661: She began . . .
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 8 concludes
SHE BEGAN VISITING the resort almost daily, before she went to her job as a waitress at the clam bar. A couple of times she borrowed her girlfriend Tina’s car, a six-year-old Commander that still had a lot of life in it. In the car she felt invisible and anonymous. She could park on the town pier and observe the work without feeling that she was being observed herself. She could even, occasionally, park right across the street, slide over to the passenger’s side, hold a magazine, and seem to be a bored young woman waiting for someone else. After a couple of weeks she bought a pair of binoculars at Babbington Sporting Goods. When she was in position on the pier and began unwrapping the binoculars, she saw that her hands were shaking, and she told herself that this was beginning to resemble the behavior of a crazy person. She made herself put the binoculars aside and drive directly to work. She pulled into the parking lot at Captain White’s, sat in the car for a moment, then backed out of the lot and drove back to the resort. She parked across the street and sat there in Tina’s car. She lit a cigarette and watched for a while, unnoticed by the men working there, who were bustling around with an intensity and an edge of concern that made her think that there must be someone important on the site, a boss of bosses. She had already guessed the levels of authority among the men she’d been watching. Now there was a new one, a small man who wore a sport jacket. He was the only one wearing a jacket. He seemed to be in charge, completely in charge. He would be the one to approach.
He was studying some plans. He shook his head, waved, pointed at something on the plans, then jabbed at it with his finger. The men beside him drew closer. He thrust the plans at one of them. They walked off with their heads down, chagrined. The small man turned slowly, looking the place over, and it seemed as if he would continue turning, to take it all in, and turn in Ariane’s direction. She had a sudden picture of herself in her ridiculous little clam-bar waitress’s outfit, and it made her shrink in her seat. She started the car and with her eyes barely at dashboard level drove to the pier, where she could turn around, and then drove past the site still hiding, with her head just visible above the door. She didn’t want to be seen until she was ready. She felt that she already had an investment in her future at the resort. She wanted it to pay off.
She visited at night, after work, or after a stop at Corinne’s. She would walk to the town pier and study the resort through her binoculars. There was a watchman, but she soon learned his routine, which included long naps. One night, after he had settled down, she stopped resisting the urge to go inside. She got out of the car, slipped her shoes off, and walked along the sand at the edge of the bay, as she had that first night when she approached the place with Denny. She had chosen this route because she figured that no one could stop her from walking there. Until she turned from the beach and walked up the steps to the terrace she wouldn’t really be trespassing, after all, just walking along the beach, not bothering anybody. She watched the room with the light, because she knew that the watchman was there, and when she was directly in front of the steps to the terrace she stopped and waited and watched, and she saw the figure of the watchman suddenly stand and stretch. She drew back. She began walking backward. She felt the water lap at her feet. She saw the figure of the watchman moving across the light, and she followed him with her eyes until she saw him cross the street, walk across the parking lot, and go into the Fo’castle, a wharfside bar. It took only a moment for her to run across the sand and up the steps to the terrace and into the large, curvaceous building.
It was dark inside, and that surprised her. The building had always seemed so bright and white, as if it glowed with a light of its own. Inside, it was dark and confusing. There was a lot of work still to be done. The floors were still raw concrete. Most of the windows hadn’t been installed. Here and there, outside light fell in bands across stacks of wallboard, barrels of nails, unknown stuff covered by tarpaulins. She pulled her shoes on and began to explore. She had no idea where she was going or what was what. As she walked, she kept a hand on the wall to steady herself. She would go a little way and be surprised by an opening. She would step through it and wonder where she was. What room is this? What will it be? She began completing the spaces as she walked through them, finishing them and furnishing them in her imagination. She had no experience with the sort of place she imagined it to be, but she had quite an extensive mental file of clippings from magazines and movies. She knew that it should be elegant, and as she wandered through it—poof!—there it was, as it ought to be, as smooth and gleaming and bright as it was on the outside, an efficient staff bustling and eager, handsome young men beside the pool, pretty young women sipping pink drinks. But where was she? Where did she see herself? She stepped through a particularly wide opening, and there she was. It must be a restaurant. It would have to be a restaurant. Large, nearly circular, but with the flexuous walls that she saw everywhere throughout the complex. In this room, perhaps because it was so large and so open to the actual night, she had to work to make her fantasy include herself, and even when she succeeded, she had the wrong clothes, the wrong hairdo, and the image was so unstable and flickering that for brief moments she was wearing her ridiculous little clam-bar outfit, which, minus the hat, was what she was wearing in fact, but then, at last, as she perambulated the perimeter of the room, she managed to conjure a vision of the room finished and gleaming, with chatting couples at every table, good-looking waiters, sizzling steaks, and herself as the hostess. It holds. It’s stable. It seems to work. She passes a table where a good-looking young man is dining alone, and he winks at her. Yes. That’s the idea. She had her idea now.
A crash. A curse. The watchman had returned.
She hid in a shadowy niche, pressed herself against the rough cement. The odor in her hiding place was damp and sharp. The watchman passed through a band of light and disappeared into the shadows. She waited another moment, remembered to slip her shoes off, stepped through an empty window frame to the terrace, and ran across it, down the steps, and onto the beach, where she ran toward the pier, leaving her footprints in the sand.
[to be continued]
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