By Jennifer Paddock

1. The End—The Cottage

Finn was lying in bed, naked. I was standing above him, fully clothed, calling him a phony.

“I’m naked,” he said. “You can’t get more honest than that.”

Not one part of him was covered. The sheets and comforter were in a tangled heap on the floor. He looked old and not old at once—thinning hair on top of his head but muscled arms, legs. He had abs. But where you looked when you looked at a naked man was shrunken, with sparse black hairs. He had not been fully erect—we had to hold the same position for fear he would slip out.

I stared there, no shame at all from him.

He just looked up at me with those blue eyes—I’d come to love the one with the droopy eyelid. He looked crazed, somewhere between wanting me and hating me.

“Catherine,” he said, shutting his eyes, tilting his head back to the pillow propped on the headboard. “Will you go down on me again?”

I didn’t hate him, but I didn’t like him anymore. I leaned in, kissed him with a closed mouth. “Nah.”

He slowly opened his eyes, looking like a fragile, naked madman watching my every move.

I turned around, began to walk out. I wanted him to say something nice—like I was beautiful, or that we just had bad timing, or that he was sorry. I hesitated, and then stepped into the next room. Each step was hard to take, crossing a border to a new land. I didn’t think I’d see him again. I lingered by the front door, took one more look around the little cottage he was renting, took in its musty smell, and unbolted the lock. It was so hard to leave. But I kept imagining him back in the bed, saying to himself, Come on, go on, get out, and feeling so relieved when he heard the door click shut.

The sun was blinding, even through the dense pine trees across the street. Walking to my car, I put my hand above my eyes in a shield and looked down at the old concrete sidewalk, chipped at its edges and with mismatched seams. And then I began to feel like I’d won. We’d been together, even though he told me loved his wife. He’d be left with the guilt and carry it with him, but I was free.

It’s a terrible thing that I felt that way.

Only an hour later, I lay in my bed filled with dread and loneliness. He had a life, a wife—someone he loved who loved him. There was no place for me in any of it. I realized what I had realized before—I would be alone. Whenever I loved someone fully, I was not loved back.

I tried to get more sleep, but it was too bright in my room, the sun filtering easily through the blinds. I should have gone with shutters like everyone else in the neighborhood. Soon I’d have to put on a tennis skirt and go to work. I hadn’t slept much with Finn. I mostly watched him—he slept on his side and hardly made a sound. He had a strong jaw, square shoulders, a long back. In the middle of the night he felt for my hand, pulled it to his chest, but his breathing stayed steady.

I glanced at my bookshelf, newly positioned next to the television that was now mounted on the wall. Everything in my house was rearranged, for the new start I was trying to make.

I was forty years old—in the middle of my life—and there wouldn’t be many chances left.

2. The Middle—The River House

 “Christ, I’m such a fool and a wreck,” Finn said. “My pulse is insane. I need to calm down and can’t seem to.”

We were in the bathroom of our mutual married writer friends’ house. A romantic bathroom, lit with vanilla candles and little white lights twisted inside and around blue and green glass vases. One vase was shaped like a star, another like a fish with scales that reflected the light in a lovely way.

“I didn’t expect to feel so sad,” I said.

“My brain and heart are kind of haywire,” Finn said.

“Mine, too.” I said. “I feel like I love you.”

“Don’t say that,” he said. “I have to keep myself sane.”

I don’t remember how I responded. We’d been in there at least an hour arguing. I don’t remember most of what was said. We’d been drinking since the afternoon out on their deck overlooking the river and those ancient live oaks dripping moss everywhere. We hadn’t intended to drink all day. We were only going to have lunch, inside, with the plan afterward being that we would go somewhere and he would “try better to explain his brain, that he was a fifty-six-year-old teenager, a destroyer of structures of precarious stability.”

When Finn tried to leave by telling our friends that he had to go write—the reason he’d rented that cottage for the week, the reason he was back home in Point Clear to begin with, that and to see his son graduate high school—I said I’d just stay and hang out on the deck and get my feet tan. I work as a tennis pro and had a tennis tan, my feet white as a blank page. And then our friends said that they wanted to go outside with me and smoke cigarettes, and we could drink Grey Goose and soda, my favorite drink. And I said great. And then Finn said that he would just stay, too. And that’s how we ended up there all day and night and somehow ended up together in the bathroom.

I remember crying. Finn must have told me what he wanted to tell me. But I hadn’t believed it—we’d had fun all day. Everyone laughed when he said in his dry way, a few hours in, “Your feet are in the shade.” And we told stories like a team. We knew a lot of the same people.

