WHAT A MAN HAS TO LEARN FOR HIMSELF

WHAT A MAN HAS TO LEARN FOR HIMSELF

“Damn,” Able said, as he stepped and pushed on the spade, lifting the dirt, half of it spilling off the spade back into the hole because of the thin tracing of spirea roots spreading in the soil.  His knee was aching violently, and in spite of it, he chopped at the roots and lifted soil from the hole and dumped it into the other hole he had dug over a year ago, which was now full with a week’s worth of kitchen scraps.  “Why do I do this?” he said to himself.  But he didn’t stop.  When he had the old hole filled, he tamped it down with both feet, and continued to dig the new one until he had it about eighteen inches deep.  Then he dumped the contents of the old coffee tin into it, took the spade back to the garage, and went into the house.

     It was a cloudy, cool April morning, and during the night it had rained.  This was the weather that made his knee ache.  He took a couple of aspirin, sat at the table by the window, and looked out towards the house next door.  He kept his mind and feelings blank—a strategy he was learning to help him cope with the changes this last year had wrought in his life.

     They were many.  A year ago he had lived in a void that both contained him and filled him.  He had become so used to it that he could no longer remember what it was to live in the world.  That changed.  He was quickened, but the person who quickened him left to pursue her own griefs, and the void returned, emptier and bleaker. Then there was his strange, compulsive, and incomprehensible odyssey, with a dream of renewal awaiting him at its end.  Nothing worked out as he wished it might.  But he was diverted into new cares, coming by chance to know a girl, Alicia, whose life had been a horror, and who laid a claim upon him, one which he tried his best to live up to.  All his efforts only served to push her, however, into the pit of hopelessness, a place with which he was all too familiar.  Her tormented life was hopelessly lost.   

     And now he was back, sitting again in the dim light of a spring morning, feeling nothing, except the familiar ache in his right knee.  The old kitchen was unchanged, its counters worn and dusty, its cabinets—painted many times and now showing a dark rim of fingermarks around their glossy porcelain knobs—needing replacement, its tile floor cracked and dusty too from his prolonged absence.  He had learned a great deal.  He had witnessed how badly a mother could craze the psyche of her child and derange its soul.  He shivered.  A sense of dread and helplessness came over him.  But something very strange accompanied these feelings—all the while he stayed beside Alicia, trying to help her and guide her, he discovered how disturbed she was and how little in the way of help he or her foster parents could be to her.  This discovery worked a kind of charm upon him, because as he witnessed her self-loathings and her final act of self-destruction, a peace had come over him, which led to an acceptance of his own life that he was not capable of before.  It was a strange healing, as though her dementedness was a balm rubbed into his own raw grief.

     There were three people at the wake and the interment—the old woman who was Alicia’s caseworker, Abel, and Abel’s brother Vaughn, who came because of his concern for Abel’s mental health and for his brother’s having to cope with yet another loss.  The girl, only fourteen, was beautiful.  Her face was intact, and the rest of her was covered by the dress Abel had found in a bridal shop.  It was simple, white and lacy at the neck and chest.  Abel had had flowers placed in her hand. 

After the funeral, the old woman took Abel’s arm and walked back to the car with him.  Standing in the shade of a tree beside the narrow lane, she looked back to the gravesite before getting into the car and told Abel that Alicia’s death was inevitable but that he was, nevertheless, a comfort to her.  She died knowing he would grieve.  He felt no emotion at this, neither anger at the caseworker’s assumptions about Alicia nor resentment at the intrusiveness of her remark, because he had come to understand the depth of this old woman’s knowledge and experience, and he knew she was right.  He recalled the look in Alicia’s face and the sound of her voice when, before she took her life, she told him that he couldn’t eat her heart because she didn’t have one.  It was an announcement of her intention which he didn’t understand until afterwards.  He shook the old lady’s hand and said goodbye, and Vaughn took him to the airport. 

     Abel had been home now for one week.  He sat, looking out the window, feeling that blankness he was learning to control.  His prolonged absence led to his being fired, in spite of Harry’s efforts to prevent it.  So Abel was now unemployed.  He was, with his and Veda’s savings, with her life insurance, and with his virtually unspent salary since her death, well enough off that he wouldn’t have to work for years if he didn’t want to.  So he decided he would begin the search for something to do.  Of one thing only he was sure—he wanted no companions, especially female ones.  He wanted to be alone, though now his reason was to allow himself time to complete the healing, not, as before, to nurse his madness.

