THE RIGHT AND NATURAL ORDER

THE RIGHT AND NATURAL ORDER

We Americans are a very religious people.  Though anything one says nowadays about “we Americans” is likely to be a lie, or half a lie at the very best, and then only when one takes pains to be as rigorous as possible collecting evidence to show that we are what one says we are.  It’s always best to qualify, to say, instead of “we Americans are such and such,” say, “people round here are such and such.”  This way, by narrowing the members of the group, you’re more likely to say something that is a half-truth right from the start.  For nobody says anything true about “people.”  Except, maybe, that they die.  After that, you can do all the classifying you want, but it’s no good, because every person’s story is, finally, his own personal business. 

     I mean, what does “religious” mean?  I come from a large family, and I mean Large with a capital letter.  Counting up first cousins and their children only, we number over a hundred.  And that’s just on my father’s side.  It’s a good thing the people on my mother’s side don’t hold much truck with those on my father’s, or we’d have to rent a city to get together in.  They’re superior.  Those on my mother’s side.  They regard my father’s people as peasants.  They’re working class.  But they themselves are movers and shakers.  They’re wealthy, for one thing.  And they’re political, for another.  The two go together, I guess.  But my father’s people, they’re neither wealthy nor political.  But when you need professional help, you go to them.  Then, we’re all family.  For example, none of my mother’s people are doctors, professors, priests, undertakers, accountants, insurance agents, car salesmen, or supermarket managers--this last being a very important job.  No.  They are all lawyers and businessmen and politicians.  I suppose they’re all three of those at once. 

     But where was I?  I was asking what being religious meant.  Well, my cousin, Reggie, he’s the son of my father’s uncle’s son.  We grew up together.  He was a good kid.  I mean, he was no delinquent.  But, like all of us, he had his trysts, his petty jealousies, his loves and hates, his successes and failures in sports--he was just an ordinary kid growing up.  But now he’s a priest.  I don’t get to see him that often, anymore--first, because I moved away and hadn’t been back in a long time; then, after I did come back, because his being a priest was a kind of natural divide. But I did see him last year and we had a good chance to talk our way across the last fifteen years or so to get each other current on where we were in our lives.   Well, the short of it is that Reggie is still an ordinary guy, and being a priest is just a kind of job, for him.  I mean, there’s no Frances of Assisi hiding in his bosom.  And there are no auras lingering over him, even in the dark. 

    

     Myself, I never go to church.  But over the years you get to know ministers and priests and so on, because they just happen to live around and their work causes them to cross paths with you often enough that you begin to pass words, and before you know it you’ve listed some Lutheran minister or Methodist in your address book.  There was one guy, a Baptist who was pastor of the church my friends across the street attended.  Old Ken, he was dying.  And it was a terrible ordeal, dying always is.  Anyway, this pastor comes into the hospital room, and sits beside Ken and asks us to leave, which we do, and when he comes out, he’s got tears in his eyes and old Ken is just bawling when we go back in.  He lasted another two days before mercy took him.

     Anyway, this pastor, I happened to see him one time in a small town I was visiting for some business of my own, and I was just about dropped.  He was in the local tavern, drinking beer, cursing and laughing, making it with the waitress.  I mean, I had my beer and left, it was so unseemly.  But what does it mean?  Why should I get so bothered by it?  I shouldn’t.  They’re just people.  They got the same needs we do.  I don’t get all sinful feeling when I go to a bar and have a drink and flirt with the waitress.  She’d think me a poor excuse if I didn’t.

     What the hell.  I’m just blowing wind.  It’s because of what happened.  When you live long enough, things happen.  Things that change your life.  All of a sudden, the world changes around you, things that never meant anything come to mean a great deal.  And things that were important before pale and slip away into that much deserved oblivion.  And there you are.

     I’ve been a bachelor all my life.  Why?  I like women.  I like everything about women.  I date women.  I like dressing up and taking someone I have been seeing to a play or a concert.  And later, I enjoy conversation in a lounge over a drink, and dancing when that’s possible.  Why am I a bachelor, then?  I don’t know.  At least, I didn’t know why I was a bachelor until I met Carey.  Caroline Flannigan.

     It was quite simple, really.  I knew and dated a lot of women.  But they were almost always people I worked with, friends and colleagues.  I enjoyed them, being with them.  But there was always something about them, something that always made me keep things to myself, however much I might have liked someone.  Love?  Never even thought about it.  They had their own lives, the women I dated.  We enjoyed each other’s company.  We had our intimacies.  That was the point, after all.  But we always had our own lives.  It was, “Got to get home.  I’m off now.  See you tomorrow,” or whatever.  And I was glad to slip in the shower, be alone, throw on a CD, pick up a book, or go out to wherever my mood or inclination led me.  And then there was always the difference in habits.  One time I was infatuated with this Japanese woman I had met in New York.  We had dated a lot for a while, and I had spent many nights at her place.  One night, about two in the morning, I woke to a smell that just about nauseated me.  I crawled out of bed because she wasn’t there, and I found her in the kitchen boiling these chunks of eggplant in a pot of soy sauce.  She had cut them up and peeled them and plopped them in the pot.  She was glad I joined her, and served me a few pieces, and when I tried to eat them I almost wretched.  I was always too busy to go out with her anymore, after that. 

     But with Carey it was different.  With her it was never a question of habits, of likes and dislikes.  After we had been living together for a couple of months, I couldn’t bear to be apart from her.  She would look at me and know me, I mean, she’d know what I was thinking, what I was feeling.  Really know me.  And she was wholly non-judgmental.  But most important of all, she wanted me to be near her and to care about her.  And that want, it drove me crazy.  I had to always be near her.  I couldn’t bear parting with her in the morning when we went to work, and I couldn’t bear waiting till evening, not to mention weekends, and holidays.

     I have this cousin, on my father’s side, who’s an undertaker.  A Mortician, I should say.  He has prospered and has two funeral parlors in eastern Long Island.  He is, how should I say? respected in his community and sits on the boards of half a dozen organizations there--a museum, the local golf course, the library, that sort of thing.  Well, Floyd has this huge house on a park-like acreage just off the bay, with his own beach and boat dock.  Every year he hosts a gathering of all the cousins--and aunts and uncles, of course--and has a great tent put up, and hires these bands that play at weddings and anniversary parties, and has the whole thing catered, and the liquor flows like a river running through it.  It’s always great fun to go to Floyd’s.  That’s where I met Carey.  She’s not a cousin, of course.  Though she came with one.  My cousin Rachel.  She’s a looker, Rachel is.  Divorced twice.  One kid from each marriage.  She works in the aerospace industry on Long Island, worked her way up into management.  Carey was at the time a low level employee working in data processing, and just happened to live in Rachel’s neighborhood.  But all

that ended when Carey moved away from there to be near me. 

