The Memory of Place

Still, I thought, nothing felt like home anymore. Colorado was a memory too far to grasp, and California was, well, lost forever in the incense and peppermint of the sixties.

"I've never been on the ICW before," I said, changing the subject. "Have you done much of it?"

"Naw, not too much. You have to motor, so what's the point. I like blue water."

"Done much of that?"

"Nope. That's the dream, though."

"What? Sailing off into the sunset?"

"Yeah, something like that. Got to finish up some things first, then I'm gonna head out, look around for a while."

"Not your everyday kinda dream, I guess you know."

"What, for a girl, you mean?" She took a sidelong glance at me, then focused on traffic in the channel ahead.

"I didn't say that. It's just that not many people have that dream anymore, you know. It was a sixties kind of thing. Drop out and see the world. 'Westsail the world'...wasn't that their ad slogan?"

"That's bullshit, and you know it. Why is sailing dropping out?"

"It's turning your back on what society expects of you."

"So?"

"Well, that's kinda frowned on, ya know. Hell, you're a lawyer...I'd think you'd know that better than anyone."

"So what? Who gives a shit?"

"I don't know, isn't that what the law is? I mean, if you think about it." I looked off at the sky, down into the water, looked back at all the implications of our choice to sell-out and sail away. "That's what life's all about, isn't it? Conformity? Conforming to the will of the group, to the rule of law. It's pretty off the wall for someone who represents the force of conformity to be a non-conformist. If you think about it, I mean."

"Hmm. I don't know that I buy that, but I'll think about it." She looked ahead, adjusted her course to scoot behind a trawler crossing ahead of us. "So, is that what it was all about? For you and Liz? Non-conformity?"

"Not exactly, but we met at Berkeley -- if you know what I mean."

"What?"

"Oh, well, non-conformity seems to be in Berkeley's DNA. But I don't mean to frame the decision in just those terms. It wasn't about what other people thought about what we were doing, about why we were doing it. It was the act of doing it -- of leaving -- that was, I think, a statement of, oh, I don't know, a rebellion against our prior choices, maybe. Getting out there and doing it, letting life hang out over the edge for a while. Experiencing the world while everyone else watched it unfold on television. We chose not to live on everyone else's terms, so I don't think we cared too much about what other people thought about the trip, about what they thought we were doing."

"So, what? You and Liz have a monopoly on that dream? No one else can take a shot at it?"

Our eyes met. I laughed; she didn't.

"You know, we met tons of people out there, but mainly from Europe. A lot of people from France, but a lot of Germans and Swiss, too. Bunch of Brits in the Caribbean, but not so many in the South Pacific. Most of the people out there, and I hate to generalize about something like this, but here goes, most of the folks out there were tired of conforming to arbitrary rules set out for them by bureaucrats and governments, they just wanted to live their lives without governments and jobs breathing down their necks all the time. So I think all of us were searching for something simpler."

"Amen to that."

"So, doesn't that make you the non-conforming conformist? Or are you a conforming non-conformist?"

"Asshole."

"Who, me?"

"Yeah, you. Like I said, I'll have to give that some thought."

"Take your time." I said, laughing again. "Let me know if you ever figure it out."

"You're bad, you know it?" She was still smiling as she said that, and that was a good thing. I was getting thirsty, and didn't particularly want to swim back to town.

"Don't you have any beer on this tub?"

"Tub? Tub!? You callin' my baby a tub?" She leaned over a rubbed a patch of teak. "There, there, girl," she cooed to the boat, "don't let the mean asshole hurt your feelings." I just shook my head, grinned at her.

"So, you gonna take this girl out on your trip?"

"I don't know. She's about as big as I can handle alone, you know. I wouldn't mind something bigger." She let that thought hang in the air for a minute. "I don't know, Tom. I always thought I'd end up doing this . . . I always saw myself doing this alone."

"No boyfriend?"

"I was married once."

"Oh? Didn't take?"

"No. Leukemia. About ten years ago."

"Oh, God, Lisa. I didn't..."

"I know, Tom. I know you're not from around here, don't know all the local gossip. Don't worry about it. And," she said as she looked at me again, "I know you're not mean."