     He had an impulse to go to the pond and fish for a while, but he decided not to.  There were memories associated with the pond he felt would be better left to oblivion.  But the idea of fishing interested him.  He put up a pot of coffee, and while it was brewing, he hopped into the car and drove to the townhall and got a fishing license and parking permit for the town beaches.  These were located on the Fire Island strip south of The Great South Bay, where the sand was smooth and white and the surf cold and green.  He came home, had coffee and toast, grabbed a warm, heavy sweat shirt from his closet, then left again.  He went to a sporting goods store in the village and bought a pole and reel, tackle, and a cooler for beer and his catch, if he was lucky.  Then he went to a bait shop and bought blood worms and clams and squid, put these in the cooler, bought ice and some beer, and before heading out to the beach, stopped at a garden center and bought himself a lawn chair to stick in the sand and sit on when he got tired.

     The wind coming off the ocean was cold and relentless and the sun, now shining bright in an unclouded sky, sapped him of energy.  Every once in a while he would strip off his sweat shirt, walk waist deep into the water, and sit down, letting the waves roll over his head.  He would blow and gasp and huff and puff, then return to fishing, and in fifteen minutes he would be dry.  He spent several hours this way.  Though he caught nothing, the bait was constantly nibbled off his hooks, and long before he was ready to quit, it was all gone.  So he sat on the beach, drinking beer, his pole and tackle neatly assembled and waiting to be hauled back to the car.

     Far, far out on the horizon he could see the shipping that plied the waters between the New York harbor and the world, and the sky always held airplanes circling for Kennedy Airport.  But nearer to him was the emptiness he preferred.  The few people on the beach for afternoon picnics were gathered far away between the flags that marked the swimming area boundaries.  Only seagulls, sandpipers, and terns came close enough for him to speak to, but he kept his silence for lack of anything to say.

     It was late afternoon, and though the sun was still shining brightly, it was too cold to stay any longer.  He had put his sweat shirt on again, but the wind was too strong.  He put his sneakers on and gathered up his stuff and trudged through the sand along the water’s edge till he came to the empty lifeguard stations, then he headed for the boardwalk and his car.  When he reached the pavilion near the parking lot, he put his stuff down and turned to the ocean. 

Standing with his hands on his hips, gazing far out to sea, he was impressed with the certainty, felt dimly at first, but then more strongly as he let the feeling take hold of him, that that poor girl, tormented and wracked as she was, living as she did deprived of mother love and a father and the very means of life in the midst of plenty--hated and condemned for trying to survive on her own--nevertheless lived a worthwhile life.  He felt her near him and connected to him in some inexplicable way.  His memory of her looking lovely in her white dress made him realize she had changed him, and, to the extent--he believed just then--that his life had meaning, hers did too.  He was impressed with a certainty too that so long as he remembered her, her life still had value, and that if he should leave anything behind of value when his time came, her life was by that much more worth living.  He understood that he had an obligation to her.  He was living for the two of them.  He felt that where he now stood he looked out upon an empty watery unknown and that at his back was the work of time and civilization which he must return to.  Far, far away, he could just barely make out a ship.  He said goodbye to it, as though it were Alicia, picked up his stuff, and walked the rest of the way to his car. 

Of one thing now he was sure, he wanted company, preferably female company.  He had been away for a long time—four years: three since Veda died and the suffering year of her illness.  He had been away not only from the world at large—he hadn’t been to a movie in all that time, hadn’t read newspapers, watched television, or listened to the radio—but he had also been away from the people with whom he and Veda had socialized.  He would have to start all over again, and it wouldn’t be easy.  People would think him a Rip Van Winkle for all he knew about the things that interested them.  “Where have you been?” they would say.  “Don’t you know about such and such and so and so?”  And he could only shrug his shoulders.  He supposed he could go to a library and scan through a couple of years’ worth of newspapers, but the idea bored him. 

