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He'd come to Bleak Bay originally because he liked the name. That was in the Sixties,
and he'd arrived in the back of an old pickup with a knapsack in his lap. Now it was
thirty years later. The knapsack was in a corner of the closet, untouched for years.
His wife was in a motel downtown being touched, intimately as they say, by the man
she worked for.
This revelation had arrived by phone.
"It's nine o'clock. Do you know where your wife is?" a female voice had said.
Minutes later the phone rang again. "If not, you might try the
Arlington Motel, room nineteen."
There was no one else it could be, of course, no one but Sanders.
He mixed a drink and sat on the patio listening to crickets fiddle furiously
as the night congealed around them. A cat came up the driveway and stood for a moment
looking over its shoulder at him before going on.
"Are you asking me out?" she had said when he mumbled something about a movie,
then gone off to see to another table. When she came back she said, "I ain't been asked
out much--but I've been asked in a lot of times. Might even say I've been taken in."
"And did you give in?" he asked when she next returned.
"A few times." She'd smiled then, sweeping hazel eyes over him. "I get off at nine."
He'd been going there for two weeks, every day twice a day, for breakfast and
dinner, since the first time he walked in and saw her. When he picked her up at nine
she'd said, "Forget the movie," and taken him to her apartment, an efficiency above a
garage off Main Street. She poured wine into coffee cups, handed him both, and walked
out of the kitchen corner into the living room corner, where she fed records into a
cabinetlike stereo. Shostakovich's Fifth leapt into the room about them. She turned
around and reached for her cup.
"You like this?"
"Oh yes. Almost all Russian music, in fact."
"That's good."
They settled onto the floor near the stereo, backs against the couch that doubled
as a bed, and he put his long, skinny arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him.
"Most people 'round here, I put that on and they think it's...I don't know, weird
maybe? Listen to this: it’s like a choir."
They listened together through most of the first movement.
"Where you from, Dave?" she said, face turning towards him.
"East Coast. Near New York."
"Thought so."
"The accent, right?"
"Right. What're you doing down here?"
He shrugged. "Wanted to see what this country was like--all of it, not just my
little corner. I hope to write books someday. You a musician?" He gestured towards the
stereo.
"Lord no. It’s all I can do to play the radio in tune. But there's something in
music like this that's inside me too, all kinds of feelings I can't express. First time
I heard this, it was like doors were flying open inside me."
"I felt the same way, but I would never have put it like that."
They kissed then, and the rest of the night followed quickly. The next day, he
and his knapsack moved in for good. Their son had put himself through school as a
programmer and ran his own software company in Hoboken, right across the Hudson from
New York.
He mixed another drink, lighter this time. The crickets had quietened; mostly he
heard traffic sounds from the interstate. Wozzeck unraveled on the turntable just inside
patio doors he'd spent a month of weekends installing.
He had never pictured himself settling down, certainly not at nineteen, but there
he was, living with her in the efficiency, starting work on the local paper he now edited,
listening to music every night. Soon they'd bought a car, then a small house, then a larger
one. Days went slowly, years quickly. Over those years they had grown, or been drawn, or
fallen, apart, something he failed to realize until the divides were already far advanced.
He sat watching death tolls mount in Vietnam and Salvador as she remained, untouched, at the
center of her music, her job and friends, their life together in this house. Slowly he
rediscovered the world's pain, a pain he had known all too well at nineteen, on the road
and open-eyed, and had since forgotten.
"We are all guilty of everything," Dostoevski said.
Wozzeck ended; the child rode away on his hobbyhorse. Dave rode in his Toyota to the
Arlington Motel. At room nineteen he knocked and waited through whispers, bed creaks, footsteps.
"Oh shit," Sanders said.
"Hi, George. I'd like to talk to my wife. I'll wait for her in the coffeeshop."
He ordered coffee for both of them, black for her, cream for him. After a few minutes
she came in and sat beside him at the counter. They drank their coffee and pushed the cups away.
"I'm sorry, Dave."
"I know."
"You need for me to tell you that I didn't mean for this to happen, that I never intended it?"
He shook his head.
"It just started," she said. "This was the first time. Now I guess it's over."
"Are you sorry?"
"A little. Regretful, anyway."
She looked out the window at passing cars. They were the only customers. The waitress sat
at a table drinking iced tea and listening to country music on a portable radio.
"Less and less is possible every year, Dave. You start thinking about all the things
you'll never do again."
"Like fall in love?"
"Yes."
He looked at her. "Have you been unhappy, Cathy?"
"No more than most. A lot less than you. I wanted to help you, but I didn't understand.
You're not responsible for the world, Dave, you can't be."
"Walk with me?"
He paid and they went out. The moon was full, white as bone. He reached through the open
window and pulled out the packed knapsack, swung it over one shoulder.
"I can't say that I'll be back, or that I won't be. Maybe by the time I can, it won't
matter to you. I took a little money, a couple hundred, and some clothes. Everything else is
yours." He watched tears gather in her hazel eyes. "Be happy, Cathy."
Half a mile down the road she pulled up beside him in the car.
"Give you a lift as far as the highway?" she said.
He got in.
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