The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  “Darryl . . . I . . .” It seemed an honor that he had trusted her enough to say this, and she wanted to live up to it, to say something truly consoling. Except that, like so many things, it was so terrible, she could think of no consolation.

  “That’s appalling,” she said finally. “Out of a nightmare.”

  “I do have nightmares,” he said.

  “I expect I will too.”

  She felt this strike him more deeply than she’d meant. He glanced quickly into her face, and away just as quickly, but it seemed the light had been at just the right slant: Charlotte caught a glimpse beneath the surface, sensed the way things moved there, and everything in her leaped to meet it. She would take a corner of his trouble, help him bear it. She’d be glad to.

  They’d laid all the bags out along the racks, and he took the pins from Fiona’s hand and went down the row, fastening each one tight to the bar as he continued the story.

  “I took over his building jobs, but fishing—forget it. I don’t like being out on the water, and working on a dragger, you go down to the pier in the morning and there’s your mate with a spike in his arm . . . you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t!” she said, laughing now. “I mean, unless you count getting stuck in an elevator, or being yelled at by a pumpkin farmer, I’ve never had a dangerous job.”

  “It’s worse in New Bedford,” he said. “The stuff that happens there, you wouldn’t believe it. Anyway, I’m just better with the shellfish. You’re still at the mercy of nature, but you try to work with it, not against. It’s just patience, daily labor, bit by bit.” His voice, his bearing, were full of pride—and why not, when he was standing on a firmament of his own making? “The fish are disappearing; guys can’t make a living on a boat now anyway. The town gave people like Bud shellfish grants, to keep their families from starving. But they’re not farmers, they’re . . .”

  “Pirates!” Charlotte said, glancing over to see Fiona, who was on her hands and knees in the mud.

  “Something like that,” he agreed. “You can’t do aquaculture that way. And you can’t say, ‘It’s too cold; I’ll go out tomorrow’—the bay’ll freeze over and you lose half your herd.” Then: “What is your line of work, anyway? Who gets yelled at by a pumpkin farmer?”

  “Journalists. That was before I started writing about fashion. Then I went to Celeb and got yelled at by handbag designers.” The job at Celeb might have been a cheap, ill- fitting costume, but she was naked without it.

  “Wow, you worked for Celeb?” Right, he was impressed. Despicable.

  “It was awful. Though I’m sure it’s worse in New Bedford. . . .”

  “Why are you two laughing?” Fiona had come running toward them, her arms muddied to the elbows, a long sea worm closed in her fist. She dropped it so as to set hands on hips and scold, exactly as her mother did when Fiona had some mischief going. She knew she’d caught them, without understanding what she’d caught them at, but hearing her, Charlotte felt it and her cheeks blazed.

  “Who put you in charge, anyway?” Darryl asked Fiona, taking her hands and swinging her around full circle.

  “More, more, do it again!”

  “We can’t,” he said. “The tide’s coming to get us, look!” He put her over his shoulder and leaped back toward the truck, asking, “Why are you laughing?”

  “ ’Cause I’m happy!”

  The sun was already high as they ran up from the water, and the house with the hollyhocks straggling by the front porch looked as if some happy family lived a good, simple life there. Charlotte got Fiona out of her wet overalls and rinsed her feet with the hose and they came in laughing, but somehow the house seemed to insist on quiet: Henry was working.

  “Hello!” Charlotte called from the top step. She didn’t like to go down there. The windows were painted shut and Henry had no interest in opening them, nor in clearing the spiderwebs—so thickly spun they had real entrances where the spiders sat like shopkeepers all day. He was working in a kind of panic—whenever he sat down at his desk he faced a tribunal: Other men had surpassed him, shaping the popular thought with their work, while he seemed to labor against a granite cliff face with a diamond cutter’s tools. The book that rescued him would have to be so big, so important that his whole being must be dedicated to it, entirely.

