Fiction
A Sensitive Soul
by Andrew Coburn
"Metaphysics is your mind stretching its ignorance."
So said Frances Ray over white wine on the balcony of her friend's second-floor condo. Husky and playful in tank top and shorts, she displayed scraped knees that mimicked those of an overactive child. An atheist, she taught philosophy at a small Christian college north of Boston.
"What I'm saying is knowledge has limits. Ignorance has none."
"I'm astounded they keep you on," Amy Oliver said. "You don't have tenure."
"I come cheap. Plus the president fantasizes over me." Frances stretched her smile. "So does the provost."
The buzzer sounded, and both women gave a start.
Rising on quick legs, her beauty a garment beginning to wear, Amy Oliver wondered about the caller. Friend or foe? Good news or bad? She strode through French doors to the intercom in the kitchen. "Who is it?"
"Your husband."
The voice, unnervingly familiar, caused her body to go still. "Don't do this."
"Do what?"
"My husband's dead."
For another minute or two she stayed on the line, listening with an unbelieving ear and speaking from a raw throat. When she silenced the intercom, she shivered. She wanted her life to be one foot in front of the other, nothing off course. Her return to the balcony, accompanied by ticking sounds in her head, was slow. Frances Ray was smoking a cigarette, permissible out in the open air of the balcony.
"Who was it?"
"Dennis."
"This a joke? Dennis is dead."
An anonymous bird flew by. It might not even have been a bird. Amy Oliver had an odd expression on her face, as if her brain were not behaving. "He says he isn't."
"People don't come back, Amy. Not unless they're Jesus Christ almighty or stinking Lazarus." Frances Ray expelled a lungful of smoke, some of which exited her nostrils. "Did you buzz him in?"
"I told him to go away."
"Do you think he will?"
"He has no choice," Amy Oliver said. "As you said, he's dead."
#
Some people claimed it wasn't a war, not officially. They called it an action, but soldiers died all the same, some with their flesh ripped open for birds to fight over and peck at. Some were dragged away by animals. Dennis Berube survived. He came home with the shakes, along with a medal for bravery he didn't deserve and didn't display. Six months into civilian life he began seeing a shrink named Wall, who had a vigorous head of hair and a face of effortless expressions. Dennis, instead of relaxing, sat erect in a large leather chair he was meant to sink into. "What's wrong with me, Doctor?"
Dr. Wall took a deep breath, preparatory to saying something, and then said nothing. He found Dennis's sharply faceted face interesting while vaguely disliking the metallic quality of his voice. He wanted his patients to be highly unusual, challenging, engaging, the sort about whom he could submit papers that would make him a force in his field.
Dennis pressed. "Please say something."
A previous patient that day had picked his nose and made it bleed. Dr. Wall had to dispense several tissues. "I try to avoid giving easy answers, Mr. Berube. However, speaking superficially, I'd say you're confused why you came home and your buddies didn't."
"Is it as simple as that?"
Behind wire-rimmed glasses, Dr. Wall viewed him with tolerant eyes. "Nothing is ever simple for human beings."
Dennis began scratching through the sleeve of his left arm, on and above the elbow, deliberately, then vigorously. Dr. Wall recognized the problem.
"I'm a medical doctor as well as a psychiatrist, so I speak with authority when I tell you that eczema is stress on the skin. It paints itself on you and mocks your immune system. It thrives on pollen, mold, spores, and anything else floating about. The higher the day's heat, the happier it is and the giddier it gets."
Blood appeared on his sleeve, a few dots that grew into a stain. Dr. Wall freed a Kleenex from a box in his bottom desk drawer. Offered, it was immediately snatched.
"Thanks."
"Since the itch carries exquisite pain, you resort to savage scratching that shreds skin, draws blood, and leaves you drained. Its mission is pure misery."
"You sound like a fellow victim."
"In one way or another, Mr. Berube, we're all victims. But we must never become one willingly."
The hour was up—the sharp ding from a timer said so—but inertia kept Dennis seated on the edge of his chair. Another tissue was needed and was instantly supplied. "I don't sleep well."
"I'll prescribe something."
"I have dreams."
"Everybody has dreams, even cats and dogs."
Dennis gripped the arms of his chair. His left pinkie was crooked, as if inadequately attached to his hand. The doctor noticed it for the first time and wondered if it were a birth defect. Dennis shook his head. No, his only war wound. "Over there, I did my best."
"We seldom know what our best is."
Dennis rose, stood tall, not quite straight. "The dead speak, but we don't have the ears to hear."
