Distortions (35 page)

*

He has been feeling lately that something good is going to happen. There is a visual distortion that accompanies the feeling; he sees, imagines he sees, sunsets when there could not possibly be sunsets. He sees them at midnight, when the moon shines over the water, then burns sun-bright, and the birds sing. Even the
seagulls are quiet at midnight, so he is not just imagining that one thing is another. He is just plain inventing. Why is he doing that?

He goes to the beach every night, and about every third night he sees a sunset, hears music or singing …

He has just celebrated his thirty-first birthday by drinking a bottle of Ringnes beer and going down to the beach to bury the bottle in the sand, waiting for the sunset. It would be too much to expect that the sunset would herald something, that it would all make sense, that all the sunsets would have been foreshadowings of this great, bright dawn of his thirty-first birthday. There is no sunset. Seagulls squawk. They are looking for garbage. Naturally.

*

Andrew and Penelope and Randy. The neighborhood children pronounce it “Ranny.” An annoyance—especially because it does not annoy his son. “Kill them!” he wants to say to Randy. “Make them call you by your right name!” Killing—just what the psychiatrist would expect of him. To pick up a newspaper one day and read about a little boy who was urged to kill another little boy by his deranged father, who babbled incoherently, who cried when the police came to take him away. The psychiatrist would consult that sheet of paper—was that loony ’65 or ’64?—and aha! of course! Lookit, honey! This man made an absolute fool of himself in my office, very sick stuff …

David has always been curious. What did the psychiatrist come up with?

He is losing touch, and it is appropriate that he does most of his walking in the sand, which he sinks into. He went into town, saw the doctor and had his eyes examined, explaining the sunsets as “bright flashes.” The doctor asked when he last had his eyes checked, and David made a little witticism. The doctor said that there did not seem to be anything wrong with his eyes. “I know not seems,” David muttered. The doctor laughed, suspecting another witticism. These schoolteachers are all mad.

*

Andrew and Penelope and Randy. Andrew and Penelope are twins, eight years old. Before they were born, the doctor took an
X ray and told them they would have triplets. He kept thinking that the doctor had done something with the other one, that he was selling it. He even told his wife that, and she went wild. The doctor assured them that he had interpreted the X ray wrong, and when that did not silence them he let them look at the X ray. “What’s that shadow? What’s that?” “I thought that might be a third.” “It might be! Isn’t that a leg?” “There were only two,” the doctor said, and walked out of the room. The bill was exorbitant. And when she was pregnant with Randy he refused to treat her, sent her to his partner. He does not really believe there was a third child any more. It seems silly to him that they were so upset. No doubt the sunsets will someday seem silly too.

*

She complains that in the city there is dust; at the beach there is sand. Anyone would expect that. Why does it drive her crazy? The sand creeps in, gets swept out, gets dusted away, comes again. She can feel her heart beating as she opens the door and sweeps the sand out the door, into the rest of the sand. Sand to sand. Ashes to ashes. She is thinking about dying again. Why? Why the hell is she thinking about that? She is thirty years old.

In the bed at night, she feels a grain or two of sand between her fingers. She gets up and takes a shower. There is a circle of sand around the drain. Why doesn’t the water wash it away? Everybody knows that water washes sand away.

*

Penelope gets the measles. Her eyes and her cheeks get puffy and pale. He consults a medical book and finds that nothing is said about the face bloating. He calls the doctor again. The doctor says that it is nothing; he examined Penelope the day before. She is just a little girl with the measles. David thinks that the man is indifferent—the way he speaks of her as just another itchy kid. They should see a specialist. He calls the doctor back—Penelope is in awe of all the confusion she has created—and asks for the name of a specialist. The doctor hangs up on him! He finds his wife in the kitchen, tells her about what the doctor did.

“You just can’t get along with doctors,” she says. The adjective
would be
wistfully
. “She says wistfully.” What is she wistful for? On the table is an open book. There is a photograph: “Seated man in a bra and stockings, N.Y.C. 1967.”

“I want to leave the beach,” she says.

“But I rented this place for the whole summer.”

