Falls (Pt. 4): Calm Before

6. 

We chose Gagney's. A large blue building with three floors and a patio that looked out over the water. At night Gagney's had a reputation for being a sleazy sports bar with acoustic cover singers playing loud and out of key, but in the bright day they had decent food at non-touristy prices. The night reputation kept it mostly empty in the day.

We were on the patio, against the wood railing. Our table had three chairs and I leaned against the railing and had my feet up in the third chair. We were going over the menus and in the kitchen I could hear the staff laughing and talking about the night before and tonight and tips and a million other things. A breeze swept through the patio and across my face and wafted my hair and then it was gone. I knew what I wanted to eat and set my menu down.

"Do you know what you're getting?" I asked.

"Maybe. When she gets here I'll know."

I stared at the lake and the large rolling mountains beyond it a few minutes passed.

"Hi folks, welcome to Gagney's."

I took my feet off of the chair and sat up. The waitress was short. Young. Red hair. Pale. Wearing all black, as was probably the rule.

"I'm Imogene, I'll be your server today. Can I start you off with drinks?" she asked.

I looked at Marie.

"You can go," Marie said to me.

"Okay, I'll just have a Sam Addams, I guess."

"Bottle or pint?"

"Pint."

"Okay, and for you miss?"

Marie scrunched her mouth a bit. "What do you have for like, mixed drinks?"

"Whatever you'd like."

"Okay, a... tequila sunrise?"

"No problem. You both have ID's?"

We dug them out and showed them to her.

"Great, were you ready to order now, or did you need a minute?"

"I think we're ready," Marie said. "You go first though, hon."

I ordered my turkey sandwich and Marie ordered a southwestern chicken wrap something or other. The beer and tequila came out and we sipped at them.

"I wouldn't go too heavy on those," I said to Marie.

"Yeah, I know. I just figure, what else do we have going on today?"

"Well, true, but you know how you get."

"I know. You don't have to remind me. I'll switch back to wine or something afterward. Well, maybe one more, then wine."

"Okay."

I reached across the table and held her hand.

"I love you," she said.

"I love you."

"I'm glad we're not like them."

"Like who?"

"Bev and Tom."

"Oh. Yeah. Me too baby."

"I'd want you to tell me if you were thinking about leaving."

"I would honey. But I'm not."

"Good."

I smiled and she leaned over the table and kissed me.

"Did you get to write at all at the beach?" she asked.

"No."

"It's all right. Something will come. Maybe after this summer ends you'll be snapped back into it."

"Whenever that is."

"It does seem like that, doesn't it? Like, it just keeps going. Like it will just keep going."

"Does it ever bother you?"

"Sometimes I think that maybe I could be productive, or like I'm leaching off of you, like I didn't earn it, you know. That bothers me sometimes."

"We're on vacation. You don't need to be productive. And you aren't leeching. This whole thing, this has been for us. So we didn't have to work in offices or retail or restaurants forever. I mean, we took a gamble. You took a gamble. If it wasn't for those couple of months last year, you know, this wouldn't have happened. You earned this. Completely."

"I guess. It's just, if I had said back then, 'No, go to work, write at night,' this could have still all happened. We could still be here."

"I doubt that." I finished my beer. My legs were getting restless and I was getting ready to move again. "That's just not how I work. How my brain works. If I was working all day, I wouldn't have written a fucking thing. It'd still just be some vague notion for a story I'd never write and I'd still be mowing lawns. We'd never have gotten here."

"Even then," she said. I could see the tequila was hitting her. The waitress was cleaning a table nearby and I caught her attention and asked for the check. Marie finished her drink and the waitress dropped off the check. "Even then, it all came from your brain."

"Knock it off."

"I'm just, listen, I love you. I'm so proud of you."

"Thank you beautiful. I love you too and believe me, it takes a hell of a woman to say 'hey, go ahead and work on a novel that'll definitely not fail'.

She laughed. "You look like you're ready to go."

"I am."

"Where to?"

"Let's just walk."

"Okay."

I left forty dollars at the table and the sun was about to set.

7.

After a quick stop at the extraordinarily overpriced wine "market" for a bottle of Merlot (our compromise wine), we found ourselves sitting in Amphitheater Park, under a tree. The evening had set in and a girl with an acoustic guitar was singing soft to a crowd of maybe a hundred spread throughout the park as darkness swept under the trees and across the cobbled path and out over the water. Marie had a small corkscrew in her bag and she opened the wine and handed it to me. I poured half in her water bottle and I poured half in my water bottle and she took the empty wine bottle and put it in a garbage can and sat down next to me and put her head on my shoulder.

"She sings so well," she said.

"Quiet."

"Yeah, but, gentle. She's not forcing you to know she can sing. She's just sort of, doing what she does, no big deal. You know?"

Marie's phone rang. A shrill melody I tried to whistle along with sometimes but could never quite grasp the end of it. She dug it out of her purse while the tones danced and pierced into the singing girl's atmosphere and I am sure more than a few people looked our way. "It's Bev," she said, answering it.