"They want their secrets safe. Till next time, Mr. Berube."
#
She relished the beauty of being near-naked on a beach with her body at its best, every breeze a caress, every glance a compliment. She stood at the ocean's edge not for romance but for splendor, for the freedom of youth, for awakening. She was a month out of college. Emerging from the surf, a man placed a hand hard on his hip, told her she looked familiar, and asked her name.
Amy. His was Dennis.
She knew no Dennis. He, no Amy.
His wet hair was smoothed back, and his sunglasses were perfect circles. She tried to read his face while editing away the glasses. His face was angular, not quite handsome, but interesting. She tried to gauge his age but couldn't. She guessed anywhere from five to ten years older than she.
He was aware of all of her: the sweep of her hair, the grains of sand in her navel, the length and shape of her legs. Her polished toenails looked like precious stones. He imagined her personal hair narrowed to accommodate her bikini.
"You're beautiful."
He was gripping her with a smile that wouldn't let go and was making her unduly aware of herself. His hands seemed on the verge of reaching for her. She spoke over the voices of passing children.
"I don't think I've seen you here before."
"I wandered in. The seaside gives me the thrill of being alive."
She considered the words. "I think I can understand that."
When a big man wearing a black bathing cap lumbered out of the ocean, they turned to watch him flop down on a spread towel. Breathing hard, shedding water, the cap still sheathing his skull, he looked like a beached sea animal.
"Dennis, you said?"
"Yes." His smile lessened as his gaze wandered to the ragged surf. Waves bulged and broke. "Are you here with someone?"
"A friend. Her parents have a cottage."
He took a deep deliberate breath, as if the air between them were full of meaning. His smile regained its strength and turned so intense it threatened his face.
"This is how things begin," he said.
"What things?"
"You know."
She became cautious. "I'm afraid I don't."
The man in the black cap struggled back to his feet and slowly returned to the water, to the breaking waves, as if that was where he belonged, his home somewhere in the deep.
"Amy, you said."
"Yes."
"I wonder if the drowned ever find their breath and make it to shore?"
"I don't think that's a real question." She turned and pointed. "There's my friend." Coming into view was a conspicuous shape in a one-piece bathing suit. Big bosom, big thighs, banged-up knees. With a face that looked overdone in the sun and a stride clumsy and wobbly over the hot sand. Amy waved. "Would you like to meet her?"
"Sure."
#
On the drive home to Haverhill, Frances Ray behind the wheel with a heavy foot on the accelerator, Amy Oliver said, "So what did you think of him?"
"Something about him is off center. The real question is what do you think about him."
"I'd need to know more."
Is he worth the effort? That's what you have to ask yourself about any man."
They were on Route 495, the traffic heavy. They passed an eighteen-wheeler, which made Amy hold her breath. "Could you slow down a little?"
Frances—who ran her watch a little fast, as if to be ahead of herself—eased her foot up, though not much. The car was a red Honda, a graduation gift from her parents. "I'll say one thing for him. He's not a Bible-thumper, which is in his favor."
"Is that the best you can say about him?"
"He's not all that bad-looking, if that's what you're after."
"I don't know what I'm after."
Frances tossed her a sidelong look. "Then get a job. Be your own woman."
Amy sat straight. "I intend to."
#
Dennis Berube's resume showed four years of college followed by two years of distinguished military service. The interviewer, a man with an oval body in a gray suit, said in a hushed voice, "Lucky you came back from over there. My son didn't."
"Many didn't."
The interviewer's soft face lacked muscles to smile. "We'll give you a month's tryout. See if you fit in."
They fitted him into a cubicle, where he familiarized himself with a computer, learned to analyze government contracts, and, proving himself a step ahead of others, caught the attention of one of the vice presidents, a retired army colonel. Dennis soon became a section chief and within the year was presenting papers in Houston and Palo Alto.
"Damn good work, Berube." The colonel, the hair on his head reduced to stubble and his small eyes relentlessly blue, gave him an avuncular smile. "You wore the uniform, you did the deed, time you reap the rewards."
He was the colonel's boy. He read the colonel's reports, improved upon them, and routed them on. He was on the fast track, he was told, but at times he was not sure he wanted to be. One of those times was when he received word that an old buddy of his had died in a VA hospital, a million things wrong with him.
The women in his life were occasional. None stuck, though some wanted to. The least desirable was a divorcee who insisted they make love on their sides. She wanted their relationship to be on equal terms. Another was highly conscious of ancestry. Hers was notable, his was not.
