Beachcombing at Miramar Page 4

  The conversation, although brief, was effortless, and I know I could have kept it going if I had wanted to. I could have found out more about her. I could have asked if she would like a cup of coffee, and if she said yes, I could have taken her to a restaurant overlooking the water, where harbor seals sometimes break the placid surface and pelicans dive in plain view. We could have sat there talking quietly, finding out about each other, what we like, what we dislike, what sort of lives we lead.

  But I didn’t do any of those things, and I know that this wariness is an aspect of myself I must confront as I comb the sands of Miramar. It’s not rejection that I fear—not at this juncture of my life. I’m not afraid if I asked her to join me for a cup of coffee that she would turn me down. What I fear is that she would accept, that acceptance would inevitably lead to involvement, and that at some point during the course of our involvement she would consider me her captive and try to make me over into someone I don’t want to be.

  It’s an unfair assessment—I realize that. I know nothing about the woman, about what she values or how she might respond to the life I lead. For all I know, she may be as wary as I, and for the same reasons. If that is the case, then my fears aren’t protecting me; they are keeping me from companionship.

  I continue along the beach, trying to put the matter out of mind. But it is a disturbing thought—this idea that I may be standing in my own way. When I reach my beach house, I pour myself a cup of tea and carry it carefully through the sliding doors. I sit in a beach chair on the deck, thinking of the woman with the yellow shirt tied around her waist. She has disappeared in the thickening mist, and I will never know who she is.

  six

  tug - of - war

  I sit on my deck late in the day, scanning the beach, watching the passersby. For a while I am blinded by the brilliance of the sun, which sets the sky aglow. When it finally drops below the horizon, I see the silhouette of a woman in the surf up to her waist, tugging on a rope.

  There is a man with her, and he is standing higher up the beach in the soft, dry sand. I can hear her calling to him over the crash of the waves.

  “Grab hold! If we pull together, we can get it out!” The man remains rooted in place, his arms folded across his chest.

  A wave washes over the woman’s pants, splashes her shirt, soaks her arms. The undertow almost sweeps her off her feet, but she hangs on. As the wave retreats, I can see the sharp angle of the rope as it slants under the sand. She tugs on the loose end, her body tense as she strains. Finally her strength gives out. She drops the rope, wades ashore, and falls to her knees, her head bowed. The breeze has died; in the still of evening, I can hear her sobs.

  The man who has been standing by places a shawl around her shoulders. After a while she rises and they slowly walk away.

  The evening gathers about me; the dusk settles in. But the image of the woman pulling on the loose end of a salt-soaked rope remains. I would paint her if I could, paint her as I saw her in the breakers, the spindrift blowing through her stringy black hair, her drenched blouse clinging to her lean, unbending back. I would depict her struggle as epic, as I believe it was. I would show her desperation in the sinews of her body, in the hard, straight lines of her face and arms. I would put her figure off to one side of the painting, poised against the long slant of the rope, so that viewers would have no choice but to wonder what invisible counterweight lies buried in the sand.

  I slump in a deck chair and close my eyes. I still see the woman plainly; I can’t seem to let her go. I engage her in an imaginary conversation. I ask her if she knows what she is pulling against, and she tells me that she doesn’t know, that it doesn’t matter and she doesn’t care. I ask her why she goes on pulling if it doesn’t matter and she doesn’t care. She doesn’t answer. She goes on pulling, pulling with all the intensity of her being, against the unyielding object buried in the bed of the sea.

  The contest that consumed her now consumes me. At some other moment of my life, I might have dismissed her behavior as eccentric, but now I understand her compulsion all too well. I feel as if she is an aspect of myself, a part of the past from which I have not yet fully emerged. I know her grim determination, the obsessive force that drives her on. She is convinced that if only she can pull harder, if only she can enlist the help of someone else, she will be able to wrest the rope free of the iron grip that holds it under the seafloor.

  But she can’t. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t. I can feel the bone-deep despair that overwhelms her like a giant wave when at long last she is forced to admit that she can’t.

  I go to bed early, but I lie awake, watching the moon shadows on the wall. I’m weary now, more weary than I care to admit. In my weariness I have to recognize that I may have crossed that delicate boundary that separates the woman in the breakers from myself. Maybe all she saw was the loose end of a rope washing in the waves and she grabbed hold of it and tried to wrench it free, as if it was just a game. Maybe that’s all it was, a game. But if it was just a game, why the cry for help and why the sobs when help never came?

  It’s hard to know what was going on. Maybe the event on the beach was staged; maybe it was a performance just for me. But I know what I saw, what I still see in my mind’s eye, and I make my own conjectures out of my dark imaginings.

  There is something down there, something the woman feels she must have. Maybe it’s a father’s approval, or a mother’s affection, or a brother’s recognition. Maybe it’s a husband’s touch, or a kind word from a friend. Maybe she wakes in the tender night and asks her lover to wrap his arms around her—and maybe her lover tells her he doesn’t know how. So she tries to teach her lover how to love her, goes on night after night trying to teach him, but it’s too late, for her lover is beyond loving, and all her effort is in vain.

