Pacific Beat

Thought: the first temptation. Small thoughts at first, always pleasant, always manageable. But betrayal and love both happen by degrees. They’re like two snakes, patiently swallowing the mouse of marriage from different ends. To be honest — honest to myself — I have to say that I think about David incessantly. Mostly, I wonder about who he really is, how he’s managed to affect me so strongly after not seeing him for twenty-five years. I want to expose the change in him, see for myself exactly what his success and power had cost him. I want to know what he was hiding. Aren’t we all hiding something? Sometimes, though, all I can think about is what if. What if we’d run away like we said we would, what if we’d had that girl and she’d been born alive, what if we’d married each other like we promised we would when we were young, dumb, gloriously in-love kids? I want to see him. Not to be close, really, but just to see. Who is this man? Who am I, to be drawn to him, still, again?

Over the past three weeks, I’ve seen him seven times, always at night after work. Twice, he’s come in for a late dinner, where, of course, we are polite and formal. We write every day, almost. He signs his letters Mr. Night because we joked about not existing in daylight. The first three times I saw him, we took the limo, but I made a crack about preferring something on a more human scale. So there I am, walking through the alley at 11:30 on a cold, windy night, and there’s no limo in sight. There’s just a busted-up old Volkswagen bug, and David’s at the wheel, all wrapped up in a thick coat. No Egyptian cotton and Italian linen, just a pair of jeans and a faded rugby shirt and the jacket. But the windows of the bug are darkened so no one can see in. Pure David. We roared down Balboa to PCH, then headed south into the Back Bay. He had a bottle of brandy wrapped in a brown bag, which we passed back and forth. Cut the chill, and went straight to my head. We drove through a chain-link gate and into a dock that said PRIVATE.

I gave the bottle to him and he took a swig. The sight of C. David Cantrell drinking brandy from a paper bag was something just too wonderful for words.

So we walked the Back Bay with the wind to our backs and the brandy going back and forth between us. When we were way out in the middle of nowhere, he turned to me, offered his arm, and I took it. Ann, he said, I can’t get you out of my mind. I saw you on the Lady of the Bay and something jumped up inside me I didn’t know was there. I get up in the morning, and there you are. I go through my day, and every second I’m not completely focused on something, there you are again. I go to sleep, my head a few inches from Christy’s — and all I’m thinking about is you. I’m afraid she can hear it, sometimes.

You might be surprised, I said.

He looked at me sharply and we walked farther. The moon was low over the hills, a perfect half, like it was cut with a knife and the other part had fallen out of the sky.

Can I ask you something? he said.

He brooded for a minute. What is there about a brooding man? Please ask me something, I said.

What... what are you doing here?

I was surprised at how little I wanted to be asked that question. I’d managed to avoid it. Not so much to avoid it, but to glide over it, consider it a mystery unfolding, a flower not to be picked. But the moment he asked, I knew the answer. I asked him if he remembered the Seabreeze.

He looked at me, his face a pale oval in the darkness. I knew he remembered it, our place, just a dumpy motel down the peninsula — no view, no pool, no TV. That was where he took me when I was fifteen and he was twenty-one and still in college, our little love nest, our world of damp sheets and sweat and smells. It sounds now like nothing more than an almost-grown man taking advantage of a girl, and maybe in a court of law you could prove that’s what it was. But that wasn’t it at all. It was the place and time I first felt love for a man, and it was a love so pure and uncomplicated, I never forgot it. One night we had spent hours in each other’s arms — like the other nights there — and we just knew it was time. I wasn’t terrified — I was famished. I wasn’t after pleasure — I was after completion. I told him I was ready for him, and he unfolded my arms from around him and my legs from over his, and he touched me from top to bottom with his warm, patient hands, and a hundred years later he kissed me and I guided that hard, wet knot into myself and I felt totally, absolutely invaded, punctured, possessed. I could feel myself hurtling through dark space. I could feel Ann the girl falling away from me. And it wasn’t an anguished fall, but a contented one, and in her place I felt for the first time Ann the woman stepping forth into being. I felt trembling, given, and, strangely, empowered. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it might. What I remember most about that night is lying there with him afterward, my head against his chest while he stroked my back, feeling, knowing, that I now occupied the world as a woman, that my world was small and simple and bursting with love, and that this world would never be so secure again, never be so complete, never be so welcoming. These were moments to be honored. Nine months later, lying knees-wide in that hospital in upstate New York, came the coda I somehow knew would end this lovely little beach-town symphony. Life and love, truth and consequence, birth and death, all neatly arranged in a bacteriostatic room of gleaming metal and hovering, masked forms — the employees of fate itself. And not once, not even when the pain finally took me out — or was it the drugs — would I have done it any differently, as if that mattered at all.