“I am attracted to the lifeguard.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I walk up and down the beach. I parade in front of him. I’ve bought two new bathing suits. Something is going to happen.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

No answer. The young man in bra and stockings has an enigmatic expression. Perhaps someone just said something that astounded him, then took his picture. Perhaps he was just walking around in his bra and stockings, and then he got tired and sat down, and then someone said something astounding and snapped his picture.

Where did she get that sick book? Is she serious about the lifeguard? You’d never leave me for a lifeguard, he wants to say to her, because I am a loving husband and father. Witness the fact that I’ve spent nine hundred dollars to rent this place at the beach to delight my wife and children, and that at this very moment I am trying to find a specialist for my ill child.

“You pick the perfect moment to bring this up,” he says.

“What do you care when I bring it up? It had to be said.”

She is sitting in her bathing suit, fingers lightly on the photograph, as if it might be a ouija board, as though her fingers might begin to move, as though the fingers might direct her somewhere … to the lifeguard? He decides to take a walk down to the beach and look more carefully at the lifeguard.

“How do you feel, Andrew?” he asks his son. His son is playing with a dump truck in front of the house.

“Fine,” Andrew says.

“Where’s Randy?” David asks.

“He’s at the beach with the Collinses.”

Andrew pushes the back of the dump truck down. Sand spills on top of five sticks, all neatly in a row.

“What are the sticks?” David asks.

“What do you mean?” Andrew asks.

“What kind of game are you playing?”

“I’m just using my dump truck.”

Andrew seems very defensive. He has seemed that way all summer. Eight is a bad age. Penelope, on the other hand, is quite cheerful when she is well. Now she is sick. He should call a specialist. But first he wants to go look at the lifeguard.

*

The lifeguard is wearing glasses that can’t be seen into, so his eyes show no expression. His mouth is covered with zinc oxide, smeared on so thickly that it’s hard to tell if his bottom lip has curled into a faint smile or if it’s just the guck. The lifeguard wears bright-blue swimming trunks. There is a chain around his neck with a whistle dangling from it. David would like to blow the whistle into the lifeguard’s ear, make him show some emotion. The lifeguard looks remarkably fit. He would slug him, then grind him into the sand with one of those large, perfect feet. Then he would stand on top of him, the way people stand on top of sand dunes, and wait for him to die.

“Hi,” he says to the lifeguard.

The lifeguard raises his hand. His palm is very white.

“Been in the water?” David asks.

“No,” the lifeguard says. “Not yet, sir.”

By the lifeguard’s foot (large, perfect) is a sweatshirt. Dartmouth.

“You don’t have to call me sir,” David says. “I’m not much older than you.”

The lifeguard smiles. The zinc oxide cracks.

“How old are you?” David asks.

“Twenty-two,” the lifeguard says. He takes off his sunglasses and squints at the water. He puts them back on.

“Do you know my wife?” David asks.

“No,” the lifeguard says.

“A tall, blond woman. She usually wears a red swimsuit.”

“No,” the lifeguard says.

“She also has a green swimsuit. Very tall. As tall as me.”

“Does she come to the beach very early?”

“Yes. She likes it when it’s deserted.”

“I think so,” the lifeguard says. “What about her?”

David had not prepared himself for that question. He smiles foolishly.

*

“You know, honey, you forgot my birthday,” David says.

She shrugs.

“Have I done something?”

“No,” she says.

“You just feel like giving me some shit,” he says.

“I don’t even feel like doing that. I’d just like to be alone. I think about the lifeguard all day.”

“That might be like the sunsets I’ve been imagining. I’ve been seeing the sky at night as rosy and bright and pearly … I’ve been seeing flashes of light across the sky, hearing birds, I think …”

“I don’t see the similarity,” she says.

“We’re both obsessed by something that isn’t real.”

“He’s real. He’s standing on the beach right now.”

“But you’re imagining he’s better than he is.”

“I see what you’re saying,” she says. “I think that maybe after living with you for ten years I’m going crazy too.”

“What do you mean ‘too’?”

“You’re crazy. The way you’re always arguing with doctors, the sunsets you were talking about.”

“If I can’t talk to you, who can I talk to?” David asks.

“Bea Collins said she saw you talking to the lifeguard.”

