Beautiful Days: Stories Read online

  The woman was determined to smile, that the man would see how she was not panicked. The woman recalled her children, when they’d been young. They too had tried not to show fear, sorrow, grief when these emotions had been perfectly justified. They had tried not to cry broken-heartedly when their daddy departed with a (vague, guilty, unconvincing) promise to return. The woman who was their mother had loved them fiercely, seeing this: stoicism in such young children! Surely this was a kind of child abuse.

  On the island, the woman had seen flashes of heat lightning in the sky, in the distance. Silent flashes, like illuminated nerves or veins. The man had taken no notice, most of the sky had been clear at this time. But the woman had noticed other boats leaving the island and had asked—“Will there be a storm? Should we leave now?” and the man had merely laughed at her.

  “Don’t panic. We have plenty of time.”

  Once they were in the boat, however, he’d seemed surprised by the quick-gathering thunderclouds. The rapidly increasing wind, the drop in temperature and the first raindrops chill as hail striking the bow of the boat, the windshield, their faces. He’d asked her to retrieve their nylon rain-jackets from the back of the boat, and the bulky bright orange life vests he’d disdained earlier in the day.

  Being taken by surprise was upsetting to the man, the woman could see. She had not ever known any man who’d liked surprises unless the surprises were of his own doing.

  Now came rain pelting like machine-gun fire pocking the water’s surface. Amid the churning waves visibility was poor. There were drifting mists. The woman peered anxiously ahead—she had no way of telling if the boat was making progress.

  Beside her the man was steering the boat with the fiercest concentration. His face was tense with strain. His jaws were clenched. He was enjoying this frantic race across the lake—was he? In his mostly sedentary life in which he gave orders to others, subordinates, and was not accustomed to being challenged or questioned let alone actively opposed, this lake crossing to the marina at Bolton’s Landing had to be an adventure, the woman thought. Several times he’d admonished her not to panic, she had to surmise that it was panic the man most feared, in himself as in others.

  He’d told her when they’d first arrived at Lake George that he knew the lake like the back of my hand. This was not an arrogant boast but rather a childlike boast and so the woman had smilingly questioned whether a person did indeed know the back of his own hand, and could recognize a picture of his hand among the hands of others?

  But the man hadn’t heard her (quite reasonable, she’d thought) query. Or if he’d heard, he disdained schoolgirl paradoxes.

  The woman had examined the back of her own hand. Her hands. She was shocked to see—what, exactly?—had her hands, already in her early forties, begun to age, to betray fine, faint lines, odd little discolorations, freckles? Or was she imagining this? But there was no doubt, she couldn’t have identified her hands pictured among the hands of other women her own age.

  Sometimes, glimpsing by chance her reflection in a shop window or a reflecting surface, the woman thought with a quizzical smile—But who is that? She looks familiar.

  The man had no time for such caprices. His mind was not a mind to “wander” but was rather a problem-solving mind, or rather brain, sharp and fine-tuned and galvanized by challenge. When he ran, he ran—for a specifically allotted amount of time. When he walked, he walked—swiftly, with a minimum of curiosity. Driving a vehicle he drove swiftly and unerringly though consumed in thought, thinking. In any public neutral space through which he was merely passing Mikael Brun had no time to waste merely seeing.

  As he’d claimed to know the vast lake like the back of my hand—its inlets, its shoreline, its myriad large and small islands, the mountains in the near distance (in particular Black Mountain)—so too he knew the little fifteen-foot outboard he’d rented that morning at the marina in Bolton’s Landing for he’d once owned a near-identical model, trim and compact and dazzling-white with a canopy and a sixty-five-horsepower motor, purchased in the bygone days of a marriage now disintegrated like wet tissue.

  Did the woman dare ask the man about this marriage? She did not.

  The man had come to a point in his emotional life at which he had no need to articulate My marriage but only to feel the edginess and dread of one who has come too close to a precipice, without needing to give his fear a name.

  Intuitively the woman understood. The woman was adept at reading the secret lives of others, that are presented to us in code; she could sense the man’s fear of something not to be named, and would make herself indispensable in combating it.

