Rumors from the Lost World (10 page)

Sidney didn't believe in Ruth's death. Only a few hours before, adjusting collars or ties, many of his neighbors had received him. “This service is inappropriate because Ruth isn't dead,” he told them. Joyce Rusk took what he was saying for grief and offered condolences. He stared at her. “If you're crazy enough to think she's dead, you can go to hell.” One or two of the others, like Pat and John Eliot, well-versed in the nuances of shock, told him to buckle up, old man, face facts. That sort of thing. Instead, he lost his temper. Gilbert could hardly picture Sid lifting a cane chair, much less tossing it through a window, but the story traveled too fast to change much in the telling.

Once they all vanished through the heat, their dark torsos sliding off their legs and tumbling down a curve of beach, Gilbert turned to face the memorial plaque, hypnotizing himself with the ceaseless crash and cradlerock of ocean.

“Hello, Sid.” Gilbert startled him, his approach shielded by the beach house. Compulsively Sidney rearranged Ruth's towel, placed a hand firmly on the binoculars beside him, and stared out to sea. A single gull slanted through the sun. In his dark glasses Gilbert saw his own reflection, and felt he was falling, uncertain where he might land. “The service is over,” he said. “If you like, you can have dinner at my place. You can rest.”

“I can't leave the beach.”

“Look, Sid, she's gone. If you'd stood over there with the rest of us, you'd be closer to the bone of that thought by now. We all loved her, but starving yourself or pretending nothing's happened won't help. We miss her, too, but we're worried about you. Come with me.”

“She's not dead. In fact, I saw her last night. If she were dead, we would have her body. The body would wash ashore.”

“Sid, there's nothing out there.” So many times Gil had reasonably thought through an impasse, suggesting compromise, calming tempers. “Look, this is absurd, you're tired. Why don't we walk a couple miles, have a drink? That'll help you sleep.” Gilbert himself was well-versed in the nuances of insomnia. “You can't just sit here.” Sidney picked up the binoculars and studied the horizon. Gilbert shrugged and walked to the beach road, past the blare of a boombox. When he looked back, Sidney's binoculars were still trained on the swooping gull, sweeping or hovering in rhythm with its wheeling flight.

“He can stay here,” his mother said. “He belongs here.” Fully recovered from her faint, she talked Gilbert drowsy. A floor fan oscillated behind her, its mechanical breeze giving new life to a dying fern, its noise and the drone of her voice hypnotizing him. For some time now, Sidney had lived in an isolated cottage with Ruth and with Stephanie, his sister, but in his mother's presence he became patronizing or very subdued: his sense of himself visibly shrank. Perhaps he was better off at the beach. With his identity undermined, Gilbert thought, she might easily convince him to stay, a genteel mother-and-son living together in a throwback to an earlier age, sharing a surname which may not have been aboard the Mayflower but which still carried its social weight.

Photographs of Sidney covered the walls. A slender child with a sand bucket, easily given to colds; a full-faced adolescent in a prom outfit, posed with his sister because he was too shy to ask anyone else for a date; a bearded emaciated face, framed by a cap and gown and a Princeton diploma which did nothing to improve his lack of inner equilibrium; a lost soul in trunks on the beach, taking a year to travel and search for the past his bashfiilness had taken from him. “He'll forget, as they say. I mean, that's what he has to do, isn't it, dear?” The chair Gilbert sat in had thick upholstery. He stroked it and stared at post cards, stuffed owls, cigarette holders from Europe, ceramic animals. For a certain sort of old woman, time doesn't pass, people don't change. When Sidney first introduced Ruth, his salvation, his soul-companion, to his mother, the grand introduction, Ruth had a cold. She suffered through an agony of icy solicitude: cough medicines, aspirin, bitter tea, a bolster for her head.

“Perhaps it's better,” Gilbert suggested, fondling a small ceramic elephant, “if Sid stays at the cottage with Stephanie. Maybe that will help him come to terms with what's happened.” At that first meeting, Ruth in fact glowed with vitality, and finally rose from the davenport for a “tour.” She and Gilbert exchanged wry smiles that Sidney was too nervous to appreciate or even notice.

