Love and Will: Twenty Stories

The Cove

Two men are walking toward each other on a beach. One man’s holding a girl of nine months and the other man’s with a woman and four children between the ages of seven to twelve. The two men are eyeing each other. The man with the baby wonders who these people are and where they’re staying on the point. He comes down to this beach every day and maybe two and three times a day and if he sees one person in a week on it it’s a lot. No, wrongly worded, or something’s wrong. Go back. Two men, beach, which is really a cove, cove which the man with the baby rents the same cottage on every summer, or to be more exact: the cove is part of the cottage’s property and the cottage is about 200 feet into the woods. Something like that. Doesn’t right now have to be that exact. The other man’s staying with his mother and stepfather for two weeks and the woman is his wife and the children are their grandchildren and the stepfather, who’s been married to this man’s mother for more than forty years, has a house on the next cove, or rather, owns the entire next cove, which is about a half mile long, and the house, or compound, for it consists of three houses besides the enormous main house, all situated fairly close together, and two garages and several barns and sheds and a private studio, is about a mile from the stepfather’s cove. To get to their cove they drove a car down their road to it, or that’s what the man with the baby assumes, if these people are who he now thinks they are: the ones who walked along this cove two summers ago, stopped to look at the lopsided vandalized boathouse and when he later asked his wife who they could be, she told him. To get to his cove the man with the baby walked to it. Mosquitoes, what’s left of the black flies, the sound of a large animal in the woods. Probably a porcupine — he and his wife have seen one around the cottage the last two days. Hotter and more humid than is usual around here during any part of the summer and it’s just the end of June and not even ten a.m. Maine, some hundred-fifty miles from the Canadian border along the coast. The man with the woman and children and the man with the baby are now only about fifty feet apart. One of the children has a dog on a leash and the dog starts growling at the man with the baby. The man with the baby thinks these must be the people he heard from his porch yesterday, talking loud and laughing and shrieking. The man with the woman and children thinks could this be Magna’s new husband? He heard from his stepfather she got married a year and a half ago and had a baby over the winter. It must be, who else could it be? He met her alone on this beach several years ago, had a long talk with her, found they had many university acquaintances in common, thought her very smart, personable and attractive. His stepfather learned of her baby from the caretaker of her cottage. She’s been renting that cottage for ten years or so, with this man for five years. He’s been spending a week to two at one of his stepfather’s guesthouses with his grandchildren and before that with his children and before that just with his wife, every other year and occasionally two years in a row for the last thirty-seven years. He brought his wife here thirty-eight years ago when they were engaged. They stayed in the main house — there were no guesthouses then — and on different floors. He remembers his stepfather calling him aside and saying “Your mother and I separated you two for very good reasons and we don’t want either of you transversing the other’s room any time of the day.” Yesterday his wife said she was fed up looking after their grandchildren every summer for a week to two and especially every second year when they also have to deal with his aging mother and controlling stepfather. “I know I said this last summer, but this summer I mean it when I say it’s the last time. I think I finally want those two weeks for ourselves, or if it has to be, then just for me.” The man with the baby says “Hiya” to the first two children who pass and “Looks like your dog’s a good watchdog by the way he growled.”

“He’s not our dog,” the girl walking with the boy who’s holding the leash says, “—he’s our grandparents’,” and she points to the two adults behind her.

“Oh, they’re so young I thought they were your parents.”

“No, our grandparents. Our parents are vacationing in France.”

By this time the two older children have passed him and he says “Hi” and one of them says “Hi” and the other waves. He says hello to the woman as she passes. She smiles, says “Good morning,” and continues walking. He says hello to the man who’s about ten feet behind the woman, holding a long bleached branch he must have found on the beach and is using as a walking stick. The man says “Must seem like Times Square to you today.”

“Why,” the man with the baby says, stopping, “because it’s so crowded or so hot?”

“Crowded for this particular beach and maybe because it’s so hot. Didn’t think of heat as such when I said it, nor have I been to New York in the summer to know how hot it gets, but it could be true too. How do you do?” He switches the stick to his left hand and puts out his free hand to shake. “Benton.” They shake. “And who’s this tyke?”

“Stella. I’m Will Taub. You people staying around here?”

“Turner Haskell’s my stepfather. We’re here with our grandchildren for our biannual pilgrimage for a week. And you?”

“My wife and I are in the cottage that belongs to that decrepit boathouse there.”

“Is this Magna’s baby?” the woman says, coming back. The children continue to the end of the cove. “Hello, I’m Nicole. How is Magna? We heard she had a baby, and it’s so darling — aren’t you, you little dear.” She puts her finger into the baby’s hand which squeezes around it. “Ned, you remember Magna — she studied with Byron Parks.”