When he got home, he entered the house and looked around.  The place was old and he hadn’t kept it very well. It was dusty, untidy, frayed and worn in the seams.  It was depressing.  He looked at the curtains in the living room and saw that they were draped with cobwebs.  He hadn’t been home for several months.  But he hadn’t cleaned the house, really cleaned it, like Veda did, for years.  He wondered why he didn’t realize it a year ago, or six months ago!  If Veda was alive it wouldn’t look like this.  He realized that the place mirrored himself.  Alarmed, he went to the bathroom and took a long look at himself.  He had changed.  Why didn’t he notice this before?  He had gotten deep lines at the corners of his eyes, his hair had gone gray, and his beard stubble was grizzled.  He washed his face, and after he dried himself, he looked again.  It wasn’t so bad, he decided.  He brushed his hair, and he thought he looked a little better yet.  He showered, shaved, dressed, and stood again in front of the mirror.  He looked his age, he thought, not more, and he felt OK.

The thought of going out and mixing with strangers made him uncomfortable.  But he would have to start somehow.  It occurred to him that he didn’t even know where to go, where people went now to mix and match, or even if they did those sorts of things anymore.  His brother was telling him that a whole new culture was growing up around the internet.  He didn’t even own a computer!  He knew computers only as tools on the job.  It had not occurred to him that they might be used for social interaction.  Why would he want to socialize through a computer? he thought, irritably.  He put the thought out of mind—he’d rather go to a bar.

But an image of himself sitting alone at a bar came self-pityingly into his mind.  He was going to become one of those men he used to see when he an Veda went out—men who dined alone and went to nice places afterwards for drinks, always looking pathetic.  He felt a sinking in his stomach and decided not to go out.  But that sinking came as a warning which he knew he should heed.  He turned, opened and stepped through the door and locked it behind him.  He stood with his back to the door, said, “What the hell,” got in the rented car and drove off.

The evening was all that he expected.  He was miserable.  He went to the Saxon Arms, had a few drinks at the bar where couples and foursomes gathered to wait being called by the maitre de to their tables, ate alone, then went into the village to places that seemed to attract people.  But the places were loud and jammed and the people were young and after a while he gave up, took a walk along the docks, and headed for home.  He was tired.  The drinking was no good.  And the music only irritated him.  “Life has to have more than this,” he said to himself.  “How do people stay sane?”

When he entered the house, he turned on all the lights and took a long and careful tour of the rooms, inspecting each one, and when he finished, he made the necessary calculations and decided that it wasn’t worth it to refurbish and refurnish the place.  He decided to sell and get out, to leave Long Island altogether.  That’s what he wanted to do.  He wouldn’t plan on buying again.  Instead, he would find a comfortable and manageable RV, something small but furnished with the necessities, and drive around the country.  He went to bed feeling like a burden had been lifted.  His mission now was to enjoy his life, to live for himself and for Alicia, and to leave his fate in the hands of the Gods, to let chance and circumstance and his personal inclinations have their way.  But like most well laid plans, this one went awry—and did so the very next day.

As chance would have it, as he sipped his coffee next morning, he saw in the pile of mail he had picked up from the post office several days ago numerous Penny Savers—he had stacked them to one side when going through the box of mail that had been collecting while he was away.  He tossed the other junk mail into the trash, looked for the latest Penny Saver, and began to scan it for RVs.  He circled three ads, then dialed the numbers of each.  No one answered at the first; at the second, the man who answered was cranky and uncooperative; and at the third, the woman who answered said the RV was still available.  He got the address of that one, finished his coffee, and drove off to take a look at it.  He knew nothing about RVs.  “What is there to know?” he said to himself?  He knew how to look over a car, and for the rest, what mattered was whether he could be comfortable in it.

     The house was in an old, 1950s style Levitown neighborhood.  The identical homes on the blocks he drove through were varied and individualized by paint, add ons, and yard sculpture.  One house had a bright blue, five-foot-high marlin in full leap out of the grass, with a structure behind it that might have served as a grotto for a statue of the Virgin.  Other homes had gnomes, frogs, flamingos, deer, and mushrooms.  Several had birdbaths with little fountains that squirted a thin stream of water a foot into the air and plastic birds attached to the rim.  All these had lawns.  Other homes distinguished themselves by having forests planted on the little square plot in front of the house.  These were dark and somber-looking places, telling neighbors and passers-by alike, “Stay away!”  And some of the homes had dandelion and crabgrass patches, with barely a blade of grass to trouble the weeds.  He thought that if he lived in this neighborhood, that’s what his place would look like, especially since Veda died.

