Fascination: Stories Page 10

  The Woman on the Beach with a Dog

  ‘Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.’

  Anton Chekhov

  For some reason Garrett Rising decided, when he was twenty miles out of Boston and heading for New York, that he had to see the ocean: he needed that far horizon, he needed the sound of surf breaking, he felt, more than anything. He knew it would calm him, so he turned off the highway and headed east for the beckoning finger of Cape Cod.

  He had been to Cape Cod as a child, when he was ten or eleven, he thought, when the Rising family had spent three weeks of one summer in a rented house in Provincetown. He had dim memories: a mustard yellow house, windows that jammed, his father’s unceasing anger, the placid bay facing the town and the tumultuous ocean on the other side of the dunes.

  When he stopped for gas in Orleans he felt a small tremor of excitement squirm through him. In the face of his problems, in the face of this new disappointment, he was doing something spontaneous – and something stupid too, no doubt – but he didn’t care, and besides he couldn’t see what harm it would do to anyone. All he knew was that he couldn’t go back to New York just yet – he needed the solace of the waves.

  Garrett Rising was a tall, limber man with broad shoulders; he had a small belly on him but, he argued, he was forty-one, after all, as old as the century, and there wasn’t much he could do about that. He had fair hair shot with grey and his nose was small and fine with a pronounced flare to the nostrils. Many women had told him that it was his small, fine nose that made them look at him a second time.

  ‘Great movie,’ the attendant said handing him his change and inclining his head at the cinema across the street: The Rio, it was called, written in a cursive cerise neon script across the cinema’s façade. The film that was playing was Scarlet Autumn.

  ‘Yeah?’ Garrett said. ‘I must try and catch it, one of these days.’

  ‘You won’t regret it.’

  Garrett drove on. He had passed through South Wellfleet when he began to feel tired and saw the sign: ‘Pamet River Inn, next right, Ocean View, Deluxe Rooms’. He turned and bumped down a rutted road towards a large white clapboard two-storey building with a porte cochère and a gravelled turning circle and, on either side, a wing of individual wooden chalets linked by a sheltered walkway. The inn was protected from the Atlantic winds by a grassy hill that rose up from the shore beyond, and in the lee of the hill was a small copse of scrub pines. As Garrett stepped out of his car and heaved his suitcase from the trunk, he could hear the reassuring wash and rumble of the surf and off to the south saw the early afternoon sun glinting hard and silver on the restless ocean.

  He checked in and a boy carried his suitcase to the furthest of the ‘cottages’, as he knew they were now called, and showed him in. It was a Friday in April, the boy reminded him, the hotel was quiet, just three guests – and the restaurant only opened on Saturday night and Sunday lunchtime, until the holidays started. Garrett gave him five dollars and asked him to fetch a pint of whisky. He wandered round the room and pulled back the drapes to let the clear marine light fill the space more. There was a neat kitchen with a stove, a sink and an icebox, a bathroom and the main room had, as well as its double bed, two armchairs and a coffee table. The walls were white and unadorned except for an old print of some gaunt-looking Puritans discovering a cache of corncobs hidden beneath an Indian blanket in the undergrowth. You could live here, Garrett thought, comfortably and easily: everything a person required to live a simple, uncomplicated life was here, and the fantasy excited him once again. He was glad he had come: but he wouldn’t call home with the change of plan until the whisky arrived.

  He picked up yesterday’s Globe, which someone had left on the coffee table, and saw the headline about the Nazi bombing raids on London, hundreds dead and wounded. He remembered his only visit to London, in ‘32, when he had been on his way to Hamburg, when Sean Kavanaugh had sent him to Germany to buy the two Reiner-Hoffman printers at rock-bottom prices. He had been a rich man in Germany with his American dollars, he remembered; he’d never felt so rich since. In London on the way back he had stayed in the Hyde Park Hotel, and he wondered vaguely if it had been hit by the bombs. He remembered the girl he had taken to his room. One pound, ten shillings she charged him. What was that? Ten dollars? Sweet girl – what was her name? Kitty? Mary? Hotel rooms always made him think of sex, which was not that surprising, he reminded himself with a brief, warm flare of shame, as the only sex he experienced these days tended to take place in hotel rooms.

