The End of the Pier Read online

  “Where’s the warehouse, that’s what I want to know,” Shirl would grumble around her smoke. “They all got food at those lake places—where do they get it? One of them’s got a helicopter pad—is that how? They fly it in—the caviar, the champagne, the roasted pheasant?”

  Maud held her glass by the stem. She hated drinking martinis from a warm glass, and between drinks she shoved the glass into the ice to cool it again. The several patio doors over there were all open now, and she could see them dancing. Sometimes they had a real live combo out on the patio; other times she supposed it must be a stereo. It comforted her, like the book in her lap, that they liked Cole Porter. It was like a party out of the past, something that might have taken place in the 1920s or ’30s, something her dead parents might have attended, and danced to “Begin the Beguine.”

  Several of them—she had to squint to make them out—had come out on the long, long patio and were dancing to it right now. Laughter and glass breaking.

  She picked her glass from the bucket, poured herself a drink, and dropped in an olive. If the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald walked, it walked there, laughing and breaking glasses on the patio.

  But the ghost of Wallace Stevens would not need to get drunk and break glasses. (He had been in insurance, to her great mystification.) Maud even went so far as to believe that the ghost of Wallace Stevens could sit comfortably on the end of the pier in the folding chair reserved for Sam (and Chad, when he was here) and contemplate the party across the water.

  She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

  (Maud read)

  The water never formed to mind or voice,

  Like a body wholly body, fluttering

  Its empty sleeves—

  She replaced the flamingo-topped cocktail stirrer that she used as a marker and closed the book. Sipping her martini, she thought about it, frowning slightly. The sea was formless, apparently. So the singer had to . . . had to . . . She squinted, looking off across the lake . . . What? She shook her head. It would come to her, sometime, what Wallace Stevens meant.

  Then there was her favorite line—oh, what a line!

  Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know . . .

  “I wonder who,” she had said to Sam back in July, “Ramon Fernandez was.”

  Sam had been silent for a moment, since Sam rarely shot back answers, and then he said that he was probably some friend of the poet. “When I’m in Hebrides next week I could go to the library and see if there’s anything there on that poem.”

  Maud slapped the book shut and stared. “No! All I said was I wondered. Wonder—wonder! The answer’s something I have to decide for myself.” She actually felt a little afraid that Sam might just look the poem up.

  He sighed. “Maud. If Ramon was a personal friend—”

  “Ramon Fernandez. We’re not on a first-name basis with him,” she snapped.

  Sam shook his head. “Well, if Señor Fernandez was a friend of Mr. Stevens, there’s nothing for you to decide.”

  “You’re so literal. And what do you mean, ‘Señor’? How do you know he’s Spanish or Mexican, anyway?” Maud was frowning at the Popov bottle to see if there was enough to get her through this conversation. “I’m not surprised you don’t understand this poem.”

  “Cuban,” Sam had said equably, as he snapped open another can of Coors.

  “What?” Maud shot up in her chair, back rigid. “He is not Cuban.”

  Sam shrugged. “Stands to reason. The poet’s in Key West, right? Florida. Closest place where somebody might be from named Ramon Fernandez”—he tilted the Coors and drank—“is Cuba.”

  Maud slapped her hand to her forehead. “Your name is Dutch, isn’t it? Dutch. Does that mean you commute from Lancaster, Pennsylvania?” She turned a furious face to him. “You’re deliberately ruining this poem for me.” She turned away and stared out over the water. “And it’s important.” She felt like crying.

  “Sorry.”

  After a suffering silence that had Maud rocking and staring straight across the lake, Sam suggested that if she was so curious about the couple on the other side of the lake he could always cruise around with a disturbing-the-peace complaint. Maud got so anxious that she yelled at him, something she hardly ever did with anyone but Chad, and told him not to dare. She wasn’t “curious,” and how could they be disturbing the peace when they probably owned a half-mile of lake frontage?

  • • •

  She thought she heard a scrunching on the path, Sam coming along with his six-pack of beer, but when she turned to look, saw that it was the black cat that had turned up a month or so ago and kept disappearing and reappearing. It walked slowly and stealthily onto the pier and simply sat, blinking.

  Maud tried not to look at it because it made her stomach tighten, seeing that it was sick and probably a stray. It was the eye that was bad. It must have been a tumor, for the right eye was completely clouded over and bigger than the other. There was no iris to see, just what looked like a hard blue carapace that must have started out small but gotten larger and larger.

  This was the fourth night the cat had come, and she had remembered to bring along a plastic dish. A half-pint of milk was sitting on top of the ice, and she poured that into the dish and set it some little distance away since she imagined the cat wasn’t all that trustful of people. Maud wondered what the cat did during the day, whether it hung around the pier, catching field mice in the rushy grass. It made no move toward the milk. Could it see the dish, even?

  To Maud, the cat’s having a tumorous eye was a source of inexplicable dread, worse than seeing it in an old, sick person. What made it worse was that the cat had this affliction but didn’t know.

  “Why in hell would you want the poor cat to know?” Sam had asked. “Wouldn’t that just make it worse for it?”

  “That’s not what I meant; you don’t understand.”