Dr. Wall considered him through narrowed eyes. "Are women a worry to you?"
"No." He was taken aback. "Why do you ask?"
"You lost your mother young."
He remembered thinking thieves had taken her away, leaving no traces in the snow that had fallen during the night. The nun who took him under her wing told him that the opposite of a snowflake is a firefly. Both, however, sparkle, she said. He didn't know what that had to do with the theft of his mother, but it made him feel better. For a while.
Dr. Wall said, "Have you thought about marriage?"
"Once. But nothing came of it."
"Whose fault?"
"No one's." He looked at the wall clock. He knew that time runs lazy on a mountaintop and suspected the same was true in Dr. Wall's office. He spoke in a restless voice. "Will I ever pull myself together?"
Dr. Wall's mouth scarcely moved. "It could happen without your realizing it."
#
Amy Oliver and Frances Ray lived on opposite sides of the street in nearly identical houses that stared out at each other. Amy had the nicer yard, with a red maple in front and lush forsythia in back. Frances, a climber, fell from the maple and broke her collarbone. Amy had a Siamese cat, Frances a dog that died of distemper. Both girls collected Nancy Drews, and each cherished Black Beauty.
At Girl Scout camp, they competed for merit badges, with Frances winning the most. When a male counselor touched her inappropriately, she walloped him in the face, splitting his lip and skinning her knuckles. Amy hollered for help. Their first sexual experience was with each other, silly stuff never mentioned again.
In high school each regularly made the honor roll and participated in extracurricular activities, though Frances was too clumsy to compete in sports. Terrible at tennis, she broke her racquet in two. When Amy failed to make varsity volleyball, the coach told her not to worry, her beauty was her passport to a larger life. She went to the prom with the class president, son of the former mayor. Frances kept at a distance boys who wanted to penetrate her, and they were the only ones who tried to come near.
At Boston University she shared a dorm room with Amy, majored in philosophy, worked part-time in the bookstore, and often studied late into the night. Her favorite philosopher was Nietzsche, who, before he went mad, hugged a horse that was being beaten. She was enamored with his sensitivity and his definition of truth, a mobile of metaphors subject to revision.
Amy majored in English Lit and became depressed by the Romantic period, when poets were sweetly consumptive and wrote in the blood they coughed up. Life was a downer, death an upper. She occasionally smoked pot, Frances never. Frances slept with a man she didn't particularly like and told Amy, "I'm glad I got that over with." Amy had a fling with an artist who took her to his studio to see his paintings, none finished, some not worked on in years. "I'll probably never finish them," he said carelessly, as if that in itself were an achievement, proof of a true artist. She eventually wrote him off as a lapse in judgment.
Another lapse was a fellow whose face came at her too quickly, too presumptuously. Eldest son in a prominent family, he was wealthy enough to wear shirts with frayed collars and start a trend on campus. He expected everything from Amy, as if it were his birthright. Ultimately denied, he was astounded, then insulted.
Amy attended services at Marsh Chapel. Frances wouldn't go through the door. A mocker, Frances said, "The only thing that could bring me into the fold is divine inspiration when I'm picking numbers at the Megabucks terminal." She waved an arm. "Other than that, if I were to be anything I'd be Catholic. The most pagan and preposterous of all religions."
Both women graduated in the upper third of their class. Frances had in mind advanced degrees and a paper on Nietzsche. Amy wasn't sure what she wanted to do. Did she want to teach? She gave Frances a wild look. No! Did she want to go to Europe to meet men? No! If any were worthwhile, let them come to her. Frances had a suggestion. "Spend the summer at the beach with me. Something is bound to wash up.
#
"Yes, go on," Dr. Wall said, and Dennis Berube spoke of stomping through secured villages and avoiding bodies degrading in the ungodly sun, children among them. Some bodies had been removed, but the gore remained. Along with the stench. And the flies.
"I didn't enlist. I was drafted the month I finished college. And four months after that, I was sent over. I could've gone to Canada. Should've but didn't." His sigh was self-accusatory. "Why not. Dr. Wall?"
Dr. Wall, holding a tissue, spoke through a stuffed nose. "We do what we think is right at the time. Occasionally it's neither right nor wrong."
In the heat of his inner ear Dennis heard the thwacking of helicopter blades and the roar of his brain as he tried to escape the river, grabbing a vine with one hand, losing hold, nearly ripping off a finger, the pinkie. "Two of my buddies went under, and I can't remember their names now. Or their faces."
"Stop it!" Dr. Wall said.
