Afterward, Bob took her away to meet some other people and every so often she would glance across the room at Joel. And even though he was deep in conversation, he would see her and smile. When they said goodbye, he asked if she would like to meet some horseshoe crabs and, far too promptly, she said she would. He said how about tomorrow and she said fine.
Within a week they were lovers and a week later Joel asked her to come and live with him. He said he felt he had known her forever, that they were ‘soul mates’, that if she moved in, they could spend the winter side by side, writing their theses. Helen had never heard anything so romantic in all her life. But men weren’t supposed to go around making such rash offers of commitment. So she said no, it was out of the question, ridiculous in fact; and the next morning moved in.
It was as close to shocking Celia as she had ever come.
‘You’re going to live with him?’ she said, watching her pack.
‘Yep.’
‘After knowing him only two weeks?’
‘Sister, if a girl can’t find Mr Right, sometimes she’s got to settle for Mr Right Now.’
Since her parents’ divorce, she had stumbled from one bad affair to the next. Not that she’d been exactly promiscuous. Even if she’d wanted to be, that would have been tricky, living out in the wilds most of the year. It was just that she seemed to have this uncanny knack of picking the most unsuitable men available. There were exceptions, but mainly they were men that other women saw coming a hundred miles away, who had jerk or cheat or bastard written in neon letters on their foreheads, men she didn’t like or lust after but still somehow ended up with.
Quite why she chose so badly, Helen had never been able to figure out. Perhaps she set her sights low because, deep down, she was sure no good man could ever possibly see anything in her. Not that the bad ones seemed to see much either, for it was rarely Helen who ended the affair, except when she sensed she was about to be dumped and managed to beat him to it.
Normally, she stuck in there, even with the worst of them, trying to make it work, striving desperately for their approval, until they drifted off or started cheating on her or announced over a last, lousy dinner in a cheap restaurant, trying to break it gently, saying maybe, honey, we should call it a day.
She’d never lived permanently with any of them. And so when Joel made his proposal, she went into a spin of panic. For weeks, she would wake up in the middle of the night with her heart pounding and an absolute certainty roaring in her head that tomorrow this gentle, golden man who lay warm and softly snoring beside her would tell her it had all been a mistake and would she please pack her bags, take her dog and get the hell out of his life.
But it didn’t happen. And after awhile she relaxed. And soon it seemed as if they weren’t even separate people. She had read about such things in books but never believed it could be so. But it was. They often knew each other’s thoughts without need of words. They could spend a whole night talking or a whole day silent.
Normally when people asked her about her work she would give a few jokey answers, putting it down, and would then switch the conversation around by asking questions of her own. Who could possibly be interested in what she did? But with Joel, it was different. You couldn’t deflect him. She found herself telling him more about her work than she had ever told anyone and he made her realize that her supervisor was right: she was good; hell, she was brilliant.
The first time he told her he loved her, she didn’t know how to react. She just murmured and kissed him and the moment passed. She couldn’t bring herself to say it back, although it was true. Maybe he was the kind of man who said it to every woman he slept with. But that wasn’t all that restrained her. There seemed something fearfully final about saying it back, like joining two ends of a string to make a circle; she would be completing something. Ending it.
But as fall gave way to winter and the Cape cleared of tourists and its skies of the great flocks of migrating birds, Helen found herself somehow clearing too. Free of doubt and self-consciousness, she came to accept what she and Joel had found. He loved her and she must therefore be lovable. He told her she was beautiful and for the first time in her life she truly felt she was. And though surely he must know it, why should she not now tell him that she loved him in return? So the second time he said it, she did.
They moved the long kitchen table into the living room and arranged it by the big bay window, setting up their laptops and piling it high with papers. But little work got done. They talked too much or gazed too long at the wind scything spume from the gray waves of the bay. There was a wood stove which they kept going all the time and each day they took Buzz for long walks by the water’s edge in search of driftwood.
Joel had a way with animals and the hitherto unruly Buzz was soon his devoted slave, sitting and staying to command and fetching sticks thrown seemingly impossible distances out into the surf. Helen watched in mounting panic while the poor dog got tossed and swamped and dragged under. She was convinced he would drown. But Joel just laughed. And soon, a bedraggled head would bob up somewhere in the foam, teeth clenched on the stick that, miraculously, he always managed to find and he would struggle back with it and drop it at Joel’s feet, begging for more.
Joel had just discovered opera, which Helen had always claimed to hate. She groaned every time he put on a disc and even more when he sang along. Then he caught her one day humming something from Tosca in the bathtub and she was forced to admit that some of it was bearable. Not as good as Sheryl Crow, but not bad.
There was a bookcase stuffed by the landlords, inexplicably, with musty translations of Russian classics, books Joel said he had always meant to read but had never gotten round to. He started with Dostoevsky and moved rapidly on through Pasternak and Tolstoy to Chekhov, whom he discovered he liked best of all.
He liked to cook and in the evenings, as he did so, he would tell her what was happening in the story, while she sat smiling and watched him work. They ate by the fire and afterward they would curl up together on the couch and read or talk about places they knew or wanted to know.
