We had just stepped into the street, brown-puddled from last night’s rain, flip-flopped through muddy tire tracks and past the sad sack mongrels, when Zee patted at the pockets of her cargo pants that she’d rolled to the knees and said, Damn, I forgot my smokes. I’ll go get ‘em, I told her and left her sheltered under a dripping almendra tree cooing at a snot-faced cherub to make my way back into the house, and, Jesus, there was Dante, stripped to the waist, kneeling on the patio floor with his head submerged in a bucket of water.
I paused for a second, taking in the scene, then realized that he was trying to drown himself. Crashing through the door, I grabbed him by his shoulders and threw him over onto his back then yelled for Zee, thinking that we’d need her to give him CPR. Dante lay there wet and looking a little stunned, holding his head in his hands. Jesus Christ, Tom. Keep it down will you. He rolled onto his knees and pointed to a towel that was draped over the back of a chair beside the bucket and asked me to hand it to him.
What’s going on? It was Zee, muddy and a little out of breath. I said that I wasn’t sure. I pointed at the bucket. I found old Dante up to his neck in that thing. Dante stood up and grinned sheepishly at us as he finished drying his hair. And you thought I was trying to drown myself, I suppose. He hung up the towel and slipped back into his T-shirt. Well, it crossed my mind, I said. He shook his head. Like that’s how an old salt would do himself in, in a bucket! Get real, Tom. Well then? I said. Anyway, I guess I should thank you for your valiant effort, he said. Well, it was a little odd, your head in a bucket, and all. Zee went over and put her hand on his arm. You okay Dante? What’s going on?
Maybe I just wanted to cool down, you know. Ever think of that? Zee and I shook our heads. It’s pouring fucking rain, man. Anyway, why not just take a shower? Dante flung himself down onto the couch, again taking his head in his hands. Well, I guess I might as well tell you. I’ve been meaning to. Tell us what? Zee and I sat in the straight backed chairs facing him. But he just sat there, scratching his head. What? Still he just looked at us. Zee got up and sat beside him. You’re scaring me Dante. Stop being weird.
He shrugged. You know I get these headaches, right? Zee nodded. I nodded. In fact, the reason he’d begged off on going out to lunch with us was another of his headaches. He was always getting headaches that painkillers didn’t seem to help. Well, the local curandera, you know, witch doctor, said submerging my head in ice water every few hours would make them go away. Zee erupted in a snort and she jumped off the couch. Oh, for God’s sake, Dante. You scared the shit out of us. Can we go get our fish tacos now? The fucking curandera! Does Tess know about this? Dante nodded soberly. It was her idea. Jesus! If you’re going to seek medical advice I’d suggest a real doctor up in the good old U.S. of A. Zee paces when she gets upset, and she’d started pacing up and down the patio. I mean, if you’re worried enough about your headaches to go see a witch doctor, maybe you should keep out of the sun for a while, and cut back on the mescal and cigarettes. Anyway, stuffing your head in a bucket of ice water is going to restrict the blood vessels in your brain. Right? Which has got to be the opposite of what you need. Doesn’t that make sense? You were in California last summer, why didn’t you go see a specialist? Dante was trying to say something, but Zee talked right over him. For God’s sake, I’ll take you in myself if that’s what you need. She would have kept going but I told her to sit down and shut up.
I did, Dante said when she was settled back on the couch beside him. Oh-oh, I thought. What did you do? I asked him. Saw a specialist last summer when I was in California. Zee had put it together by now too, and had her hand over her mouth. And what did he say? She, said Dante. The specialist was a woman. And what did she say? She did a lot of tests, MRI, brain scans, blood work, it was pretty thorough. When I didn’t like what I heard I went to another and had it all confirmed. Dante stopped and was scratching his head again, not looking at us. Then he and Zee both blurted at once: Does Tess know? and Brain cancer, inoperable. Of course Tess knows, Dante said.
Zee is a chef and she is beautiful. When I met her in San Francisco she was twenty-eight, cooking at an Italian place in North Beach and running a catering business on the side, working impossible hours and thriving on stress. I was a young kid with a pile of family money thinking it might be fun to run a restaurant. Somehow she fell for me, and together we opened a seafood place on Fisherman’s Wharf. We worked hard and made a go of it. Five years later, pretty burned out, we sold out for a bundle and moved north in search of a quieter life. We settled on Port Townsend, Washington, bought acreage on the bluffs overlooking the strait, and started a fish and chips joint on the docks. Zee wanted out of the kitchen, she wanted babies, so we hired a cook and I ran the place. Zee took up gardening and baby production, and life was great.