     The address he was looking for turned out to be one of these last—a run down structure with torn screens on the windows, shaggy bushes at each corner of the front of the house, a concrete walk down the center of a weedy unkept plot, and a driveway on which was parked a pick up truck and a car.  He didn’t see any RV and wondered if he had got the address right.  He was standing on the sidewalk in front of the drive, looking towards the back of the house when someone stepped out the side door and came walking up the drive towards him.

     She was tall and slender and looked like an ambulating been pole in the dark button-down knit dress that hung to the tops of her feet.  She was pale and had very short, curly, dark-brown hair.  When she got near, he was struck by her face, which he thought was beautiful.  He tried to keep from staring, without, he knew, any success at all.  He could see that she noticed.

     “Are you Mr. Ankrum?” she inquired in a voice deep and melodious, a voice, he felt, that shouldn’t belong to someone as skinny as her and to someone who lived in this house.

     “Able,” he said, extending his hand.

     “Alethea, Alethea Archer,” she said, taking his hand firmly and shaking it.  “The RV is in the back yard.  I don’t use it, and I can’t leave it on the street.  I saw you looking up the drive wondering if you were in the right place.”

     He smiled.  “I did,” he said.  “Then I saw you.”  There was something in the way he said that that made her turn and look into his face.

     She led him up the drive to the back, which was as unkept as the front.  The back yard was tiny, and in it the RV loomed oddly, as out of place as an elephant in a sand box.

     “Look it over,” she said.  “Take your time.  The keys are in the ignition.  I’ll be here in case you have any questions.”  She pointed to a couple of dark green molded chairs beside a matching table sitting on a little concrete patio behind the house.  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.

     “Please,” he said, “I would.  Milk and sugar.”  He pretended interest in the RV, but he was really interested in her.  Her voice was extraordinary.  Her enunciation was clear and practiced, and she had a slight accent, which he could not identify.  As she went to the side door of the house, he tried to guess her age.  By her manner and attitude, he judged her to be older rather than younger, but her face looked young.  She could be, he guessed, anywhere between thirty and forty.

     “How come you don’t use it anymore,” he asked when she returned with two cups of coffee and handed him one.

     “Actually, I never used it,” she said.  “It’s part of my divorce settlement.” 

     He was embarrassed by her explanation.  He stood looking away from her, reluctant to turn toward her again, but then he realized that his question invited her to share that detail.  He turned and looked at her.  Did she want him to know she was divorced?  She returned his glance, not defiantly but expectantly, he thought, like she wanted him to respond with a detail about himself, or to express his sympathies.  He wondered which he should do, when she said, “Go in and look around.  I’ll come in behind and explain things.  As much as I know about them.”

     The door was in the rear, and they walked through the vehicle to the driver’s seat up front, where he sat and buckled himself in.  He took the keys and started the engine.  It started up on the first crank and purred nicely.  Then, coming and going from the vehicle, she showed him where to plug it in at the camp grounds, how to pump out the waste, where the water tank was, where the propane tanks were stored, how to use the shower and the toilet, how to get at the engine, and so on.  She showed him last how the beds were stowed and how to climb up to the queen size bed above the cab.  He felt, again, a bit embarrassed, for there was something in her manner that seemed inviting to him.  He held his breath.  But then she turned and went to the back and out the door.  He followed, smiling.

     When they exited, he said he was interested, but he said it with a nod of his head, looking straight into her eyes, and she returned this look, as if to indicate she understood.  They stood beside each other for a moment, and then she reached out and touched his arm, saying they should talk about the details inside, pointing to the house, and asked if he would like to come in. 

     He was, again, he felt, being invited to go further than he was prepared.  “Why was she doing this?” he wondered, abstractedly, as he shook his head no.  He’d rather not go inside, he told her, and took the minor liberty of sitting at the table on the patio.  She joined him.  It was still early, only 9:30 in the morning, and for an April day, it was pleasantly sunny and warm.  They talked about RVs, their lack of experience with them, and what she was told by her lawyer to ask for this one.  He had no idea whether the price was good and told her so.