He was scratching his arm, digging, drawing blood through his sleeve. His eczema kicking up. "Could've saved at least one of them. Should've, didn't."
"You can't blame yourself for everything." Dr. Wall spoke from under a heavy head of hair that seemed to symbolize the world's weight. "Tell me about your work. Are you getting along with the colonel?"
The waste, the overbilling, the colonel's downright fraud. "He's not an evil man. He simply knows how to play the game."
"What game is that?"
Cheating and lying. Living and dying. "I don't know the game, only the rules. Too many rules. Life should be simple."
"Life is what it is. That's what we must deal with." Dr. Wall snatched free another Kleenex from the box on his desk and blew his nose. "Don't worry. It's past the catching stage."
Dennis shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The wall clock was eating up the time. He had more to say. Dr. Wall poked at the Kleenex box.
"Would you like a tissue for your sleeve?"
He shook his head. His minutes were evaporating. "Those dead children. Those buddies of mine who didn't make it. They don't exist anymore. Maybe they never did."
"They could be right here in this room," Dr. Wall said. "Listening to every word we say."
"Do you believe in ghosts, Doctor?"
"I believe in the human spirit. Yours, mine, and everyone else's."
#
Amy Oliver's first job was as an editorial assistant for a Cambridge publisher of religious books and inspirational material. After a few months an editor professed love for her, but she didn't trust his face, suspecting it shimmered with too much goodness. Besides, he was not the sort of man who could draw her out of her dress, even with his theatrical proposal of marriage.
A year later she was a legislative aide for a state senator who swiftly raised her in rank above others in his office. Smitten, the senator wanted to leave his wife for her. Instead she switched jobs, got an unlisted phone number, and for a while kept company with an inarticulate man who took her to action movies and bad restaurants.
Approaching her twenty-fifth birthday, she experimented briefly with cocaine, quit one boyfriend for another, lightened her hair, and interviewed successfully for a position at an advertising agency, one of Boston's biggest. Her first day on the job the head of the agency stopped by her desk and called her Blondie. Without missing a beat, she said, "What can I do for you, Baldy?" And was fired on the spot.
She hired a lawyer, who saw merit in her case and took it on contingency. In a coffee shop on Tremont Street he said to the agency's attorney, "Blondie. Baldy. Tit for tat. Do we want a pissing contest in open court?" The suit was sealed over their unfinished coffee, a check issued to Amy within the week.
Months had passed since she'd been in touch with Frances Ray. They met for breakfast in the Back Bay, Amy the nibbler, Frances the big eater. Eggs, bacon, buns. More butter, please. Frances had completed her dissertation on Nietzsche and soon would take her place in the world of Ph.D.'s and would-be geniuses.
Amy clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She wanted a child but was unwilling to have one by any of the shallow men slipping in and out of her life. She wanted a home. Her basement apartment in Cambridge was not one. She wanted to plant herself in a garden and grow another life.
Frances said, "I guess I haven't told you. My parents have retired to Florida. They gave my brother the Haverhill house, I got the cottage at the beach."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"Sell it."
"I'll buy it."
#
When Dennis Berube expressed concern over a document he had signed, the colonel slung an arm around him and said, "Let me worry about it. This is the way things are done. Always have been, always will be."
He met the colonel's wife, Faith, when he was invited to their vacation home, a mock mansion on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. Faith, an attractive fifty-year-old, took him for a walk along the lake, where leaves were changing character, the colors glorious. Wearing her hair pulled back, she had on a cardigan, jeans, and ankle boots.
"The colonel and I have no children. I suppose you know he sees you as a son he never had."
Dennis did not know quite what to say and, saying nothing, surveyed the serene surface of the lake, where, he had read, a recent boating accident had taken the lives of a mother and child.
"There's nothing he wouldn't do for you, Dennis."
With a quick step he avoided smut left by a skunk. Danger was everywhere. To his right, thorns were aimed like steel darts to fire at him. He said, "I guess that works two ways."
"Everything does, Dennis. It's a two-way world."
He agreed. In and out.
#
Amy Oliver couldn't afford to buy the whole cottage, so she bought half. She and Frances Ray winterized it and shared it. Frances landed a teaching position at nearby Collier College, and Amy stayed in the cottage at her computer, her employer a textbook publisher in Connecticut. On weekends the two women walked a cold beach littered by long strands of kelp that resembled washed-up serpents.
Amy said, "We could be in the midst of a Grimm tale. Must be ogres about somewhere."