     I’ve bummed around a lot.  Being unattached was a kind of profession for me.  I’ve done all kinds of things to make a living and have lived in many places.  I lived in Japan for a couple of years as a consultant for an engineering firm, and then I moved to Beijing and spent a year there.  Then to Malaysia.  Back in the states I lived and worked in Anchorage, Alaska, and then in Denver, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and then I spent a year in Mexico.  I was working for a branch office of a New York telecommunications firm in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, when I went to Long Island for Floyd’s party and met Carey.  But Sioux Falls was not a place either of us wanted to live, though we spent a happy year there.  So when this friend of mine from Japan wanted me to come to Long Island to help him set up an import/export office for non-electronics trade, and offered me a regular job, I took it and Carey and I set up house in Patchogue.

     Now if there is one thing you can say about Americans, it’s that if they have any money at all, they live better than people almost anywhere else in the world.  In Japan I made a lot of money.  I mean, I made bucks.  But I would have to have carried it home in a wheelbarrow to afford a decent place to live.  I lived in an apartment for two years that cost me about a full third of my income.  But this aparto--that’s what they say there--was three rooms, and if you stood in the middle of any one of them you could touch the walls all round.  I was barely able to lie down in those rooms and not have to stick my feet out the window.  And don’t let’s talk about Beijing.  Nothing is expensive in Beijing because there isn’t anything.  Except beer.  They make great beer.  So I lived in a hotel room and spent my money on booze.  Malaysia was better.  Prosperous.  Plenty of nice places.  But stylistically, they still have that large-family-small-space mentality, though the little house I rented was very fine. 

     At first, in Patchogue, we found a simple house, in a little neighborhood off of Patchogue-Holbrook road.  Simple by American standards.  It had four bedrooms, a living room, a den, a dining room, a kitchen, three baths, a finished basement with a great rec room, a patio of immense proportions, made of concrete with these gorgeous slate flagstones set in it, a built-in swimming pool, and a yard large enough to host a rock concert.  Woods all around for privacy.  I mean, all this was affordable.  And it was simple, because it was just an ordinary house.  Nothing fancy about any of it, except maybe those flagstones in the patio.  In Japan a home like this doesn’t exist, not for anybody.  Not any that I have seen, and I got around the islands pretty thoroughly in the two years I was there.  Beijing?  Forget it.  Such things make no part of the general consciousness of the Chinese people. 

     For years, I had really nothing to spend money on.  I worked and my socializing was never costly.  So I had acquired assets, as they say, mostly in the form of cold hard cash stashed in my bank accounts.  Though from time to time I put some dough into the hands of an investment councilor, who has done a very nice job for me.  I mean, money just isn’t a problem for me.  I always work, and up to now, I have never had a reason to spend it.

     Carey and I were living good.  We had plenty of time together.  After coming to Long Island, that is.  Joitaki, he’s my friend from Japan, took care of all the marketing of the goods we imported, since his contacts and associates were the ones who got us financed and started.  We specialized in fabrics, though we handled goods from Europe and the pacific rim.  I worked with the documentation and licensing protocols, the shipping and warehousing, and all the technical and red-tape side of the business.  As a consequence, I spent a lot of time in Manhattan and made frequent trips to Los Angeles, and when I wasn’t in either of those places, I spent my time on the phone.  Carey even worked for us, managing the office, with two other women.  We were a happy family.  But best of all, after the first grueling ten months or so it took to get our feet on the ground, we purred along and the heaviest and most time-consuming parts of the job became routine, and as we prospered, we hired more people to take over more and more of the burden, till we were putting in normal work weeks.  This is when my story starts.

     Joitaki is a really good looking guy.  And I like him, personally.  We socialized a lot together.  He loved the ocean, and he loved the beaches on Long Island.  And Carey and I love those things, too.  So one day Joitaki says to me, “Martin, what would you say to buying a beach house on Fire Island?  We could use it on weekends together.  A place to get away.”

     I was pretty enthused about the idea and told him I had a few favorite places I’d like to check out.  I grew up on the beaches of Long Island, and there was a place I had always liked to go.  So one weekend, he, Carey, and I took a drive out to Ocean Parkway, and we went in past the Oak Beach Inn to that little ocean-side community right on the beach just west of the Inn.  There are only a dozen or so houses there.  But just beyond the little community, a short distance down the beach road, sitting all by itself, was this really big house, a two-story, glass-front home facing the ocean, with a verandah on all sides, and shaped on the side facing the ocean like the prow of an old sailing ship.  It was a gorgeous house.  Joitaki was taken by it so much he wanted to meet the owners.  So we got out of the car and tried the doorbell, and someone answered.  She was a maid.  The owners weren’t home, so we got their name and phone number and left. 

     And for weeks afterward, Joitaki talked about that place and decided he wanted to build such a house, and we spent the next few weekends scouring the beaches for a building site.  We had a lot of fun and no success.  So we went to an agency that specialized in such property, and took all these tours, and had no fun at all.  Then, late in the summer, Joitaki comes to me and says he wants to show me something.  So we have a party at my place, and Joitaki comes with this great big package which has in it what he wants to show me.

     So we let Carey open it, and inside are all these crinkled up newspapers, and in the bottom is a little box.  Carey opens it and inside are a set of keys.  They are the keys to the house off of Ocean Parkway we had seen earlier in the summer.  Joitaki had put an agent in touch with those people and made an offer for the home, and they had made a counter offer, and Joitaki accepted the price.  And so the house was ours.  We celebrated and drank a lot of wine and next day we went out there.