We settled on a course down the middle of the waterway and she asked me to take the tiller for a minute. She went down below for what seemed like an hour, then came back up, her face scrubbed, her eyes a little puffy. She'd been crying, and now she looked around, took in the surroundings.

"Almost there," she said. "About half a mile." She looked at me while she sat down, didn't take her eyes from me. "Man, it's nice to have someone around to take the stick for a while."

"You really sail around here by yourself all the time?"

She nodded her head, smiled at me a little defiantly. "You betcha."

"I don't know, Lisa, but I think I like you."

"Like me? Oh, boy. That's not was I was hoping for, Tommy-boy."

"Oh, what were you hoping for?" Then it hit me: I had smiled as her words hit me.

"Yeah, Tom. I was hoping -- I was hoping I'd finally met someone who likes cheese grits as much as I do."

"Well, like you said. I'll have to give that one some thought."

She just looked at me for a minute, then she smiled, pointing. "There it is. Hope you're ready for this, white boy..."

◊◊◊◊◊

She was right, of course. Sitting outside on a screened-in porch, looking out on the waterway as all manner of small craft puttered by, I felt there was something almost mystical about the South. Everything I'd experienced so far about the south felt like proud anachronisms, with more than a little irony thrown in for good measure. On one side of this bifurcated terrain you had a fairy-tale land of overt meanness, the sidelong suspicions of in-your-face backwoods rednecks, the really uncool vibes of down-home racism that still bubbled in near-dormant malevolence to the surface from time to time. Perhaps most disconcerting of all, there was throughout the region an easy acceptance of intolerance that was utterly unnerving when you saw it in action. Not exactly 'Gone With The Wind,' but not too far removed from Tara and Scarlett when you got right down to it. On the other you had, you had people like Lisa Mullins. Bright, articulate, compassionate, accepting; Lisa was everything the South was not, except she too was the South, and it was these constant in-your-face contradictions that had me baffled.

Whatever it was about these contradictions that fascinated me, it was all soon forgotten as she sat across from me, leaning over the driftwood-planked table pointing out some of the good things on the menu, and hinting that there were some really, really good things for the asking -- if you knew who to ask, and what to ask for. She leaned closer to me as she talked about her love of place, this place in particular but the South generally.

And I could feel heat in the air between us just then. I was getting warm. Unsettled. So many contradictions alive in the air, and maybe more than too much irony in this union.

I looked out at the waterway: trawlers of all sorts droned along under the intense afternoon sun -- buzzing like insects -- while an occasional sailboat drifted by in humid silence. Both these forms of moving across the water embodied contradictions too, didn't they? Ultimately, they were one and the same, people moving across the water from point A to point B, people looking for some time alone, or with friends, away from the noise of everyday life; but weren't there inherent contradictions within the choice to burn gas or play the wind? Something about the purpose of your life? Looking for that way to fit in?

Lisa ordered her low-country favorites, shrimp & grits, some Gulf lump crabmeat sautéed in butter and lemon, with some chopped pecan thrown in for good measure. We ate and talked, talked and ate, the beer so cold it felt like fire going down, even though we were sitting in the shade. The sun arced across the sky as we sat, but time had long since stopped keeping track of us.

So yeah, we were lost within that slow-glowing arc of time, and I was soon lost in her story.

Her parents were evangelicals, adherents of the gospel of prosperity, so of course she grew up hating everything about them. She'd considered herself a hard corp agnostic all through high school, and flirted with being a full time atheist by the time she moved away from home. By the time she finished law school she knew enough about the world to understand you didn't make those kinds of choices lightly, and seeing how other people's faiths sustained them had made an indelible impression on her. Speaking of irony, she envied people whose faith seemed pure, unassailable -- at least on the surface -- but the more she scratched that surface the uglier faith became. Religion, she said, had become the central paradox of her life, one she felt would never be resolved. She said the country was kind of like that, too.

And then the law had become her religion. I could see that plainly as we talked over shrimp and crab through the afternoon. When she talked about the law, she would become assertive, almost masculine. She picked up her long-neck beer by the top of the bottle and swung it up to her lips with two-fingered ease, and there was nothing feminine or dainty about the way she did that. No, plainly she just felt so at ease in these surroundings that all pretension melted away.