Frances's foot slipped, and her knee scraped against a barnacled boulder. A couple emerged from the ocean in wet suits. The man's suit was black, the woman's orange, the colors of Halloween. And of bloodsuckers.
"There are our monsters."
Frances sighed, her eye traveling to the white crusts of breakers. "Monsters are everywhere."
On a November evening they drove a few miles up the coast to a roadhouse, where the music was country. The men and the women with them drank their beer straight from the bottle and stomped their feet to the piped music. Not a soul in the house who didn't adore Willie Nelson and venerate Patsy Cline. With a scholarly eye, Frances viewed the men, for the most part bruisers with bellies hanging over studded belts.
"Fits," she said.
Amy followed her eye. "What does?"
"Nietzsche said the abdomen is the reason man knows he's not a god."
A heavy man in a sweatshirt and roomy work pants bulled his way from the bar to a nearby table and challenged a chair with his weight. Amy said, "Nobody's tried to hit on us."
"They probably think we're dykes."
"What are we?"
"Whatever we want to be, whatever the hell that is."
"Don't we know?"
"Deep inside we do. We just don't know how to listen to ourselves."
They were drinking Sam Adams from glasses they had requested. From the bar, in an excess of machismo, curses exploded from two men in contention for a woman with a tough face and a long braid dangling down her back. The bouncer shouted, "Take it outside!"
Amy said, "Do you remember when I wanted to be Heathcliffe's Catherine? High school. Mr. Freeman's class?"
"I remember I was still going to church, but I never had the Christian view. I had my own. Now Nietzsche's." Ignoring her glass, Frances swigged from the bottle. "Putting a preacher in a pulpit is like piling bullshit on a platter. Sunday servings. Food for the faithful."
"I was Zhivago's Lara."
"You were always looking for something that wasn't there. I stopped doing that when I realized Christianity was paganism repainted. Aristotle writ large."
The two men with the tough-looking woman had calmed down. Bottles clinked. Hank Williams began to wail Lovesick Blues. Amy speculated that the two men were probably no great shakes in bed, mama's boys under the covers, more crybabies than lovers. Then she sighed. "Are we becoming bitter women, Fran?"
"Impossible not to be. We live in a man's world, and look what they've done to it."
Someone with bushy brows and a beard approached their table and stood like a large object that had been delivered and needed to be signed for. After a hesitation, he mumbled through the hair circling his mouth. Amy, catching none of the words, glanced at Frances.
"He wants to buy us a round."
Amy glimpsed a wedding ring and imagined him dragging his wife by the hair to the bedroom. She altered the image after looking up into his eyes, pebbles on the beach, speckled and smooth, the sort children collect. Then another face appeared, that of the bouncer.
"Roy here bothering you?"
Frances spoke fast. "He's a good boy. Aren't you, Roy?"
Roy's smile cut through his beard. All the same, the bouncer led him away as Patsy Cline sang Crazy.
In the car, driving back to the cottage, Frances said, "The fellow back there, he was harmless, you know."
Amy nodded. Roy. Roy was his name, and he reminded her of a Sylvia Plath line that likened a child's smile to "found money." Moments passed. "I need a change in my life, Fran. Something drastic."
Frances swerved onto the rough road leading to the cottage. "Be careful. You might get what you wish for."
#
On clement mornings she carried a thermos of coffee down to the surf to watch the winter sun come up and to sort her thoughts, none of which she recorded in her pocket notebook for fear she might use them against herself.
Each day she was at her computer, copy-editing a critical study about Hemingway, whose novels she had never particularly enjoyed; another about Norman Mailer, whose assault on his wife she had detested. Intermittently she gazed out the window to the crash of the surf and pictured Virginia Woolf wading into a wave, surprised to find the water salty, not fresh.
Frequently, not always with Frances, she took evening strolls on the beach, long ones as daylight lengthened, as if she were seeking the shadows. Usually she came upon other strollers, neighbors who inhabited the white line of cottages beyond hers. Then on an evening in late March she saw a stranger plodding her way, hands in his jacket pockets, eyes leaping toward her. He stopped abruptly and spoke.
"Do you remember me?"
"Yes," she said without hesitation. "A number of summers ago."
"What's my name?"
"Dennis. What's mine?"
He pretended to draw a blank. Then smiled. "Amy."
Simultaneously they turned to face the surf, waves rising, bulging, and bursting, gulls sweeping over them. Standing close to her he extended his gaze.
"If I swam out far enough, would I meet a mermaid?"
"Is that a serious question?"