They sipped their coffee and fell silent, looking at each other.  This was a strange kind of bargaining.  The way she looked at him and the way he knew he was looking at her, they were least of all interested in the RV.  They were talking about the RV but expressing something quite different.  He was fascinated by what was happening.  He was aroused, too, but he didn’t want to show it, for fear that he was misreading everything he thought she was saying to him.  Refusing to go into the house seemed right, but he wondered if she had misread his refusal. 

     Finally, she broke through.  “Are you married, Abel?” she asked.

     “My wife died three years ago,” he said, relieved.

     “You’ve been alone since?”

     He thought then about Lila and about his odyssey and the tormenting months with Alicia.  Seeing him look distant and glum, she turned the subject back to herself.

     “I was married for two years.  That’s all.  I got very sick, and Stephen, my husband, didn’t want a sick wife.  He owned this place.  It was one of many rentals he owns.  He gave it to me to get me out of his house while the divorce was being worked out.”

     “Before Stephen?” Able asked, his query seeming to carry the weight of all that might be, the directions of his intention and interest.  Immediately, he regretted saying it.  He felt insensitive for not commiserating with her over her boorish husband, for any man who would do that to his wife had to be a boor.  He knew, he had been through all that, and now he felt boorish himself.  She had stiffened at his question, which made him feel even worse.

     He immediately filled the gap with a series of  revelations about himself, feeling he owed it to her.  “I went to pieces when my wife died.  We were married twenty years.  We didn’t have children, not because we didn’t want them, but because it just never happened.  I’ve been away now for four months, staying near a girl who needed my help, but she’s gone now, too.  I’ve decided to cash in and change the terms of my life.”

     “What do you mean, ‘gone’?” she asked.  “What did the girl do?”

     “She killed herself.  I’ve only just come from her funeral, a week ago.”

     She sat back, looking dead eyed.  “Some people, like Stephen, have everything their way, and some, like that poor girl,” she paused and he expected her to say “and me,” but she didn’t. 

     “Where do you come from?” he asked, feeling like they had crossed a border into another country.

     “I was born in Athens.  My father was Polish, my mother Greek.  When I was ten years old we came to the United States.  We lived in Astoria.” 

     “Do you work?” he asked.

     “Work?  You mean like have a job?”

     He nodded.

     “No.  I am, I was a soprano and sang opera.  I had something of a career.  I wasn’t a lead, a diva, but I worked.  That was my ‘job.’  Then I met Stephen and he wanted me to quit.  We courted for a long time.  Then we married.  Now I live on the settlement.  My plans are to sell this house, too, the pick up truck on the driveway, the car, everything.  Then, I don’t know.  Whatever comes, comes.”

     “Yesterday,” he said, “I went fishing in the surf off Fire Island.  Today’s a nicer day.  Fishing’s a good way to take your mind off things.  Would you like to come with me?  We could pack a lunch, spend the day together, do whatever?...unless you’re busy today.”

     “I would like to go fishing with you, Abel Ankrum, very much.  But I have never fished.  Be warned.  You’ll have to bait all my hooks.”

     “Well, Alethea Archer, I came to look at an RV, but made a date to go fishing instead.”

     “But maybe you’ll buy my RV, anyway, just because.”

     “Maybe we’ll have good luck at the beach, and catch fish, too.”

     She smiled and looked lovely.  He sat back and finished his coffee.  Gone was the RV.  And gone, as well, was the idea of leaving Long Island.  He loved Long Island.  He loved especially the beach, he thought.  His having been to the beach only once in the last ten years didn’t seem to qualify his passion for it right now.  He loved the beach.

     “When shall we go?” she asked, “and what should I wear?”

     He looked at his watch.  It was nearing ten o’clock, so he told her to be ready about eleven or eleven thirty and to wear clothes that she could peel off if it got too warm during the afternoon.  He would stop at a deli on his way back, not to worry about food.

     “Any preferences or aversions?” he asked.

     “Olives,” she said.  “I love Greek olives, the black ones, the green ones, you know, whatever you can find.”

     “Anything you can’t eat?”