  Whiskey was his best respite, and Charlotte had wondered what he would do without McClellan’s Tap when they left the city, but it turned out the Mermaid was two miles up the road, the perfect length for an evening constitutional. Every night she would hear his solitary footsteps as he set off along the dark road. The men who drank at the Mermaid were a very distinguished lot, he said—one was a former Moscow correspondent, and another, rough though he might appear, had trained as a classical pianist before liquor got hold of him. And there was Orson, the Tennessee Williams enthusiast Charlotte had met in the SixMart that first evening. Orson had been an attorney in New York, but had given up corporate life and moved to Wellfleet to devote his full attention to art and debauchery (not necessarily in that order). Provincetown was only a few miles away, and the variety of men available there was as wide as, well, the array of cinquecento painting on view in Venice, or pastries in the window of some sublime Parisian boulangerie. And now it turned out that not only was he treading on the same sandy soil as Thoreau, gazing over the same vista as Eugene O’Neill, but drinking elbow-to-elbow with Henry Tradescome, a living author. . . . Orson could not have asked for more.

  “He’s read everything,” Henry said. “He can quote Cavafy, Ovid. . . .”

  “Invite him for dinner,” Charlotte said.

  Henry looked confused, as if he doubted such a thing were possible. The Mermaid was a sanctuary, another planet down the road. It closed at one, and at one thirty Charlotte would hear Henry’s footsteps, quick and certain, returning home. In their early days, when she’d expected physical intimacies would lead to emotional ones, she’d turned to him in sleepy compliance when he came to bed, stretching out to meet him, fold him in. Now she feigned sleep, and felt him slip quickly under the covers on the other side of the bed, careful not to brush his foot against hers.

  8

  TELL ME

  “ What is that smell?”

  Charlotte was leaning against one of the columns on the Narvilles’ expansive porch, watching Fiona concoct a stew from rose hips and sawdust and seawater, the materials available in the yard. Tim Cloutier had just driven up from the beach, and a second after his truck passed, a profound stench hit them.

  “Tuna,” Darryl said from the doorway. His table saw was set up just inside, and his goggles were up on his head. “He got two. And now he needs to wash that truck.”

  “Where’s he going at this hour?” The tide was rising—playfully, little waves racing to butt one another head-on. There was no way to do anything out on the claims.

  “He left a few bushels down on the beach,” Darryl said. “He was way behind on orders. He’ll be back at work here tomorrow, though, so . . .”

  “I should look busy?”

  “Something like that,” he said, glancing away so she caught only the corner of his smile. All week it had been just the two of them . . . or, really, the three of them: Fiona playing at the edge of the conversation, making her stews or trying to entice the seagulls with bits of bread. The morning after Charlotte had helped Darryl out on the flats, he’d arrived with three tubs of joint compound, a ladder, and two plasterer’s trowels, which he showed Charlotte how to use. They’d rolled up the rug and covered the furniture with some of the monogrammed sheets from the linen closet, and, with Darryl on the stepladder and Charlotte beneath, coated the walls and sanded them until they were smooth as new. Charlotte was going to paint them a soft yellow, but for the ten days of tuna season she did what she could to help Darryl at the Narville house—sweeping up the sawdust, the tile dust, the plaster dust, running to the hardware store for bits of metal or new blades for the tile saw—whatever would make the job run smoo
ther. Even when they were working in different parts of the house, they were happily aware of each other. Charlotte would be singing, without realizing it, and she’d hear him pick up the next line on the other side of the wall. Nine fifteen was break time; she’d roll up the blueprints and set the coffeemaker on the sawhorse table, and they’d take their cups out into the sun and continue their conversation.

  It had begun . . . well, really it had begun the day he found them on the beach, the first time she saw the house. Bits of life like this stuck in Charlotte’s heart and mind; she would remember a disapproving glance or a perplexed look, would turn these moments over and over in an attempt to understand them, while for Henry (for almost everyone else, it seemed), they were just rinsed away, forgotten. So, when she met Darryl in the SixMart, months after their first awkward meeting, and it was clear it had stayed with him too, and he’d wanted to continue the conversation . . . it was new to her, to think that someone else might attend to such things in the same way she did. And then there were the drop cloths—yes, the real linen sheets left from other lives, but they didn’t have enough, so Darryl had gone home and returned with a sail he’d salvaged after a heavy storm, and a bedspread, pea soup green with darker stains.

