Varieties of Disturbance

Cape Cod Diary

I listen to the different boats’ horns, hoping to learn what kind of boat I’m hearing and what the signal means: is the boat leaving or entering the harbor; is it the ferry, or a whale-watching boat, or a fishing boat? At 5:33 p.m. there is a blast of two deep, resonant notes a major third apart. On another day there is the same blast at 12:54 p.m. On another, at exactly 8:00 a.m.

The boats seem to come and go at all hours, and last night I could still hear their engines sounding well into the early morning. The pier is so far away, though, that the boats are the size of dominoes and their engines can be heard only when the town is quiet.

I am staying by the harbor in a damp little blue-and-white room that smells faintly of gas from the stove. The only people I see are an old couple who live just outside town. Sometimes they have visitors as old as they are, and then they invite me to have dinner or tea with them.

I work in the mornings and early afternoon, then I go out to get my mail. If I shop, I might buy a pencil sharpener, a folder, some paper, and a postcard. Another day, I might buy some fruit, some crackers, and a newspaper.

It is the beginning of August. I am not sure I should stay for the whole month. This may be a good place to work. My neighbors are quiet and I do not even have a telephone. Still, I’m not sure. I am trying to plan out how it would be. I can work most of the day. I can visit the two old people. I can write many letters. I can walk to the library. I can swim. What is missing?

A storm is coming, and the gulls cry over the streets. They have come over the land away from the storm. There is a heavy smell of fish in the air.

A short gust of wind, then calm, then the sea is dark gray and the rain comes down hard, and the wind blows against the awnings. My neighbor in the room above goes to his door, then begins walking around over my head.

To get to the beach from my room I go down the narrow boardwalk between two wooden buildings, mine and the motel next door. The two buildings lean together above me as I pass the windows of the motel apartments, waist high; at certain hours women are working in the kitchens, and there are snatches of conversations in the living rooms. These people seem louder and at the same time more stationary because they are idle and on vacation.

The different groups of people here: the year-round residents, who are sometimes artists and often shop owners; the tourists, who come in couples and families and are generally large, young, healthy, tanned, and polite; of these tourists, most are American, but some are French Canadian, and of these, some do not speak English; Portuguese fishermen, but they are harder to discover; some Portuguese who are not fishermen but whose fathers or grandfathers were fishermen; some fishermen who are not Portuguese.

I looked at whale jawbones in the museum this morning. Then I did some shopping. Whenever I go into the drugstore it seems that many people are buying condoms and motion sickness medicine.

Fog comes in over the next hill, foghorns sound, now and then boats whistle. Waves of mist blow like curtains, or smoke.

The noises here at different times of day: At 5:00 a.m., when sunlight pours into this room, there is relative quiet that continues until after 8:30. Then there is increasing noise from the street: after 10:00 a.m., a gentle Central American music, constant, inoffensive plucking and pinging, as well as the sound of passing cars, voices in conversation, the clatter of silverware from an upstairs terrace restaurant across the street, car engines turning over in the parking lot to one side of my room, people calling out to each other, laughing and talking, and all of this then continues through the day and the evening and past midnight.

I will probably not think about the whale jawbones once I am home again. I have noticed that it is only when I am at the seaside, for one short period of the year, though not every year, that the things of the sea become interesting to me — the shells, the creatures, even the seaweed; the boats and how they are built and what their functions are; and nautical history, including the history of whaling. Then, when my visit is over, I go away and I don’t think about them.

For two days I did not speak to anyone, except to ask for my mail at the post office and say hello to the friendly checkout woman at the small supermarket.

When the storm began today I heard the footsteps of the man who lives above me going across to the door that leads out to his deck, pausing there for a while, and coming away again. The ceiling is low, and the sound of these footsteps is a very loud crunch, so that I feel they are almost on my head. When he comes home, first I hear the clanging of the street gate, then his brisk steps down the concrete walk of the alley, then the hollow wooden clatter as he climbs the stairs inside the building, then the loud crunch over my head. Steps in one direction, steps in another, then steps crisscrossing over my ceiling. Then there is silence — he may be reading or lying down. I know he also paints and sculpts, and when I hear the radio going I think that is what he is doing.