  The whisky came, he drank some and called his wife in New York and told her plans had changed and he was obliged to stay over.

  ‘Did you get the contract?’ Laura asked.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ he lied. ‘Just a few details to confirm.’

  ‘Thank God. Did you call Daddy?’

  ‘I’ll call him this weekend. He’s retired, you know.’

  ‘He likes to be informed, he still likes to –’

  ‘So I’m staying over. Tell him I’m staying to sort out the details.’

  ‘How long?’ Laura could not prevent the suspicion colouring her voice.

  ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’

  ‘Where’re you staying?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’m at a pay phone. I’ll find somewhere.’

  ‘Nowhere expensive. We can’t afford to –’

  ‘How’s Joanna?’

  ‘Joanna’s got another headache. I’ve called the doctor. She has no appetite.’

  Garrett listened to his daughter’s various symptoms, said good bye and hung up. His daughter was eighteen and she seemed to have been ill from one thing or another since she was born. How could someone be so unhealthy and no doctor find a reason? Her mother fussed too much, had always fussed needlessly, endlessly, over her: too much fussing made you sickly. Garrett checked these thoughts – he could feel the anger build in him again. He picked up his hat: time to hear the noise of the sea.

  The beach was empty and the clouds had hidden the sun – the light had turned grey and monotone making the sea-grass on the dunes dull like moss. The wind whipped his tie and he had to turn his body and cup his hands tightly around the match as he lit his cigarette. He thought about old Mr Foley and the way he had broken the news: he had been fair – couldn’t argue about that – gave him three months’ notice. ‘Foley and McBride won’t be renewing the contract, Garrett, I’m so very sorry.’

  Garrett stared unseeingly at the horizon as he tried to compute the effect this would have on the company. He calculated: seventy per cent of their business was involved in printing Foley and McBride guidebooks – they’d run off 30,000 copies of the Los Angeles guide alone. Fifteen years they’d been Foley and McBride’s printers. There would have to be lay-offs: Pauly, Tom Reed, Tom Harbinger…

  He heard a shrill annoying yapping and looked round to see a small white dog with an erect, arced tail and a thick ruff of fur around its neck nosing at a coil of sea-wrack at the surf ’s edge. The dog’s lead trailed behind it. Then came another shout, more distant, and Garrett looked down the curving beach to see a figure waving its arms and shouting something. He only caught the words ‘Mister, please –’ before the wind carried the rest away.

  Garret wandered over to the dog and picked up its lead. The dog snapped and growled at him. What kind of a dog is that, he wondered? Pissant little white dog.

  The figure approached, wearing a rust-red windcheater and beige canvas trousers, short in the leg. It was a woman.

  ‘Thank you, so much,’ she said. Her thick brown hair was dragged back in a loose pony tail. She had a strong bony face and a deep voice, a voice that was full of confidence, the confidence of money, he thought, as she thanked him, profusely, sincerely, for catching her dog, her naughty, ill-disciplined, spoilt brat of a dog. There were gold rings with coloured stones on her hands, he saw, as he gave her the dog’s lead. Hard to tell her age, a bit younger than he was. Mus
tn’t stare so.

  ‘What kind of a dog is that?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a Pomeranian.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Have you a cigarette you could spare me? I’d kill for a cigarette.’

  He offered his pack, she took one and they manoeuvred around against the wind to light it, their shoulders brushing once or twice.

  She looked at him and smiled.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw a man in a hat and a three-piece flannel suit standing on the beach. Is that a mirage, I thought, a chimera?’

  ‘I’m staying at the hotel.’

  ‘The Pamet? God, am I that far down? How are the rooms?’

  They walked back to the inn together, the woman explaining that she was going to phone for her car to be driven down from Truro to fetch her. Her naughty dog was called Euclid, she said, though she realized she should never have given her stupid mutt such an intelligent name.