     We liked the idea that the house was separated from the others on the beach road.  But what I liked best was going over the Captree bridge--that feeling it always gave me of leaving my cares behind as I moved toward that endless watery horizon.  The wide expanse of the bay that day was dotted with clam boats, and a lazy sail here and there tacked in the breeze, and gulls hovered over the bridge and sometimes alighted on the rails and looked at us as we shimmered by.  But the smell of the ocean on the wind--that was the best part.  Between the last house in the row and ours there was a kind of cove, a deep horseshoe-shaped cut into the beach with a high embankment all around where the ocean dribbled in at high tide and left a kind of shallow pond behind during the lows.  And just on the other side of the embankment was the house--and it really had the look and feel of an old tar’s place, a kind of dream home for the wanderlusty. 

     We let ourselves in.  The house was empty, of course. Its rooms were all open to the daylight, and every one had a doorway to the verandah, for the bottom story was all garage, large enough for four cars, and you had to climb a high flight of steps to get into the house itself.  But I guess there was a reason for that.  We stood in the living room, looking through the wall of glass to the ocean, and then let ourselves out onto the verandah.  We found a stairway that led down to the ground, which was pretty firm there, and which had a lot of dune grass growing naturally in thickets here and there, and some rose of sharons and red pines and wild junipers hugging the sand.  There was a good breeze coming off the ocean, and when we faced it, our jackets were swept out behind us.  We had to lower our faces and put our foreheads foremost into the wind in order to walk to the surf, which was quite a distance away, about a hundred yards.  We all took our shoes off and walked in the water as it rolled up the sand slope, and the water was cold but bearable.  And like kids, we stooped to pick up shell fragments and crab claws and the usual debris that the surf deposits on the sand.  We were all glad of heart and happy and excited.

     And there was no question that the house was “ours.”  Even though it was owned by the business, and Joitaki--and his associates in Japan, of course--owned the business, this house was something we shared.  Carey and I had a bedroom to ourselves, Joitaki had his, and there were two others for guests.  Carey furnished it pretty much on her own, leaving only Joitaki’s bedroom for him to furnish for himself, which he did, not surprisingly, in Western style--that is with beds and stuffed chairs and dressers and all that.  No tatami and stow-away futons and sit-on-the-floor style furnishings for him.  He had a king-size romp-across-the-room bed large enough to sleep an average family. 

     It was during this first winter that Carey started dropping hints about getting married.  My cousin Reggie had come once to the beach house.  It was an early winter evening and very cold and windy.  A storm was looming off shore and we looked out over the ocean and saw the lightening flashing between the roiling dark clouds.  The surf was spraying high up over the slope in great upward thrusting heaves and we talked about sin.  Reggie.  A priest.  What else?  He didn’t like the idea that we had been living together now almost three years in a relationship that was so far neither fruitful nor binding.  Joitaki was insulted.  He had said that Reggie was crazy to think like that. 

     “Martin and Caroline are not sinners,” he said angrily.  “Any one who thinks like that makes his sin for himself.”

     “I understand how you feel,” Reggie said.  “It’s not your way, so you don’t know.  With us it’s a matter of faith.  It makes a difference in how we think about ourselves, it connects us in ways that just living together doesn’t.”

     And Joitaki was insulted even more and got angrier.  “We get married in Japan, too, you know,” he shouted, rising from his chair and waving his arms,  “and we have religious rites and ceremonies, too, and they give the marriage its sacredness.  What do you think we are, barbarians?”

     “That’s not what I meant,” Reggie said, shrinking away, more than a little intimidated.  “I meant that it’s not OK to think that living together is all right and the same as being married.  Why are you so mad?”

     “Stop, stop,” Carey said.  “Let’s hear no more about marriage.  Marty and I are living the way we want to, and that’s all there is to it.”

     We stopped as a particularly prolonged lightening flash lit up the clouds over the ocean, and a moment later a thundering rain came crashing against the windows and a shattering boom slammed over the roof.  The conversation shifted, as it naturally would, to winters on the beach and what it would be like when it snowed and whether we might not feel more at ease in our homes.  We forgot the business about getting married, and Joitaki and Reggie were throwing back tequilas and sucking lemons, and Carey and I put on raincoats and hurricane hats and went on the verandah and felt like crazy teenagers taking the rain straight in our faces and holding hands and laughing and choking at the same time. 

     But after that night Carey let it drop every once in a while that she had been looking at wedding dresses, or that such and such a church was very nice, and so and so had such a beautiful ring, and such and such a cousin of mine was getting married, and so on, always in a kind of far away mood, like she wasn’t conscious of what she implied.  Poor Carey, I had nothing against getting married, nothing at all.  She had just assumed I did since we weren’t.  But I let her go on like that until she had the gumption to propose.  I wanted getting married to be her idea.  Why?  How the hell should I know!  I’ve been a bachelor all my thirty-eight years.  Isn’t that reason enough?  Always, the things that devil you come unexpectedly from what seems, at first, to be so unimportant.  I mean, I really didn’t care, one way or the other. 

     You have to know something about Carey.  She is that kind of person who, if you can remember that far back, when we were in college, we used to call an “iconoclast.”  Do you remember?  She was always the smartest one around, and she used to dress like a frump, walking around in this incredible collection of incongruous things--a long shapeless flower-print dress with a man’s tee-shirt underneath, and sneakers or boots on her feet, sea-shell earrings and turquoise necklace, bobby-pins in her hair, no lipstick or makeup on her face, she being beyond all that, but heavy mascara on her eyes, because the eyes are the windows to the soul.  You know the type. She had that air about her that the rest of us were herd animals and hopelessly unconscious.  She usually affected an intimate knowledge of French culture and found it such an ordeal to speak in English to us lesser beings.  Boy, of all the girls I knew, she’s the one who drove me crazy.  Now Carey is just like this, except with her it’s no put on, she’s just that way, and she isn’t frumpy anymore. 

     And she is good looking.  She has that shine of health about her: a bright clear face and smooth complexion, shiny brown hair, firm bust, slim waist, large hips.  God.  She’s beautiful.  And she is intuitive.  I mean, she almost has ESP.  She can read me like my entire inner life scrolls across my forehead in light-printed text.  And she really loves me.  So what’s the problem, Martin?  Why are you living alone, drinking like a fish, and working eighteen hours a day?

     Religion.  Religion!  The source of all evil in our lives!  Religion and human happiness are incompatible and contradictory states of existence. 

     Carey got religion.  But that’s not true, or, at least, not in the usual sense--not in the sense of going to church and listening to sermons, and putting money in the collection box, and all that.  Nothing was simple with Carey.  She got this need to be “serious.”  And slowly and gradually she invented her own religion.  It began one evening with this conversation about making choices.