He is a friendly man in late middle age with a loyal group of friends. I discovered this one of the first nights I was here. He had been away in the city for a few days celebrating his aunt’s hundredth birthday, as I heard him tell his friends, and was loudly welcomed back by a hoarse-voiced, middle-aged woman trailing a string of other people standing outside our building in the alley. They had come by to see if he was back. I know he is friendly because of a smile and greeting he gave me on his way into the building once, a greeting that lifted my spirits.

Sometimes there are loud thumps from above. At other times he seems to be standing still, and there is something a little mysterious and disturbing in the stillness, since I have trouble imagining what he is doing. Sometimes I hear just a few notes from a saxophone, the same notes repeated the same way a few times or just once before he stops and does not play again, as though something were wrong with the instrument.

There are two buildings on this property, one fronting the street and the other behind it, by the beach, with a small garden in between. My low, ground-floor room does not look out on the beach but on the damp garden. Each house is divided into apartments or rooms, maybe six in all. The landlady sells antique jewelry from a store in the building on the street. Most of the people who live in the buildings have seasonal work here and come to these rooms every summer. They are all quiet and sober, as the landlady made very clear before I moved in. She calls my room an apartment, even though it is just a room, as though there were something vulgar about the word room.

I was wrong about my neighbor upstairs. He is not the friendly man who once greeted me. He is barely polite. He has silver hair and a silver goatee and an unpleasant expression around his bulbous nose.

I was also wrong about the saxophone, which is not played by the man upstairs but by my neighbor across the patch of garden, a woman with a dog.

All week long I had heard people saying there would be a storm. I went out onto the beach, into its first fury, to see it hit the water. After I had stood for a while sheltering my face under my hand and watching the buildings on the piers in the distance vanish behind the curtains and sheets of rain, I went down to the water’s edge, where the wind was much stronger, to see more closely how the rain hit the water. A man in a yellow slicker was dragging a rowboat up onto the sand. The wind came in so hard that it lifted the rowboat and turned it over. It lifted and flung the sand against my legs, stinging them. I took shelter under the motel deck next door, which is up on stilts off the beach. On the deck over my head, plastic chairs were being slung around and tumbled into corners by the wind.

Now the rain is coming down steadily, and the streets, which were empty at the beginning of the storm, are filling with people again, and there is, again, a heavy fish smell in the air. I have hung my clothes to dry from nails in the beams and posts of my room, so that it is a forest of damp garments swaying in the gusts of wind from the door and the windows.

The essay is taking shape now. As the time passes here, time is passing in the travels of the French historian. I trace and describe his itinerary through this country; he progresses, I progress in the essay, and the days pass. I am coming to feel that he is more my companion, in this room, than the live people in this town. This morning, for instance, because in my imagination I had been traveling with him ever since dawn, I felt I was not here in this seaside town but in a damp river valley some hundreds of miles to the west of here. I was in the previous century. This morning, the historian was watching fireworks from a boat in the middle of a broad river. For him it was evening.

It is not an easy piece of writing. I understand the information in the sources I am using, but I have no general background knowledge to draw on. I am afraid it will be very easy for me to make a mistake.

From within the town I look out at the harbor and across the harbor to the sea beyond. The horizon is very far away. But that view itself, because it hardly changes, becomes a sort of confinement. The streets, too, teeming with people, seem always the same. I feel as though I were knocking up against myself at every turn. I am sometimes almost in a panic. That may be because I am also knocking up against the limits of what I can do with this work.

Yesterday I went a little way out of town, far enough to leave the houses behind. I walked past low hills covered with scrub brush and dead oaks, and dunes covered with dune grass, and then a marsh of bright green reeds cut through with channels of clear water.

