Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

Rather dully, he took even longer to understand her interest in him, since she wasn’t the kind to express it directly. By now the long sexual death to which he’d committed himself almost twenty years before was no matter of steely will but willful resignation; for a while he hadn’t realized it was happening. A year passed after Leigh’s death before it occurred to him he hadn’t had another woman since; but the resolution of this abstinence became apparent not with Leigh’s death, not with his mother’s death, not with any other death at all but rather with the night on the banks of the river when he heard the sound of his own number and followed the small footsteps to the water’s edge. With his retreat he put something of himself behind for good; in Cornwall he had re treated out of his world altogether.

He didn’t know what she saw in him, a small dark man with heavy glasses. Perhaps she wasn’t sure herself, unless it was the pain of his retreat and that he was a man who had sealed himself off from any more loss. She didn’t need another man who flung himself into the thick of things. She was insightful enough to know that what some were unimaginative enough to call passivity might be a wounded stoicism, a life bound in a tourniquet and fighting to live. Then also maybe she was a little like Leigh after all, though drawn to his Indianness not for its exoticism but for the rooted depth of it. Anyway, she wasn’t one to flirt. But every way she could find to pass the inn wherever she was going, she did; and one day, forwardly, she brought him lunch down at his office on the docks. It was roast beef and potatoes and a fruit cobbler, with a pint of ale. “It’s so English,” he said smiling at her, spreading it out over the desk. “Imagine,” she laughed.

I worked four days a week with the other three off. Sometimes I’d go with her onto the moors on Saturdays when she took old man Cale his weekly groceries. Her daughter would stay behind at the inn with her grandmother; the little girl was the very image of Anne. I tried not to think of her as yet another bit of Leigh; I tried not to think of them as Leigh in different stages, the little one innocent and new, Anne older and sadder. Of course Anne was not really an older sadder Leigh: if Leigh were still alive Anne would be eight or ten years younger. I knew that. I knew they weren’t the same at all. I knew Anne was a better woman than Leigh in a hundred ways I hadn’t even seen. She laughed without calculation. She was kind to the old people in town. She did more for more people than a hundred of Leigh’s revolutions. She seemed a part of the moors, she was like the moors, exhaling silence and sending forth the inner light of her. On the way to the old man’s house we’d find ourselves caught in the sudden storms of the country, where it is the land that seems to rain on the sky rather than the other way around.

The old man lived in a stone house that had been built a hundred years before by a farmer who grazed cattle on wild moorish grasses. Some in Penzance speculated that maybe the old man grazed on wild moorish grasses too. He was going on seventy but looked eighty-five: stooped and utterly white, with a long beard, like a troll that lived beneath a bridge. He didn’t say much when we came with the groceries, just nodded to Anne, but we heard him talking up a storm when we left. He obviously believed the only person who understood what he said was himself and no one would have contradicted it. He had been in the house alone nearly thirty years, since the day in 1923 when I was probably standing in the dirt road waiting for Pop and Bart to return from out west and the old man, then about my age now, was washing up on the beach near Land’s End where there’s barely any beach at all. They found him caught in a thicket of trees bashing back and forth against the coast, not a few trees but a whole woods of them, as though someone had sailed the forest to shore, guiding it from the highest perch. Though they found him alone, they said he constantly called through a fevered night for a nameless girl with a deathless face.

Lake and Anne borrowed a car one Saturday and, at her suggestion, drove out to the tip of England. Also at her suggestion, they took the old man with them. “He’s a fellow American, after all,” she said, “you two can have a grand talk.” Lake answered that the old man seemed to have his grandest talks with himself, to which Anne replied, “Then you may each have your own grand talk.”

In fact the two men did have an interesting talk, but only after an hour of riding in silence, when they got out of the car and slowly made their way to the edge of the rocks that over looked the blue sea, not far from where the old man had been found among his tangle of trees on the beach three decades before. Clearing his throat and expecting nothing, Lake said to the old man, “I was born in America as well, you know.” For a moment he thought he hadn’t been heard.

But the old man slowly turned to look up at him, a wild comic look in his eyes and his mouth parted in both skepticism and anticipation. Then he said something curious to Lake. “America One,” he asked, “or America Two?”

“I’m sorry?”

“America One or America Two?” the old man said again.

Lake shrugged in confusion. “Uh. . just America.” He tried to smile, and shrugged again.

“I never could get that straight either,” the old man said, nodding confidentially. He added, “I was also born in just America.”

Lake looked past the old man to Anne, who was trying to keep from laughing. “Exactly where in America,” he said, “are you from?”

The old man waved at the sky. “Beyond it,” he said.

“Where the annexes run out.” He turned to Lake. “You been out there?”

Lake shook his head. “No, I don’t believe so,” he said slowly. He thought for a moment and said, “I’m from Illinois,” with the sinking feeling this would explain nothing. For a moment the old man narrowed his eyes as though Illinois was a name so unremembered as to be alien, but then he nodded and just looked at the sea. In the distance was a lone lighthouse and for a while the three contemplated it, Anne pointing out that it had been deserted for many years, unmanned and unlit. Sometimes the old man seemed unsteady where he stood; there was always a gust from the sea against which Lake and Anne had to support him upright, taking him by his arms. When they were ready to go Lake said, almost whimsically, “So this is the end of the Old World. What will the end of the New World look like?” And the ancient by his side raised his white face to the younger man and whispered, “I know what it looks like. I’ve been there. I’ve been there.”

I watched autumn pass. The Penzance winter was surprisingly mild. There were the constant sheets of rain but not the marrow-chilling cold of Chicago. The tide was in nearly all season, sealing off St. Michael’s from the rest of the city and keeping the boats docked. I’d go down to the water to do the books twice, maybe three times a week, and the rest of the days I’d sit in the guest room by the fire looking out to the Channel. Sometimes Anne would sit with me. She was waiting for something from me. She never regarded me with reproach, but the hope was unmistakable.