  “It was on my bed in the halfway house,” he said, throwing it over the Chippendale sideboard, then turning to see her reaction.

  “You lived in a halfway house?” she asked, cautious. He was trusting her, suddenly, with something precious; she handled it with care. “Where were you halfway from?”

  “Rehab, where else?” The floor dropped out from under his voice: The story was raging to be told, confessed, stabbed into a vein, suffered in revulsion, in ecstasy. Through the telling it might be transcended. Or relived, maybe that was all he wanted. Whichever, he was offering to share a raw secret because he’d caught some reflection in her eyes.

  “Where else?” she echoed lightly, sitting down on the wretched bedspread, hungry as a hatchling, heart wide, wide open now for the drop of real human substance he offered. “So, how’d that happen?”

  “Eh, how it always happens,” he said. Of course, this was true—life kicks you in the teeth, you grab at what you can. It was worse in New Bedford: The poverty was deeper there; possibility a distant star. “My counselor said . . . well, he was sympathetic, you know; that’s what they get paid for. The fact is, I’m an addict by nature; it’s like . . . my inheritance. My mother gave me a joint for my thirteenth birthday.”

  “Really?”

  “It was 1974,” he said. “The card read, ‘Feed your head.’ ”

  “That’s perverse.”

  “Perversity was in fashion. She’s . . . she’s got a lot of shame now; she joined AA, got involved with the church—that makes her feel better.”

  Charlotte shuddered. “The seventies, blech.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, and then my father died, and man, I wanted to get as far away as I could, so I moved to L.A. and got work in the music business, which is the most fertile ground you can imagine for an addiction. God knows why I’m still alive after all the stupid-ass shit I did. But here I am, starting back at the beginning, and we’ll see how it goes from here.”

  She had a billion questions, none of which were polite to ask. “What’d you do in the music business?”

  “Besides shooting up? Tech, to begin with, but I was good at it, and very reliable, for a junkie. I ended up working at Paramount, mixing, editing . . . my last gig, before . . . well . . . before . . .” Before the disaster, whatever it had been. She nodded quickly, to save him embarrassment. Though as much as he wanted to tell, she wanted to hear, as if she were coming to possess him detail by detail.

  “Anyway, it was the movie Heaven in Winter; did you see it?”

  She’d seen maybe two movies in the last eight years. Henry despised them, their false glamour, their happy endings. Background music seemed pernicious to him, those violins strong-arming the hapless viewer into melancholy or tenderness against his will. The few times she’d dragged him he’d inveighed so loudly against so many things (the popcorn with God knew what poured over it and the monstrously obese people waiting in line to buy it; the waxen beauty of the generic actresses; the heroic gun battles when the fighters in real gun battles were always terrified) that she had decided not to repeat the exercise.

  “Have you never heard of the suspension of disbelief?” she’d tried, after a scene of a family dinner that had provoked him to call the director a “lying scum,” loudly enough that the people behind them had switched rows.

  “The willing suspension of disbelief,” he’d corrected. Willing, Henry had never been.

  “No, I never saw Heaven in Winter,” she said to Darryl. “It did pretty well, though, right?”

  “What would I know?” he said. “I was in rehab by the time it came out. So, I got out of the halfway house, I had bus fare back here, and that was about it. The bus stops at the SixMart, so, you know, you can see the movie screen at the drive-in.”

  Yes, it loomed there, an extra square of gray sky in winter. In summer you’d see the top half of a movie as you drove past—the wide, liquid eyes of a beautiful woman or the halo of flame around an exploding car.

  “I was waiting there for my mother to come pick me up. . . .”