     Joitaki was in Japan at the time, and we were staying the whole week at the beach house.  We were wading in the low-tide pool of the cove, walking slowly and digging our toes deep into the soft sand, the stars overhead glimmering brightly, and the surf plashing behind us in its slow regular rhythm.  We had walked to the embankment on the house side of the cove and sat in the sand.  She leaned against me and dropped the string from her suit off her shoulders, which was a sign that she wanted me to rub them, something she did often.  Being alone like this at night on the beach is itself a kind of metaphysical experience, and when you can rub the shoulders of a woman like Carey while you’re there, the feeling is almost more than you can bear. 

     “What would you say if I told you I was pregnant?” she said. 

     I said, “Are you?” and the thought took hold of me, and she felt the tension in my hands on her neck.

     “No,” she said.  “But we have to make some choices, soon, about how we want our lives to go.  You have such a big family.  Don’t you think we should be contributing to it?”

     “Is having a child something one does?  I mean, does one wake up one morning and say, ‘today I’m going to make a baby?’”

     “If life is so good to you that you can.  Most people around the world don’t choose, it happens to them.  But we can choose.  Shouldn’t we think about it?”

     “Well, I guess we are.  What do you think?”

     “I want to know what you think.”

     “I think that what I want is for you to have what you want.”

     “That’s a cop out.  If we have a baby, it has to be because we both want it.”

     “Why?  I mean, why is it a cop out?  Isn’t it the woman’s decision?  Isn’t that what all women want?  For it to be their decision?”

     She turned to look at me with a wide-eyed expression of concern in her face.  She wasn’t happy with what I said, and I really didn’t understand why, so I asked her.

     “Look,” she said, “let’s put this whole thing in relation to just us, just you and me.  You’re isolating me, pushing me out.  It’s the same as saying, ‘You decide your future and I’ll decide mine.’” 

     I wasn’t sure I followed her, or that I agreed with her if I did.  “You make the decision for both of us,” I said.  “I’m not isolating you or pushing you out.  I’m saying I’ll be a part of your decision, but it must be yours.”

     “No,” she said.  “Choice doesn’t work like that.  Think about it.  It’s not choice when you go to buy a pair of shoes or buy a car.  That’s not choice, really.  There’s no real intention in it, no taking on, no accepting.  It’s just likes or dislikes.  A pair of shoes.  Either you like them or you don’t.  That’s not choice.”

     “But, Carey, tell me if I’m wrong.  Doesn’t it usually work like this?  The woman feels herself ready, she gets all sexy, she seduces her guy, and she gets pregnant.  Where’s the choice?  It’s biology.  The guy just gets his bang.  It’s the woman who does it all.”

     She leaped up onto her feet then and turned to me, holding up the cups of her bathing suit.  “You’re being an ass,” she cried.  Tying the strings around her neck, she looked so clean and perfect in the starlight.  Then she climbed the embankment, and the sand under each foot as she went up came cascading down, until she reached the top.  Up there she rose to her full length before stomping away, and for a moment I saw her as a darker shadow against the dark night sky, outlined by stars. 

     I didn’t get it.  Why was I being an ass?  I felt all out of touch with her.  I felt bad, too, like I disappointed her.  So I thought about it for a while, sitting there.  But no solutions came to me.  Just the calm surface of the pool all silver gray and shiny and the slow rhythm of the surf washing up and rolling out.  I loved it here.  But a nervousness began to take hold of me, and I got up and walked out into the pool and waded to the other side so I could look over the embankment to the house to see if I could see her, see what she was doing.  The lights were on in the living room and kitchen, but I could see they were empty.  And then I heard the car come down the beach road and I plodded through the water and rushed up the embankment on the road side and caught the taillights just as she passed the Oak Beach Inn and turned onto Ocean Parkway.  She was speeding like crazy.  I stood there, kind of dumfounded.  Far in the distance the lights of the inn glowed, and people were there, talking and drinking, dining, even at this hour.  And I was alone thinking about babies, about Carey, and about making choices.

     I went back to the house, showered, put on a robe, and put Schumann’s piano concerto into the player.  I lied down on the couch.  About an hour later I woke from a doze when I heard her come in.  She was still in her bathing suit. 

     “I’m sorry,” I said, as she went into the bedroom.  I wasn’t sure she heard me, so I got up and went in and she was getting into the shower, so I sat on the bed and waited.  When she came out, she was wrapped in a bath towel and was toweling her hair. 

     “I’m sorry,” I repeated.  And I must have looked contrite as hell, because she laughed and sat next to me and leaned her head on my shoulder.

     “Where did you go?” I asked.

     “I went home,” she said.  “I was going to stay there, but I knew you would be upset, so I came back.”

     That was our first struggle.  I wouldn’t call it a struggle if the ones that followed were much the same.  They started out as disagreements, but then grew in intensity and incomprehensibility, and in frequency, till we had one almost once a week.  Almost always these struggles began at the beach house and played themselves out against the background of that isolation and splendor.  Maybe it had to do with the rhythms of the surf, its endless grating as a kind of constant reminder of time, of the pressing nature of our decisions, of life wearing away even as we sat and looked into each other’s hearts.  I don’t know.  I still love her, and I still love that beach house, though I don’t go there anymore.

     It was mid-July and time for my cousin Floyd’s big party.  We had already gotten our invitation.  It was the only time I saw my relatives, and I looked forward to going.  But Carey said she didn’t want to go.  She had been to them several times now, and always had a good time, so I was consternated and bewildered by her refusal. 

     “Why?” I said.  It was a Saturday morning, and we had come to the beach house late Friday night, after spending the evening in Manhattan with Joitaki and several of his associates who had come from Japan.  We had been out dining and later we went to the Plaza where they were staying and had drinks in the lounge.  Mostly we talked business, though Carey also kibitzed with them and made them merry.  Joitaki never kept company with any woman we knew of, he being with a different Japanese woman every time we were out together.  But tonight he had no date, since the others were without, and the night was dedicated to making investment decisions.  That left Carey as the woman on the scene, and she took charge very competently.

     “I don’t want to go.  Do I have to have a reason?”

     “There must be one.  People don’t decide not to go to a place they always have fun at for no reason.”

     “Why do you think that way?  You pretend to be so logical, but you’re the least rational person I know.”

