Stephen Dixon - Love and Will - Twenty Stories

“He’s not our dog,” the girl walking with the boy who’s holding the leash says, “—he’s our grandparents’,” and she points to the two adults behind her.

“Oh, they’re so young I thought they were your parents.”

“No, our grandparents. Our parents are vacationing in France.”

By this time the two older children have passed him and he says “Hi” and one of them says “Hi” and the other waves. He says hello to the woman as she passes. She smiles, says “Good morning,” and continues walking. He says hello to the man who’s about ten feet behind the woman, holding a long bleached branch he must have found on the beach and is using as a walking stick. The man says “Must seem like Times Square to you today.”

“Why,” the man with the baby says, stopping, “because it’s so crowded or so hot?”

“Crowded for this particular beach and maybe because it’s so hot. Didn’t think of heat as such when I said it, nor have I been to New York in the summer to know how hot it gets, but it could be true too. How do you do?” He switches the stick to his left hand and puts out his free hand to shake. “Benton.” They shake. “And who’s this tyke?”

“Stella. I’m Will Taub. You people staying around here?”

“Turner Haskell’s my stepfather. We’re here with our grandchildren for our biannual pilgrimage for a week. And you?”

“My wife and I are in the cottage that belongs to that decrepit boathouse there.”

“Is this Magna’s baby?” the woman says, coming back. The children continue to the end of the cove. “Hello, I’m Nicole. How is Magna? We heard she had a baby, and it’s so darling — aren’t you, you little dear.” She puts her finger into the baby’s hand which squeezes around it. “Ned, you remember Magna — she studied with Byron Parks.”

“Sure, now I do — once had a very nice conversation with her on this beach.”

“Boy, girl?” she asks Will.

“Stella,” Ned says.

“Right. And Magna’s just fine — up in the cottage now. — Better watch it — she collects fingers.”

“She looks like Magna,” she says. “Features, complexion, hair — everything.”

“Whenever I hold her — of course the hair is another matter — people say she looks like Magna. And when she holds her”—no, all wrong, or mostly. Go back again. Two men, one holding a baby, other walking a dog. No, one’s alone, other’s with a dog. The woman and children are with his stepfather in the main house. The baby’s with Magna. The men are walking toward each other on the cove that belongs to the cottage the man alone’s renting. The dog barks at him from about thirty feet away, growls and bares its teeth when the men are ten feet apart. The man with the dog says “Whoa, Cunningham, whoa, boy, whoa,” and has to pull the leash back with both hands. The dog’s a retriever. The man alone says “Good morning. Looks like you have a pretty good watchdog there, but tell him I’m unarmed.” “Oh, he’s just a yipper — won’t bite a flea. Cove must seem like Times Square to you today.”

“With all this traffic?”

“I meant ‘hot.’ They’re supposedly having, though a lot worse than ours, a heat spell in New York, the radio said, but maybe I got it all wrong. Because my assumption has always been that Times Square, because it’s the most congested area in New York, would also be the hottest during a heat wave.”

“Actually, it isn’t the most congested. Fifty-seventh and Sixth, for instance, or Forty-second and Lex, as another example, are probably way more”—No, still all wrong, or mostly. “And that is where you’re from, isn’t it?” the man with the dog says, or without one. Just two men without baby, dog, stick or anything who have walked toward each other from opposite ends of the cove. “You’re Magna’s husband if I’m not mistaken, and according to my stepfather, Turner Haskell, you drove up from there a few days ago.”

“Oh, how do you do, I’m Will Taub. We’ve been meaning to drop in to say hello to Mr. Haskell, but we’ve been so busy with a million things that we haven’t had time yet. But where do you know Magna from — summers here?”

“Summers, once or twice — we only visit for a week every other year — though also through colleagues and mutual friends. My wife’s in her field. We hear you had a baby over the winter.”