  That morning the man had deftly steered the small boat between color-coded buoys on the route to Big Burnt. He’d had no trouble avoiding the trajectories of other boats. To his admiring companion he’d pointed out landmarks onshore, and mountain peaks in the distance. But now in heavy rain he was having difficulty steering a course to take him to the inlet that contained the marina—though (of course) as he drew nearer, he would begin to recognize crucial landmarks.

  Unless, as in a nightmare, he’d forgotten these landmarks. Or the landmarks had ceased to exist.

  When the rain had first begun, they’d put on light nylon rain-jackets, with hoods. But now, as rain and wind increased, the man conceded that they might put on life preservers also.

  When the woman had difficulty adjusting the bulky orange vest that was much too large for her he’d tied it for her, in a lull in the storm, to see that it was properly secured.

  The gesture had been curiously tender, protective. The woman was touched, for the man did not always behave toward her in a way that signaled affection, or concern; often, the man seemed scarcely aware of her. She wondered if when he’d secured the ties of the life preserver the man was thinking of his children when they’d been young, as she often thought of her children, not as they were at the present time but as they’d been years ago, requiring their mother for the simplest tasks.

  Impulsively she thanked her companion with a quick kiss on the mouth. He laughed as if surprised, and a flush came into his rain-wetted face, that had a slightly coarse, just slightly pitted skin as if it had been abraded with some rough substance. “Mikael, thank you! I feel like”—the woman hesitated, not quite knowing if this was the right thing to say—“one of my own children. Years ago.”

  To this feckless remark the man did not respond. She had noted how, frequently, it was his way to smile stiffly and in silence when another’s remarks baffled or annoyed him.

  I can love enough for two. You will see!

  The storm-lull had ended. The boat was bucking and heaving and the man had to grab the steering wheel, quickly.

  It was at that moment that the woman happened to glance behind them, to see to her horror that water was accumulating in the back of the boat: backpacks, towels, articles of clothing, bottles were awash in water; the back was alarmingly lower than the front. But when she nudged the man to look he brushed her hand away irritably and told her there was no danger, not yet for Christ’s sake, and not to panic.

  “Are you sure? Mikael—”

  “I’ve told you. Don’t panic.”

  If the small boat were to capsize, or to sink—if it were swamped, and they were thrown into the turbulent lake—they would be kept from drowning by the life vests. Still, the woman was frightened.

  She recalled a canoeing accident at a girls’ summer camp in the Catskills years ago when she’d been eleven years old and away from home for the first time in her life; inexperienced girls had been allowed to canoe, and one of the girls in her cabin had drowned—the canoe she’d taken out onto a lake with another girl had overturned, she’d fallen into roiling water screaming and within seconds disappeared from view as if pulled down by an undertow.

  Lisbeth had been in another canoe, staring in horror. No one seemed to know what to do—no one was a good enough swimmer, or mature enough to attempt a rescue—by the time an adult came running ou
t onto the dock it was too late.

  She’d never been able to comprehend what had happened except that one of her cabin-mates was gone and the camp shut down and sent all the girls home, a week early. Soon after she returned home she could not recall the name of the drowned girl.

  Yes but her name was Fern. Of course you remember.

  She could cling to the overturned boat if that were possible—if the boat didn’t sink. That had been the drowned girl’s mistake—she’d panicked, tried to swim, failed to grab hold of the canoe as the other girl had done. Lisbeth’s own terror she would transform into the sheer stubborn hopefulness of one who would not drown.

  Oh but where was the marina? How far away, the southwestern shore of Lake George? She did recall a narrow inlet—passing close by land on their way out into the lake—but she had no idea where this was and she did not dare ask the man another time.

  She remembered an American flag stirring in the wind, high above the marina dock. Vivid-red-striped, white stars on blue background, triumphant in morning sunlight like something painted in acrylics. The flag was so positioned, she supposed, to reassure persons like herself uneasy on the open lake, that they were nearly safe, returning to land. Her eyes filled with tears of yearning, to see that flag again and to know that the ordeal on the lake was nearly over.