"Hey Bev, what's up?" She scrunched her eyebrows and tucked her head. "Oh... Where? I, no, we... Okay... Okay.. see you in a minute." She hung up and put her phone in her purse. "Well, we have to go." She stood up and brushed dirt off of her. Her face had forgotten her tequila and in the dimming light seemed flush.

I stood. "What's going on?"

Marie was already walking away.

I walked and caught up to her just as she was leaving the park and out onto the sidewalk. A light stream of people littered the sidewalk like dried leaves dancing only a month or so away. We strode around them in brisk curves and dashes.

"So what's happening?" I asked.

"Just walk," she said. Her voice was quieter and nearly choked and the last time I had seen it on her her brother had overdosed on Saboxone a few years back.

"I'm walking, just talk to me." We left the main drag and our quick walk had bled into a steady jog.

I knew what was happening. Bev was coked up, freaking out. Maybe Tom left. Maybe they had an argument. I ran alongside Marie in silence except for the hard slap of our shoes against the pavement echoing through the dark. We turned left, up the hill, right, down the side street, up again and from the corner I could see.

Falls (Pt. 3): A Turkey Sort of Day

4.

In the morning Bev was asleep on the couch and Tom was upstairs. Marie had come to bed sometime after I had fallen asleep watching the blue dawn creep over the town. My mouth almost ached with bad breath and I crawled out of bed and Marie moaned a bit and immediately spread out across the bed. I put sweatpants on and went to the kitchen. The house was quiet and the floor creaked and outside the world was bright and peering in the windows asking if we were home and if we maybe wanted to head out later and do something.

"Maybe," I said. "Ask me later."

I took a cup from the dish rack and filled it with water and washed out the inside of my throat and then drank another, then another. I was always thirsty in the morning. I started a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table and stared out the window at the leaves on the tree barely swaying in the perfect August and listened to the pops and bubble from the counter as the coffee brewed. The breeze from the window was cool and fresh and I closed my eyes and felt my skin cooling and my soul easing. Someone was mowing their lawn across the neighborhood. The hum of the lawnmower said 'Hey, you're still a part of the world,' to me and that was nice.

The coffee finished. I poured a cup and set in on the counter. It would be twenty minutes before it was cool enough for me to drink. I went to shower and under the stream the fog of the morning and the night before slowly melted off of me and and swept out into the world where it would be evaporated under the sun and baked into the streets and when night fell it would seep out of the soil and the trees and as I walked home in the dark it would begin to wrap back around me and I would sleep and it would blanket and the next morning it would all happen again. My hair was getting long again and the water ran through it and out of it. Down my back and legs and to the drain. The soap. Toothpaste. Three or four minutes with my eyes closed and my head against the wall and the water beating down my back. I turned the water off. Toweled off. Walked to the bedroom. Sunlight lit the hallway from the window at the end of it. Marie wasn't in bed anymore. I pulled yesterdays shorts on and a white tee shirt that was now a little too big and slipped my sneakers on over my bare feet. The laces were knotted individually at the sides of the shoes so now they were almost like slippers. I walked to the kitchen and when I did small drops of water would sometimes drip down my neck and that felt fine.

Marie was in the kitchen in her robe, sitting at the table where I had and drinking a cup of coffee and she smiled when she saw me.

"Hey you," I said. I took my coffee from the counter and sipped it. Twenty minutes had passed. "How'd you sleep?"

"Once I actually got to sleep? Like a rock."

"Bev keep you up?"

"Yeah. Poor girl. I don't know what to say to her."

"How about; get your shit together?"

"Easier said than done." She drank from her mug. I pulled a chair around and sat in front of her. I put a hand on her thigh, bare and soft and ran my fingers back and forth on it. She leaned in and kissed me. "I love you."

"I love you too," I said.

"What do you want to do today?"

"I don't know. I have to try to write something eventually."

"How's the manuscript coming?"

"I'll let you read it soon. I'm not sure about it. It all feels... distorted."

"Well, you did it once, you can do it again."

"Yeah," I said. "We'll see."

We drank more coffee and then the pot was empty and Marie showered and Bev was still asleep and Tom was still upstairs and I laid on the bed watching Marie as she dropped the towel to the floor and her hair was still wet and and her body shone, full and alive, and after a decade I still couldn't help but stare. I imagined I actually was luckier than any other man alive. She crawled across the bed to me and pressed her lips to mine and I gripped at her and she gripped at me and my shirt was off then and my belt rattled and then was off and I roamed and squeezed and she moaned and moved and after we laid nude and tired, her head on my stomach, and she wanted to go swimming.

"Okay," I said. "Let's fill some water bottles."

5.

The summer had slowed. The tourist season was mostly over and August was about to settle in. Beside another couple at one end, and a man walking the length of it with his feet in the water, the beach was ours. We laid our towel out and I used my shoes as the base of a pillow, took my notebook from my bag then used the bag as the next layer of pillow, then my shirt over it. It wasn't soft. Marie sat up and spread tanning lotion across her skin, slow and teasing. The sand was hot on my heels. I read back what I had been scribbling over the last few days. A story about a man who's father had died and the man had inherited his empty coastal New England estate. I liked the idea of it but I felt like I was writing it poorly. I was better at journaling and changing names. 