But I can see that this, though it was so fresh to me today, and such a relief, would become dull, too, if I watched it from my window every day from a house outside town, and then I would need a glimpse of what I can see here: the stone breakwater, the two piers stretching out into the water, the small boats all pointing the same way, the one big, old hulk beached at low tide and leaning to one side; and in the streets the thick crowds constantly stopping at shop windows; the carriages and horses with women drivers wearing men’s formal black suits, their blond hair in topknots; the motley people in a row on the bench before the town hall watching the others walk and drive by; the tall black transvestite who strides up the street in a sequin-covered red dress away from the Crown and Anchor Hotel; the tall white transvestite who stands next to the hotel with his dress open over one lean leg all the way up to his hip, a creased angry look about his long nose under his wig and above his red lips. They are advertising a show at the hotel.

The hotel is a large establishment almost directly across from the plain and tranquil old Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, which is set back from the busy street over an unadorned rectangle of lawn. The church was built in 1874 and is now being restored with the help of a fund raised by a group of painters here. The painters are the most famous inhabitants of this place, along with the writers. Earlier inhabitants were: the Portuguese fishermen and occasional Breton and English fishermen; the whalers; the Pilgrims who first landed here in 1620 and did not stay for three reasons, only two of which I can remember — the harbor was not deep enough and the Indians were not friendly; before them the Nauset and Pamet Indians themselves.

Today in the late afternoon I went to have a beer in the outdoor café next to the small public library, which is an old house shaded by an old oak with a circular wooden bench around its thick trunk. The waiter asked me, “Is there one in your party?” Edith Piaf was singing in the background. I said “Yes” and he brought my beer.

I am thinking about a recent mystery: On the day of the storm something washed ashore that was smooth, rubbery, and the size and shape of a dolphin’s nose, though not the right color. It might have been the back of an upholstered plastic seat from a boat. For a day or two it remained there, moving as the water moved it, sometimes in the water and sometimes on the sand, always in about the same place. Then I didn’t see it for a few days. Today as I was lying on the beach, a man in a ranger’s uniform went under the deck of the motel, dragged the thing out, and methodically tore it to pieces, separating it into different layers. Some layers he left lying on the sand, the rest of it he folded and carried away with him.

The faces of the tourists here reflect what they see all day long, the harbor, the old buildings, the other people in the streets, with openness, even wonder. Only when they look in the shop windows, and seem to consider buying something, do they lose some of their ease and joy. Their faces close into expressions of intentness, care, even exhaustion.

I have been with the old people again. It is restful to me after I have been working, though if the work has not gone well I will not see them at all, preferring to sit with the difficulty than to leave it behind.

When I have made a little progress I am glad to leave it and have their company. In contrast to the work, to the denseness of all the information I am trying to put in some order, their conversation is undemanding. The old woman will talk endlessly if I ask her a question or two; the old man listens to her and sometimes adds a brief comment of his own. They do not seem to notice if I do not talk. Nothing at all is required of me when one says to the other, “Did you take your pills?”

The old man often sits in the passenger seat of the car waiting for his wife to return from doing an errand. He tells me he likes to watch the people going past. He will wait almost any length of time if he can watch the people and think his thoughts, which he finds interesting. Today he saw three women approach together, one of them feeble-minded, as he called her, her head bobbing constantly. The leader of the group stopped by the hood of his car, set a pile of papers down on it, and began searching her purse for something. She took a long time searching and the old man sat there watching her directly in front of him and also watching the feeble-minded woman, who stood at the edge of the sidewalk all that time, her head bobbing.

At the end of one pier tonight, two men were casting far out for blue-fish. One remarked to the other that the slapping of the lure on the water over and over might be frightening the fish. At the other pier, fishing boats were lined up side by side, thick clumps of nets hanging from the masts, dinghies tied down onto the tops of cabins, stacks of new wooden crates on the decks, along with piles of baskets — only what was needed for the work.

From the beach, at dusk, I look back at the land and I see steeples against the sky, and, on a roof, what look like four white statues of women in robes against the sky, as in a cemetery, but then look more carefully and see that they are four white folded beach umbrellas with large knobs on top. In the water, small boats all point the same way on their moorings, only one suddenly will move independently, wandering a little and turning.

At night the Unitarian Universalist church burns a light in its steeple in remembrance of those lost at sea.

At the entrance of the alley, my alley, where it opens into the street, as at the mouth of a stream, there is the life of the street, turbulent, eddying, restlessly moving into the early hours of the morning.

