This All Happened(11)

            26 Back home on Long’s Hill. Helmut Rehm is studying the plans of the racer, Sailsoft. He says he will lose about fifteen pounds on the final leg of the race. They will begin in Boston in June and sail to a small port near Sao Paulo. The next leg has them cross to Namibia. This is the toughest section. Some racers like to veer to an extreme southern latitude, where higher winds exist and therefore greater sailing speed. But there’s the danger of shoals, hurricanes, ice, and brutally cold temperatures. They’ll lay up in Africa for a month and begin again around the cape to Bombay. Head southeast to Sydney and north again to Hawaii and over to San Francisco. Thread the needle at Panama and then boot it to Boston. A five-month race. Their boat is sponsored by a software company.

            Helmut says he can sit in our living room all day and be entertained by the fronts combining to make weather. He has never seen weather like it.

            27 Lydia’s cousin is getting married to a man who studies geology. He has shown me a series of maps that shave plates of rock off the island, as though it were an anatomy lesson, revealing pockets of magma and oil and natural gas, seams of coal. A network of veins stripped away to expose muscle groups, then these lifted to display skeletal structure. You understand, from the rock, that the island is chunks of three continents fused together.

            In the church, an aunt two pews ahead turns around and mouths to me, Congratulations. I frown. She mouths it again, five distinct syllables.

            Lydia: That we’re getting married.

            Lydia leans over the pew to tell her the difference.

            At the reception Lydia spills punch over her blue tulle dress. She says, I guess I’ll have to walk around all night like this: one hand on her belly, laughing. The stain between her hand and her laugh. She kisses the groom on the shoulders. She kisses her cousin on the eyelids. The aunt who whispered to me says to Lydia, I can see your bra strap.

            Lydia lifts a shoulder, bends an elbow, and slips off her bra. She pulls the bra from her dress like a rabbit. She stuffs it in my jacket pocket.

            On the way home with her parents, Lydia in back with her mother, her father dropping me off. We kiss across the seats as he pulls the handbrake against the steep hill. Her parents are disappointed. Mr Murphy had said to me, I hear there’s been a proposal. And I had to say to him, We’re still negotiating. I hand back her bra, cupped in my fist. The crisp rustle of that blue tulle dress.

            I’ve known her now for eighteen months, but even this one night informs me. I can love her way. But I can’t love her if she doesnt love me.

            28 Max introduces me to Daphne Yarn. I was expecting someone quiet, but she has a story. She’s taller than Max, but then Max is short. I remind Daphne of her brother. And when I talk she laughs, because we talk about the same things. She says the way I say things is occasionally impossible to follow. She has to wait for more information. And I understand that Lydia is right about me. That I sometimes make people uncomfortable because I’m not clear. I’m confident but obtuse. And they dont want to hurt my feelings. So they laugh good-naturedly. Usually it’s a joke that I make where the leap is too large.

            Daphne’s hair is tied back in two pigtails, and this forces her face to be intense when she laughs. The laugh is something that is not serene beauty. There’s a gruff undertone that means she’s game for anything.

            29 I meet Maisie Pye to discuss our novels. She’s making a novel about what’s happening now. It’s thinly veiled autobiography. Except she’s pushing it. The Oliver character has an affair, and her friends, when they read it, think Oliver’s cheating on her. He’s not, she says. People believe if you write from a tone of honesty, conviction, and sincerity, if you capture that correctly, then readers will be convinced it all happened that way.

            I said I’m having great fun with my characters. Because it’s all set in the past. I describe Josh and Toby and Heart’s Desire. About the research I’ve done on the American painter and of Bob Bartlett’s trips to the North Pole. I’m using Max and Lydia and others as these historical characters. Max is going to be my Rockwell Kent. My father might be Bob Bartlett. That way, I can be present in the past.