Middle Age (5 page)

“Inner hills. Spiritual hills.”

“Do you feel that there are spiritual hills in your life, Marina, that you have yet to climb?”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

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“And how would you describe them, Marina?”

Don’t do this to me! Don’t expose me
.

I don’t need to answer you. Who are you, to me?

Adam Berendt had come into Marina’s life unexpected. With the authority of a protector, one who’d known her from childhood.

Knowing that the Salthill Bookstore was in a financial crisis, Adam had invested as a silent partner; often he dropped by the store to help her openly, greeting customers, shelving books and doing inventory, talking her out of becoming discouraged. (Oh, Adam sensed she was suicidal! In that way of American women, whether unmarried or married, young or not-young, brooding at twilight through windows that, as twilight deepens, become ghostly smirking mirrors of the soul.)
To be discouraged,
depressed, over business, mere money, when the world is a place of rapture,
Marina! No
. He did touch her, with his big, rather battered-looking hands. He was one to touch while speaking, smiling. Marina’s forearms, Marina’s shoulders. He might cup his hand on the top of your head, patting in approval as (for instance) he might pat his dog Apollo’s head in a similar gesture of approval, or easy affection. He might kiss Marina’s cheek, he might hug Marina in greeting, or in farewell. In Salthill, such kisses and hugs, and some of them quite extravagant, were social displays: women hugging men, and the men needing to mime passivity; women hugging women, with emotion, affection. Or the ritual display of it. Marina Troy was likely to be a stiff partner in such displays, for she felt herself insufficiently female, or feminine; and, being unmarried, she had not quite the freedom to embrace men, especially a man like Adam for whom she felt strong emotion, as her married women friends did.
Oh, Adam! If I
dared touch you
.

Here was a mystery. How Adam Berendt, a part-time teacher and not-successful sculptor, mostly unemployed, had enough money to help Marina repay her bank loan and to invest in the Salthill Bookstore. (And he’d invested quite a bit, Marina was surprised.) And he wanted no one to know: “This is our secret, Marina.” Adam might drop by the store several days in succession, fluttering Marina’s heart, and then stay away for a week, or more; he disliked telephones, and rarely called; if you called Adam, as Marina sometimes did, in a weak mood, his telephone might ring, ring, ring forlornly; he had no answering machine. He was one to chafe at the expectations of others. He might come to a party, but he might not. Impulse seemed to guide him. Unless it was strategy. You

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J C O

couldn’t predict Adam Berendt, he was a master who didn’t need his subjects. Yet, in his presence, it was impossible not to think
This man! He loves
me, alone
.

“. . . my spiritual self? The hills I haven’t yet climbed.”

Marina felt embarrassed, saying such things. She felt like a child, anxious yet trusting; as, in her own childhood, she’d never been, for there’d been no Adam Berendt in her family or among her acquaintances. Saying, goading, in his expansive, kindly voice, “Marina, what are these hills exactly? That you haven’t climbed?”

It was the pure Socratic method. The impersonal quest for Truth.

Marina felt the unease, and the excitement, of the hunt. Not she was the hunted, but the elusive Truth. For there was nothing personal here.

Was there?

Adam, you. You are the hills! Loving you
.

Loving a man. Fully, sexually
.

Instead, Marina said, in a lowered voice as if ashamed, stumbling on the path and blinking away tears, “I—I’d wanted to be an artist. As long ago as I could remember. There was no one else in my family who had such notions. We were a practical family. My father was a high school teacher, it was a job. My mother, before she got married, a nurse. They worked, they earned salaries. Me, I had ‘visions.’ I was an excitable, nervous girl. In college, at the University of Maine, I understood that, to be an artist, you must filter your vision through technique. I became interested in sculpting and pottery. But not conventional pottery—experimental, odd work. Pottery that doesn’t sell! It was calming, I seemed to fly out of myself in a kind of trance. After graduation, this was in the eighties, I lived with some friends in Provincetown, very cheaply, and I was happy there, a local gallery sold some of my things, then I got restless and moved to San Francisco, and for a while I was living in a wonderful ramshackle old ranch house in Mendocino, you’d have loved that place, Adam!—instead of the river outside your house, you’d see mountains. A mountain is a kind of vertical river, isn’t it? And the light cascading down. I was happy there, and doing some decent work; for a long time I’d been out of contact with my family, they hated my life, they didn’t want to understand it, then my father got sick and I came back east, and something happened there, between me and what I was doing, between my hands and what they touched, and that’s fatal for an artist, isn’t it? It was as if I’d lost my nerve.