  ‘My name’s Garrett Rising,’ he said, offering his hand.

  She shook it. ‘My name’s Anna…’ She paused and then said a name that he couldn’t quite catch. Demonserian? Staufferman? He thought it would be rude to ask her to repeat it, so, instead, he offered her the chance of using the phone in his room.

  After she called her home, she wandered around his little cottage, curious. She laughed at the print, unzipped her windcheater and unreflectingly picked some wool-balls off the soft front of her cream jersey, dropping them carefully in the wastebasket as she nosed around. Euclid settled down on a mat by the bed, completely docile.

  ‘You’ve got everything a man could need, here,’ she said, walking into the kitchen.

  Except a woman, Garrett thought, automatically, and in that moment, having acknowledged his need for a woman, Garrett desired this woman, this Anna-woman, this tall, handsome, confident woman, more than he had desired anyone or anything in years. And in the way that this kind of mental recognition seems to transfer itself automatically and instinctively from man to woman, from woman to man, he saw Anna pause, close the icebox and turn to look at him. He knew from the small, amused frown on her face, from the merest narrowing of her eyes that she had registered what he was thinking, had noted the tiny significant change in the atmosphere. Garrett relaxed: like it or not, signals had been exchanged.

  ‘May I offer you a drink?’

  He poured out two glasses of whisky – ‘Just cover the bottom,’ she said – and as they chinked the rims she thanked him again for catching Euclid. Garrett relished the burn of the whisky in his throat, the small fire in his belly, and, emboldened, asked her if he could buy her dinner.

  ‘Never on a Friday,’ she said, not perturbed. ‘Friday night we go to the movies in Orleans. Rain or shine. Oh, there’s my car.’

  ‘We?’ Garrett said.

  ‘My husband.’ She smiled, apologetically, Garrett thought, as if she’d liked the beginning of this adventure – its erotic potential.

  ‘But… he’s out of town. Thank you so much, Mr Rising. Euclid and I are for ever in your debt.’ Now she looked like she was about to laugh. ‘Come on Euclid, let’s go home.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  Garrett watched her lead the dog along the boardwalk towards a large, glossy Packard. The man driving opened the door for her, picked up Euclid, and placed him on the front seat. The woman looked back and waved, just a flick of the hand. Garrett closed the door.

  In Orleans, that evening, at the Rio, Garrett watched Sacred Autumn with only half a mind, the other half on Anna and, inevitably, on the future of Kavanaugh-Rising Inc. When the lights went up suddenly, he sat for a moment baffled, wondering why the actress had been so tearful at the end, what had happened to make life bear down on her so. He stood up and placed his hat on his head and strolled up the aisle. Anna was sitting in the back row.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Drive me home?’

  In the car, just as they passed through Wellfleet, she reached over and felt the hard ridge of his penis through the flannel of his pants.

  ‘Good,’ she said, ‘I thought so.’

  When he woke he was first aware of a refulgent big rhomboid of lemon light on the wall facing him. The shape of the sun on the wall blinding his eyes, as if he had woken to a different, simpler world where there was only light and empty walls. He turned and noticed the drapes were parted wide and the low, early sun was filling the room. He sat up in bed and saw that Anna was dressing. She stepped briskly into her skirt and zipped it up.

  ‘Morning,’ he said. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Early.’

  ‘Come back to bed.’

  ‘I have to go.’

  He dressed quickly and together they walked down through the dunes to the beach. She slipped off her shoes and turned to him.

  ‘I’ll be home in no time,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Garrett.’

  He kissed her and she thrust her tongue deep into his mouth, holding him hard to her. Then she buried her face in his neck and he heard her draw her breath in hard as if she were filling her lungs with the smell of him. ‘It was nice,’ she said softly into his collar.

  ‘What a word, my God.’

  ‘When can I see you?’

  ‘This is crazy.’ She punched him gently on the arm. ‘No, no, no. It would all be too complicated. It’s over – we had our adventure.’