“I wondered if I could feel again what I felt then,” I said. “I know that there aren’t many things in the world that could sound more ridiculous. I guess I’ve gotten dumber in the last twenty-five years.”

“No,” he said quietly. “No.”

And what of Raymond, my husband of two decades, my companion, my brother, my man? Dear Raymond, if you ever were to read this, your heart might break, but if I could explain it right, you would see that what I did was never meant to be at your expense. Is this my grandest lie of all? Maybe. I will admit this: My love for Raymond was never like my love for David. To me, Raymond was a refuge from the loss of Little Warm and David, a way to put aside what I’d felt at the Seabreeze. David was a world; Raymond was a living room. But I needed that room so badly. And if I never felt for him what I knew I was capable of feeling, that never once meant I could not treat him with respect and kindness, help build him as a man, be proud of him, focus my torn, divided affections on him. It does not mean I ever once wavered in my duty to him as a woman and a friend. It does not mean that I ever stroked his dark hair with anything but tenderness, that I ever diminished him in order to control him. I invested in Raymond all the faith I had to give, the ultimate faith, maybe. I believed he would love me forever, even when the days came and he would want a child that I could not give him. And there was one other difference, too, between the two men, a difference that became more and more important to me as the years went by. David may have called up something I couldn’t find again, but Raymond needed me. I may have craved being in the orbit of something larger than myself, but I was honored that Raymond would let me be that for him. No two people can love each other equally. I loved Raymond less than he loved me, but never — at least never until now — did I exploit that. Years ago, Raymond’s look began to harden and his movements took on the first jittery attitudes of anger. His distance grew wider and deeper and his silences seemed to stretch for week upon week. The basic struggle of life finally began to dull him and transform me — in his heart — from someone he wanted to please into someone whom pleasing was an exhausting, impossible obligation. But never, never did I ask him to love me more, or better, or again, or even at all. Not once did I make a demand or utter a disappointment. Half a year ago, when he stopped making love to me, stopped touching me at all, in fact, I let him without complaint move into whatever thing was calling him. It seemed the very least a barren woman could do for the man she’d married, fully aware of her limited future. But right now, incredible as it seems, I can truly say that the more I think about David — and what happened that night — the more I believe that my marriage is not in question. I believe that my marriage is strong enough to take this. If there is a wrong calculation here, there will be much suffering ahead, for all of us.

So we drove to the Seabreeze. I registered. Same room, same smell off the ocean, same traffic spinning by just a few feet away, same damp mildewed air and wrapped water glasses and little bars of pink soap. It was all the same, only smaller. When we took each other in our arms, it felt like we were coming together from a thousand miles apart. I was absolutely terrified. The room was spinning and I was spinning with it, around David, the fixed center. I almost laughed at how preposterous this was, but he kissed me. Then, slowly, his familiarities began to come back: the stiff muscles in his neck, how long his lashes were when he closed his eyes, the patient hunger, the comforting smell of his breath through the brandy — the same after twenty-five years! So I didn’t feel like laughing anymore and I just fell into the spin and let him take me to the bed.

Did I get it back, that feeling I’d had all those years ago?

Partly. What I felt when we were done this time was not that my whole life lay in front of me, but how profoundly it all had changed. I did feel again that lostness inside this man, the irresistible pull of him. But as I lay there beside him and looked out to the cold, clear night, I knew that what was ahead for us was not a love that promised togetherness and marriage and a family, but a love that promised heartbreak, confusion, and treachery. And yet, for a few moments, I was someone different; I was not Ann Cruz of the two jobs and the distant husband and the dumb routines of the same neighborhood I’d lived in for all my life. I was Ann Weir, a woman desiring and to be desired.

And let me say this to you, Dear One — even though you’ll never read this — I knew when we finished that night — the blessed night of March 23 — that you were inside me, beginning to grow. No scientist on earth can tell me that a woman can’t know.

I knew. It was like stepping into a dream you’ve always had. I lay back in that little motel bed and closed my eyes and said a prayer of thanks for you. And I asked God to show me what to do, this unvirgin Mary with child whose husband hadn’t touched her in so many months.