  In the dim light, I see the shadowy figure of the man again, see him standing by so patiently, waiting for her private tug-of-war to end. He doesn’t offer to help; he doesn’t urge her to stop. Is he wiser than she? Does he know what lies down there, buried in the sand? Perhaps he knows and is afraid to admit he knows, and so he makes his stand farther up the beach, apart.

  I fall asleep, and in my sleep I dream. It’s the same dream that has haunted my sleep since I arrived at Miramar. I am a young man again, employed by the New York public-relations firm I left two decades ago. I set out from my suburban home, board the commuter express for the city, but the train never arrives. I desperately need the job; I have a family to support, but the train never arrives.

  Months go by. I am afraid my superiors will fire me. And then one morning I appear at the office, and my boss and fellow workers act as if I have never been absent, as if I have been doing my job all along. I try to work, to focus on the task at hand, but I can’t. And the nightmare starts all over again. I dress, board the commuter express for the city, but the train never arrives.

  The sound of the surf shatters my dream. I wake in the darkness, drenched with sweat. I step out on the deck, lean against the railing, and watch the white rushing foam of the sea.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I ask myself. “Why are you dreaming about a job you left so long ago?”

  The question startles me, as if it were posed by someone other than myself. But there is no one with me in this middle night. The voice I hear is mine and mine alone, stirring up memories that go back to childhood.

  When I was eight, my parents sent me to live with my grandparents. When my grandmother became ill, I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle. By then my father had died. My mother remarried and I was sent to live with her and my stepfather. Then my mother died and I was sent to my aunt and uncle again.

  Through all these migrations I was never sure where I belonged. I was a child and I made the assumptions a child makes. I felt as if I was an outsider, a guest in somebody else’s house. If I wanted to be taken care of, I thought I had to behave as a guest is supposed to behave. I had to avoid attracting attention to myself. I had to
be compliant. I had to please the appointed guardians of my life. If I didn’t, I was certain some terrible, nameless calamity might rise from nowhere and strike me down.

  It wasn’t as if my grandmother, my grandfather, my aunt, my uncle didn’t have my best interests at heart. I’m sure they did. But they weren’t my parents, their homes weren’t my home, and that made all the difference in the way I lived as a boy and the decisions I made as a man.

  When the time arrived for me to take care of myself, I didn’t do what I wanted to do. I did what I had always done, what I thought others expected of me. Instead of investing in myself, in the course I wanted to take, whatever the risk, I opted for a job that provided a steady income and security. My aunt and uncle had always counseled prudence, and that seemed to me the prudent way. But it became the pivotal point of despair, the precise place where the nightmare began.

  I possess this knowledge of myself now, but the knowing didn’t come in a rush. It came gradually, over the course of years, and as it came, I found the will to alter the direction of my life. In time I gave up the white shirt and tie of the executive and donned the garb of the beachcomber. But I know now that, like the woman in the breakers, I still engage in a mighty tug-of-war.

  I know where I want to be—and it’s here on the sands of Miramar, where life comes full to me with every wash of the waves. As I walk the beach, I like to think I am an autonomous being, moving through the world as I wish to move, free of encumbrances. But despite my deepest yearnings, there is a contrary force, buried in some secret, shameful part of my being, drawing me toward conformity. I am still trying to meet the expectations of others, still afraid that if I don’t, the whole unstable world will come down about my head.

  So I am back there still—back at the job I thought I had left behind. I am there not by light of day, but by dread of night, in my dreams. I journey back to that alien land in my sleep, trying to set my wrongs aright, but the train never arrives.

  This desire to please others, so widespread, so deeply rooted—I wonder where it comes from. Is it the result of what others do to us, or what we do to ourselves, absorbing the judgments that swirl about us when we are young, taking them in and making them our own? We yearn for a blessing from those who have the power to bestow it on us, and when they don’t give us what we crave, we blame ourselves.

  I know a seventy-year-old woman who is still waiting for a sign of love from her mother, who is ninety-five. The daughter calls faithfully once a week, inquiring about her mother’s health, hoping for a kindly word in return, and almost always she hangs up on the verge of tears. But she goes on trying, endlessly trying, week after week, never conceding that the fault lies with her mother, not with her.

  I listen to her lament as sympathetically as I can. I watch as she turns to her children, her friends, trying in vain to wrest from them the approval her mother withholds. My fervent hope is that one sleepless night she will suddenly understand that she is wasting a lifetime of energy in quest of something only she can supply.

  The impoverished in spirit have no choice but to bless themselves. This is as true for my friend as it is for me, as it is for every individual who yearns for the affirmation they never had. We must bless ourselves; there is no other way. If we don’t, there is no telling how far we will go or what terrible acts we will commit to prove our worthiness.

  I am haunted by a story a journalist friend once told me. In a refugee camp in the Middle East, she spoke with a woman who held a baby in her arms. The mother proudly told my friend that the infant was a boy. She hoped to have many sons, she said—to give them to the revolution.