  THE MAN’S NAME WAS MIKAEL BRUN. The woman’s name was Lisbeth Mueller. They were forty-nine and forty-three years old, respectively.

  Each was unmarried. Which is not altogether synonymous with single. Between them they had accumulated three ex-spouses. And five children of whom the eldest (nineteen) was the man’s and the youngest (seven) was the woman’s.

  The two were—technically—lovers; yet they were not quite friends. It was painful to the woman (though knowing that this was a thought the man wasn’t likely to have) that they were not a couple but two.

  A casual observer at their lakeside motel in Bolton’s Landing, at the marina that morning or on Big Burnt Island through the day—(obsessively the woman would afterward contemplate such “pictures” frozen in time as a way of trying to comprehend the man’s motives in behaving as he’d done)—might plausibly have mistaken them for a married couple: middle-aged, in very good physical condition and just slightly edgy as if they’d had a recent quarrel and wanted to avoid one another. The woman, quick to smile. The man more likely to frown, glancing about as if distracted.

  He is looking for someone. Something.

  That is why he has come back, to look.

  Were the two long-married, thus invisible to each other? Or were the two not married, nor even lovers? The casual observer might have noticed how the man held himself aloof from the woman, as if unconsciously; though meaning her no ill will, he simply forgot to hold open a door for her, for instance, so that she knew to come forward quickly behind him to press her hand against the door, to hold it open for herself in a graceful gesture lost to the man; when the man conferred with the lank-limbed boy at the marina who was preparing the boat for him, the woman stood by alert and attentive, though neither the man nor the boy would acknowledge her. The woman had perfected a small smile for such limbo-situations in which, though in physical proximity to her companion, she somehow did not exist until he recalled her.

  In the light wind, the woman’s tangerine-colored scarf blew languidly over her face. Somehow, without her knowing, she’d become the sort of woman who wears such scarves even before there is a need to hide a ravaged neck.

  The man wore a baseball cap to shield his eyes from the sun. The man also wore (prescription) sunglasses. His jaws glittered with a two-day beard that gave him a look of mild debauchery. Yet the man was speaking quietly, wistfully to the marina attendant:

  “I first came to Lake George forty-six years ago—that is, I was brought as a small child. My parents camped on Big Burnt for weeks in the summer. I’ve come back often—though I’ve missed a few years recently . . .”

  But why did the man feel obliged to tell this to the lanky-limbed teenager in shorts and T-shirt, how did he expect the boy to respond? The woman was embarrassed for her companion, that he spoke so frankly to a stranger. Clearly, this was out of character. Mikael Brun barely spoke to her.

  “Same as my dad, I guess,” the boy said, not looking up from what he was doing in the boat, “—except he lived here year-round.”

  “You’ve camped on Big Burnt?”—eagerly the man asked.

  “Some islands we camped on, I guess. But I don’t remember their names.” The boy paused, shifting his shoulders uncomfortably. “Hasn’t been for a while.”

  Lived. The man had not heard the boy say lived. The woman sensed this.

  In Cambridge, Mikael Brun was often stiffly formal with strangers, and even with acquaintances and colleagues; his manner was never less than civil, but he wasn’t a naturally friendly man. As a prominent scientist at Harvard he’d cultivated the poise of a quasi-public figure who, even as he seems to be welcoming the interest of others, is inwardly repelling this interest.

  When they’d checked into their lakeside motel Mikael had engaged the proprietor in a similar conversation about Bolton’s Landing, Lake George, and the Adirondacks generally; he’d asked the proprietor questions intended to establish that they knew some individuals in common in the area. And the proprietor had certainly known of Big Burnt Island though he had not ever camped there.

  Lisbeth had thought of her companion—He is lonely. Lonelier even than I am.

  She felt a surge of hope, knowing this. For the weakness of the man is the strength of the woman.

  He’d called her out of nowhere, to ask her to accompany him to Lake George for a few days at the very end of August. It would make him very happy, he said, if she would say yes.

  Astonished by the call, needing to sit down quickly (on the edge of a rumpled bed in her bedroom) as faintness rose into her brain, the woman had murmured Yes maybe—she would have to check her schedule.

