The End of the Pier (2 page)

Sam was always fussing about the lamp, telling her to get rid of it. “It's dangerous,” Sam kept saying, though he was pretty vague about the danger. She asked if he was afraid it would electrocute the fish if it fell into the lake, and he said it would probably blow fuses all over the place. What was dangerous about that? she asked him. Just blowing a fuse?

“Well, but don't you think it must look kind of strange if they”—he nodded towards the party—“look over here? And see someone sitting under a lamp? It would look strange, I think.”

She told him she needed the lamp for reading.

The only person she knew who understood about books, how they would make you feel rooted to the ground and to the past, somehow, the way TV never could, was Miss Ruth Porte. Miss Ruth came to Shirl's every evening except Thursdays and weekends for her dinner. She always sat in the high-backed rear booth, the side not facing the big television screen that rattled and wept its way through the day. It drove Miss Ruth Porte crazy, she said. Why didn't they bring along a book—Miss Ruth liked Jane Austen—if they wanted entertainment?

Miss Ruth would smooth her hand over her vellum-covered Jane Austen, carefully wrapped in plastic, and say, “It's just like family, her people. It's the kind of thing these new writers don't understand, that readers want to feel this is a family they can almost walk and talk amongst. Writers these days”—it was never clear who they were—“only want to write about breakups and breakdowns, everything unraveling and everybody going to the devil.” She would pause then over her menu, open it and close it several times, not satisfied with the expression of whatever notion she had. “It doesn't have to be
good
family—the dear Lord knows most families aren't, and certainly Miss Jane Austen knows it. Let's see, what's the special?”

Maud would stand patiently with her small book of checks and pencil for taking the order. Often she would make comments about whatever book she was reading, not because she wanted to soft-soap Miss Ruth (who was the last of the Porte family and rumored to be rich) but because there was hardly anyone else to talk about books to. Besides Wallace Stevens, Maud was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Miss Ruth was very enthusiastic, saying he was much, much better than Ernest Hemingway, despite what the Book Mark people thought. This was a reading club that met every Thursday night, which was why she didn't come into the Rainbow Café.

Miss Ruth would always inquire about Maud's son, Chad, whom she thought to be “splendid, just splendid,” and it was no idle compliment. It was right in line with what everyone else seemed to
think, and Maud wished they'd stop talking about him as if he were a visiting divinity. Everyone seemed hanging around waiting to get anointed or something. He knew what to say to people, it was as simple as that. God only knew where he'd got this instinct, for it surely hadn't come from her. She considered herself what they call pathologically shy, which was one reason she liked working at Shirl's. All the customers were used to Shirl's surliness, which had spilled over onto Charlene and Wash, the cook, and even the two part-time girls who came in when there was what Shirl thought of as a rush.

Maud, compared with everyone else, was considered a real find. Shirl's customers were always asking her what she was doing working here, and she would always answer “Just lucky, I guess,” with a little wink, and they would laugh. When they all sat in a line at the counter—Dodge and Sonny and Mayor Sims and sometimes even Wade Hayden from the post office, and Ubub and Ulub—and reacted to something in unison, turning their heads right or left, it would put Maud in mind of a decrepit chorus line, and then she would have to laugh, too.

She knew it mystified the customers that she was working as a waitress when she had all of that education. It was hard to make people understand that education or not, there were some people who had no ambition in that way, who didn't want a profession, and who didn't want a lot of money, and she was one of them. So with her three years of college and her timid smile, she imagined they took her for someone with a sad past, like a duchess in exile.

•  •  •

Two speedboats ripped by, crossing in each other's wake. The pier felt the reverberation, the slap of the churning water, before it closed behind the boats, smoothly and seamlessly.

Maud stuck an olive on a cocktail stirrer. The dish of olives sat on the wooden barrel she'd found behind the house. The stirrer had come from a small, flat box of six she'd found in the crawl space. Each had been carefully niched into an inner strip
of white cardboard. They were clear glass topped with pink glass flamingoes, the sort of thing people never buy for themselves, but give as gifts. This one had never been used, or never been given.

Another small craft cozied up to the dock over there. By now there were at least a dozen, more than usual because it was the Labor Day party. The guests didn't all come by boat, of course; most of them probably drove down some old road on the other side of the house.

Now from this silvery-white boat emerged the party-goers. She was too far away to see what they actually were wearing, beyond brief blobs of gold or blue or red, but she knew some of them must be wearing long gowns that made it difficult to maneuver out of the boat. The high, trilling voices of the women, the brief whoops of laughter from the men that accompanied their emergence from the silver cocoon of the rocking boat suggested to her that they were rescuing their hems from trailing in the water. Others would come down to the dock, with their drinks and cigarettes—she could see the coal ends throbbing on and off. They helped the new arrivals up and then all trooped back to the party, towards the patio. She wondered where the latecomers had come from. Was there another party farther down the lake that took precedence? That was hard to believe. Probably from their small cocktail parties in their smaller cottages they had met briefly with this as the final destination.

This scene was repeated endlessly, until the dark lake over there was divided by strips of light from the boats, so many that it sometimes resembled a small marina.

Maud had always been quite sure they were not ordinary people and that they were in some way acutely blessed, as one might be who would remain in a state of grace for a season. She never came to the pier during the day to see what the house over there looked like then. And she knew that this was the last party, the Labor Day party, for La Porte was basically a summer
place, where the summer people threw open the shutters of the big Victorian houses right after Memorial Day and shut them after Labor Day. Then La Porte became a ghost town. To hear Shirl talk it was always a ghost town; the summer people came in their shorts and Docksiders, hung over and tan as only the rich seem to get, to do little more than buy the Sunday paper and milk.