I didn’t know Dante back then, although I’d heard of him: Zee’s first love. The mythical ‘older man’, the connoisseur of women, who’d taught her everything she knew. Yes, his name would crop up now and then. I didn’t have any problem with his existence, not really. In a way, I suppose, I was grateful, because Zee certainly did know her way around, if you know what I mean. I might have experienced a twinge or two of jealousy, thinking of an innocent Zee at eighteen with someone other than my eighteen-year-old self. Well, there was nothing to be done about it, and I’m the one who ended up with her. Dante, she didn’t even recall his last name, if she’d ever known it, had moved on after six lost months, New Zealand, she thought, but couldn’t remember.
But Dante was a sailor, an old salt, as he liked to call himself, and the owner of a fleet of wooden boats, so it just had to happen that he’d show up one September at the Wooden Boat Festival, an annual Port Townsend event, and wander into our restaurant when we were both there, and he’d recognize Zee and she’d squint and squirm and finally recognize him, Dante, whom I’ve told you about. Yes, I would have to acknowledge, jealousy now not a mere twinge, but a red-eyed bull, I’ve heard of you, Dante. Zee has occasioned to mention you in her reminiscences of days gone by.
He was forty-five then, but looked older. He was grey and weather-beaten, crippled and scarred. He smiled a broken-toothed smile at Zee’s wide-eyed amazement at his broken frame, this shoulder and collarbone crushed in a cliff fall in Peru, this knee never set properly after his stirrup caught in a fall from a horse and he’d been dragged half a mile down a canyon, his back and chest covered in coral scars from various swimming and sailing encounters involving waves and reefs, one missing pinkie that was caught in the jib sheet in a squall off Timor, invisible broken ribs and forearm from being run over by a herd of cattle in Guatemala. His every adventure could be read in his leathery hide, crooked nose, sea-green eyes, ferocious smile. Zee offered him our guest room for the night and he stayed for a week, the best week of my life.
Dante knew Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula better than we did, and while Zee stayed home with our babies, he and I sailed every day out among the islands and tides, the channels and rocky shores. He had dragged one of his wooden Drascombe Luggers up from Baja, an open, sail-driven workboat from the quays of London’s Thames, and that was our craft. I had done some sailing in my day, but I learned more in that week than I would have in a lifetime without Dante’s stewardship. Not just the rudiments of gibing in heavy weather or light-air navigation through running tides, but forecasting wind changes by watching the seabirds, and reading the sea color for uncharted rocks. We would beach the boat on unlikely spits and climb to search out wild strawberries, then anchor somewhere else and strip naked and free-dive into the freezing straits to prize oysters from their beds. At dusk, or later, we would stumble home with our treasures, freezing and exhilarated, knock back a few shots of tequila, then Dante would descend to the beach to scrounge wood for a fire and every night the three of us would grill something from the sea, oysters, bass, mussels, on embers of beach-wood, and we’d eat and drink and smoke, and talk and talk. Talk mainly about Dante and his adventures, but also about politics and movies, the stars, books we’d been reading. And I understood why Zee had fallen in love with him, and also why he couldn’t have stayed with her, and my jealousy of their relationship turned about, so I was almost more jealous of Zee’s luck at knowing him first and better in those long gone formative years, than his dallying with my future wife.
The sea’s a wicked mistress, he told me once. I was getting impatient to get going as he fiddled over his carefully coiled sheets and taut stays, making invisible adjustments to a block and squinting up the mast and down the boom looking for god-knows-what. Sailors, he said, we all die at sea, but the object of sailing is to put off that day for as long as possible. Small boat sailing has a short apprenticeship, like being a gun slinger, either you learn quick, you’re very lucky, or you die young. Them’s the options. The basics, they’re simple, but the sea, she’s infinitely subtle and complex. A wicked mistress. Ah, but we love her so.