  My friend never saw the woman again, but I can’t help but conjecture about those sons and the martyrdom that came to them through mother’s milk. I have to believe they grew up with their mother’s mission on their minds, and that from an early age they were fully prepared to sacrifice their lives for the sole purpose of pleasing her. They undoubtedly convinced themselves that their deaths would advance a revolution—which wasn’t their revolution until they were old enough to make it their own. But revolution wasn’t the reason they shouldered their rifles or planted their bombs, killing others as they killed themselves. It was the justification, the rationale for their irrational deeds.

  I wonder what might have happened if they had discovered within themselves the will to defy their mother, to let go of her expectations and act for themselves. Perhaps one had the makings of a teacher, another a poet, another a doctor, another a genuine peacemaker. Who can say what grand works they might have wrought if they had been allowed to live out their lives as they were meant to be lived?

  For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe without knowing why. I have often stood for hours in galleries and gazed at her pictures—so intense, so strikingly original: New York Night, Cross by the Sea, Lake George Window, Cebolla Church, Pelvis with Moon, The White Trumpet Flower, The Lawrence Tree. Only now, after all these years, am I beginning to understand the pull these paintings have for me. They are the works of a woman who dared to see with her own eyes.

  As I move back inside my beach house, the faint rays of dawn are sifting through the windows, providing enough illumination for me to read by. I find the volume of reproductions that I have carried with me clear across the continent. I open to the page I know so well, a page that shows a pastel of a single dark alligator pear on a white cloth. But it’s not the painting of the lush pear that I’m looking for: it’s the artist’s words that accompany it.

  “I get out my work,” O’Keeffe writes, “and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it—how good or bad or indifferent it is. After that the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.”

  I am deeply affected by the directness of her words. What O’Keeffe writes and what she paints—they are one and the same. The individual who fears the criticism of others is no different from the one who seeks their praise. Both are shadow figures, fading into the landscape, lacking the will to act for themselves.

  I can’t help but think about what the world would have lost if O’Keeffe had felt otherwise. What if the artist in her had succumbed to the voices in her past—the knowing voices that must have been there—the voices that attempted to tell her which colors and shapes to live by and which to avoid? If she had heeded them, she would have died within herself, died in the spirit, if not in the flesh, and left no lasting testament of her passage through this world.

  I am forever indebted to men and women like O’Keeffe. I aspire to be as they were, as they are. In the aftermath of my nightmare, I feel as though I am closer to that moment of awakening than ever before. There is only one person who can sanctify my life. That power lies with me and me alone.

  The light of morning has passed over the peaks of the coastal range and filled the sky. I leave my beach house, climb down the rickety steps from my deck, and head for the edge of the sea. I am lost in thought, moving by compulsion toward the exact place where I saw the woman in the breakers the night before. The loose end of the rope is still there; I can see it in the surf, floating free. It is a temptation—the way it washes in the waves. I feel as if I could wade in, grab hold, and yank it free. But I go on by.

  seven

  stone with a hole in the center

  Far down the beach, I see a woman bending over, her head almost touching her toes, the strands of her windblown hair blending with the sand. She is wearing jeans and a white sleeveless T-shirt, and as I approach, she looks up at me and smiles.

  “What are you looking for?” I ask.

  “Stones with holes in them,” she says. “I have a shelf full of them at home. A stone with a hole in the center wards off evil spirits.”

  “So how are you doing with evil spirits?”

  “Lately—not so good,” she replies.

  I laugh and she laughs,
too—but under her laughter I detect an earnestness. For her, this is more than a pastime, a momentary diversion on the beach. She believes in stones with holes in the center. If she didn’t, why would she devote an entire shelf to them in her home?

  I continue on my way, thinking about what she said, about what it means to me. I have my evil spirits, too. At night they invade my dreams; in the mornings they weigh me down.

  I’m worried about money. My funds are dwindling. I no longer bother to balance my checkbook. Any day I expect a notice from my bank telling me they have closed my account because I’m so overdrawn. Suppose I become ill? I have no health insurance, no paid sick leave, no retirement income, none of the benefits that accrue to the workingman. Who will look after me?

  I am alone, completely alone on this strip of beach. I want an antidote for my loneliness, a placebo I can swallow, a talisman I can hold to cast out my fears. I see a stone riddled with holes, half-buried in the sand. I pick it up—but even as I roll it over in my palm, I know it is too small to dispel the ache in my heart that grows larger with each passing day. I need a stone that is huge, a stone with a hole so big that it surrounds me body and soul.

  I come upon a rock with a cavernous hole in the middle, carved out by the perpetual pounding of the waves. The rock is easily twice my height. It is perched at the edge of the beach, beside a bluff that rises straight up out of the sea. I crawl into the hollow and sit on a hard ledge, watching the breakers crash against the offshore reefs, sending plumes of spray into the air.

  I sit as still as I can, my back straight; I make a valiant effort to empty my mind. I want to feel the cadence of the waves, the rise of the swells, the ebb of the tide. I want to move in unison with those elements, to become part of them as they become part of me.