Toby Olson - Seaview

She was in the car in the parking lot at the foot of the thick shaft of the lighthouse, where he had told her to wait for him. She was neither silver nor gold, and there were no spaces on her body that he could think of as virginal, nothing for him to touch into that way; it was scars over scar tissue, a surfeit of a kind of knowledge. He did not bring her with him, and when he reached near the cliff edge, he turned away from it and watched the shadows darken and cut cavities into the fairways and the slopes of rough as the sun left them. Clear across the course, before the sun finished, he saw a hard glinting off large white objects, three of them in a cluster on the far side. Turning back, it was the feminine moon he woke to, half axed away and the color of tarnished brass, to see it moving into a black cloud, and the stars that looked to him like pulsing tattoo needles, puncturing through the skin of the dark sky. He stood erect and singular, totally unaware of the limiting romance of his perceptions and the melodrama of his visions. If there were things going on at the lighthouse or down the beach below him where a small fire flickered, he was apart from it. If the action of the moon had been a slow camera shutter, closing, he was not the one involved in the activity photographed but was standing to the side, looking into the lens. He wore a Western leather vest, tight Levi’s, and black leather tennis shoes. His pendant was a thick gold chain with a large coinlike object at the end of it. On the face of the object was an etched figure of small wires and rods that formed a rough circle, a complex matrix. His shoulder brushed the wood of the barricade that kept him back from the cliff ’s lip, an erosion-control device. He kicked the wood firmly, and bits of sand fell away at the edge.

IN THE MORNING AFTER THE MINIATURE GOLF GAME, THEY had packed up and headed north. Melinda had thought of the small bird freed from the snake’s jaws and its possible whereabouts and fortunes for over a hundred miles of travel, but in the end she came to suspect that Bob White was correct. Regardless of what final mystery might remain, it had most probably come to its end, and that was now over, and the way was no longer important. Wherever it was it was at peace now. And so she turned her thoughts to the traveling, and in turning from the bird, she turned from the way of her own ending. She knew the place of it, was fairly certain about the timing. The passage of the car now stirred up grasses symmetrically along the roadside, and she watched these waves for a while, dozing at times and awakening in a kind of sureness of comfort to find them continuing and unchanged. They put on considerable mileage that day, steadily working their way north, and they were up early the next morning and on the road again. In the late afternoon, after passing Niagara Falls, they moved through the outskirts of Lockport and pulled into a motel near Albion. After loading their gear into the adjoining rooms, Bob White excused himself, said he would be back shortly.

“Got to phone some boys back in Niagara.”

When he returned, Allen had some ice waiting in a plastic bucket, a quart of J & B on the table beside it. They filled up motel glasses with Scotch and water for two. Melinda took hers neat, and she and Bob White talked quietly over their drinks, while Allen took a look at the lay of the land in his Golf Digest encyclopedia. After they had had their drinks, and Allen and Bob White had gotten them some sandwiches, they sat on bed and chair eating. Allen suggested they might want to stay there for the next day and rest up, and maybe Melinda and Bob White would like to look around a bit. Bob White agreed, and Melinda smiled and nodded.

“You found a good possibility, huh?”

“Yeah,” he laughed, “I think I did. Pretty good-sized private club. Looks quite tight: a lot of water, Scottish-type rough and fairways. Do you mind?”

“No, no,” she said, “why rush it? I’m tired too. And I could go for a little rest and maybe some sightseeing.”

“Fine. You can drop me off in the morning. I’ll find a way back,” Allen said.

They dropped him off in the morning and went about their business. There was a farmer’s market fair nearby in Medina. Melinda and Bob White drove there and took pleasure in seeing the prize vegetables and smelling them. They bought some peaches and a couple of good-looking apples, a bunch of red cherries, three nectarines, and a stalk of sweet grapes and found a nice park in the heart of the town, near the city hall, and made a picnic. When they were finished eating, they drove out of town to a winery they had learned of from a brochure in the motel room. Melinda did the driving, and Bob White sat over by the door, a little half turned toward her, watching her hands on the wheel.

The winery had an odd, heavily stained wooden building for a tasting room. It looked like some kind of cathedral, and they stood at the counter in the high-vaulted central room inside of it, tasting various wines. The wines were just okay, nowhere near as good as what Allen and Melinda had gotten in California while they were there. These were fruitier, closer to the land, and a little raw. There was a meadow and a lot of hilly land behind the cathedral, and there were a couple of picnic benches out there and a stand of thick trees. They sat in the sun, and Bob White showed her how he could make a pennywhistle out of a twig he had found at the foot of one of the trees. They handed the whistle back and forth between them, playing and testing each other with the identification of simple tunes. Melinda pointed out the way the sunlight hit among the trees, the way of the shadows there, and how she would go about doing them in charcoal. As she spoke her fingers moved in the remembered gestures. She itched a little for it, but not much. She knew she now saw better than when she had tried hard to see while drawing and doing pastels, and she felt it was the seeing that had been the point all along; she didn’t need to render it anymore.

When Bob White moved closer to her on the bench and put his arm around her, first putting his large hand on the side of her face and pressing it down to his shoulder, then holding her shoulder firm in his palm, she was not startled, nor did she feel uncomfortable in the embrace. His lips were a little sticky with wine, and when he kissed the top of her head and withdrew his mouth, a few hairs came away, and he used his free hand to remove them from his mouth. He didn’t feel like a father or a brother to her, but he was not embracing her as a priest might or a lover either. She couldn’t give a name to the quality of the touch. She realized that she could make love with him and that he would be wise about her illness and how weak she was. It would not be exactly passionate, but it would be as if passion were a kind of guarding prevention against intimacy. What they would do together would be much deeper than passion; it would not take physical stamina but would take a kind of effort that she was incapable of because of her weakness. He seemed to know something like this too, and though neither of them did anything with their bodies in contact that was translatable into an understanding, there was a kind of knowledge between them. When, after a few long moments, he did speak to her, she realized how much she needed the very fact of speaking and the words as well. She needed very little quantity anymore when it came to the larger scheme of things, but what Allen could not quite bring himself to say had started to become an absence to her in her self-involved state.

There was a family at one of the other benches, about fifty yards away, and some birds and a dog had put their song and motion into evidence. There was the occasional sound of tires on gravel in the parking lot on the other side of the cathedral and a steady, almost subliminal hum from the distant highway. It was as if a previously hidden empty space in her had revealed itself, begun to ache, and then been salved to fullness and closure all at the same time in the quick process in which he slowly touched and moved her and began to speak.