He was a Brit, transplanted to our side of the pond sometime in his twenties. He’d had an uncle, his mother’s brother, who worked a small marina, and when she’d died, Dante’s mother, and his father took to drink, Uncle Roger, a crusty old bachelor, had taken up the slack, pulled the boy out of school and put him to work cleaning boat bottoms. Eight years later there was little the boy didn’t know about boats and sailing and the English coastline. When his uncle drowned in a riptide off the Isle of Man Dante found himself a man of considerable property, all of which he sold before he shipped off to Australia with a sheep farmer’s daughter twice his age.
It’s a mantra, he continued later that day as we were setting anchor just outside the surf-line, and it keeps us focused, keeps us safe, safe as we can be. Ever seen a pilot take off without first checking his fuel line, his tire pressure, the flap controls? I used to live in a monastery in Taiwan, did I ever tell you that? Early on the master told me to come to his quarters at such and such a time. I showed up and he was sitting on his cushion chanting. I don’t know if he saw me or not. In any case, he ignored me. There was nothing for me to do but to sit down and wait. An hour later he asked me to bring him some tea. Dante had begun re-packing the jib. He turned to me and smiled. Do you get it?
He told us about Tess, their shared passion for the ocean, hers for horses and trail riding, how they’d hooked up in some dive in Costa Rica, both down and out and tired of the vagabond life. Their need at the same time for the same thing: a way to settle down someplace warm for a while, someplace on the water, where they could make some reliable money. They decided to pool their resources and talents and try running adventure trips from Baja California. It was working fairly well, perhaps a bit too settled for him, but working. Tess had just had a baby. The pregnancy had surprised him, but he was happy about it. No, he snorted to Zee’s question, he didn’t have any pictures. What did she take him for, a bleeding banker?
All the time I spent with Dante, and that would be about eighteen hours a day for a week, he never once mentioned his earlier time with Zee, and when we were all together there was no flirtation, no sexual jokes or innuendo. Old friends, new friends. That’s what it was. They could so easily have, even inadvertently, excluded me by referencing the past, by presuming on each other’s memories. That week my appreciation of Zee deepened immeasurably and I loved her more than I ever had, treasuring her treasuring of me, her not taking me or our relationship for granted, not teasing or testing, just trusting, and letting me discover Dante for myself.
And so, every April, towards the end of their season and before ours began, Zee and I sent the kids off with their grandparents and we flew down to Baja to spend a week or two with Dante and Tess, with sun and tequila, salt water and palm trees.
So, we sat there, stunned, in that awful minute, Zee with her arms around him, her face buried in his chest, weeping, and Dante, his head lolled against the back of the couch, staring at the thatch ceiling neither encouraging nor rebuffing her embrace. Finally I asked how long. How long do they give you? Dante coughed and disentangled himself from Zee then went into the kitchen. He returned with tequila and limes. Christmas, he said. Christmas! Zee was off the couch, charging, her arms raised, going to beat some sense into him, I suppose. Christmas! He handed me the bottle and caught her arms, What are you doing here? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at the Mayo fucking Clinic getting this dealt with? Dante!
Dante held her by the wrists, straining as she twisted against him, silently staring her down. He told you, Zee. Told me what? She flashed a look at me so full of hatred I was struck dumb for a moment. Inoperable, Dante said quietly. Tom’s reminding you that it’s inoperable. Zee, there’s nothing the Mayo Clinic, or anyone, for that matter, can do for me. Quitter! she screamed, then she spat in his face. Dante was so surprised he dropped her arms and she whirled away and kicked out at him with all her force, catching him on the hip with the flat of her foot. I never took you for a quitter, Dante, you sorry son-of-a-bitch! Never, never, took you… Quitter!
We let her go as she stormed out into the street in tears.
Dante wiped his face with his shirt, fished his jackknife out of his pocket, stooped to collect the scattered limes from the floor then sat down and methodically began to slice them. I filled our shot glasses with tequila and we both drank. Where’s the fucking salt? he demanded. I found it in the kitchen.
Anger blows through Zee like a gust through a screen door, leaving no vestige. It’s a blessing. She was back in five minutes. Sorry, she mouthed silently to me before she kissed Dante on the forehead then sat beside him, putting her hand on his bungled knee. It’s alright, Love, he said. I’ve never been kicked with so much affection. He managed a smile. Well, that’s not wholly true. He burst out in his guffaw of remembrance. Tess had a mule once, we called her Amiga, and she loved me dearly. Caught me in the backside, once she did, as I was bending over the fire. Sent me ass over teakettle, literally. I was making tea just at that moment. Apparently I’d neglected to nuzzle her sufficiently, and thank her for her forbearance in hauling my sorry ass up the mountainside. She was a very sweet animal and I still have an indented buttock to prove it. But you’re a close second, Zee sweetheart, among the females I’ve loved who’ve flown their heels at me. Truly you are.