  “Would you want to know?”

  Maud couldn’t really understand it herself, why it was worse that the cat wasn’t aware that this shouldn’t be happening to it. “Yes. Anyway, that’s a stupid question because I’d know whether I wanted to or not.”

  “Okay, then. The cat doesn’t know, whether it wants to or not.”

  “You’re just twisting it all around.” She had watched the cat that night, sitting as it was now, yawning, not knowing, unaware that something hideous was consuming its left eye. It wasn’t that Maud found the malformation repulsive; it was that the cat didn’t know that there was an alternative, that its eye might have been perfectly normal.

  “Let’s just say,” Sam had said when the cat first turned up, “that the eye doesn’t hurt, which it probably doesn’t, the way that cat just sits there and doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “How do you know it doesn’t—?”

  Sam had waved his hand for her to shut up. “For the sake of the argument let’s just say. Now, for all that cat knows, that’s just the way things are supposed to be. One day something starts clouding up in its eye. Does it think, ‘Je-sus, but I better get me to a doctor,’ or ‘I’m dying,’ or ‘I’m going blind’? No. It just takes what comes and doesn’t worry about it.”

  The cat at this point had gone over to the edge of the pier and lain down, as if it were bored by all of this talk about its fate. Then it rolled over.

  “You’re just reading stuff into that cat’s mind. Stuff that cat doesn’t have any idea about and doesn’t care.” Sam had popped another cap on a can of Coors for emphasis.

  Maud hadn’t answered. The conversation was going around in circles and she couldn’t explain. She imagined herself in a room with a window suddenly shuttered against the light, imagined herself starting, sitting up, wondering what had happened. No, she thought impatiently, that wasn’t it.

  The cat had inspected the dish of milk now, but didn’t drink it. Could it see it? That was stupid; it had one good eye. Anyway, it could certainly smell it. Maybe it was too cold. Maybe she shouldn’t have put the carton on the ice. Just becaus
e she and Sam liked their drinks icy cold didn’t mean the cat would.

  Why would you want the poor cat to know?

  Maud fingered the book in her lap—the book of American poetry—as if it were one of those little stoppered bottles she thought Indians used for magical purposes and it might release the answer. The cat was sitting nearer her chair, looking up at her with its clouded eye. It was worse than pity, what she felt. It was more like remorse and shame. Blood crept up her neck, heated her face as if a torch had been set to it, and she would have poured herself another drink except that a tremor had started in her hand so that she had to set the glass down. It was as if a task had been set for her: she must work out the answer to this problem about why it was worse for the cat that it didn’t know.

  For the life of her, she couldn’t think of one single human situation that might fit the cat’s. Again, she thought of a room, imagining herself asleep in the dark. She squinted across the water, where the lanterns were lifting and bobbing. It must be windier there.

  The room could not be like a prison cell. It was important that it be a fine room, one with a very high ceiling and pale, prettily tinted walls. And at the end were two very high windows, long and narrow, almost like French windows but not reaching the floor. Curtains made of light stuff like chiffon would rise and fall in the breeze. The curtains were pale yellow. Every morning (except for the last one, when she would rush from the room, terrified, she’d decided)—every morning, she would wake slowly to see these soft, lemon-colored curtains billowing out in a wind blown from . . . where? what? From the water, the sea.

  For this room would be somewhere in a warm country—Greece, maybe—where the east-facing windows with their delicate, blown curtains would frame two oblongs of blue sky. Maud rubbed her elbows and searched for the right shade of blue. She thought of her one piece of good jewelry, a ring that had been her grandmother’s, an opal. The lemon-yellow curtains (it might be Cyprus, where the lemon trees grew) would blow in a wind off the green sea. The walls would be pink, and the ceiling perhaps garlanded; the bed a sort of filigree ironwork, and no furniture except for a wardrobe that would house her few dresses, all long cotton with straps, no sleeves. She would go with bare shoulders and feet.

  Maud started when the music changed across the water, and realized she was a long way from the cat’s problem. She was merely dreaming about herself walking in pale cotton dresses, hems to her ankles, walking across the cool stone of the floor.

  This was the scene that would meet her eyes every morning. She would see the pale pink stuccoed walls (it might be a villa in Italy) and the frescoed ceiling, the pale curtains and the opal sky.

  And then one morning she would wake slowly to partial darkness. It would seem at first like one of those half-dreams, an inner darkness, something the mind knew was only temporary and would soon climb up into full light.

  Only in this case it didn’t. For one of the windows would be missing. The point, Maud thought, frowning, was important. It was not like waking into a slow and awful awareness that you couldn’t see out of one eye, and jumping up and calling the doctor. But that the window was missing. Where it had been was only the wall, the wall grown over the place where the window had been. On one side of the room everything was dark, the curtains were gone, the pink drained from the walls, the figures holding garlands vanished from the ceiling.

  It was all gone; the bed was dark; she could not make out the wardrobe.

  And she could not say, “I’m blind in one eye.” She could not run out into the street in her terror and yell that her room was disappearing, that the wall had overgrown the window. No one would believe her. They would think she was merely some Greek crazy, gone mad like the one who had murdered her children. She would be completely isolated. She would be alone with no explanation. And this was what made her problem like the cat’s.

