Note to new readers: This is a work of fiction
***
In the Spring, Kim and I took a weekend off and went to Cape Cod where we stayed in a small cottage on the water in Truro just south of Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod. While we had seen increasingly more of each other during the winter – drinking with coworkers on Friday nights, occasionally going out to dinner, and spending nights at my place when her children were with their father -- this was our first trip together. I liked her quite a bit, and enjoyed her company. She fit my moods well, drinking beer and chatting when I felt garrulous, and not minding my occasional moody periods, when I dwelled in silence.
She’d gone to Cape Cod often as a child, and had continued to bring her children there for a week each summer. “Maybe you’ll come with us this year,” she said. “It’d do you good to get away, and the Cape in the summer is great. Spend the day on the beach, drink beer and eat lobster at night – speaking of which that’s where we’re going to tonight. I’m taking you to the Lobster pound in Provincetown. You can pick your own lobster out of the tank.”
“It all sounds great,” I said.
That night at dinner, she saw me smiling at her as she showed me how to crack open a lobster. “What are you laughing at?” she said.
“I’m from Maine,” I said.
“Oh, do’oh. You’ve had lobster before, obviously.”
I laughed. “I didn’t ever tell you what I used to do?”
“I know you told me once you drove a truck. You didn’t drive a lobster truck, did you?”
“Well, in a way I did, only it was a boat, not a truck.”
“A boat?”
“I come from a family of lobstermen.”
“How come you never told me that before? And also how come you’re not out there now? It sounds like a great job, although I suppose its hard work”
“It has its rewards.”
“Free lobster?”
“That’s one of them.”
“So what happened?”
“My father had a stroke right before I got out of the army. He didn’t have health insurance. I suppose I could have gone back to fishing when I got back, but I didn’t really feel like staying. I sold the boat, squared his bills, and that was that.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Sometimes I do, but I don’t as a matter of course. Besides, what if I’d stayed? I’d be an old man with barnacles on my skin, smelling of fish, and drinking beers with toothless fishermen instead of sitting across the table from the prettiest sweetest smelling girl in New England.”
She laughed. “You’re drunk.” And then she added, “Well, I’m glad I’m here with you, too. It’s nice to be away from the city.”
After dinner, we went out and walked along the docks and looked at the fishing boats. The truth was I did miss the sea. And this was the first I had seen the Atlantic in over a decade. The salt air, the fullness in your lungs when you breathed, the wind on your face -- it brought back memories, but at the same time, it all made me feel old and incomplete like I had no real place in the world anymore.
That night when we made love back in our cottage, I made love to her as if I would never have another chance. When you are a young man, there is no concept really of time closing in on you, the future is infinite. I believed that night that nothing lasts, and so while I held her in my arms, I wanted to remember every moment of it, to love as if my very life depended on it.
“My god,” she said after. “I’ll have to get you lobster more often.”
“It’s the sea air,” I said, “and of course the company that just keeps getting better. ”
“You’re nice,” she said, and brought my hand to her breast, as she nestled into me.
We slept late and made love again in the morning, and then went into town for coffee and doughnuts. She held me close as we walked the streets. She saw a sign advertising a whale watch with guaranteed sightings, and joked “A whale watch? How do you know there are not going to go, ‘Look that way, it’s a whale! Oh, too bad, you missed it,’” she said.
“No, there are whales out there,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll take you if you want. My treat you.” I knew it would be something she would marvel at when we’d get out there on the fishing grounds. “They are out there.”
So I was again out upon the sea. And with Kim at my side, and the water all around us, and the sun rising bright cutting through the fog, I felt, in fact, young again. And then on the feeding grounds, the humpback whales came out and watching the joy on Kim’s face and the faces of the children and other customers as the whales breached and flapped their tails, and splashed us, I felt like I had no reason on earth to be morose. “This is like being in another world,” Kim said. “Or at the edge of our own. Thank you for bringing me here.” She kissed me, and then turned again to point at the whales like I was the one who had conjured them up for her. I knew then that she loved me, and I felt that maybe my time wasn’t past at all, and that a real life was possible for me.
The whales led us north. No one objected when the captain asked if we wanted to stay out longer to follow them. Evening finally fell and we turned back. I looked out at the lights of the land to our west, and Kim knew at once that something had changed. “What is it? Are you okay?”
There to the west were the lights on the coast. I knew the houses of each light. It was a sight that I remembered as if it were only yesterday, and I was returning again from a day on the sea. But now instead of going home, I was heading back to this other life that now contained me, one I had never as a child dreamed of. I wondered who was left in the town, if anyone thought of me, if anyone even noticed the tourist boat out at sea, and wondered who the boat carried. The emptiness I felt was now almost unbearable. Kim leaned against me, and while I felt I could not begin to share with her the hurt I felt inside, I was glad for her to be there.
“I think we should build a house together right here,” I declared. “We’ll put our bed in this very spot.”
Penny and I were up on the bluff overlooking the ocean on land owned by her father. It was spring of our senior year, the afternoon of the senior dance. We’d been coming up there to drink beer and make love since we’d started going out our sophomore year. Her father was a banker and she was going away to college in the fall, but the town and her family had pretty much accepted us an inseparable couple. I was varsity athlete and a solid citizen with just a few rough edges. She was smart, athletic herself and a free spirit. I don’t know if I knew what love meant, but I enjoyed the hell out of her, and hadn’t imagined myself with anyone else.
She lifted her head off my chest. “Are you proposing to me?”
“Yeah, yeah, I am.”
“My mother’s going to want a big wedding. I wouldn’t mind just you and me and the justice of peace standing up here in our spot, but she’s going to want a church, and the country club.”
“We could get married secretly now and save the big ceremony for when I get back.”
“When you what?”
“When I get back. “
“Back? So you went ahead and did it?”
“I went yesterday.”
“Just because Billy’s going.”
“We’ll be back in a year. It won’t be long.”
“I can’t believe you’re doing it. I told you I didn’t want you too. That didn’t count, huh?”
“He needs someone to look out for him.”
“Why don’t you marry him then?”
“Penny, com’on. I love you, but this is something I have to do.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“He’s my best friend. I can’t let him go by himself.”
She sat up and turned her back to me as she put her bra back on. She was crying.
“I feel like I am falling in love with you,” Kim told me that night as we lay in bed in the dark, “But at times you are so distant. I feel like I don’t even know you. If you let me in, you have to keep me there so I can feel safe.”
“I’ll try,” I said, and held her to hide her from my tears.