  She scarcely knew Mikael Brun. She’d had an unfortunate experience with the man the previous year, which she would not wish to repeat; yet, when she’d heard his voice on the land line, she’d felt a stab of hope, and happiness. She’d thought—He has forgiven me.

  Lisbeth Mueller was an actress, or had been an actress in regional theaters and on some daytime TV, whose primary source of income came now from teaching in the speech and drama departments in local universities. Of her recent projects she was most proud of having staged a multi-ethnic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream conjoined with an original, collaborative drama of the sociology of urban immigrant life from the perspective of first-generation American-born undergraduates at Boston University.

  Among Lisbeth’s fiercely loyal circle of theater friends and acquaintances in the Cambridge-Boston area, ever-shifting and diaphanous as the trailing, undulating tendrils of a great jellyfish, it was believed that her considerable talent as an actress had never been fully realized. Married too young, children at too young an age, two divorces, numerous men who’d exploited her trusting nature, career missteps, misjudgments—how swiftly the years had gone, and how little, except for the children, and her reputation for stubborn integrity, Lisbeth had to show for them. It was difficult for her to believe, waking in the early hours of the morning as if an alarm had rung somewhere close by, that her career wasn’t still in its ascendency: the next audition would be the catapult to long-delayed recognition . . . And there was always teaching in which she threw herself with the zeal and enthusiasm of a seasoned ingénue, always the hope that, experience to the contrary, she would be offered a more permanent contract than simply the three- or one-year contracts given adjunct instructors like herself.

  “‘Adjunct’! I don’t think we have ‘adjunct instructors’ in our department. I know we don’t have anything like ‘adjuncts’ at the Institute”—so Mikael Brun had remarked, like a man discussing a rare disease.

  How did you meet Mikael Brun?—the woman who’d accompanied him to Lake George wo
uld be asked. What did you know of Mikael Brun’s state of mind?

  And she would say, for this was the awkward truth, that she had no clear memory of when they’d first met, only a (vague) memory of their being (re)introduced to each other, at one or another social gathering in Cambridge. Not frequently, but occasionally over the past several years since Lisbeth’s separation and divorce they’d “seen each other” in interludes of varying intensity. Lisbeth berated herself for being (nearly almost) always available to the man. (Of course, she saw other men in the interstices of seeing Mikael Brun. Always she was hoping that a relationship with another man would take predominance in her life, that she might forget Mikael Brun altogether; but this had not yet happened.) Once he’d brought her a dozen blood-red roses after he’d seen her in The Cherry Orchard and they’d been drinking together in her house when Mikael said, in an outburst of emotion, that lately he’d been feeling the need to try again . . . And this too, in the faintly bemused, faintly incredulous tone of a man describing a rare pathology.

  He had not stayed with Lisbeth that night, however. Or any other night.

  And then, he’d been furious with her when she’d had to leave a dinner party to which he’d brought her, having had an unexpected call from a friend who’d had a medical emergency that day, and could not bear to be alone. Livid with indignation Mikael had said to Lisbeth, not quite in an undertone, that, if she left the dinner, she shouldn’t expect to see him again; Lisbeth was stricken with regret and tried to explain that she couldn’t ignore the call, a plea for help—“Please understand, Mikael. I’d rather be here. I would rather be with you.” Her oldest friend in Cambridge had had a sort of seizure, perhaps a small stroke; the woman simply could not bear to be alone that night, and had called Lisbeth out of desperation.

  Lisbeth had smiled at Mikael Brun most winningly, like Desdemona beguiling Othello. But the man had been unmoved. It was astonishing to her, he’d been unpersuaded by her appeal; for wasn’t Mikael Brun renowned as a man of generous instincts, himself; wasn’t he a legendary figure with students, post-docs, younger scientists? Lisbeth had said, faltering, “Well—I won’t go. I’ll call Geraldine and explain that I can’t see her until tomorrow.” But Mikael said, “No. Go to her. Whoever she is, go. I’m leaving, myself.” Others at the dinner had seemed not to be listening to the two as they spoke rapidly together in an adjoining room.