“Sure, now I do — once had a very nice conversation with her on this beach.”

“Boy, girl?” she asks Will.

“Stella,” Ned says.

“Right. And Magna’s just fine — up in the cottage now. — Better watch it — she collects fingers.”

“She looks like Magna,” she says. “Features, complexion, hair — everything.”

“Whenever I hold her — of course the hair is another matter — people say she looks like Magna. And when she holds her”—no, all wrong, or mostly. Go back again. Two men, one holding a baby, other walking a dog. No, one’s alone, other’s with a dog. The woman and children are with his stepfather in the main house. The baby’s with Magna. The men are walking toward each other on the cove that belongs to the cottage the man alone’s renting. The dog barks at him from about thirty feet away, growls and bares its teeth when the men are ten feet apart. The man with the dog says “Whoa, Cunningham, whoa, boy, whoa,” and has to pull the leash back with both hands. The dog’s a retriever. The man alone says “Good morning. Looks like you have a pretty good watchdog there, but tell him I’m unarmed.” “Oh, he’s just a yipper — won’t bite a flea. Cove must seem like Times Square to you today.”

“With all this traffic?”

“I meant ‘hot.’ They’re supposedly having, though a lot worse than ours, a heat spell in New York, the radio said, but maybe I got it all wrong. Because my assumption has always been that Times Square, because it’s the most congested area in New York, would also be the hottest during a heat wave.”

“Actually, it isn’t the most congested. Fifty-seventh and Sixth, for instance, or Forty-second and Lex, as another example, are probably way more”—No, still all wrong, or mostly. “And that is where you’re from, isn’t it?” the man with the dog says, or without one. Just two men without baby, dog, stick or anything who have walked toward each other from opposite ends of the cove. “You’re Magna’s husband if I’m not mistaken, and according to my stepfather, Turner Haskell, you drove up from there a few days ago.”

“Oh, how do you do, I’m Will Taub. We’ve been meaning to drop in to say hello to Mr. Haskell, but we’ve been so busy with a million things that we haven’t had time yet. But where do you know Magna from — summers here?”

“Summers, once or twice — we only visit for a week every other year — though also through colleagues and mutual friends. My wife’s in her field. We hear you had a baby over the winter.”

“Nine months tomorrow — a girl. In fact, babyproofing entails half the million things we’ve been doing”—No, back again, just about everything’s wrong. One man’s on the beach, holding his baby girl. He’s standing in the middle of the cove in front of his dilapidated boathouse. He and his wife and child drove up from New York two days ago and this is the first chance he’s had to come down to the beach. Unpacking, shopping, cleaning, babyproofing the porch and house, putting up the mailbox, cutting back the alder, mowing, getting the lawnmower repaired, buying a washer and dryer, clearing a path to the woodshed and one to the beach. He’s been coming to this cottage for the last five summers. His wife started renting it three summers before that. The cottage wasn’t lived in for twenty years before she convinced the owners, who also had a winterized house in town, to let her open it. They thought nobody would want to live in it because everything in it was made or bought sixty years ago and the cottage was so run-down. She fixed it up, had part of the cottage rewired, bought a new water pump. Something like that. A phone installed, and also an electric stove. The rent was that cheap. He only knows of this part of Maine because of his wife. She started coming to it six years before he met her. Six and a half to be exact. They met in November, the following June they flew to Bangor, rented a car at the airport and drove to the cottage. Now they own a car. They’d like to buy the cottage. They’ve lived in Baltimore for the last two years but stayed for a week with his wife’s parents in New York. His wife first came to this peninsula to visit her dissertation adviser and his family. That professor and his wife have since split up and sold their cottage. The man with the baby and his wife also teach and are on vacation for the next two months. The professor visited them here last year and his former wife will stay a week with them this summer. Go back. He and his child are on a beach, forget about getting there, why they’re there — they are there. Man and baby, or just he’s there. He took the baby down before but it was too hot and sunny for her — he forgot her bonnet — so he brought her back to the cottage, left her with his wife on the fenced-in porch, and went back to the beach. The beach there is a cove that’s part of the property they rent. He sees at the end of the cove a man sitting on a rock and looking at the lighthouse in the bay. The end of the cove is called something but he forgets the word. The arm, promontory, reach — none of those. The “end of the cove” will do. It extends into the water, is shaped like the end of a crescent and is the beginning of the next cove in that direction. Will’s in the middle of this cove, his cove. The man’s sitting and looking out at the water. Maybe the man’s looking at the lighthouse which is on an island about a mile away. The man stands and starts walking toward Will. If the man keeps walking at that regular pace it should take him several minutes to reach Will. Less, of course, if Will walks toward him and the man continues walking. Will walks toward the man, but only because he did come down to the beach to walk. To go from cove to cove and then after resting at the end of one, to go back. He could walk in the other direction and would prefer to, since he doesn’t like meeting strangers on the beach, but the sun would be facing him. It’ll be facing him coming back, but because of the reason he came down to walk on the beach, he wants to avoid the sun now more than he wants to avoid the stranger. So the man who was sitting at the end of the cove is now walking toward Will. He wonders who the man coming toward him is. Will wonders the same thing about the man. The man thinks Jesus, it’s hot, why the hell did he ever come down here? He’ll be glad when he gets back to the house. Will thinks he should’ve stayed on the shaded part of the porch. But he wanted to get away from the cottage, to take a long walk and let his mind wander. What comes into his head is that he left hot Baltimore to stay for a week in hot New York to come to an even hotter Maine. But it’ll be mostly pleasant during the days and nights for the next two months while in Baltimore and New York it won’t. The hot sticky weather must be traveling north because the radio this morning said that fairer drier weather was predicted for New York tomorrow and for New Hampshire the day after and for this part of Maine the day after that. The temperature and humidity when they left New York two days ago was in the mid-nineties. When they stopped for the night at a motel just over the Maine-New Hampshire border the weather was about the same as it was in New York. When they got to the cottage yesterday — No, he has his days mixed up. They got to the cottage two days ago, left New York the day before that. Today was the first chance he had to come down to the beach. The man’s a few feet from him now and says hello. Will says hello.