Tess showed up the next day, back from a week-long kayaking and snorkeling trip with a bunch of California teenagers. Leaving Dante on the porch soaking his head, Tess, Zee, and I piled into the truck and drove out to the beach to load up the gear, haul it back to their bodega, hose it all off and get it packed away. Why didn’t you tell us, Tess? Zee was standing close, her hand on Tess’s shoulder. Tess turned away. It’s his business to tell you. Zee shook her head. What are you going to do? Deal with it then move on, said Tess. What else can I do? You’re angry! Of course I’m angry, she said. Life’s the shits. And there’s nothing to be done, you’re convinced? Tess slammed closed the bodega door. Well, it’s what they all say. Two specialists, one in San Diego, another in L.A. He’s had symptoms for years but it didn’t click with us. His headaches, of course, but he’s also losing motor control. Did you notice? Sometimes he walks funny, and he gets face twitches. But mainly it’s the headaches, that and being forgetful. But we left it too late. They can’t get more than half of the tumor out. It’s spread from his frontal lobes way back towards the hippocampus. Surgery might provide some temporary relief, a short respite at the most. Still, said Zee, you should do it. Yeah, sure, huffed Tess. With what? Do you have any idea what brain surgery costs? We have money, said Zee. That’s sweet, said Tess, but he wouldn’t do it anyway. Says he wants to live his life and die his death. In a way, I don’t blame him. He’d never really recover from the surgery. It would serve no purpose. Does Melanie know? She knows her dad’s sick, that’s all. You probably noticed that she was with Maria, not Dante, while I was out on my trip. That’s how it is now. I can’t trust him not to drop her or something.
Jesus Christ, I felt like a fool. He’d told us Melanie was staying over with friends, but it hadn’t clicked. We know the world is always changing, but we expect it always to be the same. He had been the same old Dante, just a bit craggier. How had we spent two days with him and not noticed he was dying?
So, tell us about the curandera, Zee said. We were sitting, the five of us, Melanie on Tess’s lap, around the table on the patio, Dante with a Corona, the rest of us having tea. It was Tess’s idea, said Dante. She’ll tell it.
She’s an old crone, said Tess. Lives in a shack behind the garbage dump with her daughter and granddaughter. I’ve know about her for years, but I didn’t think of it. It was Maria who suggested it. She’s cured all sorts of people around here. Everything from diabetes and cancer to a broken heart. She put her hands on Dante’s head. She had her eyes closed and she was humming. She sniffed him. It would have been funny, except it wasn’t. Her daughter is middle aged, and she started talking to her, it was hard to follow. She had him lie down on a mat and she sat at his head for a while, holding her hands on his face, talking to her daughter. Finally it was the daughter who told us what to do. Put his head in ice water every few hours. It might take a month, even two or three, but eventually the headaches would stop, and the cancer would go into remission. She used that word, remission.
She fell silent and we all just sat there until, finally, Dante said what we were all thinking. It’s nuts, of course, but why not? What have I to lose? An age-old remedy. Well, I said, it can’t be that. They’ve only recently had ice here, I’d imagine. That brought a scowl from everyone, including Melanie. How long ago was it you saw her? asked Zee. Couple weeks.
It was late, the women long in bed, Dante and I still sitting at the table. Tequila and cigarettes. Let’s go for a walk, said Dante. There’ll be no moon ‘til later, so we’ll have big stars. He rose and went into the kitchen, returning with a long stick. My staff, he explained. Sometimes I need help with my balance.
Yesterday’s rain and clouds had dissipated, leaving an odor of fecund intimacy in the earth and under the trees. The lane was still muddy and the sand, when we reached the beach, cold under our bare feet. Are you scared, I asked him, but he didn’t seem to hear. Orion dominates the evening sky, but its time was almost spent, following the Pleiades into the western mountains.