     “Baloney.  Get anything but baloney.”

     “What’s in a name!” he said.

     “Blandness!” she said.

     “No baloney,” he said, and got up to leave.  “I’ll be back in an hour or so, more or so than an hour, OK?”

     “I’ll be ready.”

     Some things in life a man has to find out for himself.  Able felt an unnamed happiness, a calm, and a confidence that he hadn’t known before, even in his life with Veda.  Everything seemed fresh and new and interesting.  When he passed the leaping marlin on his way out of the neighborhood, it seemed to him an expression of joy, a simple and real feeling.  Even the sunlight impressed him with a feeling of significance, as though it shone for him, making a place for him to live, and he was filled with wonder.  Some things a man has to find out by living.  A man can’t learn them from others.  They are not lessons that can be taught.  They must come to a man through his suffering.  What he thought he had found out was that he had, as he felt yesterday on the beach but hadn’t really understood, an obligation to live.  Not for Alicia, but for himself.  If he did that, then it would be OK for her.  Why?  Because with her there had been too much suffering and not enough life to carry her through it.  That, really, he thought, was the burden of parenting.  To give kids enough life to carry them through the suffering of adulthood.  Next to that feeling of unnamed happiness, as though it were an adjacent room, was the feeling of loss and pain, the old void, the bleakness, that was the lingering presence of Alicia in him.  He wanted to become friendly with this presence now, to allow it to grow and change.  It would be his gift to her.

    And he thought, “What is it about Alethea’s face?  There isn’t much there to look at but a face.”  As he contemplated her face, he could call it up and watch it smile and grow thoughtful and register the moods he had seen cross it during the half hour or so he had spent with her.  She had thick eyebrows and round eyes, a wide full mouth, a small rather pointy chin, and translucent skin, so that one could see the delicate tracings of capillaries in her cheeks.  Her curly hair was dark, making her skin shine even more translucently by contrast.  But her face was more than a configuration of parts.  It was the mobility of those parts, the way the eyes and mouth worked together to express what she was feeling, that so attracted him.  “I’m martyr to a motion not my own,” he said, and drove passed the turn off to his house. 

     Once on the beach he did everything he could to make her comfortable, setting the lawn chairs in the sand and spreading a blanket across her knees to keep the wind off her as much as possible.  He put the cooler beside her so she could reach for a sandwich or a drink when she wanted to.  He had put six ounces of lead on his fishing line, baited his hooks with blood worms, which made her squirm, and, walking towards the surf dragging the sinkers behind him, made a long, beautiful cast far out beyond the breakers.  He let out line as he walked backed to her, clicked the bail of the reel, tested the line for a while, then set the pole in the tube holder he had shoved into the sand in front of their chairs. 

     She asked him about Veda, and he was able to talk about her freely and about his three years without her.  They talked and forgot to eat, and forgot about the pole, about fishing, and about the beach.  She often seemed downcast, but at times she turned a bright smile upon him and stroked his arm.  And when she did that, he felt a closeness with her that made him feel like he had always known her.  He took her hand and held it up as though to examine it, and ran his fingers over her knuckles and then over the light hairs on her forearm.

     It was one of those days on the beach when if you left your sweater on you overheated but if you took it off you chilled.  And it was this alternation that kept them from losing touch altogether with where they were.  After a while, she rose from the lawn chair and asked if he wanted to walk.  She kicked off her sneakers and pulled off her socks and he did the same.  They both turned up their trousers and walked to the surf and stood in it as it rolled up, and then they began to kick the foamy water. 

He took her hand and started up the beach, limping slightly from the returning ache in his knee.  They came after a while to a place where the dune grass grew thickly on a rise of sand, and he steered her towards it.  As he expected, the rise fell away on the other side of the crest only to meet another coming behind it.  There, in the sheltered depression, not a person in sight in either direction, they laid down and made love, and after they put their clothes back on, Abel lay beside her, delirious with happiness.  She turned on her side facing him, put her hand on his upper arm, and nestled into him out of the sun.  He was content to stay that way for as long as she wanted, all the rest of the day if she wanted.