A young artist has courage, maybe the courage of ignorance. Then you lose that courage. I didn’t know it at first. I kept going for a while,
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mechanically. I loved my work but it became too important to me. It was my life, my breath. It was obsessive. I did sculpting, I suppose you could call it, on a smaller scale than your work, and in natural forms, not metal, but it exhausted me, I couldn’t sleep, my head was filled with ‘visions.’ I wanted to create astonishing things that hadn’t been imagined before. I wanted so badly—” Marina felt the old, sick excitement; she’d been speaking rapidly, heedlessly.
Why am I doing this. Exposing myself. As if it could
make this man love me!

They’d ascended the hill, and were in an open, grassy area; wild rose was blooming in white clusters; to the east, miles away, the Hudson River was of the hue of weathered stone, flattened by distance, without motion as a design in wallpaper. Adam, who’d climbed the hill without betraying exertion, he whose legs were hard-knotted with muscle, twice the size of Marina’s slender legs, waited a respectful moment before asking, “How long was this phase of your life?” “About a year. A year and a half. I ran away to live again in New York, with a friend. He was an artist, too. And he had a commercial job in graphic design. I believed I loved him, it was part of my desperation.” Adam asked, “And then what happened, Marina?” Marina said, “I don’t know. I’ve tried not to think about it. I don’t

‘dwell’ upon the past. I had a collapse, I guess. I suppose I was sick, physically. I seemed always to have a fever. I was terrified to sleep, I was anxious and angry all the time. Everything I touched, I seemed to destroy. My hands had turned against me. My lover couldn’t live with me, he said. I drove him away, and begged him to come back; I drove him away again; I hated what I was doing, my work, I destroyed most of it, I lost all faith in myself; I even threw out most of my clothes. I returned to Bangor, I got a job. It was my duty, I believed, to visit my mother, even if she didn’t know who I was, or care. When there’s someone very sick, you can measure yourself against that person, and take comfort that you’re not so bad.

That’s
sanity
—that thrill of relief. Even with the sorrow, relief. But this confirmed my resolve not to risk mental breakdown. ‘Art’ isn’t worth it.

And there was another side of me: I’d worked in bookstores, and I love books. I love the look and smell of books, the culture of books. There’s a romance, too, in sanity, isn’t there? I like the kind of people who come into bookstores. Thank God, I thought, I’d given up on the other—that craziness. I came into a little money and I borrowed money and I took over the mortgage on Salthill’s ‘quaint’ little bookstore and I’ve been happy here.”

Marina laughed. She was stubborn, and just slightly angry. “I am happy.”

But was Adam impressed? In his droll, blunt way evidently not.

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J C O

He said, “Maybe you’ve embraced failure too quickly.”

Marina was stung. Failure!

“I’ll give you another chance, Marina. A choice. A way back into the life you abandoned.”

I   that Adam proposed to Marina Troy that he make a gift to her.
Make a gift
was the expression he used. He would sign over to her the ownership of a forty-acre property in the Pocono Mountains, in Pennsylvania, approximately one hundred miles west of the hill upon which they were standing. An old lodge, but in good condition; of fieldstone and half-timbering; seven miles from a small town called Damascus Crossing, and about thirty miles from the city of East Stroudsburg, on the Delaware River. Marina listened to this, without fully comprehending. Adam was pointing westward, and Marina turned to see a sequence of hazing receding hills, a horizon of trees that must have been only a few miles away but seemed distant. “Don’t look so alarmed, Marina,” Adam said, bemused, as if this were the crux of Marina’s alarm, “—the place has been winterized, insulated. It’s furnished, more or less. There’s a deep spring well, the purest water I’ve ever tasted. You could live alone there, Marina, undisturbed, and undistracted by any of us in Salthill. You could do the work for which you were born.” Adam spoke excitedly, sincerely; Marina had never heard him, or any of her adult acquaintances, speak in such a way.

