The weight of water - Anita Shreve [6]
“I wouldn’t have thought that someone who worked for Citibank would know so much about poetry,” I say.
“Actually, it’s Bank of Boston.” He tilts his head and looks at me. “I think poetry is something that’s fairly univer $$$on’t you? Enjoying it, I mean.”
“I suppose.”
“How is Thomas?”
“I don’t know. I think he’s convinced himself that each poet is given a finite number of words and that he’s used up his allotment.”
“I notice that he’s drinking more,” Rich says. Rich’s legs are brown and covered with dark hair. Looking at his legs, I contemplate the trick of nature that has caused Thomas and Rich to receive what appear to be entirely separate sets of genes. I glance out toward the sloop, which floats four hundred feet from us in the harbor. The mast teeters in the chop.
“Adaline was married once,” Rich says. “To a doctor. They had a child.”
I turn to him. He must see surprise on my face.
“I think the girl must be three or four now. The father has her. They live in California.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Adaline doesn’t see the girl. She’s chosen not to.”
I am silent. I try to absorb this information, to put it together with the gold cross and the lilting voice.
“Adaline came over from Ireland for him,” he says. “For the doctor.”
He leans over and brushes a dried smear of muck from my calf. He smooths my leg with his fingertips. I am thinking that the calf is not a place that anyone touches much. I wonder if he shaves his head every day. What the top of his head would feel like.
“She’s kind of detached,” he says, withdrawing his fingers. “She doesn’t stay with people long.”
“How long have you two been together?”
“About five months. Actually, I think my tenure is almost up.”
I think of saying to him that to judge by the sounds emanating from the forward cabin, I cannot agree.
In front of us, Billie lies down at the waterline. Mostly, I think, to get sand in her hair. I tense and begin to rise. Rich puts a restraining hand on my wrist.
“She’s OK. I’ve got my eye on her.”
I relax a bit and sit back down.
“Did you want something more?” I ask. “From Adaline, I mean.”
He shrugs.
“She’s very beautiful,” I say.
Rich nods. “I’ve always envied you,” he says. “You and Thomas.”
He puts his hand to his face to shade his eyes, and he squints in the direction of the boat.
“I don’t see anyone in the cockpit,” I say.
A few minutes later, I take a photograph of Rich and Billie and her pail of mussels. Rich is lying on the small piece of rough beach, his knees raised, dark circles inside the wide openings of his khaki shorts. The eye is drawn to those dark circles. His arms are spread at his sides in a posture of submission. His head has fallen into a depression in the sand, so that his body seems to end at his neck. Billie is standing over him, perfectly bent at the waist, her arms stretched out behind her for balance, like two tiny wings. She is talking to Rich or asking him a question. Rich seems vulnerable under her scrutiny. Beside Billie is her green plastic pail of mussels, perhaps enough to make an appetizer for two. Up behind them both is the Haley house, small and old, the trim neatly painted in a dull brick red.
When I look at the photographs, it is hard not to think: We had seventeen hours then, or twelve, or three.
Immediately after the photograph is taken, Rich sits up. He remembers, he tells Billie, that a pirate named Blackbeard once buried his treasure on the island. He gets up and searches through the scrub, examining this branch and that, until he has made two forked sticks. He sets off with Billie while I wait on the beach. After a time — fifteen minutes, twenty? — I hear a cry from Billie. She is calling to me. I get up to look and then walk over to where she and Rich are standing together, about two hundred feet from the beach.