We Are Water. Wally Lamb

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a turkey wrap at the food court and ate, a singleton among young couples, elderly cronies, and chatty young moms, their babies in strollers beside the tables. Back home again, I decided I’d read. A book a day. I walked around the house, pulling from the shelves books I’d meant to get to for months, even years. A couple of Elmore Leonards, a P. D. James, the Dennis Lehane that Ariane had sent me for Christmas the year before. Maybe I’d reread, too—Updike, Steinbeck, Thoreau. I stacked maybe ten or eleven books on the coffee table and ran my finger up and down the spines. I picked up Walden. Flipped it open to a page where someone—me?—had underlined the author’s mantra: Simplify, simplify, simplify.

      Which I interpreted as: downsize, downsize, downsize.

      I dialed Annie’s number and let her machine know I had decided to put our house on the market. (Our divorce settlement stipulated that I would make the mortgage payments and could live in the house for up to five years, at which point I could either buy her out or put it up for sale and split the profit 60/40.) When Annie called me back, I saw her name on my caller ID and didn’t pick up. In her message, she asked me why I’d made the decision to sell. I didn’t return her call, or her next one, or the one after that.

      After the realtor did a “walk-through” with the first prospective buyers—a nice enough couple who nevertheless seemed like intruders—I knew I wasn’t going to be able to handle a whole summer’s worth of the same. Nor did I want to drop everything and evacuate at a moment’s notice every time the agent called to say she was bringing someone over. So I took out a month-by-month lease on a small furnished apartment downtown. At six fifty a month, I could afford the extravagance—not that this little place where I was going to wait it out could be called “extravagant” by any stretch of the imagination. It was more bunker than luxury digs. On the realtor’s advice, I left everything at our house “as is.” In a market this tough, she said, we’d need every advantage, and a “homey” place showed more successfully than bare rooms and bare walls. She even brought over one of those scented Yankee Candles. Banana bread, it was, so those would-be buyers could smell something not really baking in the oven. Our ace in the hole, she said, was that the house was beautifully decorated. This had been Annie’s doing. “Shabby chic,” she called it.

      On the first of July, I moved into the bunker. I hate it there. For one thing, there’s a nightly racket from the bar across the street. For another, the old gal in the apartment across the hall is needy. Pesty. She seems to lie in wait and, whenever she hears my footsteps, pops open her door and wants me to talk or fix something for her. The couch in my apartment has a peculiar, not-quite-identifiable odor to it. And worst of all, the place is just too goddamned small. When I sit on the wobbly toilet seat, I can make my knees touch the opposite wall. Whatever room I’m in, I can reach up and palm the ceiling. The first night I was there, I lay awake in the dark and could almost swear the bedroom walls were closing in on me. It had been a stupid move on my part. Simplify, simplify, simplify? Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

      By the third night, I decided that if I was going to quell my emotional and vocational seasickness, it wasn’t going to be at this place. But rather than take our home off the market, I decided that what I needed was a getaway from my getaway. But where? When I’d moved into the bunker, one of the few things I’d taken with me besides the necessities was a box of stuff the kids had given me over the years: homemade cards and gifts, mostly. I pulled from the box the nautilus shell Ariane had given me one Father’s Day. Held it to my ear, listened to the sound of the ocean, and said it out loud: “Cape Cod.”

      I looked online. Circled a few of the classifieds at the back of the New York Review of Books. Even though it was off-season, everything was overpriced. And later, when Annie and I finally did talk about the house, she suggested Viveca’s place. Viveca herself called me later that day and offered me the house rent-free. “It’s just sitting there, Orion. It’s yours to use if you want to.” I’d declined her offer at first but then a few days later had changed my mind. It wasn’t until after I’d said yes that I learned there was a stipulation.

      Deciding that a slow crawl along the scenic road might be a relief from the bumper to bumper of the main drag, I signal and exit from Route 6 to 6-A. In Orleans, I pass that Christmas Tree Shop where Annie always wanted to stop. Look for bargains, use the restroom. Needing to pee myself, I pull into the parking lot of the Hearth & Kettle where we’d eaten a couple of times. Get out of the car, stretch, and walk on rubber legs toward the restaurant. Passing a newspaper box near the entrance, I read the Cape Cod Times headline: GREAT WHITES CURTAIL LABOR DAY FESTIVITIES. Inside, I head for the men’s room. Some would-be graffiti artist had drawn a cartoon on the wall over the urinal I was using: a shark. “Ah, a human,” it said. “Yum yum.”

      Leaving the bathroom, I decide to stay, get something to eat. I wait at the hostess’s stand, looking around at all the families and couples in the dining room. Opt instead for a booth in the bar. A flush-faced young waitress approaches; her colonial cap and ankle-length checkered dress are offset by the snake tattoo crawling up her neck. “Somethin’ to drink?” she asks, passing me a menu. She has tattoos on the backs of her hands, too, I notice, but I can’t see what they say.

      “Just an ice tea,” I tell her. “Unsweetened.”

      She nods. “You ready to awduh aw do you need a few minutes?”

      “I guess I’m ready. What kind of chowder do you have?”

      Our eyes meet. “What do you mean, what kind?”

      “New England? Manhattan?”

      “All’s we got is New England,” she says. She asks me where I’m from and I tell her Connecticut. “Oh, okay. Newyawkachusetts. That explains it. You want a cup or a bowl?”

      “A bowl,” I say.

      “Cawn frittuhs with that? They’re on special. Three for a dawluh.”

      I tell her no, but that I’ll take a Caesar salad. She nods. Writes on her pad. “So what do those tattoos on your hands say?” I ask.

      Instead of telling me, she holds them out in front of me. The left hand says, Ask me if … The right says … I care!

      After I’ve eaten and passed on dessert, my waitress brings me my bill. Eager to get back on the road, I pay in cash and leave.

      At the Orleans cloverleaf, I get back on Route 6, grateful that, at last, the traffic has begun to ease. I should be getting there in another fifteen or twenty minutes. I pass that place that sells the inflatable rafts and the two-dollar T-shirts, remembering the time when we had to pull in there. Andrew had waited to tell me that he had to go to the bathroom until it was an emergency. “Sorry, no public restrooms,” they’d said, and the poor kid had made a beeline for the bushes behind the place and had an accident before he reached them. Had walked back to the car in tears with a big wet spot on the front of his shorts. And when Marissa’d started giggling, her mother had threatened to forbid her from going swimming for one whole day if she didn’t cut it out. Then I’d looked in the rearview mirror at the commotion—Andrew punching his sister, her punching him back. Per Annie’s order, they’d both spent that day on the blanket instead of in the water with Ariane. “Daddy! Mom! Look at this,” she’d kept calling, so that we could watch her turning somersaults in the surf. Poor Ariane: it seems as if she was always trying to get our attention. And poor Andrew, too: he could never measure up to his twin sister’s feats, and never resist being a hothead when his little sister teased him …

      “If you ask me, Dad, it’s a sickness,” Andrew had said in that phone conversation we’d had about his mother’s wedding.

      I told him СКАЧАТЬ