He told her that when he was a kid, his father used to take all the kids crabbing at night. They’d row out into the bay, drop the pots, then come back and light a fire on the beach. Then they’d row out again and haul up the pots and his father would just empty them into the boat.
‘It was only a little rowboat and we were all in swimsuits and no shoes or anything. And these crabs and lobsters were scuttling around in the dark over our feet in the bottom of the boat. God, we used to shriek.’
Once, he said, they’d pulled up a pot and found a plastic bag with a bottle of whiskey in it and a note saying, Thanks for the lobster! Some people on a yacht must have left it, he said.
She loved listening to his stories. Later they would make love, while the clapboard rattled and the salt wind moaned in the eaves.
That winter, for the first time in years, snow fell heavily and stayed for the best part of a month. It was so cold that the bay froze over. From the frosted window, they watched it stretching away like tundra to a gray horizon. Joel said they were like Zhivago and Lara, marooned in their palace of ice. All they needed, he said, were some of her Minnesota wolves to howl for them at night.
The spring and summer were the happiest of Helen’s life. They borrowed a dinghy and Joel taught her how to sail. Sometimes at night they would hike through the woods to a freshwater pond and swim naked. Their bodies undulated pale as muslin in the black water, still warm from the sun. They would hold each other and listen to the frogs and the muted roar of the ocean beyond the dunes.
Instead of doing her own work Helen helped with his. Wolves now seemed to belong to a distant age, some desolate place in her past. This was her life now, this place with its teeming shores and vivid skies and air so full of salt and ozone it scoured the inside of your skull.
That second fall, at last, she got down to work on her thesis. Just as he’d promised a year ago, they wo
rked side by side in the big bay window. Sometimes they would spend a whole day discussing a problem one of them had run into. On other days they hardly spoke. Joel would go out to the kitchen and make tea and bring it to her at her desk and kiss the top of her head while she worked and she would kiss his hand and smile and go on with her work without a word being uttered.
Then, subtly at first, things began to change. Joel grew quieter and corrected her sometimes when she was talking. He would criticize her for little things, how she’d left something unwashed in the sink or forgotten to turn off a light. It didn’t bother her too much, but she took note and tried not to make the same mistakes again.
They had long disagreed about the issue that lay at the heart of Helen’s research: nature versus nurture. Joel believed the actions of any living creature were almost entirely conditioned by its genes, while Helen thought learning and circumstance often counted just as much. They had debated the subject endlessly and quite amicably. But now when it arose, Joel would get impatient and one evening he shouted at her and said she was stupid. He later apologized and Helen made light of it. But she felt shocked and hurt for days.
They went to Celia’s for Christmas and Joel and Bryan got into an argument about a new catastrophe that was unfolding in Central Africa. Every TV news program was showing footage of hundreds of thousands of starving refugees, fleeing from tribal butchery through knee-deep mud and filth. A car-load of American aid workers had been ambushed and hacked to death with machetes. And watching the report from his leather recliner, in the big living room, Bryan said casually that he didn’t understand why we bothered.
‘What do you mean?’ Joel said.
Helen caught the tone of his voice from the hallway. She’d been reading the children a bedtime story and had just kissed them goodnight. Carey had asked her if she and Joel were going to get married and have babies and Helen had made a joke and avoided giving a proper answer.
Bryan said, ‘Well, it’s none of our business, is it?’
‘So, what, we just let them all die?’
‘These guys have been killing each other for centuries, Joel.’
‘Does that make it okay?’
‘No. But it has nothing to do with us. In fact, I think it’s kind of patronizing for the West to get involved at all. You know, like we’re the civilized ones. We don’t even understand why these people are killing each other in the first place. And if you don’t understand it, you just end up making things worse.’
‘How’s that?’
Helen was hovering in the doorway. Celia came out of the kitchen and made a face at her as she went past into the living room. She asked breezily if anyone wanted coffee, which meant, Okay fellas, merry Christmas, that’s enough. Both men declined.
‘We always end up backing the wrong side,’ Bryan said. Helen could see Joel nodding, as if considering what Bryan had said. He didn’t say a word and had an icy look in his eyes that she had never seen before. The TV news moved onto a story about a fifteen-foot python that had been found under an old couple’s house in Georgia. It had been living there happily for years and was only discovered after someone thought how remarkable it was that so many of the neighborhood’s dogs had gone missing.
Bryan seemed a little disconcerted by Joel’s silence.
‘So, what do you think?’ he asked.
Joel looked at him for a moment then said quietly,
‘I think you’re an idiot.’
The holiday never quite recovered.
They came back to the Cape and for awhile things seemed more or less normal. But, as the new year settled in, Helen became aware of a growing restlessness in him. She would look up from her computer and catch him staring into space. She could tell that little things she did irritated him, like when she tapped her nails on the keyboard while thinking something through.