I’ve been dreaming, he said. Dreams like I’ve never had before. Like what? I can’t really say what they’re about. It’s not like there’s a common thread to them, but they are so consistently real, like I can taste them, touch them. Somehow muscular. I wake from them in simple pleasure, like I’ve been watching a great movie, or like I was intimately a part of wonderful events. The dreams themselves are ephemeral, like all my dreams, but the feeling they leave me with is of connectedness somehow.
That’s strange, I said, your dream pattern changing. You think it has something to do with the changes in your brain, the cancer? I hadn’t intended to use the word but there it was. Dante didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, it didn’t bother him. Could be, he said, or it might be secondarily that. I think it’s my unconsciousness just enjoying itself in these last days. You know when you wake up in the morning how you experience a few moments of pure pleasure, of innocence, of purity, before your real life invades your awareness, before your cares catch up with you? I’m sure we all experience that. Well, this is the same, only stronger. The dreams carry me longer, buoy me extra minutes, half an hour if I just stay still, and even as my consciousness returns, and I remember my cancer and that I’m dying, somehow it doesn’t matter, it just seems natural, kind of an extension of the dream, which is fading but still seems real, or the sensation of it remains real. I feel like it’s some miracle that I’ve been missing all my life, there’s a connectedness to miracle, to sustained miracle, does that make sense? that I’ve just been missing. Do you know what I mean?
I didn’t really. Well, maybe I did. I understood the words. So it gives you hope, I said. It was dark. I couldn’t see him very well, but I sensed he was shaking his head, sensed it was important and that I had it all wrong.
What’s hope got to do with it? Jesus, Tom. There’s no hope. There’s never been any hope. Hope is the most disgusting, weak-kneed… Jesus!
There was no surf, just a barely perceptible wash. We’d walked north of town and could smell the garbage dump. Another mile up the beach shone a single light, the whore house. I wondered briefly if that was where we were going. I hoped not.
Dante had pulled ahead of me, or perhaps I’d lagged behind. We passed a dead pelican, its carcass picked clean, a pile of bones and a few feathers. I lengthened my stride in an effort to catch up. Dante seemed to accelerate ahead of me. Then abruptly he turned and threw himself onto the beach where it inclined a bit more steeply towards the line of barbed shore grass that followed the high water mark. As I squatted beside him, not sure if I wanted my butt in the damp sand, he put his arm around my shoulder. Don’t waste a precious second of your life on hope, Tommy boy. Life’s for living, not hoping. You know that. Sure, I said. I was just trying to get my head around what you were telling me. I’m just sensing, he said, that somehow life is even more of a miracle than we know. Maybe it’s just because I’m running out of it, and I’m not taking it for granted any more.
Doesn’t seem to me you’ve taken life for granted, I told him. I don’t know anyone who’s been more alive. He grunted, a grudging assent, I thought. You have any regrets? He grunted again.
Sweet regrets, Tommy. Isn’t that life, sweet regret? I don’t know, I said. Regret nothing, is the wisdom I’ve heard. He laughed. Bit strident, isn’t it, marshaling our feelings? We can pretend to regret nothing, we can act as if we regret nothing, we can think we regret nothing, we certainly know there is no point in regretting anything, we know we can’t change the past, but I don’t believe that any of us lives without regret. The point is not to fret over it.
So, what do you regret? He answered immediately, Every woman I’ve ever left, to start with. That’s absurd, I said. You wouldn’t have had a life, not your life, anyway. The charm of your life is all the things you’ve done, all the women you’ve left.
That’s why it’s sweet regret, Tommy boy. Very sweet, the heartbreaking wonder of life. It’s like regretting getting old. We can’t get old without living, yet who doesn’t, in some small way, rail against the aging process. It’s a paradox. The only way out is to live. I’ll give you a for instance.