     “How do you mean?”  I was offended.  She knew that saying that would offend me, and it wasn’t that she said it so much as that she knew that made me mad. 

     Then she looked me straight in the face and in a tone of deadly seriousness, she said, “Do you know it’s impossible to make a genuine act of kindness?”

     “What?” I said.  I was perplexed and began to run the night before through my mind to find something in our talk with the Japanese businessmen to account for her feeling.  I have become used to the Japanese way of walking sideways into matters of importance having to do with business, of there always being unstated purposes, of communicating intent with a bow or a joke, of there always being a subtext to everything that is said.  In such situations, all acts of generosity and kindness are motivated by self-interest.  But Joitaki is a friend as well as an employer, and one could ask for no more loyal friend than him.  Carey knew that.  I was perplexed.

     “Have I been unkind to you?” I said.

     “No,” she said, “it’s not you.  You live so entirely in your feelings you’re unaware.”

     “I wish I knew what you’re talking about,” I replied.

     And then she started to cry.  God.  I hate that.  She didn’t do it often, but when she did, I could just disembowel myself, it made me feel so bad.

     It wasn’t like Carey to change trains like that in the middle of a conversation, temperamentally she was too sincere and earnest for such evasions.  So these two things were equated in some way in her mind--the party and genuine acts of kindness. With a sense of frustration and impatience, I knew I had to figure it out.  I thought about that Baptist minister and old Ken, the way he came out of that room all choked up, his eyes flooded.  And then his flirting with the waitress in that town where nobody knew him.  Did they cancel each other out?  Or were they connected as two sides of a coin are?  Was he just a guy doing a job?  I couldn’t speak of these things to Carey, because I didn’t know what they meant, but I knew that somehow they were involved in whatever was afflicting her.  But I had no idea how to get at it.  So I just said, “Fine, we won’t go.”  And waited, thinking, watching, listening to her. 

     After lunch we took a walk up the beach, going west toward Cedar Overlook and Cedar beaches, and we walked for miles, staying on the hard wet sand at the top of the surf’s roll.  Every once in a while we would wet ourselves, and at those places where the dune grass grew close to the top of the slope, we would sit or lie down and rest.  I deliberately avoided the topic of the party.  And she didn’t raise it, either.  But it was there, in our minds, in the air, on the tips of our tongues.  After a long, long time, she opened it herself.

     “The thing you like most about going to Floyd’s is the feeling of being part of the family.  I know that’s it.  You like your father’s family.  Your mother’s people, now, they have never invited you to any of their homes, have they?  Not since I’ve known you.”

     “I guess they’ve never forgiven my mother for not marrying her brother.  She lowered herself by marrying a stranger, a working class stiff they turned their noses up at.  To them, anybody who earns a livelihood is working class.”

     “You never see them.  Does that bother you?

     “Not at all.  It would bother me to see them.”

     “So all your aunts and uncles and cousins on your father’s side, they’re your family, right?

     “Right.”

     “That’s the problem, Martin.” 

     I waited for her to go on, to explain, but she was thoughtful for a while, sitting up and hugging her knees.  She was an only child, and her father had passed on a long time ago.  She had only her mother, with whom she had a close enough relationship, but nothing fanatical.  She never saw the few aunts and uncles she had, and so she had no real sense of family at all.

     “It’s all an illusion, you know.  Family.  You never see them.  You’re not connected to them in any way.  And none of you really care about each other.  During the year, you all go your separate ways, you never get in touch, you don’t go to each other’s baptisms, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations.  OK.  You do go to weddings.  That’s about it, though.  So you get together at Floyd’s and you all think what fun being part of the family is, but all of you couldn’t care less about anybody else.  It’s all pretend.  There’s just us, Martin.  Just us.  Just you and me.  And all we have are these few moments, then we get like those crab’s claws there in the sand.  Torn apart.  Eaten up.  Scattered.”

     “Well, there’s no remedy for that,” I said.  And once again I put my foot in my mouth, for she got all agitated at the remark.  Up she got, and swaying her large hips back and forth, she strode away leaving me there to play with those damn crab fragments, I suppose.  So I came after her, running until I caught up.  And then something happened.

     A man was fishing in the surf.  He had come onto the beach in his four-wheeler which was parked at the top of the slope.  He had brought with him a large black Labrador that ran up and down the beach and seemed to enjoy leaping into the waves and getting wet.   As we approached the fisherman, he was working his line hard and his pole was bending practically into a u-shape.  The line was moving slowly westward, parallel to the beach.  He had waders on, and he walked knee deep into the water, struggling with the pole.  Then all of a sudden the line turned and it started heading out to sea and whatever it was he had hooked was peeling line off the reel at a tremendous rate.  The fisherman didn’t give up, though.  He walked deeper in, put the base of the pole in a cup that hung from a sling around his hips, increased his drag on the reel, and started working the fish back in long, deep pulls alternating with rapid taking-in of line. 

     His concentration and efforts had gotten the Lab all excited, and it rushed into the waves, leaping and struggling to get beyond them.  Soon it had gotten into the smooth swells behind the breakers and was paddling out to where the line hit the water, which had just then gone slack.  Then, as we looked out to the dog, we all saw at the same instant the fin come up.  The Lab had turned and was trying to head back to the breakers.  But it was too late.  We saw the great head emerge, the long projections on either side of its skull, at the very ends of which the eyes rotated, like some eerie monster from a 1950s horror movie, and the great mouth opened and took the dog. 

     The fisherman had watched, helplessly.  He took out a knife and cut the line, and waved his hand in a gesture of disgust and defeat, and came treading sand up the slope.  When he got near enough to us, he said, “Did you see that damn shark take my dog?” 

     “Yes,” I said.  “It looked like a hammerhead.” 

     “Well,” he said, “That’s a first.  I thought I had me a big bass, but when I felt the weight of him I was sure it was a ray.  I was going to cut the line but I thought, hell, why not play the damn thing, it’s only line.  Maybe I can land it.  See if I can, anyway.  If I knew it was a shark, I’d have cut the line right away.  Poor dog.  Must have scared the hell out of him.”

