The Wooden Sea

After they moved to Crane’s View and Susan heard I was chief of police, apparently her reaction was to cover her face and groan. When we met on the street for the first time in fifteen years she walked right up and said in an accusing voice, “You should be in prison! But you went to college and now you’re chief of police?”

I said sweetly, “Hi, Susan. You changed. How come I can’t?”

“Because you’re horrible, McCabe.”

After being elected mayor she said to me, “You and I are going to have to work together a lot and I want to have a peaceful heart about it. You were the worst boyfriend in the history of the penis. Are you a good policeman?”

“Uh-huh. You can look at my record. I’m sure you will.”

“You’re right. I’ll look very closely. Are you corrupt?”

“I don’t have to be. I have a lot of money from my first marriage.”

“Did you steal it from her?”

“No. I gave her an idea for a TV show. She was a producer.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What show?”

“Man Overboard.”

“That’s the most ridiculous show on television—”

“And the most successful for a while.”

“Yes. It was your idea? I guess I should be impressed, but I’m not. Shall we get to work?”

At our traffic-light meeting that summer morning, we finished with my giving Susan a briefing on what had been going on in town policewise the last week. As usual she listened with head down and a small silver tape recorder in hand in case she wanted to note anything. There really was no interesting news. Bill Pegg had to remind me to tell her about the disappearance of the Schiavos.

“What are you doing about it?” She brought the recorder to her mouth, hesitated, and lowered it again.

“Asking around, making some phone calls, putting locks on their doors. It’s a free country, Mayor, they can leave if they want.”

“The way they left sounds pretty strange.”

I thought about that. “Yes, but I also know the Schiavos and so do you. They’re both emotional wackos. I could easily imagine them having a big messy fight and storming off in opposite directions. Both probably thinking ‘I'll stay out all night and scare ‘em.’ The only problem being neither thought to lock the doors before they left.”

“Ah, love!” Bill said, unwrapping his midmorning sandwich.

“Did you talk to their parents?”

Bill spoke around a mouthful. “I did. Neither have heard a word.”

“What’s the usual time frame for filing a missing persons report?”

“Twenty-four hours.”

“Fra

I nodded. She looked at Bill and, voice faltering, asked if he would leave us alone for a moment. Very surprised, he got up quickly and left. Susan had never done that before. She was as upfront and direct as anyone around. I knew she liked Bill for his wit and candor and he liked her for the same reasons. Asking him to leave meant something big and probably personal was about to land in that room. When the door closed I sat up straighter in the chair and looked at her. Suddenly she wouldn’t meet my stare.

“What’s up, Mayor?” I tried to sound light and friendly – the milky fuzz on top of a cappuccino you tongue through before getting to the coffee below.

She pulled in a loud deep breath. One of those breaths you take before saying something that’s going to change everything. You know as soon as it’s out your world will be different. “Fred and I are going to separate.”

“Is that good or bad?”

She laughed, barked really, and pushed her hair back. “That’s so you, Fra

I turned both hands palms up like what else am I supposed to say? “He’s going off to grow chili peppers.”

“What?”

“That’s what my first wife said when we split up. There’s this primitive tribe in Bolivia. When one of its members dies, they say he’s gone off to grow chili peppers.”

“Fred hates chili peppers. He hates all spicy foods.” It was clear she needed something safe and inane to say to pole-vault her over the painful admission she had just made. That’s why I tried to help with the chili pepper remark.

“How do you feel about it?”

She worked on a smile but it didn’t work. “Like I’m falling from the top of a building and have a few more floors to go before I hit?”

“It would be u

“It’s pretty final.”

“Your doing or his?”

Her head rose slowly. She stared at me with flames and daggers in her eyes but didn’t speak.

“It’s a question, Susan, not an accusation.”

“Was your breakup your fault or your wife’s?”

“Mine, I guess mine. Gloria got bored with me and started fucking around.”

“Then it was her fault!”

“Blame is always convenient because it’s so decisive: My fault. Your fault. But marriage is never that clear-cut. He pisses you off here, you piss him off there. Sometimes you end up with a toilet bowl so full neither of you can flush it.”

That conversation made me miss and realize again how grateful I was for my wife. It made me want to see her immediately so I went home for lunch. But Magda wasn’t there and neither was Pauline. Different as they were, the two women liked hanging around together. Anyone would like hanging around with Magda. She was fu

My first wife, the inglorious Gloria, shrunk the world like heavy rain on leather shoes and made me feel like I no longer fit in it. She was beautiful, endlessly dishonest, bulimic, and as I later found out, promiscuous as a bu

Eating lunch alone, I contentedly sat in the living room listening to my thoughts and the buzz of a lawnmower someplace far away. If her marriage really was finished, I did not envy Susan the next act of her life. In contrast, I was at a place in my own where I didn’t envy anyone anything. I liked my days, my partner, job, surroundings. I was working on liking myself but that was always an ongoing, iffy process.

Over the friendly smell of my bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, an increasingly pungent fragrance of something else began to butt in. I didn’t pay much attention while eating, but it became so pervasive as I slipped an afterlunch cigarette between my lips that I stopped and took a long, serious sniff.

The nose can be like a blind mole brought up into the sunlight. Below ground—in your unconscious—it knows exactly what it’s doing and will guide you: That stinks—stay away. That’s good—have a taste. But bring it above ground, demand to know What’s that smell, and it moves its blind head around and around in confused circles and loses all sense of direction. I asked out loud, “What is that fucking smell?” But my nose couldn’t tell me because that smell was an incomprehensible combination of aromas I had loved my entire life. This is a crucial point, but I don’t know how to describe it so it makes better sense.

A whore I visited in Vietnam always wore a certain kind of orchid in her hair. Her English was minimal so the only understandable translation she could come up for the flower was “bird breath.” Naturally when I got back to the States and asked, no one had ever heard of a bird breath orchid. And I never smelled it again until that afternoon in my living room in Crane’s View, New York, nine thousand miles from Saigon. Naturally my brain had long ago put the aroma in its dead-letter file and forgotten about it. Now here it was again. Remember me?