Leaving the Chesapeake

by Edward M. Belfar

[continued from January 14]

In the evening, the house filled quickly. Muted arrangements of "Autumn Leaves" and other jazz standards played on the stereo, while lawyers talked shop or debated investment strategies. Flitting from room to room like a ghost, I settled myself at last in a corner of the deck, relishing the cool breeze that wafted in from the bay and half-hypnotized by the chorus of the crickets. High above, a three-quarter moon glowed in a slate-black sky.

As I reached into a cooler for another beer, I noticed April standing beside me.

"I was wondering where you were hiding," she said with mock severity. "This is Karishma Mathur," she added, placing her hand upon the shoulder of a petite woman in a sleeveless red and white flowered dress that fluttered in the wind. "Karishma works with me at South Shore. And works, and works, and works. She's the best nurse we have. The I.C.U. would fall apart without her."

"Oh, please," the smaller woman answered, with an expression that wavered between a smile and a grimace. "I would work less if I got paid more."

"Beer?" I asked, sticking my hand in the cooler again.

Karishma shook her head.

"What do American beer and making love in a canoe have in common?" she asked.

"What?"

"Both are fucking close to water."

The punch line left me sufficiently discombobulated so that I spilled beer down the front of my shirt. No shrinking Indian violet was she, this beauty with the honey-brown complexion and eyes as big and dark as the night sky.

"Bobby has two girls. "How old are they now? Twelve and…?"

Even as she spoke, April had begun to drift back toward the house.

"Amanda's 13 now, and Leah's 11. Though it might be more appropriate to say I had two girls. It was one of those divorces that only a lawyer could love."

"Your brother handled my divorce."

"And you're still on speaking terms? He's grown soft, my brother."

Karishma had a girl of her own, an eight-year-old. The story was one I had heard variants of before. Born in Hydarabad, Karishma had grown up in London, and she spoke in the accents of the latter city. She had come to the States to live with her boyfriend, who had resigned himself, finally, to marriage and even to fatherhood but not, alas, to monogamy.

Of him she spoke softly, so that her words sometimes got lost amid the song of the crickets. Only once did a note of bitterness creep into her voice, when she said, "He's a man, after all. You can only expect so much."

My ex had often expressed such sentiments, though in much more pungent language. Wisely choosing not to bring her into the conversation—a rare display of forbearance on my part—I remained silent. Looking sheepish, Karishma apologized at once. When she turned to gaze out over the bay, the moon draped her slender neck and shoulders with silver, and for the first time in many months, I had cause to wonder at and regret having allowed myself to grow so accustomed to solitude and celibacy.

On Saturday, following an afternoon at the beach, Peter took me out for dinner and some bar hopping. As the muggy night wore on, though, what began as a slight ache in my knee steadily intensified. Peter's attempted flirtation with a pretty but harried young waitress evoked no response other than careless service, and during our subsequent wanderings, he grew surlier with each successive drink. Eric had not yet returned when we left for dinner, and though Peter tried to call home several times on his cell phone, neither human voice nor answering machine responded.

"My kid's a goddamn lowlife!" he shouted to the sky, from the parking lot of the last bar we visited.

During the drive back home, when I told him that I could not spend the whole of Sunday at the beach because I needed to return to Baltimore at a reasonable hour, he smashed his fist against the dashboard.

"What the hell are you going back to? Your kids? When was the last time you saw them? You're living in a goddamn whorehouse. If you don't get knifed, you'll get some disease that should have been wiped out a hundred years ago. Just what is your objective here? You couldn't finish yourself off in your car, so now you're trying to get someone to do it for you? If that's what you're up to, I can call half a dozen shrinks right now, and any one of them will be perfectly willing to put you in the hospital."

Neither of us spoke again for the remainder of the drive.

"Why do I bother?" Peter hissed, as we entered the house. "It's not as if I get any appreciation from anyone. Everything you do, you do out of spite and envy."

"I don't envy you. Not in the least."

I went straight to my room. Peter, however, continued to fume, to stomp, to curse, to shout—but now at April. Eric, it seemed, had returned earlier in the evening, spent three hours on the Internet, tying up the phone line so that none of Peter's calls could get through, and then had run off again.

"Why can't you tell him no?" cried Peter. "Just once."

"Why don't you go to hell?" shouted April.

There followed the sound of her footsteps, rapidly ascending the stairs, and then a door slamming. I fell into a doze, only to be awakened by Peter's final salvo, this one directed at Adam. Someone had fouled up the DVD player.

Though Peter had quieted down by the next morning, he remained sulky and shut off all through breakfast and the drive to Fire Island. The day was ideal, the air warm but dry, the water temperate, the sky a perfect dome, a trompe l'oeil masterwork, deep blue overhead and paling in the distance, with puffy, white cumulus clouds arrayed in a semicircle above the horizon. Swimming out beyond the crowds, I spent most of the morning and early afternoon bobbing with seagulls atop the waves or diving beneath. I floated on my back, suspended between ocean and sky, trying to ward off the Sunday dread and forget that there existed such a place as the Chesapeake Hotel. The previous night's histrionics notwithstanding, I knew I could not face a return to the coffin of a room that I had occupied for the past month. About that, at least, Peter had been right. I stayed in the water until my fingers grew blanched and as wrinkled as prunes, and when I swam back to the shore and tried to stand, my legs turned to jelly, and I fell forward onto the wet sand.