     We commiserated and took our leave.  As we walked on, he was reloading his reel.  I guess he’d fish all afternoon.  I wished him luck, to myself.  Carey had said not a single word.  And as we walked, she held it in.  On good days, at the beach behind the house, we often swam out deep into the swells behind the breakers.  I wouldn’t be doing that anymore, now, not for a while anyway.  Carey’s silence interested me.  She had been considering abstractly the illusions we live by to make bearable our pathetic drift between the eternities.  Those red brittle crab claws in the sand, what are they but signs and symbols of the reality we had just witnessed?  The fisherman went back to fishing.  What the hell.  What else can one do?

     The next day, Sunday, Carey was burning incense all over the house.  It was gagging me.  But she had gotten dressed, prepared breakfast, and had put Vivaldi on the player.  So I said, “Let’s have breakfast on the verandah.  It’s a nice morning, isn’t it.”

     “Yes.  It’s a lovely morning.  Shouldn’t you get dressed?” she said.

     “Why?  I’ve got my robe on.  I’m not naked.”

     “Nevertheless, you should get dressed.  There are certain formalities that should be observed, you know.”

     “Why?  What’s the difference?”

     “Formalities give structure and meaning to our lives, where otherwise there wouldn’t be any.”

     “Oh,” I said.  She was in a mood again.  Breakfast was going to be long.  What the hell, eating stark naked on the verandah could be a formality too.  I stopped to look at her as I passed through the door into the kitchen.  She was dressed in white, and her hair was plainly done, as it always is, short, parted down the middle.  She had no smile, but a look almost of woefulness in her face.  God.  When she looked like that I wished I could pick her up out of her thoughts and place her down inside my own. 

     As I was dressing, I heard a car horn blare a couple of times.  That would be Joitaki.  I was glad he was here.  He would take the edge off Carey, talking business, filling us in on the deals he had made with those investors we had spent Friday evening with.  But when I came out to the verandah, I saw that he had a woman with him.  She was Mika Shimamura, the eggplant woman, and when we saw each other, we both dropped our jaws.  Joitaki introduced us, so I said hello as though I was just then meeting her for the first time.  She was relieved. 

     Carey had made us French toast and had gone in to make some more, so we could all sit down together.  In the meantime, we had coffee and chatted about the weather and the beach and what we were planning on doing that day.  Joitaki wanted to rent a boat and cruise the bay, and I seconded the proposal, and we were just talking about where we’d go for the boat when Carey returned with a platter full of French toast and bottles of syrup and a cup of whipped butter.

     “So,” she said to me, as she sat down and passed the platter, “You and Mika know each other?”  She is, as I’ve said, intuitive.  Joitaki was astonished. 

     “Do you?” he said.

     “Yes,” Mika said.  “We met, how long ago, Martin?  Ten years?  It’s a long time ago, anyway.”

     “When I was working for Rohm Electronics,” I said, “here in Manhattan.  That was about ten years ago, maybe eight or nine.  We had dated a couple of times.  But then I left for Los Angeles.”

     “Were you lovers?” Carey said.

     Mika blushed like hell.  I guessed that answered for both of us.  Carey was, for the first time since I’ve known her, acting badly.  She was being insensitive and rude.  Joitaki was blushing too.  And we all ate in silence.  I got up to refill our coffee cups, and Carey followed me into the kitchen.  When we were out of ear shot I said, “It’s impossible to make a genuine act of kindness.”

     Her face went hard and blank.  I felt bad instantly.  So I told her I was sorry.  But she said, “You were lovers, I just wanted to clear the air.”

     “Don’t be naive,” I replied.  “Joitaki was crushed by what you said, couldn’t you see it?  What the hell difference does it make?  Besides, making love and being lovers are different things.  Mika and me, we just had a good time for a while.” 

     But the day was a bad one.  Joitaki tried to cheer up, but it didn’t work.  Mika and Carey couldn’t get far enough away from each other.  We had rented a boat from the Captree boat basin, a twenty-two footer with a flying bridge and dual inboards, and we cruised the bay.  After a while we dropped anchor in the mud flats on the south side of the bay not far from the bridge, went overboard and toed the mud for clams and swam around a bit.  But it was no good.  We all felt it.  Joitaki was embarrassed the whole time and acted strangely detached.  I hoped he hadn’t been getting romantically attached to Mika and was now falling away from her.  When it came to women, I had no idea how Joitaki felt.  That was the one side of himself he didn’t share much with us.  I felt like hell. 

     Carey, too, felt like hell.  I could see it in her face and her manner.  She was lethargic, almost willess.  And quiet.  Tonight we would go back to the house in Patchogue.  I looked forward to getting away from the beach, to the seclusion of our wood-surrounded yard.  It would be hot, there.  But that would pass as evening fell, and we could sit on the patio and sip a drink and not hear the surf.  Then we could talk.

     As I was thinking these things, I was treading the mud alongside the boat, and my toes hit something so large I thought it was a stone at first.  But as I traced it out, it felt like a great clam, so I dunked for it, got my hand under it, lifted it out of the mud, and came up holding it over my head.  It was a giant, all right, nearly as big as a dinner plate.  I heaved it over the side of the boat, shouting that I had got us the mother of all clams.  Carey had been swimming and floating near the boat’s ladder, and she scrambled up and climbed aboard.  I followed. 

     Joitaki was holding the clam up and saying, “What are we going to do with it?  Can you eat a clam this big?” 

     “Of course you can.  I’ll cut it up and make a sauce for pasta with it.  It’ll be delicious.”

     “No,” Carey said, “we can’t and we won’t.  This is the mother of all clams, and we’re going to put it back.”

     At that, Mika began to laugh, and she laughed merrily and loud, and we all thought that Carey was joking.  But Carey turned and got this strange somber look on her face.

     Mika said, “Martin didn’t mean that it was really the mother of all clams.  He just meant that it was big, that’s all.”

     It was clear that Mika was missing something, like people do who still translate a second language into their first in order to feel secure with meanings.  But Carey’s expression had not changed.  She stepped across the boat to the stern seats where Mika was sitting and in a long, clench-fisted roundhouse punch, she clobbered her right in the face.  It was not a slap.  It was a knock-out punch, and Mika dropped to the deck, out cold.  I didn’t have time to react, neither did Joitaki.  He had an expression on his face that I can’t explain--disbelief?  Horror?  Pain?  Bewilderment?  They were all there.  He was stunned, and I couldn’t help myself, I had to laugh.

     “I don’t think she meant to insult you,” I said to Carey.