  Now she felt better, slightly. She felt a bit triumphant because she could explain to Sam how much more dreadful it was for the cat not knowing.

  She visualized it again, that room, floating over the Aegean. Sea of jade, a sky of opal, the diaphanous curtains of milky yellow like dissolving pearl, a room of pure light, without the burden of furniture, of the past, of the future . . .

  With its missing window vanishing from her mind’s eye Maud felt her throat constricting.

  She was relieved to hear just after that the sound of Sam’s car pulling up. Maud squinted back at the headlights, which switched off, and she heard the door slam.

  “Evening,” he said as he set about emptying the six-pack of Coors into the tub of ice, shoving five into the space around the Popov bottle and setting one on the upturned barrel. Sam sighed and lowered himself into a chair. Before he said anything, he always had to line up his cigarettes and matches and pop the can of Coors.

  Having done that, he settled back in the aluminum and wood-slatted chair, crossed an ankle over his knee, and rubbed the ankle. “It’s the big one tonight, I guess,” he said of the party, and tipped the can back and drained half of it. Then he offered Maud a cigarette from his pack of Winstons. They sat back and smoked. “Had to break one up over at the Red Barn earlier,” he said. “Bunch of kids were on something. Then I had to go over to Spirit Lake and break up a fight at the hotel.”

  Sam had been La Porte’s sheriff for years. He’d started out as deputy and was now in charge of the four-man police department. He was easygoing and well liked.

  “That place is crazy.” Maud shook her head. Spirit Lake was another summer resort town, two miles away, even smaller than La Porte, and even emptier in the winter. If people thought La Porte was a ghost town, well, it had nothing on the ghostliness of Spirit Lake in dead winter.

  “Still, it’s Labor Day. Guess you can’t blame people for wanting to celebrate,” Sam said sympathetically. That was one reason he was well liked; he could make allowances. “Chad get off?”

  Maud nodded, looking straight ahead. “I was about to write a letter to him today. I had it all worked out, but—”

  “Why were you writing? He only just left. He’s off to visit his friend. Isn’t that what you said? That he was going to visit his friend in Belle Harbor?”

  Maud squinched her eyes shut. Sometimes he drove her crazy. “I know where he is. Do you have to keep saying it?” Irritated, she tossed her watered-down drink into the lake and stuck her glass into the ice. “I wasn’t going to mail it yet, just write it, that’s all. Anyway, that’s not the point.”

  “Oh,” said Sam.

  He was waiting patiently for her to tell him the point, but now she couldn’t bring to mind exactly the way she’d felt when she’d tried to write the letter. Her fresh drink tasted tepid. “Never mind,” she said, though she’d forgotten the point herself.

  Her saying that bothered him, so he urged her to go on.

  “Well, just don’t keep interrupting.” There was a silence while she tried to enter into the feelings she had had earlier when she was writing the letter. Trying to. All day at the Rainbow Café she had been fretting over the fight they’d had about where Chad’s money was going. So when they’d got to the airport neither one of them was in an especially amiable mood. “This is what I don’t understand,” she was saying about the letter. “The words were all there, as neatly lined up as boxed chocolates one after the other. They were clearly in my head. Now, why is it they wouldn’t simply move down my arm to my fingers and right out along the page? I started writing and it all disappeared. It was like the ink just dried up in my mind.”

  Sam said nothing, but she knew he was thinking the problem over. Sam wasn’t much of a letter writer.

  “The words just—frizzled.”

  “Frizzled?”

  “You know—curled up around the edges. Frizzled. Burned. Turned to ashes.”

  “Hmm.”

  She knew it took Sam a while to think things like this over. Sometimes he made no comment at all beyond a “well” or an “oh,” but that was one reason she liked to talk to h
im. If Sam couldn’t think of a helpful reply, he made none at all, except for the times when he was being deliberately (she thought) obtuse. But usually, when her full thought was out, if he couldn’t add to it, he didn’t try to take away from it by saying something like others might: “Have a hard time writing myself,” or “Try again,” or something like that which demeaned her point. And he never tried to cheer her up, even though he often found her in a bad mood, to say the least. Most people would probably have thought his silence strange; after all, wasn’t that what friends were for? To cheer you up?

  No, friends knew the difference between that downcast, hangdog, lowdown feeling people called “blues” (music the party across the water never played, for some reason) and what Maud had. And what Maud had was something unnameable and probably unnatural, unless you wanted to call it “depression.” That was probably the only word anyone could come up with, but it didn’t help her much.

  After the lull in the dancing the combo started in on “Brazil.” She was glad she’d never left anyone behind in Brazil or it would probably have started her crying.

  Another boat—or was it the same black Chris-Craft?—ripped by near the far shore. “Isn’t that the same one? Where do they go, anyway? There’s nothing at the other end of the lake.” There wasn’t anything at either end as far as she could make out, except for the Red Barn, which wasn’t much but what the name said. They sold beer and half-smokes and had a jukebox and one of those big TV screens like the wall of a house caving in on you.