I can’t stop. I don’t want to. On the nights I can’t see him, it feels like my body just might drive over there on its own and wait. I can’t go when Raymond is working the peninsula beat — that would be an insane risk. When I don’t go to David, I take one of Mom’s dinghys out to Sweetheart Deal and write in this book. We meet in his beach house down the peninsula now — safer than the Seabreeze and a lot nicer, too. Sometimes we go aboard his yacht, Lady of the Bay. It was his boat we met on again, and I didn’t realize it for weeks! I get there at eleven, after work, use the garage-door opener he gave me to slide in unseen, then shower upstairs in the big bedroom, put on some fresh clothes — or not — and wait. Sometimes, if I’m late, I’ll change at work in the downstairs rest room and hope nobody sees me between the door and my car. I can see the ocean from the bed, twinkling across the sand. He always comes at eleven-thirty. Then we have until twelve-thirty, when I have to shower again, then dress myself on trembling knees, and go home. One hour. I live for it, and I feel, all this time, your presence inside me, Dear One, so patient and so warm. You, my miracle of all miracles, my secret life!

To my shock, Raymond has begun to seem happier these days than at any time in the last year. There is a minor intimacy in his looks, a gentle, growing lightness when we talk. I see him watching me sometimes when he thinks I’m not noticing. Little bits of that old adoration seem to be coming back to him. It is wonderful to see. And it is so necessary, so absolutely important, to what I want to accomplish.

Dear One, though you will never read this, I must tell you that I know what I will do, already. There was never any doubt about it. In the strangest of ways, you have given me everything that I had ever wanted in my life, and in the strangest of ways, you have given the same thing to Raymond.

I believe I am being watched. I will also be the first to admit I am afraid, vastly afraid of being discovered, but still, when I discount my fear and look at the facts, I have to believe that I am being watched.

First was that time back in February, at work. I was lacing Tyler’s shoestring and I felt eyes on me. When I looked up, there was this kid up the sidewalk, standing still while a gaggle of tourists parted and passed by him, looking straight at me and Tyler. He turned, joined the crowd, and disappeared. I say a kid: He looked about twenty maybe, an average beach kid.

Then a couple of days later, I got the feeling again. When I looked around, I didn’t see anyone, until I noticed one of those little dinghys they rent at the Pavilion, and there was a man sitting in it right offshore, with a camera held up to his face, aimed at me. A big yacht slid by between us, and when I looked again, the dinghy had taken off. The first thing I thought was Raymond. He hired a man to shoot me and expose my unfaithfulness. But why shoot me with the kids? Then I wondered if it was David. No. Why would he want me photographed?

I asked Ray about it, and he said I was probably just making it up. But, he said, the best way to expose a tail was to double back a lot, and keep an eye out for who was still behind you. So I tried that a bunch — walking to work on the nights I wasn’t going to David’s, going back and forth to the preschool, strolling down the bayfront on my Sunday afternoons off. It never worked. Like I said to Ray, it wasn’t that I was being followed, I was being watched.

He said it was the mark of a guilty conscience.

We were up early, Ray getting ready to head up to school for a contracts examination, I bound for the preschool.

But I don’t have a guilty conscience, I said. You can imagine, Dear One, how guilty it truly was.

Maybe you just think you don’t, he said with a smile.

Well then tell me, what is it I feel so guilty about?

God, I wonder if my color showed. I have to hand it to myself, I’m a pretty good liar. So was Poon.

I don’t know, he said. You’d have to tell me.

He was looking at me with calm interest.

I nodded, glanced at the newspaper spread out on the table before us, and thought before I spoke. “The only thing I feel guilty about is not being able to have your children.”

“Then you’d have felt followed — watched — for fifteen years. Have you?”

No, I told him. Just a couple of weeks.

Ray was quiet for a while, looking down at the paper.

I could arrange surveillance, he said.

I told him not to. God, imagine that.

I’m serious, he said.

For a moment, he looked like a boy, acting serious. There is something so decent, so genuine about Raymond. That something, if I had to name it, is generosity. Even if he thinks I’m making something up, he’s generous enough to suspend his disbelief and put himself in my shoes. Jim — your Uncle Jim — always said Raymond was a good cop because he could anticipate. I think he’s a good cop because he can put himself in the bad guy’s shoes. Sometimes I think that it has broken my heart to betray him. But it hasn’t, because my betrayal has yielded you, Dear One, the great gift to us.

A long pause, Raymond looking at me. I can tell you, as a thirty-nine-year-old woman who isn’t totally dumb, that Raymond Cruz has the most penetrating eyes on earth. They cut in without hurting you, they’re so sharp. I have always found it astonishing how hard Raymond tried to turn them off, how often he just blinks and turns away while his eyes are cutting in, ready to snip off the truth like a cluster of grapes from the vine. Sometimes I think it’s because he’s afraid of what he’ll find. Sometimes I think he’s just being polite. I’m sure he doesn’t offer his suspects such courtesy.