     And she said, “That’s not why.  Let’s go.  I want to go home.”  And she took the clam from Joitaki and let it drop to the water, and he looked over the side and watched it sink.  Then he looked at Carey, and looked at me, and lastly, looked at Mika, still on the deck.

     “Shouldn’t we tend to her?” he said.

     “All right,” I said.  There was a first aid kit in the cabin and I went for it.  Mika had a bruise under her eye where Carey’s fist caught her skin, and she was going to have a shiner.  I broke a capsule of smelling salts, put it under her nose, and she began jerking her head.  She came round, and we helped her onto the seat where she had been.  Carey had gone up to the bridge and was starting the engines.  Soon we were flying over the water, heading back to the basin.

     It was late afternoon when we crossed the bridge.  I was driving, and Carey was leaning against the door, looking out over the bay on her right.  I don’t know why crossing this bridge gives me so much pleasure.  I usually like to let others drive, so I don’t have to tend to traffic and can look east and west over the water, and pick out familiar places on the shore, places that I mark as so far in this direction from that water tower, or those buildings behind these docks, or that patch of woods where you can see the roofs and chimneys of those old houses.  I have a kind of mental map of the details of the shore, a map that tells me all things are where they’re supposed to be, and the world is fine and safe, and life is good.  I guess that’s why.  I just love this bridge.

     We drove in silence.  Once home, we both felt relieved.  We didn’t shower and dress at the beach house, because neither of us wanted to be there any longer than we had to.  We left Joitaki and Mika sitting in the living room.  He was holding an ice bag to her face, and she was leaning back limp and wounded against the cushions.  He was making small cooing sounds as he tended to her bruise, and she was enjoying the attention.  I was seeing a side of Joitaki I hadn’t seen before, and I realized that his evening was going to go better than ours, better than it might have, anyway. 

     I showered first and came down and fixed us a sandwich in the kitchen.  But Carey didn’t come down.  So I ate alone.  Then I cut up a lime and fixed myself a gin and tonic and went out on the patio.  We had a bench swing there with cushions on it, and that’s where I sat.  It was beginning to get dark.  Someone up the block had just finished mowing his lawn, and silence filled the dusk.  I was sipping the drink when I saw Carey, like a ghost, drift by the patio doors.  She was in a nightgown, all white and loose.  Then she came through the doors, barefoot, drifting really like a ghost, but when she got close I saw that she had her sandwich.  She sat next to me, took the glass from my hand and swallowed a mouthful of the drink.  She ate and we maintained the silence.  We hadn’t spoken to each other since she clobbered Mika.  I knew it was going to come.  It was just a matter of time. 

     Finally, I said, “Do you want me to make you a gin and tonic?  Or get you something else?”

     With her mouth full, she said, “Sure, a gin and tonic.”

     When I got back she was rocking the bench, swinging like a kid, and she looked so lovely I felt all those yearnings and movings inside that make me go mad when I feel them and that only Carey ever made me feel.

     We rocked in a gentle swinging motion, our feet pushing in rhythm together.  She leaned her head on my shoulder.

     “Let’s not go back to the beach house for a while.  Let’s stay a few weekends here,” she said.  “This was a big bad weekend for us, wasn’t it?”

     “It was,” I said.  “Poor Mika.  She’s going to have a first-class shiner.”  I wanted her to talk about it, but I didn’t want to push her into it either.  So I let it drop when she didn’t respond.

     “I had a vision when you came up with the clam,” she said after a while.  “I’ve been thinking about it and what it means ever since.  I don’t know if I can explain it, but I’ll try.  I saw everything as connected, Floyd’s party, Mika, the dog and the shark, Joitaki, Friday evening at the Plaza with the Japanese men, the boat, the clam, you, me, your mother’s family, the beach house, the bay--it all came together in a pattern, or almost a pattern, and that was the troubling thing, what I’ve been thinking about.  It seemed like I had a vision of some kind of order, the right and natural order of things, as things are supposed to be.  But all sorts of things were wrong in it.  One of them was the dog on the beach, for it was breaking the pattern, it was out of order.  What did a dog have to do with the ocean?  He was paddling out there, where he shouldn’t have been, and something from below came up to take him away, something that corrected the disturbance in the pattern.  That poor dog.  I felt his terror.  I really did.  It wasn’t his fault.  It just happened.  He was paddling so hard to get away, he knew that shark meant no good to him.  But in an instant he was gone, and the ocean was restored.  And that was what it was all about.”

     “And the clam and Mika,” I said, “what about them?”

     “The same.  When you came up out of the water with that big clam, that’s when I had the feeling.  I saw it all in one instant.  And it was wrong.  Something in that very moment skewed everything out of order.  You said it was the mother of all clams.  And I couldn’t help but to feel that what you said was in some way true.  Not in any way you might have meant it.  But in some way, because connections were breaking.  I knew I couldn’t understand it.  But it was a strong feeling.  And then Mika, with her stupid laughing and her explaining to me what you meant.  She was so unaware.  Laughing on the bay.  Clams all around her feet.  Seagulls flying around.  Suddenly, she was the black dog, paddling in a place not meant for her, disturbing the order, and I became the shark.  I couldn’t eat her, so I decked her,” she said, making a fist and shaking it in front of her.

     I laughed.  “Did it work?”

     “You mean, did I restore the natural order?”

     “Yes.  For a moment you were Nemesis.  Did it work?”

     “You bet it did.”

     And I laughed again.  “The eggplant woman,” I said.  “She was a disturbance to the natural order.”

     “What do you mean?”

     I told her about Mika boiling eggplant in soy sauce and why I stopped seeing her.  And she said. “Ugh, God, I can’t believe it.  Ugh. Ugh.”  And she took a long pull on her gin and tonic.

     I didn’t know what to make of Carey’s vision, except that she had it.  I never doubted that.  What it meant, though, I didn’t know.  But I began to think about us and what it might mean for her regarding our life together, and it made me all uneasy, for I felt some trouble in it. 

     It had been a long time since she stopped dropping hints about getting married.  I thought that the mood had passed and that it didn’t mean that much to her.  But I wasn’t so sure, anymore.  Reggie had touched on similar thoughts that night at the beach house when he got Joitaki all angry over Carey and me being sinners.  How did he put it?  Our relationship was neither fruitful nor binding?  Marriage would connect us in ways that living together couldn’t?  I thought it was all nonsense and still do.  But Carey was feeling something now about connections, what she called the order of things.  Whether what she felt was something truly mystical or just a contorted way of explaining to herself what was lacking in her life, I didn’t know.  Anyway, if getting married was a way of getting by this problem, I resolved to do something about it.  I was going to ask her to marry me, and I thought that next weekend would be the best time to do it.