It was inevitable that as we talked I drew comparisons to Liz.

While Liz had always been open -- almost vivacious -- in public, she was really quite reserved around the people she cared most about. She cared a lot about what others thought of her too, about the labels inside her clothes, for instance, or if her hair was 'in style' or not. She watched television shows but hated movies, hadn't read a book since college, and loved to invite strangers to the boat for dinner whenever we pulled into a new anchorage. She hated that I listened to the BBC on the boat's shortwave radio while we sat in some remote anchorage at night, and thought my interest in the stars was pathologically weird. But we cared about social justice, we found common ground when we talked about the disenfranchised and oppressed, and we even argued about things we held in common, challenged our preconceptions about the world. We had always found it easy to talk to one another, even when we knew things between us were turning sour. And there was that history between us, those California afternoons that seemed to linger like her breath on my neck in almost every memory I have of those days. Liz was a fragile, almost willowy blond who nevertheless always seemed ready to ask the hard questions -- but then again, I always thought she had embraced life on her own terms, was rarely a follower. Yet another irony; as the tears and years swept by, I realized she had been holding on to me by following my dreams, following in my wake, then resenting the implications of my choices on our lives. She was, I had come to understand, more of a pretender. And then, I suppose, she grew bitter about having been found out.

As I listened to Lisa, I had the feeling she had had her fill of pretension, her fill of men who sought power for power's sake, and that she'd also had a belly full of life in the sewers. She made it clear that while almost all legal professionals have to deal with the sewer from time to time, she had embraced criminal law in spite of all that, she knew the implications of her choice but stuck to it despite all her misgivings, and it was amazing to me that she wasn't more jaded than she appeared to be. Sure, she was rough around the edges, but hell, who isn't; by that I mean life does that to you, it grinds away at you, exposes all the things you'd rather other people never found out. But she still wanted to go after her dreams, and in my experience not too many people can claim to hang on to those by the time they hit forty. Conforming to expectations chews away at your dreams -- until one day they're gone.

I wasn't sure that was what killed our marriage; after all, Liz and I did get out there and chase our dreams -- even if mine became the prime mover. Anyway, I asked Lisa what she thought of marriage, because surely she'd seen enough marital bliss in family court to have a fair understanding of the terrain.

"You know," she began, "most marriages fail for one simple reason. People play games with one another. Power games, dominance games. Con games. They get used to conning their partner for what they want, and sooner or later all honestly leaves the relationship. There's not an honest emotion left in the marriages I see falling apart. Everyone I see says the same thing: 'I can't believe I married that son-of-a-bitch'. But is it that? Is it that they didn't know the truth about each other when they got married, or is it that the truth got lost in all the lies and games?"

"Truth gets lost? That's an interesting idea."

"Have you thought much about Liz, and what happened? What happened to your marriage, I mean?"

I looked at her. There was no hesitation in her eyes, no regret for having asked the question. "I don't guess I'm too different from most other people, Lisa. For a while it's all I thought about. It hurt. The split seemed so unexpected, yet now, looking back at things, it seems like it was inevitable. I don't think we got caught up in lies, I think our lies got caught up in our dreams."

"That's a subtle distinction. But you were running? Is that what the boat was all about?"

"We never thought about the trip in those terms, and I'm not sure it's an accurate way of looking at the decision, either. But I'm willing to think about it." I think I was smiling as I said that.

"So, what are you going to do now?"

"I've been wanting to get a smaller boat, shallower draft. I want to go to Europe, wander through canals in France, then maybe go to Greece." Of course Liz and I had always talked about doing that someday, but maybe 'our dream' was mine after all.

"When are you going to leave? I mean, any plans firming up?"

I shook my head, but didn't know where this was going. "No, gonna play it by ear for a while."

"Well, one thing's certain," she said as she looked down at her watch. "We gotta be headin' back soon or the tide's gonna turn and smack us right on the nose."

Life's like that, you know? If you don't watch out, you spend your whole life swimming against the tide. If you're lucky you figure it out before you're too old to give a damn, before all you can do is turn and drift on the flood.