He kept saying, “I’ve been through so much pain.”

I may have nodded.

“I just want peace,” he said. “I want to live out the rest of my life in peace. I am not getting another divorce.”

I hadn’t asked him for anything like that. He’s the one who said things. Our first night, after the party on the pier, I was going to sleep in my clothes. At first, we stayed at opposite ends of the bed. Then he moved closer, then one hand was under my skirt, and then his fingers were inside me. He tried to unbutton my blouse, but got frustrated when his hands tangled in a necklace. “Take all this shit off,” he said, and I did.

But then he told me something about how there were too many walls. The whisky was a wall. His wife was a wall.

I didn’t say anything back. I just moved his arms to my waist.

He held me in a sweet, tender way, and said softly in my ear, “You are beautiful. I wish I could take you back to Montana with me.”

I must have looked at him like I was in love.

Because then he said, “Now, we both know what this is.”

My friends, our friends, told me later that they heard cooing, not crying, in the bathroom. That is like me—to forget the nice things. They told me, trying to be nice, that they were sure he was tortured, too, that he latches on and never lets go, that he’s a train wreck, that it’s why he’s brilliant.

When we finally came out of the bathroom, the lights were out and our friends’ bedroom door was shut.

“Let’s just leave,” I said. “They’re probably asleep.”

“We’ve got to say something,” he said, and then he yelled very loudly, “We’re leaving now, and we did not fuck in your bathroom.”

There was no response from them. I felt horrified. My ex-husband had had an affair. I was newly divorced—still outraged by it all. I didn’t want them to think that I could be anything like him. I kept justifying Finn to myself because the first time I’d met him, ten years before at a bookstore reading in Fairhope, before he’d even met the woman he was with now and before I was married, I’d had a crush on him. Finn had a great reading voice. My ex-husband even accused me of the crush all the time throughout our marriage, saying I didn’t even try to hide it.

“Now they know,” I said. “They’re not stupid. They’ll think not there, but somewhere.”

Outside by our cars, I asked Finn if he had signed my book. I at least wanted that. I’d been too afraid to ask him all those years before at the bookstore.

He said he had, and he opened his passenger door and gave me the beautiful hardback with the beveled pages publishers like to give to important books. I’d given him my copy days before. I opened it to the inscription, which wasn’t too personal:

To Catherine, here’s to you.

The last lines of Thoreau’s essay “Walking:”

His writing was so messy that the only thing I could make out there in the dimly lit dirt driveway was this:

 And light up our whole lives with a great awakening light.

When I looked up again, he was in front of me, with glaring, glassy eyes. “Her father died. My wife’s father died. She’s been calling me all day, and I wasn’t there for her. I was here with you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Well, he was a miserable man, and eighty-five years old. It’s not exactly a surprise.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “Losing your father is very hard. I know.”

“I know you know!” He was almost screaming at me. “It’s not like your father’s death. It’s not that kind of shock, and she’s not young like you were. It’s much harder when you’re young.”

I said, “Save us from shotguns and father’s suicides. It all depends on who you’re the father of if you want to kill yourself—”

Finn’s look of rage turned to worry. “What?”

“The John Berryman poem about his father and Hemingway. I know you know it, that you love Hemingway, and even admire the way he left his wives.”

“I’m my father,” he said. “When my mother’s dad died, my father was with another woman. I used to be an honest person. I never should have started anything up with you.”

“You should have written lines from that Berryman poem in my book. I don’t know anything about Thoreau. He means nothing to me.”

Finn got back into his car.

I stood there in the red Alabama dirt, watching him in the overhead light through the windshield, as he talked on the phone to his wife in Montana.

I thought about my father, how he shot himself with a shotgun in the woods on the bank of a creek across the street from our bay house, a house that was way too expensive for us. That was one of the reasons he did it. His law practice was failing, and we were broke. He told my mom where he’d be in a note, and she called the police, and they found him. I was twenty-five years old then, living in New York City, and my father was Finn’s age. I never dreamed I’d be living back home again in Point Clear, Alabama.

I wasn’t crying thinking of all this—I’d cried so much about my father before that day—but I must have looked very sad because Finn got out of his car, walked over to me, and instead of saying goodbye, said, somewhat defeated, “Just follow me back.”

3. The Beginning—The Party at the Pier

We were trying to make the party at the pier by sunset. I was driving, and Finn Patterson was in the front with me. My sense of direction was off as usual. I had been to this house a few times before and knew it was on Scenic Highway, the side that bordered the bay, but it was always hard to find, hidden behind giant magnolias, sprawling live oaks, and tall pines.

