John Casey - Spartina

“So it appears,” Marie said. Her expression didn’t change. Schuyler, on the other hand, furrowed his brows with puzzlement, then lifted them in surprise. Then smiled pleasantly at Dick. “Are you a cheerful sort of fellow?”

Dick said, “If there’s something to be cheerful about.”

Parker came in, wearing a blue seersucker suit. He still had on his white sneakers. Parker said, “Dick’s a little on the negative side, but he gets the job done. You got to say that, he goes all the way. What do you think? A little tight, but I don’t suppose I got to button it.”

Schuyler poured the eggs into the omelette pan and shook it lightly. “Just right. What do you think, my darling?”

Marie turned her head. “Absolutely wonderful. Except for the shirt. I think just a nice white tennis shirt instead of all those stripes and buttons. Don’t you, Captain Parker?”

Schuyler said, “I think she may be right. Especially with the sneakers. Try another shirt — they’re in that blue duffel.…”

Schuyler scraped the scallions out of one frying pan onto the eggs in the other pan. “One thing I’ve always wished to be appreciated for is being cheerful. I mean, luck is just luck, but being cheerful … It’s a regular Boy Scout virtue, isn’t it? Part of the Boy Scout pledge—”

Marie said, “So you’re going to New York today.”

“Yes, my darling. I’m leaving now, because starting tomorrow I have lots of things to do with my luck and charm, among them a shitload of work in the editing room, that well-known sump of luck and charm. So if I’m going to help Captain Parker sell sea-shells by the seashore, it will have to be today. Those three guys are coming this afternoon to help you finish up moving. The only thing you have to do is tell them what goes where. I even leave it to you where they should put my piano.”

Schuyler pushed the toast down, folded the omelette over, and got three plates out of a carton on the floor.

Without liking Schuyler any better, Dick was beginning to get on his side. Marie was like one of those fish who take the hook and just sulk on the bottom — no runs, no jumps, no play — takes forever to get them up without breaking the line.

Parker came back in. Marie was right, he looked better with the plain white shirt. Marie’s face brightened up some for Parker. She sat up to take him in, her eyes getting wider as her head came up, like a china doll’s. She was a knockout, no question about that, you could put her picture on a fashion-magazine cover right alongside any other model’s — frame her face, which seemed to float, crystallize her widened eyes, her finely drawn sharp lips. Dick wondered if Schuyler ever figured he’d made a mistake, if Schuyler ever wanted more bounce. Or maybe he knew what he was getting, a shining ghost who made her clothes move right.

Schuyler, Parker, and Dick ate.

Dick said, “Good eggs.”

“Wait’ll you try the coffee,” Parker said. “It’ll set you right up. It’s rocket fuel.”

“Where do you want the piano?” Marie said.

“See if it’ll get through the door into the back room. Did you know,” he said to Parker and Dick, “I spent the year after I got out of college on a ship? I played the piano in the cocktail lounge. That’s why I didn’t get seasick on your boat. Maybe I should leave the piano here in the Wedding Cake and give myself my old job back. I don’t know why I ever quit. The food was good, I had a cabin to myself, I got to play with the toys. They had a swimming pool and a gym, and you could shoot skeet from the top deck. And I didn’t mind the work. Well, I did in the end — I refused to play ‘Autumn Leaves’ and I started telling jokes.”

“I thought they caught you swimming nude with someone,” Marie said.

“No, my darling, it was the jokes. ‘Say, Tex, how come you bought that dachshund?’—‘Well they told me “Get a long little doggie.” ’ And then I’d move right into the song. I did a lot of Texas jokes that cruise, we had lots of Texans. A Texan goes into a pissoir in Paris and while he’s taking a leak he notices this Frenchman leaning over and staring at his shooting iron. The Texan says, ‘Say, Bo—’ The Frenchman says, ‘C’est beau? Mais non, c’est magnifique!’ And I’d go right into ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ I think it may have been that …”

Parker laughed.

Marie said, “Maybe that’s where you learned to be so hippety-hoppity cheerful, when you were having such a good time playing cocktail piano.”

Schuyler said, “Don’t you move, my darling, we’ll clean up. And then we’re off to Gotham in the Batmobile. Tell Elsie … Never mind, I’ll call her from New York.”

Now Dick was completely for Schuyler against Marie. For his telling jokes, playing the piano, his playing money games with the rich partners, and taking Parker to New York. At the same time Dick knew that he himself was just as sullen as Marie, just as disapproving. As sullen as May had been when she burst out and said his boat was a black hole after Elsie had been saying it was a work of art.

Marie was Schuyler’s May. Maybe Dick was Parker’s May. What flavor you were depended on whether you had a wish or were being dragged after someone else’s wish.

Dick wanted his boat, Parker wanted his fancy boat, Schuyler in his way wanted … might as well throw in Joxer Goode — they all wanted and wanted. Until this very minute Dick would have figured that all their wantings were different, that everything about all of them was so different they were each in their own shell. But now it was as if their wantings stretched out of themselves into each other, not just fighting it out with each other but conducting, backward and forward, some of Parker into Dick, some of Dick into Marie, Marie into May, Dick into Schuyler, Schuyler into Dick.…

Dick would have figured everyone was different the way everything was different. A lobster wasn’t a crab, a blue crab wasn’t a red crab. The old Pierces in the Wedding Cake. The Buttricks in the Buttrick house. Miss Perry in Miss Perry’s house. Dick in the house he’d built on the last piece of the old Pierce place.

Now everything seemed to be leaking, percolating, flowing into everything else. Dick could turn around right this minute and be for Marie as easily as he’d been for Schuyler. He could go back another step and remember the Wedding Cake and Uncle Arthur … and be like Miss Perry. He could feel the way his father felt. He could stiffen up and wish to feel like Captain Texeira. He could let himself feel like Parker, he could try to back away and not feel like Parker.

He’d got onto an edge. Was it last night? No, the night before — he’d broke off the piece of black bank so it slid into the water, dissolved. Stopped being footprints and mud, slid into the salt creek.

It shouldn’t take him by surprise, he’d always known both sides: that the salt marsh is the salt marsh, the sea is the sea, the sky is the sky … and that the land washes into the salt creek, the salt creek into the sea, the sea into every sea, and everything in the sea dissolves. Everything in the sea dissolves — the particulate matter into the deeps, then back into upwellings, into the chain whose first invisible links are animal — plants, plant-animals; and all the while the great fluid of the sea is drawn into the sky by the sun, takes passing shapes as cloud, and returns to the earth.

The cycle had always been a remote comfort. So long as it was out there — earth, water, air. Somewhere else. Now it was in this kitchen, suggesting dissolution, dissolving. His notion of his —his house, his boat, his difference.

He got up. He washed Schuyler’s dishes. Took Parker’s key and drove home in Parker’s car. He didn’t explain the car to May, he’d had enough of everything for the morning.