Years ago, I must have been in my early thirties, I was in southern France sailing a junky little Catalina that I’d begged or swindled off a Spaniard, an old acquaintance, you might say. Anyway, you know, you can travel all over France by water, they have a whole network of canals and rivers. That summer I’d decided to check it out. I entered someplace on the Atlantic, motoring mostly, and was down near Toulouse. What a place! Hot, sticky, summertime-wonderful. The fruit, plums, apricots, grapes, just bursting with nectar, quiet waterways through verdant farmland stretching from horizon to horizon. Every few miles an inn or a pub with a little quay to tie up to. It was, it is, paradise. I met a woman, a bit older than I was, a widow, owned a vineyard and a big, crumbling house on the hilltop. You know, the whole thing, with the stone-flagged terrace under the giant elm trees, and the rows of grapes straight-ruled along the flanks of the rolling hills below. Great bedroom windows that blew with white cotton in the summer breezes. We wouldn’t get up until noon, making sweet love all morning, eat a late breakfast on the stone-topped table on the shaded terrace, wile the afternoons away among the vines, or around the pool, or in the surrounding hills and villages, drink wine and dance, talk and stare into each other’s eyes long into the night, then fall into her giant downy bed and collapse into pleasure and dreams. I stayed for a month. She didn’t beg me to stay, but she wanted me to, that was clear. But one day I just kissed her goodbye, sauntered back down to my boat, and motored off. That’s a sweet regret. Think of it. I could have stayed for a lifetime, become a vintner, learned about soils and musk, presses and fermentation, become a happy French landholder with a beautiful, rich wife, never another worry in the world. I savor that memory and wonder what if, what if?. That’s a regret, maybe, but I keep it very sweet.
I rocked my shoulder into his. Jesus, Dante. What a fool, man. Yeah, he said, but you know, it’s just life, and there’s a worm in the heart of every rose. Every paradise has it’s underbelly, and I think I’d have been no more or less happy in the long run. Or so you tell yourself. Could be, but why not? There’s no point in telling yourself anything else. Done is done and here we are. I don’t think our circumstances change us very much, don’t make us, in the long run, better people, happier people. We carry what we are wherever we go. We adapt ourselves to our situation, but our personalities, our penchant for happiness or misery, more or less remain the same. You can’t make a miserable person happy, no matter what you do, not in my experience, not in the long haul.
I was cold but Dante showed no inclination to move. He lay back in the sand, cradling his head in his hands. I was wishing we’d brought the tequila with us. You asked me if I was afraid, he said, gazing east at Scorpio rising in its endless pursuit of the diminishing Orion. And, yeah, I’m a little afraid of the pain. I don’t want more pain. Well, there’s morphine for that, I said. Yeah, I know. And I’ll take it. I’ve already got a prescription for when the time comes. But other than that, I’m not much afraid. It’s been too short, but I’ve had a good run. I’d like to have seen Melanie grow up a bit more, see who she turns into. Right now she’s a fucking brat, but I expect she’ll outgrow it. Most kids do. But it doesn’t matter. They’ll both get on fine without me.
You ever wonder where you’re going, if there’s something else? Fish-food, Tommy, that’s all there is. If I die in bed Tess’ll cremate me and toss my ashes into the ocean. If I have my way I’ll just roll off my boat when the time comes. Either way, I’ll be food for the fishes of the sea. That’s not what I meant. I know it’s not what you meant, but I’m giving you my answer. It’s a bogus question because there’s no real answer. It’s like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s not a question because there are no angels.
I didn’t say anything because I didn’t feel like arguing with him. Seemed insensitive. I don’t believe in heaven or hell or angels, not even God, but there does seem to be some cosmic spirit of which we’re a part. Come on, Tommy. I’m not a fucking flower. You can give me your woo-woo lecture if you feel like it. I’m not going to break down in tears. Naw, I said. It’s okay. I’ve nothing to say about it.
We were quiet for a while. The cold was creeping up into my hips and spine. I rolled onto my belly beside him. You know me, he said. I’m not a thinker. I just do things, seat of my pants, but what I’ve learned is this: that the Truth, with a capital ‘T’, is what we cannot know. I didn’t say anything. My brain seemed thick, turgid somehow, maybe it was the alcohol, as I tried to make any sense out of what he was saying. After a few seconds he continued, I think that’s a good definition of it. Suddenly he snorted. Shit! I’m freezing. Let’s get the fuck out of here. He struggled to his feet. Come on, friend. He held his hand out to me.