This man does love me. But on a spiritual plane. Not human
. Tears sprang into her eyes, she was so deeply moved; yet of course it was impossible, an absurd proposition. “But Adam, what of the bookstore? I couldn’t—”

“What of the bookstore? It will be there when you return, if you want it. If you return. Say you’re gone a year: we’ll hire a full-time manager. There’s your current assistant who seems very capable. And of course I’d be in town to oversee things.” Adam let his hand fall, and clamp, upon Marina’s shoulder; the weight of this hand, and its heat, nearly made her stagger.

Marina continued to protest, and Adam continued to make plans. “Your Pearl Street house, you can rent it for a high price. I happen to know about Salthill real estate, and it’s as inflated as properties in Westchester County.

Your droll little place, the size of a dollhouse, would be snapped up within twenty-four hours, and with your rental money you’d have more than enough to support yourself.” Marina stared at her friend’s face that seemed now to be glowing, glaring more fiercely. And his hand on her shoulder, so
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warm.
I can’t. Can’t breathe
. Long Marina had yearned to be touched by Adam Berendt, yet this touch was strange to her, disconcerting. They were standing so close together they might have been mistaken for a couple.

Marina had to resist a sudden impulse to step into Adam’s arms, to embrace him around his burly chest, lay her head against him, and be comforted in her distress, even as Adam was the agent of her distress. She disengaged herself from the weight and heat of his hand. “Adam, of course I couldn’t accept such a gift. How have you come into this property, that you can throw it away? What are you thinking of?” Adam said, surprised,

“What am I thinking of? I’m thinking of
you
.” “I’m not a young woman any longer, Adam. And even if I—” “Bullshit.”

Abruptly then, Adam turned away, and continued on the hiking trail.

He was offended, thwarted. He would speak no more on the subject that day. Like a woman who has crawled out of a wreck, Marina glanced down at herself to see if she was still there. She wiped her damp, clammy face carefully with a tissue, tightened the laces of her hiking shoes, and followed after Adam who was nearly out of sight.

Marina hoped the preposterous offer he’d made to her would be discreetly forgotten, but a few days later, Adam stopped by her narrow lavender house at the top of North Pearl Street, beside the Catholic churchyard, to present to her several fully executed legal documents deeding a property in Damascus County, Pennsylvania, to her; and, in a manila envelope, a hand-drawn map in colored inks, labeled keys, and a page-long list of instructions regarding the operation of the house. With maddening aplomb he said, “Anytime you wish, Marina. It’s yours now, it will be waiting.” Marina was frightened, furious. She wanted to strike Adam with her fists. “Adam, are you crazy? I can’t accept such a gift from you.” Adam said, winking, “From whom, then, Marina, would you accept it?” “Adam, God damn it, I
can’t
.” But Adam merely placed the items on a table in Marina’s front room, and strode back into her kitchen to brew himself coffee. (It was Adam’s custom to drop by houses in Salthill where he was known and, in his words, tolerated. How vast were his friends, acquaintances, neighbors, Marina had no idea. Sometimes he bicycled about, sometimes he walked.

Sometimes he was accompanied by his dog, Apollo, “Apollodoros.” If you invited Adam, he was sure not to come; if you did not, he might.) Marina begged Adam to take back the gift, and Adam said pleasantly, “Marina, a gift from the gods can’t be rejected without invoking a curse. In time, you’ll come round.” Adam took his coffee mug back into the sunroom, and

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J C O

Marina joined him, with a mug of her own, and for a half hour or so they talked of other things; when Adam left, declining her offer of dinner, he squeezed her hand hard, wetly kissed her cheek, and laughed at her. Marina thought,
Is he mad?
She could hear him laughing to himself halfway down the block.

The gift
as she would come to think of it. She couldn’t bring herself to touch the items he’d left for several days. This was to be Marina’s fate, was it? “No.”

It was as she’d known: she wasn’t strong enough. She couldn’t have borne freedom in the Pocono Mountains, or anywhere. She’d lost the courage of her youth. The audacity of her youth. Never again, to her relief, did Adam bring up the subject of the farmhouse in Damascus County, Pennsylvania, and Marina never brought it up. Of course, there was the knowledge of it between them, unspoken; as, Marina supposed, the knowledge of an unborn child, a creature aborted in the womb, must hover between a woman and a man, forever in consciousness yet never spoken of.