  The way he said this she could feel what it might be to be pushing forty, standing beside the highway with all your possessions in a duffel bag, waiting for your mother to come get you because you had nowhere else to go.

  “And I looked over and saw snow falling—it was Heaven in Winter. Of course, I couldn’t hear anything . . . you can’t imagine how I’d worked to get the exact sound, or not the sound, but you know, the feeling of snow falling—that absolute silence, or the way it seems so silent because the sound is soft enough to mask everything else without really being heard.”

  “I do—now that you mention it. Though I’d never thought it out like that.”

  “It was the strangest thing. It was like I’d disappeared and every trace of what I’d done had been erased, from the movie, from the world.” He’d laughed, as if he were reporting this only as an interesting phenomenon, and then Henry had come up the stairs and they’d remembered they were supposed to be working.

  The tide was well up; light sparkled on every little wave. Small boats were anchored out in the middle where the bass had been feeding at the surface, and striped umbrellas tilted along the sand across the way at Try Point beach. Fiona whispered her little recipe happily to herself as she picked the clover tops for her stew. Charlotte and Darryl’s conversation had wound through the days, growing tendril by tendril, story by story: He’d been walking down a street in Los Angeles, seen a woman in a phone booth, a man pushing boxes along on a dolly . . . a second later the gas main exploded and it all turned to flames. The Challenger blew up on the anniversary of her mother’s death; the pattern it made, an emblem of frightful chaos, was always in her mind. When his best friend died in a car wreck, he’d been too stoned to care. His confessions inspired her and she found herself telling him things she usually tried to forget—that there had been times when she just wished her mother would die, so she could go on living. That she’d always slept with the loneliest, oddest boys, because she felt so odd and lonely herself. That nevertheless they had managed to betray her.

  “You’re brave to keep trying,” he’d said. “I wish I was so brave.”

  “To start all over? Make a whole new life?” she’d asked. “You don’t call that brave?” And she saw this affect him, all over. He looked as if he were seeing an angel. It was the height of summer; everything was bubbly and sparkly and bright.

  “So, did you ever go see that movie—Heaven in Winter?”

  “It was another life,” he said, his hands tense around his coffee cup as if he were watching everything slip through his fingers again.

  “It’s something you accomplished,” Charlotte said. “It might be good; you might be proud of it. It can’t be erased.”

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nbsp; “I’m not sure you can lose the . . . well, I won’t say sins, but the wrongs you’ve done. It’s not really fair to forget those and keep all the good stuff.”

  “Darryl!” she said. “No!” Thinking for a second she added: “You don’t seem to have forgotten the wrongs, anyway.”

  “No,” he said, checking his watch and getting up, ready to go back to work. “I think about them every day.”

  He stood there like an old horse: strong, patient, aware that the next stop was the glue factory. But his eyes were bright and searching; he believed there was something to hope for . . . some kind of redemption.

  “First thing I did when I moved back to Wellfleet,” he said, “I planted seed clams—eighty thousand of ’em. Seed was the right word—they were smaller than sunflower seeds, about a hundred in a handful. I started them in grow-out trays—I went down to see them every day; I never missed a tide . . . then, when they were big enough—like marbles, maybe—I raked out a bed for them on the seafloor. I was so careful. It seemed like, if I didn’t get it right, it was a sign that I was just a natural fuckup and I might as well go back to shooting dope. I dug way deeper than you have to, just to be sure all the moon snails were out. So I spent the whole tide raking; the water was at my heels before half the clams were in. I couldn’t get the net down, and if I’d left them out overnight the bed would have been full of snails by morning. So I had to dig them all out and do the whole thing over the next day, with Tim laughing at me, of course, saying I’d staked my net like an old lady knitting a doily.”

  “And so,” she said, “there they are, solid as a rock, literally.”

  “Yeah, it’s a good feeling. There’ll be a ton, really, two thousand pounds, when they’re ready next summer. And I’ve started more, so it should be a pretty steady income, once it’s going.”