We were walking again. So, you think we can’t know the truth, I said. That’s not what I said, he turned to me. I said something much bigger. I said that the truth is what we cannot know. Your statement objectifies the truth, makes it into something, almost concrete. I say it’s effectually non-existent. I shook my head. You don’t believe in truth? Jesus, Tom! Of course I believe in truth. I’m truth incarnate. Look at me, a dying, lonely man. That’s the truth. The sand is wet, that’s the truth. But the big truth, the truth you’re braying at is nonsense. That’s what I’m saying. All concepts are false, that’s what I’m saying. What’s true is what is real, what you can touch, see, smell, hear, what’s the other one? Taste? I ventured. Yeah. Potatoes are real, reincarnation is a crock. We were back at the pelican skeleton. He picked it up with his stick and flung it into the lapping water. What happened to the pelican is what’s going to happen to you and me. We’re animals, just animals. Animals with enough of a brain to remember the past, enough of a brain to invent stupid ideas to fret about. What’s going to happen to your god, angels, heaven, and hell when human beings are extinct? Ever think of that? They’ll die with us, of course, unless we summon enough communal intelligence to kill them off beforehand.
I don’t believe in any of those things, I told him. Of course you do, he snorted, just a more sophisticated version of it, something a bit more palatable to your modern-day intellect. And you, I said, you believe in nothing? You know, he said, it’s a great liberation believing in nothing. It means I can believe in anything. I don’t discount anything, even God in his heaven with a choir of angels, I just don’t count on it. I do believe that we’re on this rock, this earth, and that it is physically here, coursing about the sun, and that the miracle of life somehow happened through some chemical fluke, and we’re all a lucky part of it. There’s nothing sacred about it in any cosmic sense, but it’s a miracle and we’re it. And one day the last of our species will die out and the earth will continue to spin and something else will be afoot. That’s it. If crystal gazing, or dancing in circles, or mumbling made-up names of God affect the course of events, that’s really cool too. Show me solid evidence of anything and I’ll convert. I believe in nothing except what is clear to me, but I’m not adamant in my disbelief either. Life’s complicated enough!
And the curandera? You seem to believe in that.
It’s a straw to grasp at, is all. But it’s easy to test and nothing else has been offered. I don’t mind it. I’m getting pretty good at holding my breath.
We walked. The beach had a good slope to it and my back was starting to hurt with the lop-sided gait. I turned and walked backwards for a while. Dante turned and did the same. It’s nice, he said, not seeing where you’re going, kinda like life.
So, what you going to do, I said. You mean this summer? Yeah. Oh, probably the usual thing, go for a sail. Is that wise? Who gives a shit? Well, you got a point, I suppose.
You ever listen to the Cowboy Junkies? he asked. Sure, some, Mike and what’s-her-name? Timmins. That’s right. You know the one that goes, I didn’t mean to leave you darling, I unfurled my sail and the wind did blow? Yeah, sure, my fave. From Caution Horses. I gave you that album. Years ago, must have been, ‘cause I think I’ve had it forever. Yeah, I guess it was a while back now. Well, he said, thinking back again to Madeleine, my French vintner lover and the other women I’ve left, that’s about how it was. No reason to leave, every reason to stay, but one day I unfurled my sail… It’s like I believed life was infinite. I didn’t tell any of them I’d be back, not that I can remember, but I knew I would be, thought, at some level, that I would be, acted like I would be, because life is just so infinitely long and wonderful.
I didn’t say anything. We walked. Finally, You never even wrote her? He didn’t answer. Bit late now, I suppose, I said. More silence. You know what I really want? he said turning to me, What I really want to do? There was still no moon. I couldn’t see his features, just a vague black on black silhouette of his wild hair, but I sensed the color rising in his cheeks, and the fierceness of his gaze. I suppose it was the intensity that had grown in his voice. What? I said. He stopped and planted himself facing the ocean, feet buried wide apart and his stick in the sand in front forming a tripod. Don’t be mad, now. I made the few steps back to stand beside him. What’s to be mad about? Well, he said, the biggest regret, my biggest regret, and this is the god-damned truth even though I’ve just been realizing this past week… He was looking at me again. What? I repeated. It’s an annoying habit of his, to leave his sentences hanging like that. Is Zee, he continued. Leaving Zee. That was my big mistake my friend, not the French babe, or the Australian. It wasn’t leaving Fiji or never taking a crack at Everest. I regret every day of my sorry fucking life that I haven’t been holding your sweet wife to my breast. God, what a fool!
I just looked at him, dumbfounded. Here it was, finally, the subject that had never been broached in all our years together, Dante and Zee. He wasn’t looking at me anymore, his gaze returned to the horizon. I laughed, a forced laugh I suppose, and said, Well, I don’t blame you for that, my friend, Zee’s great.
She is, he said. She is. And I want her back.
