Alice McDermott - After This

And there was comedy in this too, in the musical accompaniment-the scales that drew them to their first, stale-mouthed kiss followed by the inept and repetitious beginnings of some vaguely familiar but as yet unrecognizable piece as they shyly (still) got out of their pajamas. And then ineptitude giving way, on all their parts, to a certain confidence, even grace.

Did he hear it, she wondered as she glimpsed her husband’s face through half-closed eyes and saw what was quickly becoming a familiar look: a kind of determined concentration, a grimace to the lips, and a far-off gaze to his eyes that marked a consummation that she was beginning to suspect turned him in on himself far more than it would ever turn him out toward her. She imagined it was akin to the look the piano player upstairs wore as he worked the keys, that kind of crazy-eyed focus on the task that could obliterate all distractions, even the very instrument under his hands. Does he even hear the music, she thought, arching toward him as he labored above her. Does he even see my face?

This was something she had never anticipated before she was married, the painful, physical struggle he seemed to wage with himself in the course of their joining. She had thought it would all be whispered endearments, only pleasantly breathless. She was surprised to learn that there was labor in it, pain and struggle as well as sweetness.

There was still more music to listen to after they had fallen apart. She thought she was beginning to recognize some refrain, or maybe he was just going over the same notes. With her eyes to the ceiling she said, “It’s a baby grand.”

Her husband turned his head on the pillow. He might have been startled to find her there. He frowned, and then hesitated, and then whispered, disbelieving, “You can tell already?”

There was one window in the corner of the bedroom, its sill worn to velvet, looking like velvet even in the weak, winter morning sun that came from beneath the wooden blinds and marked the new day. Another day. She grew giddy with laughter, convinced as she was, and would remain, that there was portent in his misunderstanding, that their child’s life had indeed begun at that hour. Their baby grand, first of four.

Either the wind kept them all away or the entire population took to heart the notion that the beaches were closed after Labor Day. In the deserted parking lot, on a Sunday morning that was only, after all, in mid-September, the wind moved a thin scrim of sand across the bleached asphalt, brushed it along the ground in wide, crossing arcs that thinned and ebbed in much the same way the beige sea foam thinned and ebbed at the edge of the beach that was just beyond the trees.

The wind took the sound of the slammed car doors, the slammed trunk, and sailed it off like a black scrap, over their heads, back toward the long highway and the crowded towns and the churches on shaded avenues choked with parked cars. It took their voices, too, but more gently. The parking lot was empty and so there was no need to cry out after the children as they ran ahead.

“Not a soul,” Mary Keane said to her husband, the wind lifting her words, tossing them gently back over her shoulder, the way it moved the colorful tails of the scarf she had tied under her chin. In her arms she had bundled a wool blanket and a tufted pillow and a stuffed bear, and her husband stepped in front of her to take everything from her arms at once, leaving only the bulge of her belly under the green canvas car coat.

“They’re all in church,” he said and saw the flush of guilt, or of wind, on her broad cheeks. The wind lifted his own thinning hair-those long strands he combed back over his crown-made it stand, briefly, on end.

Something done right-at least so far-this suggestion of his, whispered to the ceiling this morning, his hand on her thigh. That they skip Mass just this once and head to the beach.

Some weeks ago, a tropical wave had slipped off the African coast, as if (he’d thought, reading the account) the continent itself had shuddered, and moved into the waters of the south seas, stirring the ocean and the air and the various inhabitants of small islands and southern shorelines, until finally it woke him this morning at dawn with the sound of the wind in the eaves, with some memory or dream of the Ardennes, and a hankering to see what the shudder of a continent did to the waters off Jones Beach.

Across the ceiling of his bedroom, the dawn had appeared to be made up of reflected light, light that moved with the rise and fall of the wind as if it were light reflecting off water-although the house was ten miles from any shore, smack in the substantial heart of his own spit of island, and even the neighborhood backyard pools had been drained and dismantled.

Beneath this watery light the room itself was in steady shadow. His wife was beside him, buried in pillows. He was fifty-one and would be a new father again by the end of the year. This morning, woken by the wind, he had put his thumb to each fingertip, counting decades.

The children ran ahead. A white trail of sand cut through the scrub pine and the yellowing beach grass, rising across the dunes and then dropping down again to the wide white beach that then itself dropped down again, sharply, a kind of cliff, a kind of collapse-the way the children felt their breaths collapse, coming to its edge, to the terrific thunderclap of the ocean.

The sand here, at their feet as they looked down from the dry cliff, was dark gray, the color of a thundercloud. The children bowed, putting down their toys (plastic machine guns, a football, a shoe box filled with green army men and small, camouflaged jeeps), unlaced their sneakers, and jumped down, arms raised, heels digging into the falling sand of the seawall.

Not a soul.

At the foot of the dunes, John Keane dropped the wool blanket and the tufted pillow and the teddy bear, unhooked the quilted hamper from his shoulder and his wife’s hand from the crook of his arm. He felt the wind raise the sand and fling it, stinging, into his cheek, saw his wife pull the folded edge of her scarf over the side of her face, turning away from him and the blowing sand.

He picked up the wool blanket and moved it farther inside the dunes, to a shallow valley where even the sound of the moving air seemed suddenly to retreat. He spread the blanket, walked out again to lift the tufted pillow and the bear and the plaid quilted hamper, then returned a third time to give her his arm.

She stood, holding the edge of her colorful scarf over her cheek, shading her eyes with the other. Her face made harsh and unlovely by the sand and the wind and the deep line between her eyes.

“Sit back here,” he said. “You’ll be out of the wind.”

Under her chin, the bright red-and-blue tails of her scarf rose, writhed, paddled the air. “I can’t see them,” she said.

He looked toward the ocean, the forlorn image of the abandoned sneakers and toys-the shoe box had already lost its lid-at the edge of the known world where the sand disappeared and there was only water and sky.

“I’ll tell them to come up,” he said and knew she would not move-some vestigial habit of her race or of her sex, this frowning vigil at the edge of the sea-until he had returned them to her sight.

He crossed the wide breadth of beach, hearing their voices coming to him on the wind before he saw them at the shoreline. The two boys were stamping at the creamy edges of the waves-making small explosions of water and wet sand-his daughter down on her haunches, examining something, a mussel or a crab or just the mysterious, bubbling holes that opened and closed like mouths under the retreating waves.

Beyond them, the ocean was high, whitecapped, agitated. There were disks of black and gray as well as gold among the rushing swells. In the panhandle, in the Carolinas, metal blinds had been drawn, iron awnings brought down on the white houses that were bunkers now, among the palm trees and the flamingos. But here the sky was mostly blue and clear, except for a few white, rushing clouds just above the horizon.