But it wasn’t long before they became restless.  He helped her up and together they ambled back to the surf and turned towards their place up the beach.  She tried to walk in the footsteps they made coming up the beach where the water had not effaced them.  He joked about her feet being as large as his own and that she was really walking in his footsteps.  The tide was turning, and so there were long stretches of their footprints, side by side.  But once a wave rolled up and swamped their feet, and she laughed and screamed because of the water’s coldness and he lifted her and carried her out of the water and set her down in the dry sand.  She had pretended to fall backward when he let her go and reached out for his hands, which she caught and held onto, pulling him down on top of her.  He kissed her and she kissed him back as ardently. 

When they arrived, he saw that his reel was empty. Something, he discovered, holding and looking at the long pole, something large and powerful and mysterious had come while they were making love and, overcoming the drag on his reel, had peeled off all the line.  Luckily the tube holder kept the pole from going too.  He tried to explain what had happened, but she laughed and said he was no fisherman. 

So they ate and talked and took another walk.  He wanted to see her again, he said.  So they talked about when they could do that.  It turned out not to be easy.  She was evasive about why and he didn’t push.  She had, she offered, a large family with many obligations.  He should wait for her to call him, and he agreed to this, unhappy that she would give him nothing certain about when it might be.

“Why, Alethea?” he asked, finally, “Why can’t you say?  You’re acting so mysterious about it.  I’m not asking you to change your life, just to spend a day or evening with me.”

“Abel Ankrum. . . .  I haven’t enjoyed a day so much in so long I can’t remember when.  I don’t mean to be mysterious.”

“Am I prying?”

“No, you’re doing what you should do, what I want you to do.  Please, Abel, let this be for now.  I’ll call you, I’ll tell you when I’m ready again to see you.”

“Look,” he said, holding up the empty reel, “I’ve lost the biggest fish I have ever hooked.”  He feigned a sad and downhearted look, letting his head hang, but looking at her out of the corners of his eyes.  She saw, and laughed, but became responsive and soothing.  They were sitting in the sand, and she sidled close to him and put one hand on the back of his head and the other on his cheek, turning his face to her.

“And now you think you’re losing another one?”  She laughed again and kissed him on each cheek and then on the mouth.  “I’m not a fish, and you’re not losing me.”

“OK,” he said, “I believe you.”  He leaned in to her and kissed her on both cheeks and then on the lips, tasting them, lingering, stroking her from the side of her forehead, along her cheek, and down her neck.

It seemed like a dream.  A month had passed and he hadn’t heard from her.  He had forgotten his resolution to sell the house and leave Long Island.  He tended to the business of buying a car before the month’s rental had expired.  It was an unpleasant experience.  Alicia had crashed his car into a telephone pole, killing herself.  He could not get her out of his mind as he searched for a new one.  The steering wheel had crushed her upper body, and though he didn’t see her, the police had described the scene to the foster parents, and they told him. 

They, the foster parents, at first regarded Abel as an intruder, at least partly causing the disturbances in Alicia’s behavior.  But after a while, they were glad he was there, for he was the only one able to talk to her and whom she would trust. 

Going to school for her was an ordeal.  She had been an object of ridicule among her classmates for so long that her mistrust of boys and girls her own age could not be altered.  Even though Abel bought her clothes and had her hair done in a salon, she acted like an outcast, forcing the girls especially to treat her like one, and then rebelling against that treatment.  She mistrusted everyone, struck out at everyone, and made people hate her.  Abel had gone with her to the school, talked with her teachers, and picked her up every day when school was over.  But none of this helped.  Alicia fought with both boys and girls alike and refused to be spoken to by councilors.  After seriously injuring a girl, she was, finally, expelled. 

And then the nightmares in the home of her foster family began.  Not being in school during the day gave her opportunity to slut around, and she became involved with drugs, turning the life of that family into a state of siege because of the seedy and dangerous-looking men whom she would let into the house and who parked themselves on the sidewalk in front of it and in their cars on the street, always looking for her.  These were men, some of them teens, whom we seldom see in our everyday lives.  Americans who work and buy homes and raise families live an almost fabled existence—the old American Dream.  These were the people who don’t dream.  We find them in our cities wherever decay has overgrown the capacities of people to deal with it, and where violence and hatred and corruption of the soul are as common as rats.  Where and how Alicia found these people he couldn’t imagine, but she was their key to working this new neighborhood, and they hung on to her and threatened whoever got in their way.  Abel could no longer influence her.  He had been giving her money when she needed it, but when she started buying drugs, he stopped.  He pleaded with her not to go in that direction with her life.  Finally, he had threatened to leave.