     It was a long week.  But Friday evening we went out to dinner by ourselves and planned the weekend.  First thing in the morning I had taken down the drapes from the living room and Carey had carted them to the dry cleaner.  Then I hauled all the throw rugs and carpets outside and hung them over a line and beat the dust from them.  Meanwhile, Carey had washed all the curtains and was ironing them.  I had finished with the carpets and rugs and was vacuuming the house all over, dusting, and shining things up.  Carey had opened all the windows to let air in, and a warm breeze filled the house, and it smelled gorgeous inside. We had not cleaned house like this since we moved in, and we were happy and cheerful, and neither of us missed the sound of the surf.  Carey was ironing in the bedroom, and when she was done, she called to me, and together we went round the house putting the curtains back.  The mattress in the bedroom was bare, and clean sheets were folded and stacked with their pillowcases at the top of the bed.  Carey told me to get on one side and she got on the other, and together we made up the bed, pulling the sheets tight and making neat military corners, perfectly creased, where we tucked in.  She threw the pillows in place, and I said,     “Let’s get married.”              Just like that.  No preliminaries.  No bended-knee proposal.  I wanted to seize the moment, because we were both happy. 

     “You pick the day, Carey, and afterward we’ll go wherever you want for a honeymoon--Hawaii, Australia, Japan, Malaysia--would you like to go fishing in Alaska?  Or go on safari in Africa?”

     She looked at me wide-eyed and bewildered and didn’t answer.  So I walked round the bed and took her hand and pulled her down on top of me as I lied down.  She was completely quiet and still. 

     So I said, “Carey, don’t you want to?  We’ll have a big wedding.  All the cousins will come.  Joitaki will be delighted.  He’ll be best man, of course.”

     “I want to,” she said.  “I want to.”

     “Why don’t we go down for some lunch,” I said, “and take out the calendar and find a date.  Then we can go out looking at wedding gowns.”

     “I can’t wear a wedding gown,” she said.  “I’m no virgin thing venturing forth from the nest.  Martin, we’ve been living together for four years.  I’ll need to find something simple and plain but elegant and suggestive of innocence.  Do you think something like that exists?  We’ll ask Reggie to perform the service.” 

     We spent the day looking at gowns and dresses, going from one mall to another, from one down-town dress shop to another, and we were tired and happy, and our heads were swimming.  Carey was bewildered with all the planning that would have to go into the wedding.  Her mother would not be much help, because she lived far away and because she was arthritic and was barely able to walk. 

     When we’re in Patchogue, we always cook for ourselves.  But, like last night, this night we went out to dinner, and we had a celebratory air about us, for we wanted to toast the world and all its beauties.  For everything was beautiful, and I was feeling expansive.  I talked about finding a nice place on the bay for the reception, like the La Grange or the Saxon Arms, and ordering lobster for everybody, and having a bash even my mother’s people would admire.

     Carey seemed blissful.  And more than anything else, that made me sure that I had done the right thing.  That night we went back to the house in Patchogue.  We didn’t call anybody because we wanted to be alone.  Plenty of time to let people know.  Instead, we went to bed early.  Carey crawled in next to me, and we were both sitting up.  She leaned against me and I put my arms around her.  For a long time we sat like that, quiet.  Then I said, “I do want to have a baby.  I want to get to work on him right after the wedding.” 

     I thought that would be the final link closing the circle of connections that she needed to have made for her sense of the right and natural order to be complete.

     But she only sighed and didn’t respond. So I said, “Don’t you want that?”

     And she said, “I can’t have children.  I’m barren.”

     She had gone all stiff and rigid.  Moonlight was flooding in through the windows, casting an oblique pattern on the wall and dying on the large mirror above her dresser.  It was a filmy inorganic light, devoid of sensation, and making shadows like dark twisting vines climbing up the bedposts and the closet door, reflecting from the mirror in odd shapes, making patterns that looked like women’s breasts dangling from the shadows and glowing in chemical ecstasy.  It was a prophetic light, a light that would start no fires. 

     “Tell me,” I said.  “I want to know.”

     “OK,” she said, but she was silent for a long time.

     “When I was thirteen,” she started, almost in a whisper, “in eighth grade, I became pregnant.  An older boy, who should have known better, because I didn’t know anything.  I had been having my periods for only a few months.  My father was outraged.  He went to the police.  But when they questioned me and the boy, they said that there was nothing they could do.  So my father got a lawyer.  His parents got a lawyer.  They exchanged letters.  The boy claimed that four of his friends had sex with me and that he was no more the father than any of the others.  It wasn’t true.  And my father never believed it.  But he wanted to drop it.  Trying to salvage something from the grief, we looked forward to the baby coming.  But it didn’t come.  I was too small and it was an agony, and finally the pregnancy had to be ended.  And that was the end of it.  Then, when I graduated high school, that summer, I had gotten pregnant again.  This time the guy just left town when he found out.  But I decided to have the baby.  In the second month I miscarried.  The doctors said that I would never be able to carry a baby to term because of damage to my uterus caused by the first pregnancy.  That’s it.  I can conceive.  But I can’t bear.”

     We sat closed in our embrace for a long time, saying no more.  I didn’t know what to say, anyway.  I had my chin leaning on her shoulder and her head leaned against mine, and my arms were wrapped around her, and all I could do was hold on and not let her go.  I couldn’t say that it didn’t matter, for it mattered to her.  I couldn’t say that I didn’t want children anyway, because I had just told her I did.  There was nothing to say. 

     I felt her heart beating and listened to her breathing.  That was all.  After a while, I slid her down and lay beside her and we both fell asleep.  In the morning, when I woke up she was gone.  It didn’t occur to me that she was gone, I mean, gone forever.  I thought she had dressed and gone out somewhere.  But when the morning passed and there was no sign of her, I began to get this feeling of dread.  She was gone, and I haven’t seen her since.  I can still feel her as  we sat on the bed, smell her, hear her whispering.  But she is gone.  And I have never felt so empty and alone.