But that morning, he didn’t turn them off me.

Is there something going on, Ann? he asked.

Like what, baby? I don’t understand what you’re asking.

His eyes kept coming in — exploring, finding?

“I’m asking you, Ann.”

“Well... no. I feel good. Everything except that feeling of being watched.”

He waited. Raymond can wait for hours.

But I can escalate.

Maybe you’re right, I said. I’m still willing to talk about adoption.

He looked back to his newspaper, sipped his coffee, shook his head. No.

I have held out for adoption for years. Sometimes I could almost feel that bawling little bundle in my arms. But deep down inside, whenever I imagined that bundle and knew that it was neither mine nor his, all the joy drained out of the scene and I felt only falsehood in it. Even though I’d offered this option to Raymond as unflinchingly as I could, there was never the conviction behind it I would have wanted. Certainly, that Ray would have wanted.

But beyond that, there was the other reason we never adopted, the bigger reason. Hope. We were still both under forty. We were still healthy, even though my uterus was destroyed — damaged, I know now — by infection after Little Warm. Raymond thought the scar and the damage was from an acute appendectomy I had had in France. France is where Poon and Virginia told everyone I was going, as an exchange student. I told Raymond about the operation before we got engaged, when he was sixteen and I was eighteen, and there was never any question from him. When the gynecologists later pronounced me unable to conceive or carry a child, I pretended to be as shocked and disappointed as he was. In so many ways, ways that I’ll never be able to express to Raymond, I truly was. But still, there is that grand, eternal, lifesaving illusion called hope, and Raymond would never let it go. Maybe it was the saints he prayed to, maybe it was his faith in the Virgin Mother, maybe it was the only log floating in the stormy sea around him that he could grasp. Since we first “discovered” I couldn’t bear children, Raymond never once has capitulated. He never once admitted defeat. He used to read to me all the biblical tales of women who were barren, rewarded by God with sons and daughters. He used to pray with me for long hours, begging for a child. Only in the last two years have I thought that Ray really began to doubt, when he enrolled suddenly in law school, when his embraces started to vanish and his words to dry up and his interest in me as a woman seemed finally buried by the thousand burdens that plague this decent, trusting man. And I? Who was I to blame him? I wish I could tell you this, Dear One, that until you came along I had begun to lose hope, too. Hope. Perhaps we will name you that, if you’re a girl.

We can keep on trying, I said.

I’d like to, he said, his ears flushing red. He swigged down his coffee, stood, and leaned over and pecked my cheek.

I’m late, baby. Have a great day.

You, too, I said. I’m okay, baby. Don’t worry. This thing about being watched, just my dumb imagination.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” I said, like I always did. There was more truth in it than I knew, Dear One.

I am three weeks pregnant, as confirmed by the drugstore test. Of course, I already know that!

I stopped by St. Mary’s Church and went in, and knelt down before the pew and prayed. But I prayed with one hand in my lap and the other upon my womb, feeling for you, Dear One, feeling for you. And I prayed for Raymond to make love to me, soon.

David sat on the bed as I told him. At first, he disbelieved, then, slowly, it all sank in. I told him I had decided to have you, Dear One, for Raymond, as Raymond’s. I told him that for a while — a long while, probably — he and I should not see each other. It was simply too dangerous, and too difficult for me. He listened to me, then he came over and put his arms around me and let me cry on his shoulder. I still can’t tell you whether they were tears of sadness or tears of joy — maybe both. Then he pulled away and looked at me and said that he would help me in any way he could. Love me, I said. Let me count you as a friend.

I do, he said. You can.

He went to the window and stood with his back to me, looking out to the sea as if it were a future that he hadn’t planned, developed, built, created for himself. A future imposed on him, instead of his imposed on everyone else. Truly, it was. He looked so helpless.

I assured him that your future, Dear One, was in my hands, and mine alone. That you and I had a family to start, that we would orbit away from him to form a little galaxy of our own, that we were really a family of four and that I would be tied to him by love and by you, Dear One, until the day I died. And as I looked at him, I could see the trenches of disappointment in his face, the etchings of defeat.