Soon she felt that everything she did was being silently judged and found wanting. He would suddenly get up and snatch his coat and say he was going for a walk and Helen would sit there, wondering what she had done and blaming herself. She would watch him from the window as he strode away along the shore, shoulders hunched against the wind, ignoring the sticks that Buzz dropped for him to throw, until the dog got the message that the game was a thing of the past.
In bed one night, staring at the dark ceiling, Joel said he wanted to do something worthwhile with his life.
‘You don’t think what you’re doing at the moment is worthwhile?’ she said. He gave her a look and she quickly added, ‘I don’t mean, you know, us. I mean your work.’
She meant both actually, but he took her at her word and said, sure, of course it was worthwhile, in its own way.
‘But saving a few crabs isn’t really going to change things. I mean, the oceans are dying, the whole planet’s being destroyed. Helen, all over the world people are starving and slaughtering each other and actually, when you think about it, what the hell am I doing? What the hell do a few crabs mean alongside all of that? It’s like fiddling while Rome burns.’
She suddenly felt very cold. He made love to her, but it was different, as if he’d already gone.
One night in late April, he told her over supper that he had applied to a foreign aid charity to go and work for them in Africa. They wanted to interview him. Helen tried not to look hurt.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s great.’
‘Yeah. Well, you know. It’s just an interview.’
He took another mouthful. He wouldn’t look her in the eyes. There was a pause in which Helen’s head screamed inside with accusation. She tried to find a tone of voice that wouldn’t show it.
‘So, do they have starving crabs in Africa?’ The words just slipped out, she couldn’t help it. He looked at her. It was the first bitchy thing she’d ever said to him. She went on, trying to make it seem like a real question, ‘I mean, they need biology graduates, do they?’
‘I think the two years of med school I did maybe impresses them more,’ he said coldly.
There was another long silence. He started to stack the plates.
‘You didn’t mention you were applying.’
‘I wasn’t sure I wanted it.’
‘Oh.’
‘I mean, I’m not even sure now.’
But she could tell he was. The following week he flew to Washington for the interview and they called the next day to say they wanted him to start in June. He asked Helen what she thought he should do and she told him what he wanted to hear. He should take it. Of course he should take it.
It was a long while before they could talk about it, or about anything else, come to that. Outside the air was growing warm. You could hear the call of piping plovers and see sanderlings again on the shore, playing their tireless tag with the waves. But, in the house, winter endured. They were clumsy with each other now, colliding in the cramped kitchen, whereas once they had known each other’s moves, effortlessly, like dancers. A cool politeness had settled, under which Joel stifled his guilt and she her anger.
Reason told her she had no cause. God, it wasn’t as if they were married or had even discussed it as a possibility. Why shouldn’t he go and do something worthwhile with his life? It was fine. More, it was laudable. He was a ‘disperser’, that was all. It was ‘in his nature’.
Then anger gave way and creeping upon her came that same old sense that, yet again, she had failed. But she knew it was worse, for this time she had not just sought to please but had opened every corner of herself. There was no part of her he didn’t know, nothing with which she could console herself and say, had he but seen this in me, then surely he never would or could have gone.
She had given all and still been found wanting.
In May, when the water warms along the Cape, the horseshoe crabs return in droves from their deep winter haunts. And when the sun and the moon align and the highest tides of the year flood in, they swarm to the shallows to breed.
At this time, for the last two years, Joel had tagged several hund
red of them, pressing numbered stainless-steel tacks into the rear of their shells. The idea was to see how many returned. Now, just a fortnight before he was due to leave for Africa, he planned to do it one last time.
Tentatively, for that was how things now were between them, he asked if Helen would like to come along, as she had last year, to help. To show him how little (or how much) his departure bothered her, she had taken a job as a kitchen hand at Moby Dick’s, a seafood place out on the highway. But it was her night off. Fine, she said, if he needed her help, she didn’t mind coming.
It was a cool, cloudless night with all but the brightest stars doused by a full moon, around which there hung a ring of umbral haze. Later, Helen heard such a ring was considered by some to be an omen of disaster.
They loaded the tagging gear into two large packs and, leaving Buzz in the house, set off in their waders along the strip of sand that traced the lip of the estuary. The sand glowed pale as bone dust and although they walked apart, the angle of the moon made their shadows merge.
They could see from a long way off that the crabs had come. Along the shore’s edge the water seethed and as they drew nearer they saw hundreds of domed and barnacled shells jostling in the shallows. The water swirled around them in galaxies of phosphorescent foam.
From the previous year Helen knew what to do. With barely a word, they took what they needed from their packs and got to work. Joel waded in among the crabs, putting on a pair of tough rubber gauntlets. One by one, he carefully hoisted the crabs and held them to the beam of the flashlight that hung on a cord around his neck. The crabs bucked and struggled in his hands, the hinged rear part of their shells thrashing as they tried to stab him with their dagger-tails. When he found one that was tagged, he called out the number and Helen, beside him, noted it down on a pad. With those that weren’t tagged, he called out their sex and size and she duly recorded them and handed him tags to clip to their shells.