Oh, dearest friend . . . save you, I think I scarce know any one that is happy in the world: I trust you may continue so . . . you in whose sweet serene happiness I am thankful to be allowed to repose sometimes. You are the island in the desert . . . and the birds sing there, and the fountain flows; and we come and repose by you for a little while, and to-morrow the march begins again, and the toil, and the struggle, and the desert. Good-bye, fountain!
Ethel Newcome to Laura Pendennis, in William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes
It needs a wild steersman when we voyage through chaos! The anchor is up — farewell!
Zenobia, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
IN THE MORNING, BEFORE DAWN, Eric slipped out of the hotel as silently as a shadow, made his way to the dock in the dark, patted the flank of the Chris-Craft triple-cockpit barrel-back mahagony runabout, and drifted across the bay like a patch of fog. He walked into town, walked to the train station, and caught the next train back into his life, where he and his wife, Madeline, were heavily in debt, living in a house that they could no longer afford, isolated on the east end of Long Island, dependent on an automobile for every social contact, sinking into the cesspool of popular culture. He was sitting at his computer in his workroom on the top floor of the house. He read the last chapter, changed “leaving a permanent silence” to “leaving what would have been a permanent silence if all the inmates of Small’s Hotel hadn’t burst out laughing,” and then wrote the last scene, which he found required no changes at all. He stood. He stretched. He rolled his head from side to side to get the kinks out of his neck. He had been away for quite a while. Three years had passed since he had stowed away aboard the leaking launch for the trip to Small’s Hotel. He felt wonderfully refreshed by his visit, because time spent in another place, in another life, is the perfect vacation, the ideal.
Not until later in the morning, when he was walking along the edge of the ocean, did he fully appreciate the implications of what he had done, of what was about to happen.
AT THAT TIME, Albertine and I were standing on the dock, about to board the runabout and make our way across the bay.
Albertine put her hand on my arm.
“Peter,” she said, “we don’t have to go. We can stay here.”
“Al — ” I said.
“Really,” she said. “We could. Lou would be happy to have us stay. We can play the parts we’ve been playing, but he’ll be paying the bills, so it will be a carefree life, an easy imitation of the life we’ve been living.”
I held both her hands and said, “My darling, sometime in the night I realized something about us.”
She said nothing.
“Do you want to know what it is?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said.
I gave a sardonic grin and said, “We are among the very few people who can be happy, and I think that, since we have the ability, we have an obligation to use it.”
“You do?”
“I do.”
“And how do we do this?”
“First, we step aboard the boat.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Peter. I don’t think you want to go.”
“Listen,” I said, and then went on to say what I had composed during the night. “Our two happinesses are forever linked. I love you, and you love me, and I want to make you happy, and you want to make me happy, so we are caught in a vicious circle, but it’s not really a circle. It’s a helix, a directed spiral, like the cutting edges of a screw, and if the helix is turning the wrong way, then when I see that you are a little unhappy I blame myself for it, and that makes me unhappy, and you see my unhappiness and blame yourself for it, which makes you unhappy, and so on, and if the turn of the screw is not reversed, then we will go on spiraling downward, narrower and narrower, until we are screwed down tight into our misery, and we will end up like Mrs. Jerrold or the people in Baldy the Dummy’s catalog.” I paused.
“‘But’?” she said.
“What?”
“There is a ‘but’ coming, isn’t there?”
“But,” I said, “if we reverse the twist of the thing, make a change, shift gears, then the process begins working in our favor. You will see a little smile on my face, and you will smile to see it, and I will catch you smiling, and I will smile all the more to see it, and we will begin to spiral up and out, and we will rise, turn by turn, in a delicious circle of multiplied love, doubling daily, elevated and expansive, rising even above the petty preoccupations of our painful times, until we have sent ourselves off the chart, off the map, beyond the gravitational grip of human misery, and into the realm of immortal hilarity.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding. But it takes a reversal, a change of direction, to get that process started.”
She wrinkled her brow.
“If you are in earnest, begin this very minute,” I said.
She sighed and said, “Oh, Peter.”
“One of us has to shift gears. One of us has to reverse the spiral. I’m asking you to be the one. I’m asking you to board the boat.”
“I love you,” she said, taking a step toward me, away from the boat.
“If you love me, you will take what I’m trying to give you.”
She smiled, nodded her head once, and stepped aboard, and I followed her, and we settled into the third cockpit and covered ourselves with a blanket. Modesty ought to prevent me from telling you what she said to me next, reader, but it won’t. She said, “Thank you for loving me. You are my happiness, and I am a lucky woman.”
ERIC STOOD ON THE BEACH, looking out at the rolling waves, dictating Albertine’s words into his microcassette recorder, and when, after a pause, he decided that not another word was needed, he snapped the stop button, put the recorder into his pocket, and stood there a moment longer, savoring the sensation, the tingle spreading within his mind, accompanied by a muted rumble, a ripple, a setting off, the embarkation of his imagination, released from its isolation, escaping the region of his mind to which it had been confined, slipping across the bay to insinuate itself into the rational regions, and there to run about. A shiver ran down his spine, just as people say it does in a moment of panic and doubt. “What have I done?” he asked himself, then shook himself and turned and began the walk back home, where, that night, he began reading this book to his wife, Madeline, one chapter a night.
Peter Leroy
Manhattan
February 19, 1998
[to be continued with the serialization of Inflating a Dog]
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