Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

“So she was a swallower,” someone at the fire would say, a tired joke that served as an excuse for stoned laughter.

But it was no joke to the lifeguards who’d braved riptides and undertow to save her, those athletic boys earning money for college, whom she left hollow, directionless, and arrested by a narcissism fixed on adolescent reflections: worn snapshots from which they grinned back still young and golden, with movie-star sunglasses perched on their white-slathered noses, whistles dangling like holy medals. Unable to love another woman, unable to live alone, they’d gaze at those demigods they were for one brief moment of summer, and weep.

The Lifeguard didn’t weep; he watched and waited. When the girl came to drown once more, he’d save her again, and from her cold mouth suck back his soul. Night enlarged an already enormous sea. A seabird cried out. As if in answer, a voice could be heard over the surf, singing. Come dawn, the Lifeguard was still there, his hair bleached silver as if he’d spent too much time beneath the moon.

2

Duane Shelly, my roommate the year I spent in military school, claimed he was a reincarnated Romantic poet. He relived his previous legendary life in dreams from which he hated to wake, and so he’d oversleep and miss his morning classes. It was the kind of affectation that had persuaded his father to send him to military school. A coterie of girls at our sister school found him intriguing, and I was allowed to tag along as Lord Byron if I agreed to limp. Shelly, who hated to be called Duane, provided us with good weed and fake IDs for the bars, and it took only a few drinks before he’d begin to declaim: “O haloed Bud sign, O toke of mystery! O night’s black lipstick! O life that is a fake ID!”

The timidity of my own Romantic rebellion disappointed him.

“All you need for a barbaric yawp, Byron, is the circular vowel that this vulgar century we’re forced to inhabit has appropriated for the Big O,” Shelly confided. “It’s the secret of Romantic transformation: O sullen soulless homework! O sperm-crusty plaid boxers! O morning woody saluting attention, sir!”

Shelly returned to mind on a weekday when Mariel and I played hooky from our sullen soulless jobs in order to sneak in a last trip to the beach, and I found myself yawping: “O final flame of Indian summer before the frost!”

“I hope that term hasn’t become offensive,” Mariel said. “Do you think Native Americans call it Indian summer, too?”

“Stop worrying and give the old poetic O a whirl,” I told her, not that she struck me as the type who would have gone in for black lipstick, or for a poseur like Duane. But then, despite all our time together, I knew next to nothing about what she’d been like in high school, or, for that matter, about the kind of boys she’d found attractive. Early on, Mariel told me she wasn’t one to dwell on the past. She thought the boomers still lining up for Dead concerts were pathetic. She said nostalgia, like most things self-indulgent, was ultimately boring.

“O hidden heart of fading summer,” she said, being a sport and playing along in a way meant to be ironic. Yet I caught a note of such wistfulness in her voice that I had to suppress an impulse to ask: Are you talking about us?

And if she had answered yes, I would have had to admit that I, too, felt that something had faded between us, and I missed Mariel and Bryan, that crazy-about-each-other-couple-living-for-the-moment we’d once been. I wanted to be them again.

O haloed trips to the beach when we first met! It was thrill enough then simply to watch Mariel strip down to her swimsuit as if she couldn’t wait to shed her clothes. She’d kick off her sandals and unbutton her blouse while simultaneously shimmying from unzipped jeans, and then adjust her swimsuit like a teenage girl, tugging it over a buttock and hitching up her top as if concerned with modesty even though the choice to wear a revealing pink bikini was hers. She’d stretch out facedown on a beach towel, untie her bikini straps, and have me slather her with lotions scented with coconut and almond. Her sun-streaked hair seemed a perfect complement to her gleaming skin. I told her once, “A lot of people would pay to have hair your color.”

“And I’m one of them,” she said.

I’d laughed. We were still all but strangers then, having met earlier that spring, and I remember wondering if she was the kind of woman whose self-deprecating humor sprang not only from a distrust of vanity but also from a refusal to play along with the manipulative flattery of men. It turned out that she was gracious when told she was beautiful, although the fact that she was beautiful may have made the compliment acceptable. She prided herself on being a realist, someone who, as she liked to say, “tells it straight or not at all.” I hadn’t realized yet that the emphasis fell on not at all .

I drove a vintage VW Bug at the time, pumpkin-orange with the engine in the rear and a convertible top that folded down by hand. Mariel liked my choice of car—“the ultimate beachmobile,” she observed—even though it was April, rainy and chill and therefore cruel given the Bug’s dysfunctional heater and leaky top. Once summer kicked in, that car lived up to her name for it. We’d pack a cooler with a picnic lunch—cold pizza and a bottle of wine—and drive to one beach or another, each weekend farther south along the coast. We were on a quest to find a beach with a riding stable nearby. Mariel, who moonlighted as an instructor at a school for dressage, had heard about a place where you could rent horses to ride through the surf, though we never found it. I’d never seen her ride, but horses were the measure in the sweetest, most haunting thing she ever told me: “The way I know I’ll always love horses, I know I’ll always love you.”

After the battery dropped through the rusted-out floor, I sold the beachmobile to a collector. I drive a Ford Taurus wagon now.

It was a day for hooky. The twisting shore road climbed through the color change, its macadam pasted with leaves. We sped along windward stretches where the rainbow haze of spindrift made it seem as if we’d just missed a sun shower. This time we were heading north, where the coast was wilder and deserted, as if making a getaway. And maybe we had escaped, if only for the drive, from Mariel and Bryan—a couple we referred to in the third person. “I liked those two people,” Mariel would say in a rare nod to the past, and I’d agree. Despite their unfair competition with the present, I liked them, too.

On a stretch of beach selected at random, I set down the cooler, slipped off my backpack, and Mariel plunged the stake of her beach umbrella into the sand. Then she kicked off her sandals, undid her blouse, and eased off her jeans. She was wearing a black one-piece I hadn’t seen before. We hadn’t been to a beach in a very long time. The suit emphasized the swell of her breasts and the width of her shoulders. In an evening dress, those shoulders were arresting. She had a rider’s posture and a swimmer’s build.

“That’s an athletic-looking suit,” I said.

“I’m afraid my bikini days are over.”

“Nonsense, you’re trim as ever.”

“Forever young?” she asked. “Do you think, to remain so, one has to become her own child?”

“You’re still a beautiful woman, is what I think.”

“Thanks, Bry. I know you mean it. We’ve grown older and it’s sweet of you not to notice, but I don’t want to be someone who doesn’t realize when it’s time to dress appropriately.”

The beach was deserted, and the water, despite the sun flaring off its surface, was already too cold for swimming. We sloshed barefoot, stopping to skip stones and to collect shells, though they were wave-worn beyond recognition. It was like wading along a coast of broken china. We were about to turn back when Mariel noticed hoofprints in the sand. They emerged suddenly from the water and continued at a gallop down the beach in the direction we’d been heading.