At dawn I was woken by a thrashing in the patch of garden outside my door. It was a skunk caught in some brambles.

The travels of my French historian have taken him away from the damp river valley and out to the Midwest now. He is studying the structures of municipal governments in newly incorporated towns. This interests me only a little, but the historian himself is good company, and so his intelligence illuminates these subjects and they become tolerable.

Yesterday I took a walk in the rain and saw: tough-stemmed old stalks of Queen Anne’s lace with their several heads waving in the wind and banging against a gravestone; the cemetery that has been allowed to go wild and is posted with signs prohibiting overnight camping; a woman awkwardly turning her car in a dead-end lane and crushing some tall stands of purple loosestrife outside a fenced garden; the man in the garden on his knees weeding a flower bed; a uniformed nurse in a small paddock talking over the fence about her horse to a neighbor in the road; the oldest house in town, built of wood from wrecked ships, with a plaque in front of it describing its circular brick cellar, whose technical name was included, though I now forget what it was; a street called Mechanic Street.

Last Sunday I decided to go to church. It didn’t matter to me which one I went to. I was on my way to the Catholic church, St. Peter’s, with its onion-shaped steeple of dark painted wood, when the bell began to toll in the belfry of the Unitarian Universalist church; I was walking slightly uphill in a narrow lane where I could see the belfry close at hand; I changed my mind and went back down the lane, into the yard past the flea market on the front lawn, into the church building, and upstairs to the chapel itself with its trompe l’oeil interior. Even the columns that looked so real were not real columns; the sparse congregation and the minister might have been trompe l’oeil, too.

But the minister was a young woman from the Harvard Divinity School, full of information, with an emphatic and direct manner; the music played on the organ was well chosen and performed; the soloist sang well from the organ loft; and the hymns were familiar old ones. Downstairs, after the service, sweet lemonade was served, with rounds of toast covered with sliced egg and olives laid out on a table that stood between the door to the musty basement thrift shop and the outer doorway with its rectangle of bright sunlight.

Later, on the street, I was thinking about a funny story the minister had told. A bronzed man on a motorcycle with impenetrable dark glasses and a bandanna around his forehead passed me and gave me a long dark look. I had been smiling, inadvertently, at him.

Recent dreams about animals: I was about to take an exam given by Z. when a small animal, a shrew or a mouse, escaped and I went off to help catch it. At that point I discovered other loose animals, larger ones. I alerted people and tried to get the animals back into their cages. This was taking place in a school, and the animals were probably connected with the exam.

On another night I was the one who let four animals loose in a field — a brown-and-white goat, a palomino horse, and two other large animals whose descriptions I was going to advertise so that they could be recovered. I stood watching the horse gallop into the field among other horses.

Yesterday I was sitting in the back seat of the old people’s car. We were driving out to the ocean beach. The old man made a statement that shocked me, though neither he nor the old woman noticed it. I sat there shocked behind the old woman, who had great trouble driving straight into the setting sun.

I go for a long walk on a railroad track near the old people’s house. The rails have been taken up, and the bed is straight and narrow and visible ahead of me for a great distance. A thin, bearded man dressed in layers of ragged clothing comes ambling along toward me with his black dog, which ranges around him nosing in the underbrush. The old people’s cat, which has been walking with me, turns broadside to the dog and arches its back.

Last night, after midnight, walking barefoot near the kitchen sink, I stepped on something slippery and hard. On the mat lay what looked like some animal part, a glistening innard of uniform color and texture. I bent down to examine it: it was a slug. I was afraid I had killed it. I picked it up: it was cool and moist. As I held it in my palm, this dollop of glistening muscle, two bumps appeared at one end of it and then grew steadily into two long horns, as below them symmetrically two more bumps grew into slighter protrusions which I guessed were eyes, and at the same time the body thinned out and tensed, and then the slug set off and glided around my wrist and up my arm.

Tonight I heard the footsteps of a neighbor returning down the concrete path, then more footsteps, then many more all at once, and they continued so long and so steadily that I realized they were not footsteps: it was the rain. Heavy drops splashed on the leaves in the garden and on the planks of the wooden decks. Then, among the splashes of rain, I did hear the footsteps of a neighbor coming home, and it was the man above me, now walking over my ceiling.