◊◊◊◊◊

The wind faded with the afternoon, and we pushed against the tide the last mile or so back into Charleston. I watched Lisa again as she worked the tiller, her calm self-assurance, the practiced eye she cast on Soliloquy's course or other traffic crossing ahead. As we got near the marina, I set out dock lines and dropped fenders over the sides to shield against a hard landing, and stood up by the bow-sprit for a while, enjoying the sunset and the history that was all around us as we turned by the Battery. The waterfront was beautiful, quiet and full of history. I looked over toward my boat, and saw the outlines of a woman sitting in the cockpit. I squinted through the fading sunset, and could just make out Liz sitting there.

I turned, looked at Lisa, and saw the expression on her face. She had seen her too, and suddenly, to me at least, she looked hurt, almost betrayed -- like the forces of destiny had just lined up against her.

We docked gently, and I turned to help Lisa sort out the lines, but she stopped me short.

"You better go now, Tom. She's come back for you, so be careful."

◊◊◊◊◊

"Well, I see it didn't take you long to land on your feet."

I was just stepping onto the boat -- 'our' boat -- when she let go with this first assault.

"Hey, you know what? I didn't file for a divorce, you did. Tell me what exactly I'm doing wrong here, would you?"

"Oh, Tom, I'm sorry. I didn't come down here to fight with you. I, well, to tell you the truth, I half expected to find you shacked up down below with some girl."

"Well, you know, if you'd given me another hour..." I let the nastiness in my voice trail off into the air.

She looked at me for a moment, then shook her head. "I'm sorry, Tom. I really am. I should never have done this to you. To us."

"Well, breaking news, kiddo. We're divorced. You said you wanted one, in writing, as I seem to recall, and you got just what you wanted, too." I was trying to be as obtuse as I could possibly be, and frankly I think I was doing a damn fine job of it, too. "I'm just curious, is this a social call, or was there something you wanted from the boat?"

"No. No Tom, there's nothing."

It was almost dark now, and I could barely make her out in the fading light, but suddenly she was crying. I knew that quiver in her voice, I remembered the air of alarm that sound used to imply, how uncomfortable I used to feel when she cried. She was a manipulative crier, cried when she wanted something and didn't get it, or when she didn't get her way. Now she was facing the consequences of her actions. Maybe she was sorry, or maybe she was feeling sorry for herself. There was no way to tell, maybe there never had been, and standing there on the boat I realized that I didn't care anymore one way of the other.

"Yeah, well, mind if I go below? I wanna change clothes."

"Was that your lawyer, Tom?"

"Uh-huh."

"She's kinda pretty -- in a frumpy kind of way. Never would have thought of her as your type, though."

I moved past her through the cockpit, unlocked the companionway and began to lift the boards out, then moved to place them on the seat next to me. Liz reached out and took the first board and placed it gently on the seat, taking care not to scratch the ten coats of varnish she had so lovingly applied to the teak not a year ago. Automatically I handed her the next one, then the last board, and I was caught short by my reaction to the familiar in my mind.

Caught within the memory of place, within the echoes of a heartbeat, I saw Liz as she was twenty years ago on a Saturday morning in San Francisco, when we had gone out sailing on our first date, and within that moment I saw her face as she looked up at mine on our wedding day, her eyes so full of love, and I remembered my love for her on that day as an absolute. As something time could never rip asunder.

I paused before I pushed the companionway hatch open, unsure where I was, unsure if I was still on the boat or caught within the shadows of a never-ending dream. I saw her standing next to me when we first saw our boat taking form at the yard in Southwest Harbor, I saw the pride in her eyes, the will to take this creation to the limits of our imagination.

Were we really so bound together through the life we had shared on this boat? Had we really been such a well oiled machine that we sailed half way around the world -- and back -- trusting each other so completely, knowing how the other would react in the face of a storm, knowing that if we worked together we could overcome any obstacle, reach any destination?

Oh, the fucking irony of it all.

"Do you want me to leave, Tom?"

I didn't have an a pithy comeback waiting that time, did I?

"Liz, just tell me what you want."