Still dripping, my body coated with sand, salt, and seaweed, my hair matted to my scalp, I sat down beside April. She lay on a blanket beneath a blue and white striped umbrella, flipping through a copy of Town and Country filled with glossy photos of English topiary gardens and villas overlooking the Amalfi coast. Below us, at the edge of the water, Peter and Adam were tossing a football back and forth.

"I hope you're planning to call Karishma," she said, smiling mischievously.

"I haven't had much interest in women lately. It's like I've blown a fuse or something. And I don't know, really, what she'd want with me. But it is a rare and wonderful thing to meet someone here in America who shares my abiding love of Asterix comics."

"Call her."

She touched my forearm gently.

"I had to leave my Asterix collection with the girls when I moved out. I used to read it to them at bedtime. All the furniture and everything else I was happy to leave behind, but that grieved me."

"You never see the girls anymore?"

"No. It's two, more like two-and-a-half years now. I send them birthday cards. Whether they get them or not, I have no idea."

"That's not right what she did, turning the girls against you like that. If Peter and I ever got divorced, I wouldn't do that, no matter how angry I got at him. It's the kids who suffer."

Her eyes followed the movements of her husband as he backpedaled, lunged to his right to evade an imaginary tackler, coiled his body, and threw. Adam leapt for the ball, but it sailed beyond his reach.

"I made the decision to stop seeing them. Given the level of hostility they had built up toward me…. Ah, what are kids anyway? They're Hobbesian creatures. Nasty, brutish, and short.

"Peter and I used to play football on the lawn when we were young. One on one, tackle, no pads or helmet. Usually, I got the worst of it, but I got my shots in, too. I broke a finger, pulled a neck muscle. He got a broken elbow when I tackled him and he landed on the driveway. Do you think it's odd that I remember those games fondly? More fondly than I remember just about any other time we've spent together in the last 25 years or so? He's my brother, and I love him, but I find it hard to be around him for very long. He'd make me go deaf, too."

April's mouth tightened.

"I blame him for a lot of things but not for that."

"I'm sorry," I answered, feeling my cheeks start to burn. "That was a damn stupid thing to say."

"It's all right. Anyone can see that we have our problems. We still go to counseling. Sometimes it gets better. Sometimes it gets worse. He's a good person, basically."

"A fact that, for reasons known only to himself, he's always tried his best to conceal. But he is a very good person. And he's been a far better brother to me than I've been to him. He's lucky he never needed anything from me."

"Every day at work he sees human beings at their worst. He has to be a certain way to do his job, and he can't just turn it off when he comes home."

"Sooner or later, we all become what we despise."

"I know he could have been more tactful about it, but he really does want you to stay until you get back on your feet. We both do."

Suddenly, the doubts that I thought I had shed in water assailed me once more.

"I would like to. But it's difficult, things being as they are. Given my recent employment history, my job prospects can't be very bright. I have the child support. I couldn't even pay the rent in Baltimore, and here everything costs three times as much. I don't want to be a charity case. I'm not even very good at being a guest."

"It's not charity. Right now, when you're having a bad time, you're better off being with family than being alone. You don't belong in that dump in Baltimore. You can't go back there."

I leaned far over to my right, scooped up a handful of sand, and let it run out between my fingers. Adam, I saw, had grown tired of playing catch. For the third time in succession, he let an eminently catchable pass slip through his hands, and, looking quite morose, trudged after the ball yet more slowly than before, kicking sand as he went. Peter, waiting with his hands on his hips, his shoulders and neck cooked by the sun to a blazing red, spit into the ocean.

"No, I can't go back to the Chesapeake. Whether or not I belong there is another question entirely. I can't go back because I can't afford to. It's too damned expensive to be that poor. When you can't manage a security deposit and a month's rent in advance for someplace decent, you end up paying just as much for a rattrap like that. You have no refrigerator, so you live on moldy deli sandwiches that cost seven dollars each.

"I had a little hot plate to make coffee or tea, but that got stolen. As I discovered one day when I locked myself out and banged on the door in frustration, you can open any door there without a key. The other day, someone stole my toothpaste and toothbrush. I can't imagine why, considering the general level of personal hygiene there. Whoever it was left me my Epictetus, though, so I can't dismiss the possibility that the thefts were a pedagogic technique, a lesson in the virtues of detachment.

"Unfortunately, I would have made a better Stoic 15 or 20 years ago. I'm too old now and too bourgeois. I like showers and toilets that flush. The life of the Chesapeake no longer holds any appeal for me or even much interest."

Adam, summoning all the strength he had stored in his spindly frame, punted the football far over Peter's head and began walking toward us.

"I'd better go make my peace with him. Let's hope it lasts."

As Peter went to retrieve the ball, I ran toward the water, narrowly avoiding the startled Adam. Without pausing to look up, Peter whirled and threw—a perfect spiral aimed at the spot where he assumed his son still stood. I leaped, plucked the football out of the air, and began to run it back the other way, defying the throbbing in my knee. Peter, crouching and gimlet-eyed, closed upon me, and I faked to the right and then veered left, toward the water. He dove, wrapped his arms around my thighs, and we slid through the muck. Panting, I stood up and brushed the dirt from my chest, legs, and swimsuit, then scooped up the football from the ground.

"My ball," I said. "First down. Count to five Mississippi before you rush. The lifeguard's chair is a touchdown."

Edward M. Belfar's works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Awakenings Review, The Baltimore Review, Dodobobo, Pennsylvania English, Potpourri, Soundings, Steam Ticket, and The Story Exchange. He lives in Maryland, where he works as an editor and teaches at Prince George's Community College.