“Really? You think so? He'll remember everything there.” She thinks I'm an ally, Gilbert thought, interested in connections, someone who knows his place, who has no credentials except her son's friendship and my unofficial role in the summer as village troubleshooter.

“It's not really for us to decide, is it?” Through the window over her shoulder he saw Sidney, still in blue trunks, step to the porch. The screen door slammed. His mother started.

“Hello, everybody,” he said. His mother, ready to return him to the sanctuary of the past she imagined he once lived in, started to rise, arms opening. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “No, don't get up, not for me. Don't disturb yourself. I can't stay.”

“Darling, let me fix you something to eat.” The bottom of her face was slack.

“That would be nice,” he said. Still, he held her down. “Maybe some other time? I'm just here to pick something up.” He hurried into the bedroom. Unable to contain herself, she followed.

Gilbert sat alone as a shower of late-aftemoon sun puddled on the floor.

Sidney emerged with a sleeping-bag under one arm.

“Delinquents, beach bums, stray dogs, and worse,” his mother said. He answered politely, his voice soothing, and Gilbert, standing restlessly now, opened the screen door for him.

“You know where Ruth is, don't you?” Sidney asked. His glance dissected Gilbert. Until Gilbert emptied his mind and took a cleansing breath, as though jogging, a flurry of associations careened wildly through his mind, a canoe adrift in white-water. She's lost, elsewhere, I don't know, he thought, but yes, dead, accept loss or become its victim. “You
do
know where she is.” Sidney's voice was blotchy, beginning to peel. He still wore the blue-striped trunks. “I tell you what. If she should by chance end up at your place, will you tell her I'm waiting?”

Ruth appeared that night. A shower pelted the roof until morning. Unable to sleep, Gilbert jogged through rain, the cool splash of water, the churning of ocean against its shores, the sound of bare feet on wet sand. Everything felt right. He had routines, and they were harmonious with the cruel traction of the world.

Back in bed, damp towel around his waist, insomnia lifted; he drifted between cool pelting rain on the roof and more rapid waters of nightmare where Ruth swam, liquid, whirling. The sun splashed a rainstorm of light, soaking her hair, drenching her with sun and shadow, body towed helplessly, lungs full of water, arms aflail.

On the beach road next morning he met Stephanie, walking barefoot, avoiding bits of gravel and swords of beach grass, hair braided and curled into a knot, as though grief required a mouming-cap. “Going to check on Sid,” she said.

“I'll come along. I want to retrieve those Melvilles Ruth borrowed.”

Bleary-eyed, Sidney refused to leave the beach until Stephanie agreed to take his place. Eyebrow screwed up, he stared at Gilbert. “You going to wait?”

“Not for Ruth, no.” Sidney smiled sardonically and stumbled away. In the dry slanting glare of morning, he was clearly mad. Gilbert told Stephanie her indulgence fed into his delusion and became outright participation in his madness.

“Get off it. I spend part of my day on the beach, why not now?” Handfuls of scooped sand trickled through long fingers. “Whatever made you chink up that charade on the beach? It was grotesque, that plaque, those people.”

Gilbert pulled his brows close, hooding his eyes. “People die. What would you have us do? Pretend she stepped out for a pack of cigarettes?” With a wave of her hand, Stephanie contemptuously dismissed the routines of community life—a special ordinance that allows a section of isolated beach to serve as a memorial, the muted punctuation of a funeral, a solid line of type in the obituary columns. Independent, talented, a young painter who knew her craft and didn't imitate the latest rage, thick highways of paint scraped across the canvas with a rake, she still refused to be serious, never worked for a living. That's what Gilbert thought. People looked out for her. Gilbert was one of them.

“I don't believe in funerals because I've been there,” she said, refusing to face him. “Things fall into place.” For a moment he wondered whether she was taking her promise to Sidney seriously. A nervous leap of her eyes usually qualified or deepened her words; a twist of her full mouth hinted at her mood. But now he had only a severe angular profile of a dark woman sitting cross-legged, staring at coins of sunlight on the water. “Artificial bouquets, business suits, who needs it? Besides, most of those creeps were there to make you feel better, not because they thought a few poems and speeches on a beach was a great idea.” She sifted another handful of sand. “You ever see one of those New Orleans funerals with a brass band? That sort of thing would be okay.” She trailed off. “I like to imagine her far out at sea. I like to think she's halfway to Africa by now.”