"Get my back?" Marie asked.

"Sure, baby." I set my notebook down and sat up, squirted lotion into my hand and kissed Marie across her neck and back before spreading it. As I did she dug around in her bag and took out the water bottles and handed me one. 

"Make sure that's the Chianti. I don't want to be surprised," she said.

"Okay, hold on." I wiped my hands on my shorts and drank from the bottle. Sweet and sharp. "No, Moscato."

I handed it back to her and she handed me the other bottle. 

I pulled from the Chianti. I needed the day to start. I needed the wires to cross. I needed motivation and a spark and all of the other things lazy beach crawlers mumble about. "I don't know how you can drink that shit warm," I said.

"It doesn't matter about halfway through."

"Fair enough."

I laid back down and tapped my pen against my notebook. Nothing was coming except sweat on my forehead and chest. I thought about the water. 

Marie laid down. Her eyes were closed under her large black sunglasses. "So what do you think is going to happen with Tom?"

"He's leaving."

"He said that?"

"More or less."

"Oh. I told Bev he probably wasn't."

"Bev knows. She can tell. She might not want to admit it, but she knows."

"Yeah. Woman's intuition, I guess."

I laughed. "That's not a thing."

"What? Sure it is. A woman can feel these things. She may not always pay attention, but she knows. Why do you think Bev's been freaking out about it before Tom's even said anything?"

"I don't think it has anything to do with being a woman."

"No?"

"No. It's just intuition. Men are intuitive also, you know. Well, can be."

"I know, but I think women more so."

"Okay." I gave up on the idea that I'd write anything today and laid down and set the notebook over my face.

"It's true you know," she said.

"It is, I know."

"You're just saying that. You don't think so."

"Is that your woman's intuition?"

"Shut up." She nudged me with her elbow and we laid baking in the sun as it drifted slow and careless across the rich blue and sometimes a cloud, not long for the sky, would graze between us and the sun and we'd cool a bit and then the cloud would go on it's way before burning up somewhere a thousand miles from us. I would roll over. Marie would roll over. We'd sip from our water bottles.

Maybe two hours had passed. Sweat was drying off of me as soon as it was forming on me and I sat up. My hair dangled in my eyes and the world was brighter than I remembered leaving it. The light on the sand bounced into my corneas and stung them and I squinted out at the water.

"Going in?" Marie asked.

"I think so. You?"

"Maybe in a bit. I still have some time left on this side."

"All right." I stood and brushed sand off the backs of my calves and though I was thinner than normal, I looked at my stomach and thought it probably wouldn't kill me to do a sit up or two once in a while. 

My toes in the water. My foot. Up to my knee slowly. The water wasn't cold and a little shocking like it is in June, but I was enjoying the moment. Savoring the relief. Up to my waist and I let my legs out from under me and I was under the water now completely. I kept my eyes open and couldn't see much beyond the brown mud below me and in front of my blue and green into black and above me pale blue and white and shimmering gold. I let the air from my lungs and laid backward and let my body rise, just breaking the surface.  I closed my eyes to the sun and under the water my ears picked up the sharp buzz of a boat motor maybe a mile away and my skin was cool and I didn't think about the book. I didn't think about what I'd do a few months from now. I didn't think about Tom or Bev or anyone. I laid in the water with my eyes closed and breathed slowly through my nose and that was where I belonged in the world. In all of my life on all of the planet, that moment in that lake was mine.

When the moment was gone I stood up and looked back at Marie. She was walking toward the water. Her hips swung side to side and her dark hair fell across her shoulders and she kept her sunglasses on and she was my girl. I smiled and when she stepped in the water she pulled her foot out again.

"It's cold," she said.

"No it isn't. Come in. You get used to it."

"I'm not going to be in long."

"I'm going to be out soon anyway. I'm getting hungry."

She worked her way in deeper and deeper until she was to me. "Don't hug me," she said. "You're all wet."

"Well, I'm in a lake."

"I know, but I don't want my top half to be cold."

I leaned in and kissed her.

"What do you want to eat?" she asked.

"I don't know." I looked to the shore to the left, a half mile away where the main town was and where restaurants lined the beaches and docks. "Just a sandwich from somewhere is fine. Anywhere I guess."

"Okay, after this then. I'm out of wine anyway."

"Yeah I finished mine a little while ago."

She reached into the water and cupped some out and splashed it across her chest and stomach.

"Why don't you just go under?" I asked.

"I don't want to get my hair wet. It looks nice today."

"It looks nice everyday."

"Yeah, yeah," she said. "Will you just lightly get my back cooled off without getting my hair wet?"

"Sure honey."

She turned and I rubbed water on her back. She kissed me and said thank you and we left the water and put our shirts on and put our things in our bags. I held her hand and as we walked the half mile into town, passing lingering tourists and bored employees lounging outside of shops, I thought I might get a turkey sandwich. It seemed like a turkey sort of day.