  She touched his lips with her two fingers to stop him saying any more and turned and walked away from him, not looking back, striding up the beach to – where? – to Truro, she had said. Can’t be a big place, Truro, he thought – you’ll be easy to find.

  Tom Harbinger held the new sheets out to him. Garrett was staring across the street into an office where he could see the receptionist through the plate glass window. The summer sun angling in painted a lucent green rectangle on the dark green walls and lit the girl as she talked on the phone. She looked a bit like Anna, he thought, younger, hair shorter, but that kind of angular face with prominent cheekbones. He remembered Anna on the phone, calling for her car, how she tucked the phone under her chin and spun the rings on her finger as she talked. She –

  ‘What do you think?’ Tom Harbinger said. ‘Garrett?’

  ‘What? Oh sure, they look great.’

  He signed the docket and Tom took the sheets away. Funny how things happen, Garrett reflected, for maybe the thousandth time: we lose Foley and McBride and we get Trans-American Airlines a week later. He had thought he was lost and yet he was saved. True, airline timetables weren’t as interesting as guide books, but what did he care? He was a printer – and they needed new timetables four times a year.

  He went into his office and called Laura. The doctor thought that Joanna was suffering from nerves, she told him, there was a clinic he recommended she go to. Of course, he said, whatever it costs: Trans-American Airlines had made him prosperous again. He had a sudden image of Anna shucking off her brassière to reveal her white, uptilted breasts and he felt his bowels slacken. These images came to him spontaneously and with absolute clarity, absolute palpability, as if they were memories of events that had happened yesterday. Over four months now, and not a day, not a waking hour had gone by without his thinking about her.

  Listen Laura, he said, I have to go back up to Boston today. But it’s Friday. I know, I know, but old man Foley called – he wants to see me urgently – Christ, I think he may give me the guide books back. Tell him to fuck himself, Laura said, vehemently. I’ve got to go, Garrett said: fifteen years of business and all – I owe him. You’re a weak man, Garrett, she said. Sure, he said, weak as they come.

  The film playing at the Rio was called The Golden Stranger, starring Dalton Paul and Jayne Callot. Garrett had arrived early and for a while sat alone in the cinema with only the bored usherette for company. Slowly the seats filled and the lights eventually went down. He had a good view of the entrance but he hadn’t seen Anna come in. When the movie began he thought about leaving and laughed at the idea that a woman like Anna would go to t
he movies every Friday night like some kind of ordinary housewife. He hadn’t been able to book a room at the Pamet Inn and had found a kind of guest house in Orleans which was clean but basic. Now he thought about it, how could he take Anna back there, a woman like her? Ridiculous, he thought, and tried to concentrate on the film but he had missed key plot developments and the fellow he thought was the bad guy turned out to be good.

  He came out of the men’s room and saw her standing alone in the lobby smoking a cigarette. It was raining outside and cerise rain slanted down through the neon areola of the sign. She wore a light coat and her hair was down. It was shorter than the last time he had been with her, he thought, as he went up behind her and touched her elbow, softly.

  ‘Hi.’

  She turned and the look on her face, the instant, pure joy in her face only lasted a second until it turned hard and panicky.

  ‘What’re you doing here? For God’s sake!’

  He kept his voice low and his face expressionless. ‘I had to see you. I’m going crazy. I think about you all the time.’ He smiled. ‘It’s pathetic. All the time, all day – I think about you. I can’t help myself.’

  She dropped her voice and dropped her gaze. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Me too.’ Then she looked up and her face brightened falsely. ‘Hi, honey,’ she said. ‘Look who’s here.’

  Garrett turned and saw the man he’d been pissing next to in the men’s room. A tall, stooped, bald man with a slack face who looked about twenty years older than Anna.

  ‘This is Mr Rising – the man who saved Euclid.’

  ‘And may you suffer eternal punishment,’ the bald man said, his grin showing his good, even teeth. ‘Euclid is my bête noire.’