“Nine months tomorrow — a girl. In fact, babyproofing entails half the million things we’ve been doing”—No, back again, just about everything’s wrong. One man’s on the beach, holding his baby girl. He’s standing in the middle of the cove in front of his dilapidated boathouse. He and his wife and child drove up from New York two days ago and this is the first chance he’s had to come down to the beach. Unpacking, shopping, cleaning, babyproofing the porch and house, putting up the mailbox, cutting back the alder, mowing, getting the lawnmower repaired, buying a washer and dryer, clearing a path to the woodshed and one to the beach. He’s been coming to this cottage for the last five summers. His wife started renting it three summers before that. The cottage wasn’t lived in for twenty years before she convinced the owners, who also had a winterized house in town, to let her open it. They thought nobody would want to live in it because everything in it was made or bought sixty years ago and the cottage was so run-down. She fixed it up, had part of the cottage rewired, bought a new water pump. Something like that. A phone installed, and also an electric stove. The rent was that cheap. He only knows of this part of Maine because of his wife. She started coming to it six years before he met her. Six and a half to be exact. They met in November, the following June they flew to Bangor, rented a car at the airport and drove to the cottage. Now they own a car. They’d like to buy the cottage. They’ve lived in Baltimore for the last two years but stayed for a week with his wife’s parents in New York. His wife first came to this peninsula to visit her dissertation adviser and his family. That professor and his wife have since split up and sold their cottage. The man with the baby and his wife also teach and are on vacation for the next two months. The professor visited them here last year and his former wife will stay a week with them this summer. Go back. He and his child are on a beach, forget about getting there, why they’re there — they are there. Man and baby, or just he’s there. He took the baby down before but it was too hot and sunny for her — he forgot her bonnet — so he brought her back to the cottage, left her with his wife on the fenced-in porch, and went back to the beach. The beach there is a cove that’s part of the property they rent. He sees at the end of the cove a man sitting on a rock and looking at the lighthouse in the bay. The end of the cove is called something but he forgets the word. The arm, promontory, reach — none of those. The “end of the cove” will do. It extends into the water, is shaped like the end of a crescent and is the beginning of the next cove in that direction. Will’s in the middle of this cove, his cove. The man’s sitting and looking out at the water. Maybe the man’s looking at the lighthouse which is on an island about a mile away. The man stands and starts walking toward Will. If the man keeps walking at that regular pace it should take him several minutes to reach Will. Less, of course, if Will walks toward him and the man continues walking. Will walks toward the man, but only because he did come down to the beach to walk. To go from cove to cove and then after resting at the end of one, to go back. He could walk in the other direction and would prefer to, since he doesn’t like meeting strangers on the beach, but the sun would be facing him. It’ll be facing him coming back, but because of the reason he came down to walk on the beach, he wants to avoid the sun now more than he wants to avoid the stranger. So the man who was sitting at the end of the cove is now walking toward Will. He wonders who the man coming toward him is. Will wonders the same thing about the man. The man thinks Jesus, it’s hot, why the hell did he ever come down here? He’ll be glad when he gets back to the house. Will thinks he should’ve stayed on the shaded part of the porch. But he wanted to get away from the cottage, to take a long walk and let his mind wander. What comes into his head is that he left hot Baltimore to stay for a week in hot New York to come to an even hotter Maine. But it’ll be mostly pleasant during the days and nights for the next two months while in Baltimore and New York it won’t. The hot sticky weather must be traveling north because the radio this morning said that fairer drier weather was predicted for New York tomorrow and for New Hampshire the day after and for this part of Maine the day after that. The temperature and humidity when they left New York two days ago was in the mid-nineties. When they stopped for the night at a motel just over the Maine-New Hampshire border the weather was about the same as it was in New York. When they got to the cottage yesterday — No, he has his days mixed up. They got to the cottage two days ago, left New York the day before that. Today was the first chance he had to come down to the beach. The man’s a few feet from him now and says hello. Will says hello.