Yesterday I rode a bicycle along a winding macadam trail past lily-choked ponds and through a thin forest of young beeches. On my way back, I stopped on the pier to watch fishermen mending their nets before they set out to sea. They pull large comblike implements through the squares of the net and tie knots in it. One man holds the net while the other does the mending with quick, economical motions. Small clusters of tourists stand on the pier above looking down at them respectfully where they work in the boats.

Not far away, three men fished off the pier for mackerel, casting again and again, pulling up silver fish that fought hard, all muscle, then unhooking them and slipping them carefully into a Styrofoam cooler where they flopped so violently that the cooler shook and thudded for a while after it was closed.

At the same time, a bright red oil truck was fueling the boats. It would stop next to them on the pier where they were tied two or three deep alongside and send the long hose down into one, over one into the next, and then into the third. At the same time, a steel cable that extended the length of the pier into what seemed to be a fish-packing shed was being wound mechanically onto a drum in one of the fishing boats. The winding went on and on. A group of tourists watched this carefully, too.

The tourists took pictures of the fishermen mending their nets. If a tourist asked a fisherman to smile, the fisherman would glance up soberly, with a neutral expression on his face, and keep still for the picture, but he would not smile.

I went out to eat recently with the two old people and two old friends of theirs. We sat in a room surrounded by water and they all ordered lobster. The plates came, and the red lobsters looked pretty lying on their lettuce leaves next to their little white cups of melted butter. Now the conversation died and the table was silent except for the furious cracking, pulling, and prying of those old people, who suddenly showed such competent physical strength, intent on destroying their lobsters.

People I see here: the clerk at the post office; the friendly checkout woman at the supermarket; my neighbors; my landlady; the woman across the garden, who once asked me in a neutral, curious tone what I was doing here; last night, a plump, gregarious off-duty bartender attending the free movie at the public library, though I did not speak to him. He wore a bandanna tied around his forehead and cowboy boots. He was there to see the 1954 movie, whose title I forget. Most of the small audience were old people calling back and forth to each other.

“Everybody’s here!” someone cried.

I felt I was included in “everybody,” though I was sitting by myself waiting for the movie to begin. I listened to the bartender talk to the other people. Then we all watched the movie.

A plumber came to my room yesterday to fix the shower. He told me his family had lived here for generations. He said that these days there isn’t much cod or haddock and the fishermen are taking shellfish off the Great Bank about six miles west of the tip of the land; the beds there seem to be inexhaustible.

I have seen great crates of these shellfish, which I thought were quahogs, coming up onto the pier, hoisted by a small crane on a boat. The crates were stacked on the wharf while tractor trailers from Maryland with their engines running prepared to load them. Seagulls ran around on the asphalt with their wings raised threatening one another over the scraps. Only one gull sat on a crate at the top of a stack and pulled the slimy, elastic flesh of a quahog up through the slats, leaning back as he pulled, bending forward to get another grip, and leaning back again in the midst of a great noise from the boat’s engines.

This was at twilight, and as the sky darkened, the lights on the boats grew brighter, and a handful of tourists watched, standing gingerly at the edge of the pier. The young fishermen, bare-chested, wearing shorts and high rubber boots, went about their work steadily, maneuvering hooks, hoisting a dredger, then a large piece of grating. The boat’s engine throbbed, sometimes thundered.

On another night it was later. I was the only one watching. Sparks flew up into the darkness from a boat where something was being welded or soldered. Another boat set out to sea after blowing its whistle. A black fisherman ran to the stern of the boat as it pulled away. He looked up, smiled, and waved.

I have just come back from looking at the motorcycles on the pier. They are parked side by side in great numbers near the snack bars that sell such surprisingly good Portuguese fish soup. They are of all kinds, plain and fancy. The fancy ones are decorated with antlers, and with leopard skins.

More crickets are singing now as the air grows colder and colder. It is the last day of August and the season is changing suddenly. Just as it is time for me to leave, the historian, too, has finished his tour and will be returning to Europe.