*

The lifeguard awoke several times: once because he was sleeping on his arm, another time when there was a noise, either in the house or in his dream, and again when the bright light shone into the room. The third time he woke up, the lifeguard made a mental note to change the position of the bed so that the light wouldn’t shine in his eyes every morning. Finally, he got up. He remembered awakening only once; the light, the bed …

He put on his blue swimming trunks and walked to the bathroom. It made no sense to have put them on, because he had to pull them down to urinate. He flushed the toilet—his pig roommate,
a former waiter who had worked himself up to maitre d’ at the Cliff House this summer—couldn’t even be bothered to flush the toilet. The lifeguard felt himself getting angry. He went to the kitchen and took a peach out of a bag on the counter. He rolled the peach back and forth on the counter, but didn’t eat it.

In the bedroom, the lifeguard examined himself in the mirror. His lips were puffy from too much sun. As awful as it felt, he should put zinc oxide on his mouth. There was a half-full glass of water on the dresser, and the lifeguard dipped his comb in the glass and combed his hair back. He had seen pictures of men in the thirties and forties who slicked their hair back that way. It didn’t matter what the lifeguard did to his hair; the early-morning mist and the hot sun would make it fall into his eyes.

A thought came to the lifeguard on his way out of the bedroom: you might also have looked at that glass as half empty.

He put on his sandals and went out. It was a steamy morning. The cloudy sky might mean rain, or it could just be overcast all day. Half the summer was gone. It was the fifteenth of July, and at the end of August the lifeguard would return to Dartmouth to begin his senior year as a mathematics major. Before becoming a mathematics major, he had been a political-science major, and before that a psychology major. His girlfriend, who was a waitress at the Cliff House—who associated with his pig roommate every day and who thought he was a “nice guy”—was studying art and thinking about becoming an interior decorator. She was a Lutheran, and on Sunday she always went to church. The lifeguard felt himself getting angry.

He walked through the parking lot and across the wooden planks leading to the beach. There was a woman sitting on a blanket on the sand, with a child sleeping beside her. It was windy, and the woman held the edge of the blanket up so that sand wouldn’t blow in her child’s face.

Later, her name, Toby Warner, would be as familiar to him as his own, but today he didn’t know, or care, who she was. It was the fifteenth of July. The ocean was slate-gray. The seagulls flew over the shoreline as unpredictably as rolled dice. He took a little tube of zinc oxide out of the pocket of his blue shirt—a button-down, wouldn’t be seen dead in it anywhere but on the beach—and
smoothed it over his lips. He took the chain with the whistle on it out of the same pocket and put it around his neck.

A seagull swooped low over the empty trash can, and the lifeguard blew his whistle at it. A shrill noise—quite a contrast to the slow, regular slush of the waves. The woman laughed. She giggled like a girl. Her little boy stirred, but continued to sleep. The lifeguard felt awkward; it was foolish to have blown it, awakened the child. He took off his blue shirt and dropped it in the sand and sat on it. He looked at his feet stretched in front of him, and thought that his toenails never grew in the summer. Toenails continued to grow after death, so why would his stop growing in the summer? The sand probably wore them down. All day the lifeguard sat or stood, but when he was off duty he always ran three miles down to the main beach, where he met his girlfriend. Her name was Laura. They must have eaten almost a hundred pizzas together, at the stand by the main beach. Laura got the pizza all over herself. The lifeguard was not in a very good mood. He was displeased with Laura because of the way she ate pizza, for God’s sake, and he loved Laura. It also bothered him, though, that she liked sausage on the pizza and he liked it plain—mozzarella only. They could have compromised, but Laura pouted, so they always ordered pizza with sausage. Tonight he would insist that they eat it the way he liked. Maybe she would even be nice about it. That made him feel better. He looked to his right and saw an old man in a golf cap walking in the surf. The woman on the blanket had her head on her knees, but he thought that she had been looking at him the second before and that she did that to cover it up. The little boy looked comfortable, and he was sleeping soundly. The lifeguard suspected, as he often suspected when he contemplated a child for a long time, that he was a father. Maybe he was in hell and the punishment fit the crime—he was a lifeguard to watch over little children, and one of them might be his. But his would be only … two years old now? It couldn’t possibly be the child on the blanket. And this child had a mother. And he had never seen the woman before. That made him feel better. He was proud of his ability to think things through.