“Where's the warehouse, that's what I want to know,” Shirl would grumble around her smoke. “They all got food at those lake places—where do they get it? One of them's got a helicopter pad—is that how? They fly it in—the caviar, the champagne, the roasted pheasant?”

Maud held her glass by the stem. She hated drinking martinis from a warm glass, and between drinks she shoved the glass into the ice to cool it again. The several patio doors over there were all open now, and she could see them dancing. Sometimes they had a real live combo out on the patio; other times she supposed it must be a stereo. It comforted her, like the book in her lap, that they liked Cole Porter. It was like a party out of the past, something that might have taken place in the 1920s or '30s, something her dead parents might have attended, and danced to “Begin the Beguine.”

Several of them—she had to squint to make them out—had come out on the long, long patio and were dancing to it right now. Laughter and glass breaking.

She picked her glass from the bucket, poured herself a drink, and dropped in an olive. If the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald walked, it walked there, laughing and breaking glasses on the patio.

But the ghost of Wallace Stevens would not need to get drunk and break glasses. (He had been in insurance, to her great mystification.) Maud even went so far as to believe that the ghost of Wallace Stevens could sit comfortably on the end of the pier in the folding chair reserved for Sam (and Chad, when he was here) and contemplate the party across the water.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

(Maud read)

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves—

She replaced the flamingo-topped cocktail stirrer that she used as a marker and closed the book. Sipping her martini, she thought about it, frowning slightly. The sea was formless, apparently. So the singer had to . . . had to . . . She squinted, looking off across the lake . . . What? She shook her head. It would come to her, sometime, what Wallace Stevens meant.

Then there was her favorite line—oh, what a line!

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know . . .

“I wonder who,” she had said to Sam back in July, “Ramon Fernandez was.”

Sam had been silent for a moment, since Sam rarely shot back answers, and then he said that he was probably some friend of the poet. “When I'm in Hebrides next week I could go to the library and see if there's anything there on that poem.”

Maud slapped the book shut and stared.
“No!
All I said was I wondered. Wonder—
wonder!
The answer's something I have to decide for myself.” She actually felt a little afraid that Sam might just look the poem up.

He sighed. “Maud. If Ramon was a personal friend—”

“Ramon
Fernandez.
We're not on a first-name basis with him,” she snapped.

Sam shook his head. “Well, if Señor Fernandez was a friend of Mr. Stevens, there's nothing
for
you to decide.”

“You're so literal. And what do you mean, ‘Señor'? How do you know he's Spanish or Mexican, anyway?” Maud was frowning at the Popov bottle to see if there was enough to get her through this conversation. “I'm not surprised you don't understand this poem.”

“Cuban,” Sam had said equably, as he snapped open another can of Coors.

“What?”
Maud shot up in her chair, back rigid. “He is
not
Cuban.”

Sam shrugged. “Stands to reason. The poet's in Key West, right? Florida. Closest place where somebody might be from named Ramon Fernandez”—he tilted the Coors and drank—“is Cuba.”

Maud slapped her hand to her forehead. “Your name is Dutch, isn't it?
Dutch.
Does that mean you commute from Lancaster, Pennsylvania?” She turned a furious face to him. “You're
deliberately
ruining this poem for me.” She turned away and stared out over the water. “And it's important.” She felt like crying.

“Sorry.”

After a suffering silence that had Maud rocking and staring straight across the lake, Sam suggested that if she was so curious about the couple on the other side of the lake he could always cruise around with a disturbing-the-peace complaint. Maud got so anxious that she yelled at him, something she hardly ever did with anyone but Chad, and told him not to dare. She wasn't “curious,” and how could they be disturbing the peace when they probably owned a half-mile of lake frontage?

•  •  •

She thought she heard a scrunching on the path, Sam coming along with his six-pack of beer, but when she turned to look, saw that it was the black cat that had turned up a month or so ago and kept disappearing and reappearing. It walked slowly and stealthily onto the pier and simply sat, blinking.

Maud tried not to look at it because it made her stomach tighten, seeing that it was sick and probably a stray. It was the eye that was bad. It must have been a tumor, for the right eye was
completely clouded over and bigger than the other. There was no iris to see, just what looked like a hard blue carapace that must have started out small but gotten larger and larger.

This was the fourth night the cat had come, and she had remembered to bring along a plastic dish. A half-pint of milk was sitting on top of the ice, and she poured that into the dish and set it some little distance away since she imagined the cat wasn't all that trustful of people. Maud wondered what the cat did during the day, whether it hung around the pier, catching field mice in the rushy grass. It made no move toward the milk. Could it see the dish, even?

To Maud, the cat's having a tumorous eye was a source of inexplicable dread, worse than seeing it in an old, sick person. What made it worse was that the cat had this affliction but didn't know.

“Why in hell would you want the poor cat to
know
?” Sam had asked. “Wouldn't that just make it worse for it?”

“That's not what I meant; you don't understand.”

“Would
you
want to know?”

Maud couldn't really understand it herself, why it was worse that the cat wasn't aware that this shouldn't be happening to it. “Yes. Anyway, that's a stupid question because I'd know whether I wanted to or not.”

“Okay, then. The cat
doesn't
know, whether it wants to or not.”

“You're just twisting it all around.” She had watched the cat that night, sitting as it was now, yawning, not knowing, unaware that something hideous was consuming its left eye. It wasn't that Maud found the malformation repulsive; it was that the cat didn't know that there was an alternative, that its eye might have been perfectly normal.

“Let's just say,” Sam had said when the cat first turned up, “that the eye doesn't hurt, which it probably doesn't, the way that cat just sits there and doesn't seem to mind.”

“How do you
know
it doesn't—?”