Gilbert touched her. She stiffened. “No. I don't need your solicitude.”

“Even your mother knows the value of ritual.” He chose his words carefully. “She protects investments, avoids exploitation.”

“I still bum candles for my father. Burning candles isn't a ritual?” She turned to him.

He was lost, swimming in dark eyes. “I dreamed of Ruth last night, that couldn't have happened by itself. The memorial service had to snap something into place. Ritual. Ritual helps. Ritual, exercise.”

“Exercise?” She looked thunderstruck, a hand raised to one cheek.

“Activity. He needs to survive, that's the first priority.”

“God, you're a mushbrain. You're not even you. You're a pod that looks like you. Is that it?” She drew in her lips. “All that Hemingway crap, that Bogart stuff. A stiff drink, a pull on a cigarette?” She covered her thighs completely with sand. “Ever think Sid might need something besides three rounds in the ring?”

“You
can wait if you like,” he said, standing and stretching in his sweats. “I've got a date with some saw grass.”

He slapped through sand, light surf, past an occasional sunbather, relishing the thought of the estuary and its breezes, concentrating on his breath, but still Ruth rose, disappearing in the undertow, arms waving, a corner of her mouth twisted because he wasn't there to save her.

Heavy-limbed, torpid, strangely ill at ease, he nursed a drink as daylight faded. He was stupified, unable to move, his bones dusty, filtered through lamplight and the pages of a book.

He woke, book still in hand, to the screen door banging on its hinges, curtains blowing wildly. Again he had dreamed of Ruth, in a gallery, a portrait museum. Ruth, Sidney, and Gilbert. A screen of moss or gray hair covers every picture. Portraits of Gandhi, Einstein, Lou Gehrig—dozens of paintings and photographs, all slowly breathing. Ruth covers her face with a pair of claws, bends over, the claws mutate into shovels. She tunnels into the sand-floor of the gallery. Sidney calls after her, the sand is serene, undisturbed. They're alone in a vast desert, Gilbert takes a portrait in his hands, a small cameo.

He latched the door and window. The phone rang. “Is Sid there?” Stephanie asked.

“No. Something wrong?”

“Yes. No. I don't know, okay?”

Light-headed, far from his stupor, he couldn't touch ground. “What do you mean?”

“You don't know what I mean? Well, let me tell you, okay? Is that all right?” He could see her eyes, leaping with each phrase. “What's wrong, he wants to know.”

Someone knocked viciously on the screen door and kicked its bottom panel. “Let me in!” Sidney shouted. He pulled on the door, moved to the window.

“Listen, okay? After all this, let's celebrate. Okay? Celebrate. No funeral, a celebration. Get it?” As Gilbert put down the phone, Sidney smashed the window with an old board, stepped through shards of glass and splinters of wood, and shook his head, wild-eyed. “Hello,” he said, and plucked small splinters from his skin. His eyes darted into the dark bedroom. “How are you? A tad chilly?”

He was bleeding. “You want a towel?” Gilbert tried to be gende, but he wasn't practiced at it. Still, aggravated impatience was clearly no way to handle a weak man in the middle of breakdown.

“Oh, that.” He glanced at the curtains. “I'm sorry. I lost my balance. But I'll replace it.”

“It's just a window, Sid. That's not the problem. You're the problem. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Don't try to pretend nothing's changed. Everything's changed.”

“You don't mind if I take a leak.” He sauntered from room to room, searched cabinets, opened garbage cans and closet doors, flushed the toilet and returned, still blood-spotted. “You think I don't know what's going on?” He leaned against the wall.

“Nothing's going on, Sid.”

“Last night I dreamed of rising,” he said. “I was on my back on a mattress in a white room with white furniture. Wicker, I think. There were lots of people, mostly strangers. They were urging me to fly. So I tried. I floated up. The sky was white, too. It was nice, very peaceful.”

If only Gilbert could take him to a gravesite, dig up her body, grab him by the scruff of the neck, tell him to see. Look at this, Sid. Look. He struggled for composure and smiled.

“I have to go,” Sidney said. “Ruth's coming home tonight.” He screwed up his eyebrow. “I want to be there.”