What?
He still wasn’t looking at me. Just for a while.
Well, fuck you Dante! Just, fuck you. You can’t just have her fucking back! She’s not a commodity! You think I can lend her to you like she was a video camera or some fucking thing? Dante took a great breath. I could hear the inhale and sudden, forceful expulsion of air. Yes, Tom, he said. Just like that, like a video camera. You can let me have her for a while, accompany me on the final sailing trip of my life, this summer. Around the Olympic Peninsula, I think it will be. Keep her close to home.
You’re crazy, man. Fucking crazy. This must be a brain tumor thing. Listen, I’m not going to let you fuck my wife, I don’t care how sick you are or how much you want to. And even if I did agree to let you fuck her, there’s the little matter of her consent. You think maybe she wants to be a dying man’s final gasp? Stroke you off while your head explodes? Or is it a nurse you want? Dante was walking now, suddenly brushing past me down the beach. Look, man. I know you’re sick and dying and probably scared. I know you’re regretful and everything is shitty, but that doesn’t give you license… He had stopped and I ran into him in the dark, knocking him into the sand. Sorry, I said. I fumbled for his hand to help him stand, but he resisted.
License? he said. I sat down beside him. I don’t want license, and I’m not asking for your permission. Tom, it’s your blessing I want. Dante! My blessing? Just forget it! And, Zee won’t go along with this! What are you thinking? Look, man. I understand you want it, think it would be fun, but don’t ask. Don’t make things worse than they are. How could they be worse, Tom? Here I am, dying of brain cancer. What could be worse? Well, you could be already dead. You could die tonight. Would that be worse? he asked. Look, Tom. What can it hurt? A dying friend’s last wish. A week’s sailing trip with Zee. Old friends. You’ll get her back. What can it hurt? It’s not like… What do you mean? Who knows what it will hurt? Relationships are fragile things. I can’t just go up to Zee and say, Dante wants to fuck you for a week and I think you should do it. What kind of a man do you think I am? I said I want to take her on a sailing trip, Tom. You’re the one focused on fucking. Oh, so you’re not going to fuck her? Night after night snuggled into a tent on the beach together, you don’t think it will come up?
Dante struggled to his feet. Let’s go, he said. So, what’s the answer? Yes or No? Will it come up? He turned to me. Well, I certainly hope so, Tom, but whether it actually happens will be up to her, now, won’t it.
Two months later, late June, Dante dropped Tess and Melanie in their summer quarters in California, and he continued up to Port Townsend, then he and Zee took a ten day sailing trip around to Port Angeles. I was stuck with the kids and running the restaurant. I could have called in her mother to help with the kids, but didn’t want to have to explain the situation. The day after Zee got back, exhausted and happy, I headed off for a trip of my own to New York, exhausted and unhappy.
Dante’s brain cancer had apparently gone into remission. Zee told me he’d been doing the head-in-the-ocean thing every few hours she was with him. On his own again, he’d continued his sail around to the West side of the Olympic Peninsula then down the outside to Seattle and on to Portland. Somewhere in there he was running out of money, so he managed to line up some journalists to write a story about him, Brain Tumor on the High Seas, and he scrounged enough to continue down to San Francisco. By then he was a news item, and he announced he would sail across the Pacific if he could get some sponsors. Somehow that worked and some Los Angeles adventurer types decided to film a documentary of the crossing, or of the man, more likely. Last I heard he had made the Marquesas Islands, living on raw fish like the Old Man and the Fucking Sea, and was heading for Australia. Son of a bitch.
So, what’s the Truth? Is it what we cannot know, as Dante suggested that April night on the beach? Beats me. I can’t even get my head around my own small-letter truth. Am I pissed? At Dante, at Zee? Yeah, I guess, but they are just living their lives. I suppose I’m more jealous than angry, more hurt than jealous. Zee’s just waiting for me to get over it, and that seems to be happening, slowly.
I sulked in New York for a week, didn’t even call. The business took a hit, the cook quit because he wasn’t getting any help, there was no one there to get in the fish and manage the crew. Right in high season! Maybe I’ll just sell out. I’m sick of it anyway. Find something else to do.
The other day I suggested Australia to Zee, the four of us, we’d take the kids and be there to meet Dante as he made landfall. She smiled, said it was okay with her. I’m thinking about it.
Taos, 2007