I understand men. I understand that greatness is a louder call than decency, that ambition is a stronger desire than love. I understand that to be a great shortstop you must love a white leather-covered ball of twine more than anything in life. That to be a great general you must love the risk of war more than peace. And that to be a land developer you must love buildings and land and money more than you could ever love a near middle-aged waitress you knocked up in high school and knocked up again twenty-five years later in a motel that smelled like mildew.

So I understand what he said next, but I will never forget how small it made him seem, how small and shrunken it showed him to be.

“You won’t ever talk about the Duty Free, will you?”

The Duty Free. She was a cute little Chris-Craft that belonged to Dale, a Newport cop. Mom rode along with him on the Toxic Waste patrol, to find out who was dumping in the harbor. I went along, too, twice with Mom. One time, we saw the dumpers’ boat, but I could hardly see it at all in the fog. Only Dale really saw it, or said he did. Another time, I tried to go out, because I was home alone on a night I couldn’t see David and I was out of my mind with nerves. So I went to where they kept Duty Free, where Mom and I had gone to meet these men — Cheverton Sewer & Septic — and I watched Dale and Louis Braga fill the bait tank with canisters of something from Blake-Hollis Chemical, and load on a bunch of fifty-five gallon drums, too. Their jaws dropped as I walked up and asked them if I could go along. But I played dumb. I acted like I hadn’t seen them fill the tank or load the drums on board and cover them with a tarp. And when they told me it wasn’t a good night for me to go, I humbly accepted and apologized and gladly left. Of course, I knew who owned Blake-Hollis. So one night later, being more frivolous than anything, I told David I knew his secret: I knew the Toxic Waste patrol was dumping more into the ocean than they ever prevented, and if he had a heart as big as I thought he did, he’d stop it. Since he owns Blake-Hollis, that is.

You would not believe, Dear One, the look on your father’s face when I said that.

He was furious. I thought I knew by then when he was innocent and when he only wished he was. He asked me for everything I knew about Duty Free, over and over again. What I’d seen and who had been there. He even wrote something down. While he paced the room, he gave me the most hateful glances.

Then later, so very casually, he asked me if I’d said anything to Mom about loading the stuff onto Duty Free.

I told him no. And I wouldn’t. I don’t mix politics and love, Dear One, and I hope you never do. As far as I was concerned, David could just as easily get his henchmen to dump somewhere else. I told him I was doing him a favor, because deep inside, I knew that Mom or someone like her would catch him sooner or later.

He said again he knew nothing about any dumping by one of his companies, and that he would look into it.

I doubted then that he was telling me the truth, but never since that day have I had a solid reason to doubt him. David is too thorough to have something so obvious land in the lap of someone so disinterested as me. It wasn’t like there were fish dying everywhere, or birds dropping from the sky. The drums might have been full of water for all I really knew. Plus, with all the money he gives away to charity and hospitals and the college — millions every year, I’ve read — I figured maybe he really didn’t know what Dale was doing with the Blake-Hollis Chemical waste.

But I was surprised to have hit such a sore spot. I decided to leave it alone. I was not put on earth to rectify David Cantrell’s soul, I thought. There are more capable agencies around — in heaven and on earth — to deal with that.

But there it came again, on the day I told him about You, that fantastic fear he had of what I had seen. Dear One, I was shamed for us both.

“David,” I said quietly. “Your secret will die with me.”

Raymond found me in the bathroom this morning, sitting on the toilet seat, crying. His eyes looked down on me, those cutting dark blades, and I almost told him everything. Almost. But I diverted him again. I played into the one thing I can always get his attention with — and told him I was crushed for the millionth time that I couldn’t have his child.

Then it happened, what I had been craving for so long, what I needed to accomplish my plan. He reached down, pulled me up from the toilet, and kissed the tears off my miserable, slobbering face. He led me into our cold little bedroom and put me under the covers and climbed in naked beside me and covered with his tender mouth every inch of my body and made love to me. And when I looked up at him, Raymond — my husband, my brother, my man — he was crying, too, big tears spilling down onto my face, and I drank them into me along with everything else he had.

And when it was over, he said to me Ann, can we start again? Can we please start it all over and love each other like we used to? It’s been so long and I want you so much and there’s nothing in the world I love like you.

It is amazing how clear the answers can be, once the questions are put. From the very beginning of this whole thing, in my mind at least, there was never any doubt about what I wanted from Raymond, where I hoped that we would someday arrive.

“Please,” I told him. “Please let’s do that.”

I have never in my life uttered a sentence that I meant more, or that seemed more filled with the glorious scent of hope.

I will wait two weeks before I do another pregnancy test. We will run it together, so my surprise will be his surprise. We will have a party to announce the unannounceable!