“I have topographical amnesia,” I said. I had just read about it, a real condition.

Finn talked about his memory—how he’d forget spending time with people.

“Will you forget this day?” It already felt like an important day for me, being there with Finn.

He had surprised me, just called me up to say he was in town and asked me to dinner with him and his friends. But I was already going to the party, so I invited all of them.

In the fading light, he looked at me intensely, his eyes like blue glass. “Maybe this conversation,” he said. “But probably not this day.”

I parked and his friends, a married couple—a silver-haired sportswriter and pretty photographer—and Finn’s teenage son who had been crammed together in the back seat stumbled out. I had forgotten about his son. The boy was a ghost—silent, drifting between the two worlds of his mother and father.

By the time we got down the gravel driveway, through the sweet and strong scent of magnolia and pine, past the guesthouse and gazebo and swimming pool with the slide, the sun had dropped. We walked the long narrow boardwalk, Finn and I, the other couple behind us, and then Finn’s son, as the last light leveled violet and pink and orange across the bay and then was gone.

When we finally made it to the boathouse on the pier, the party was in full swing. I introduced the hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Norman, to my guests, and they got their very good-looking son, Garrett, who was in from Colorado and single and just a few years younger than I was, to get everyone drinks.

Mrs. Norman talked to Finn’s friends and Finn’s son, and after Garrett returned with everyone’s drinks, she led them back to the main house, wanting to show it to them.

I helped Garrett with the rest of the drinks and talked some to his little sister, who was still in high school and the reason I was even at this party. I was her tennis teacher.

“I see you met my brother, Miss Catherine,” she said and smiled.

Garrett and I walked back over with the drinks for Mr. Norman and Finn. Mr. Norman was in the middle of a story about mining diamonds in Africa—he’d just gotten back.

Garrett and I talked awhile about how he loved both places that he lived, Point Clear and Vail. It was hard to choose. He really loved snowboarding, but he also loved standup paddleboarding.

“I haven’t done either,” I said.

“Oh, you have to. You have an open invitation to come see me in Vail anytime.”

“Thanks, maybe,” I said.

 He nodded toward Ron Norman, who was his stepfather. “He just got a new plane. Get him to fly you.”

Finn caught my eye, and walked over to us. Then he whispered in my ear, “Is he a warlord?” talking about Mr. Norman, who was a tall, big man, with a commanding voice.

I smiled. Finn stayed close by my side, and we talked to Garrett more. Finn talked about his prize-winning novel and short story collection, the new novel he was working on, and about his recent lecture at Harvard.

Garrett said he never finished college or a book.

“Really?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said. “College wasn’t for me, and I get bored anytime I try to read anything. I also just got back from Africa. I’m working for Ron now. This month we’re diamond miners. Last month we were importers, before that we were commodities traders. I’m getting another drink. You want one?”

“Nah,” I said.

Finn said, “Come with me.”

It was dark now, and we left the boathouse, and started walking farther out onto the pier. It felt like we were disappearing into the bay or even the sky, like those faint stars above us.

Finn kept talking about all kinds of things: a boundary fence he was building at his ranch in Montana, fly fishing, snapper fishing, and playing golf. I imagined his golf swing was like my father’s, a pure, technically-perfect swing.

He talked about his second ex-wife—his son’s mother—whom he had not seen for five years. And then he told me about his mother and father and younger brother. They had all lived and died in Point Clear. He missed them and this life on the bay.

I loved listening to his voice, to his stories.

I hadn’t said much. I was nervous, and I wanted him to think I was smart.

“A Sky Full of Ghosts,” I finally said. “I just watched a documentary about it. That was the title. Some of those stars are already dead. We’re just now seeing their light.”

Finn smiled at me, with his sly smile, his eye that drooped, his beautiful face.

We were finally at the edge, and I held onto the railing, and he held on next to me, our hands not quite touching.

I felt like I was living in a memory, like time was slowing down, until it was still, and we were a photograph, silently looking out at the starlit sky, the moonlit water, the flicker of fish, the barely visible Mobile skyline across the bay.

I saw all that light traveling around us, from far and near, until I felt Finn move closer, felt the heat of his breath on my shoulder, and though I knew this would probably not end well, I turned to him and opened my arms.

~~~~~

Jennifer Paddock is the author of the novels A Secret Word and Point Clear (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster). She received a Master’s in Creative Writing from New York University, and her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The North American Review, Other Voices, Garden and Gun, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. She also teaches tennis and is a tennis writer at Tennis View Magazine.