to Estelle—the wife who had left him last year—and to their daughter, Bridget. He had asked them to leave the city at the same time he had asked our girls, and Estelle did that, she went to stay with her mother in Larchmont, right outside of New York City, and she was there now with Bridget and her—Estelle’s—new boyfriend. I was struck by William’s tone as he spoke to both Estelle and Bridget; he spoke to them with great affection, and sometimes I would hear him laughing with Estelle, and when he got off the phone he might say, “Boy, she’s got herself a loser,” meaning the new boyfriend, but William never said it meanly. One day he said, “I don’t see how that can end well.” I never asked him anything about the man; it did not seem my business to do so.

“But are they okay? Are they safe?” I asked, and he said, Yes, they were fine, they were all managing. Mostly I did not hear these talks because he would go out on the porch or talk to them during his walk; he often FaceTimed with them.

One day I said, “William, aren’t you mad at Estelle?” It had been less than a year since she had walked out on him. William is a parasitologist, and she had left while he was delivering a paper at a parasitology conference in San Francisco. When William returned home he found a note from Estelle saying that she was gone. She had taken most of the rugs and some of the furniture too.

William looked at me with slight surprise. “Oh Lucy. She’s Estelle. How long can you be mad at Estelle.”

And I understood. Estelle was an actor by trade, though I had only seen her in one play. But I had met her many times over the years and she was a friendly person, and sort of plucky, this is how I perceived her.

I did not ask about Joanne, who had been William’s second wife. I assumed that Joanne was the one mad at William, since he was the one who had left her. I did not care about Joanne; she and William had been having an affair while we were married, and she had been a friend of mine. Her name never came up.

But William would tell me when Bridget was having a hard time about something—and it was usually Estelle’s boyfriend. “God, that poor kid,” William would say and shake his head. “The guy has no idea at all how to talk to a young girl, he never had children and he’s just a jerk.”

I felt bad for Bridget, and yet sometimes—not often, and I am not proud to say this—I was slightly irritated that William spoke to her and about her so often; we would be eating and he would be texting with her, and sometimes this irritated me. One time I said, “Would she rather be with you during this time?” And he looked surprised, then said, “I don’t know.” He added, “Even if she thinks she does, she wouldn’t want that, no. She’s her mother’s daughter, there is no doubt about that.”