That changed her and led to her suicide.  At first, she seemed to come to her senses.  She cooperated with the police and accepted a temporary residence in another town.  Her foster family were relieved.  They had come to so despise her that they didn’t even go to her funeral.  After she settled in, she began to come to the apartment he rented and spend her mornings and afternoons with him.  He liked her during this time.  She was like what he had imagined she would be that night in the hospital when he returned from Chicago, the time her mother beat her nearly to death.  They would have breakfast together and clean up afterward, then go for a walk, and later he’d take her to the library and try to find books she would be interested in.  They checked out Jane Eyre, and he began to read it to her, hoping she would relate to the misery of Jane’s early life.  But Alicia couldn’t take to reading.  She jumped around and complained so much, Abel finally gave up. 

He tried other things.  It wasn’t long before she started attending a new school.  To help keep her interests up, he began taking her to the zoo, to a planetarium, and to museums.  But she had no capacity for interest in these things, and he was frustrated.  She had cried and cried.  She told him that she was making him unhappy and that she couldn’t help it, she was what she was.  It was then, in response to his efforts to comfort her, that she said he couldn’t eat her heart because she didn’t have one.  She had stolen his car keys and before he even knew they were gone, she was dead.

He never did buy a car.  Looking for one brought him too close to her.  Instead, he concentrated on the house.   He had to make some decisions about the house.  Since Alicia was on his mind and in his heart so often during this time of solitude, he worked hard at keeping himself empty and blank.  When Alicia came to him especially vividly, as she did more and more often, he would think of Alethea and the day spent on the beach.  But not hearing from Alethea depressed him, and after a month, he believed that he wouldn’t hear from her again and that he’d have to get on with his life.  So he looked over the house and instead of putting it up for sale, he decided to renovate it himself.  There was a lot he could do working alone, and the work, he thought, would be restorative, helping him get by.

He had emptied out the living room, thrown the old curtains away, and began patching cracks in the walls and ceiling when he got a call from Harry, his former supervisor.  The firm needed a man to go to Kuala Lumpur to supervise work on a new skyscraper going up and did he want to go?  He was just the man, Harry said, and the firm would take him back if he did this for them.  He decided to go, made arrangements to have the house taken care of and have his bills paid, packed his bags and left.  He was gone for a year.

He didn’t have his phone service disconnected, in hopes Alethea would call.  He bought an answering machine and put a message on it for her:  “Alethea, I don’t know why you haven’t called.  I trust you will, that’s why I’m leaving this message.  I’ll be gone for a long time, perhaps nine months, maybe more.  Look for me then.”  He didn’t tell her where he was going or how to get in touch with him because he knew if he heard from her, he would leave his job unfinished.  Too many complications would arise from that.  The thought of her was distraction enough.

And now he was back, and back, too, was the old ghost of desolation.  He had overseen the installation of his firm’s heating and cooling system in the new skyscraper, made design changes as needed, and served as an ambassador for the firm.  The year was a good one, in spite of setbacks.  During it, he felt productive, necessary, successful, and happy.  But now, his empty and disordered house revived the old ghosts he had clung to and made him feel like he was reawakening a dormant derangement.  Everything was as he had left it—unsanded spackle on the walls and ceiling in the living room, furniture stacked up in the dining room, pots of paint, drop cloths, brushes, ladder—and immediately it brought back his grief over Alicia and his disappointment over Alethea.  He could have called his own phone number from Malaysia and checked his answering machine to see if Alethea had called and left a response.  But he couldn’t do it.  He feared to do it now.  But anxiety over not knowing worked him into such an agitation that he finally checked the machine.  There was a message recorded on December 23: “Dear, dear Abel, call me.” 

He didn’t know what he felt when he heard it.  He was half hoping there would have been no message.  Did he want to continue with such a strange relationship?  See her again, get all those feelings wakened in him again, only to not see her anymore for who knows how long?  “Dear, dear Abel, call me!”  He called.