Hot enough for you?” the man says, neither of them stopping.

“I’ll tell you, worse than it was where I drove up from.”

They’ve smiled at one another, now pass one another. Will continues to the end of the cove. The man continues to the other end. Every now and then one of them looks back at the other. One time each looks back at about the same time and sees the other looking at him.

“Caught me,” Will says.

Just looking, the other man thinks — not having much else to do, so just looking. But he doubts, knowing what he knows about him and his wife, that he’s the type to mind somebody crossing his beach property which really isn’t his. Which really isn’t anybody’s but everybody’s, one could say. Say, that’s not bad, even if he really means from the high water mark down. He just wishes his stepfather was the type to also believe it.

The man continues to the end of the cove and then goes around it and heads for the stairs in the middle of his stepfather’s cove. When Will looks back again he doesn’t see the man. On the next cove, he thinks. For a while he didn’t want to look back because he didn’t want to get caught again and have the man think he was spying on him. The man looks back again but only when he hears a seagull squawking. The gull flies over his head, dives to about fifteen feet of him, sweeps up, circles him twice — all the time squawking fiercely at him — and then flies back to the end of the cove and settles on a rock and seems to stare at him. He must have got too close to its nest, he thinks, when eggs or chicks were in it. Then he tums back to the stairs when he hears his grandchildren approaching them from the road. No, go back again. Two men. Maine. Its northern coast. Hot. Humid. Morning. Beach. Cove. Lobster boat dropping a trap about three hundred feet out in the water. No. One man, no boat, dusk, northern coast, cooler, orange-green striped sky. The man sits on a rock in front of a boathouse in the middle of the cove. He’s tired. He did a lot of work today. Fenced in the porch, built two gates for it, scythed the overgrown grass around the cottage and then mowed it, two car trips to a town twenty miles away to get fencing and gate materials and a lawnmower part. He’s holding a gin and tonic. He’s showered and changed clothes and in a half-hour he’ll have dinner. He’s already cooked for his wife and himself and all he has to do when he gets back to the cottage is heat up the pot on the stove and take out the pan in the oven. He looks at the lobster boat in the water. Too far from shore and late in the day to be lobstering so probably going home. He thinks of the man he saw on the cove before. He was walking behind a woman and four children and a dog. He only had a baby with him. The baby wore a blue bonnet and pink overalls and the man with the drink in his hand couldn’t tell if it was a girl or boy. The men said hello to each other, then passed one another. The man with the drink was returning from a short walk to the end of the cove. The man holding the baby looked familiar — not someone he knows personally or knew long ago but a public personality perhaps — an author, politician, TV newsman, someone whose face has been in the news lately, maybe a stage or movie actor. Back again. No men passing, no man on the beach. A quiet cove, except for a lobster boat far out in the water. Dusk, multicolored striped sky. No boat. Plain sky. Just a buoy ringing. No buoy. No sounds. Maybe the wind passing through the trees that line the cove. No wind. Trees along the cove stay. The old boathouse stays. A half-filled glass on a rock in front of the boathouse. The ice in it melted. A slice of lime in it.