Mark Mills - Amagansett

She grabbed her handbag and the two bottles of Champagne, and set off on foot. Almost immediately she kicked off her shoes and tucked them under her arm.

She was sweating now, irritable, and it occurred to her that she must look like some slattern searching for a party.

The fisherman didn’t see or hear her approach. He was bent over the front of a battered truck, head in the engine, revving the motor loudly. He was wearing only a pair of tatty cotton trousers, and she could see the muscles in his shoulders bunching beneath the skin as he worked.

She didn’t call out; her shadow alerted him to her presence, startling him.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you. I’m looking for Conrad Labarde.’

He reached into the engine and killed the motor.

‘You just found him.’

‘I’m Lillian Wallace’s sister.’

‘Yes…’

He must have spotted the resemblance. There was oil on his hands, and what she first took to be oil smeared around his right eye and along the side of his chest. She quickly realized that what she was staring at was bruising.

‘Some gear fell on me,’ he said, reading her look.

‘These are for you, you and your friend, by way of thank you.’

He took the bottles of Champagne from her.

‘You look hot,’ he said. ‘Are you thirsty?’

‘A little.’

‘Come with me.’ He wandered off, leaving her little choice but to follow.

The house wasn’t at all what she’d been expecting. What had she been expecting? There were pictures and books and fine old pieces of furniture, albeit of a rustic nature. He obviously felt no inclination to make idle chat, and she browsed around while he washed his hands at the sink.

‘Here,’ he said, handing her a glass of water.

She had every intention of leaving as soon as she’d quenched her thirst, but when he indicated a chair at the end of the table she found herself sitting. He took a seat near her.

‘I’m sorry about your sister.’

‘It could have been worse.’

‘Worse than death?’

‘If you hadn’t caught her in your net she might never have been found.’ She paused. ‘Does that sound silly?’

‘No. We all look for small consolations at times like this.’

We. He was sending her a message that he too knew about loss, that he knew what she was going through. But he didn’t. Even if he thought he did, he didn’t. And she resented the complicity he was forcing upon her.

As if sensing this, he changed the subject. He asked about Lillian, remarking that since she had been buried in East Hampton she must have loved the place. Gayle found herself warming to the conversation, eager to talk. There was nothing pushy about his questions; he drew responses from her effortlessly. At a certain moment it occurred to her that she was satisfying a need in him, that his desire to understand the person he had only ever known as a corpse was a necessary part of putting the experience behind him. Against his wishes he had been written into the last chapter of Lillian’s life, and he had a desire to know the details of the story preceding his involvement.

There was something calming about his presence. He was considered in his comments, articulate when he made them, and his attentive gray eyes never left hers, not even for a moment.

She felt a momentary twinge of disappointment when he suggested that she must have things to do. He got to his feet.

‘I’ll get a tow rope,’ he said.

‘How did you know?’

He smiled. ‘Happens all the time.’

As she followed him from the house he turned to her. ‘I want to show you something first.’

He struck out across the dunes towards the ocean. She followed, intrigued, the hot sand scorching the soles of her feet, obliging her to tread lightly and quickly behind him.

Along the beach a scattering of people were huddled beneath their sun shades, sheltered from the midday sun. A dog scampered to and fro at the water’s edge, barking at the gulls.

Gayle hurried to the wash and cooled her feet in the spent waves.

‘That’s where we found her,’ he said, pointing down the beach. ‘About a hundred yards along.’

Gayle stared at the spot, aware that he was watching her intently.

‘I’m not sure I wanted to know that,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you see her?’ he asked. ‘At the morgue?’

His tone had changed. In fact, his whole appearance had changed. He suddenly seemed very big. And very threatening.

‘I wanted to, but when it came to it, I couldn’t.’

He glanced back down the beach. ‘Maybe with time you’ll be glad you knew,’ he said, more gently.

She doubted it, but said nothing.

The rope was in the barn, coiled and hanging from a wooden peg.

‘You use all this…stuff?’ she asked, awed by the amount of equipment on display.

‘Pretty much.’

‘What’s this for?’

‘It’s a scallop dredge.’

‘And that?’

‘Eel trap.’

As he led her to the truck, he asked, ‘You eat fish?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you want, I’ll drop some by. Maybe a bluefish or two.’

‘That’s very kind, but you really don’t have to.’

‘I’d like to.’

He hauled open the passenger door, removed a sleeping cat from the seat and helped her climb up.

He only untied the tow rope once he’d seen her safely back to Montauk Highway.

‘Thanks for the Champagne,’ he said, then added with a smile, ‘I’ll try to remember Rollo gets his bottle.’

She found herself not wanting to leave, and watched as he swung the truck round on the highway, negotiating his way past her and back down the track.

A thought suddenly occurred to her and she punched the horn several times. He pulled to a halt, leaning out of the window.

‘How much do you know about game fishing?’ she called.

‘Game fishing?’

‘For tuna.’

Eighteen

‘You’re kidding me,’ said Abel.

‘No.’

‘Mary Calder’s invited you to a party!?’

‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ said Lucy, coming to Hollis’ defense.

‘Yeah,’ said Hollis.

‘Come on, Tom, you’ve got looks, brains, a sense of humor, but not a whole lot of any of them.’

‘Abel Cole!’ snapped Lucy, kicking him under the table.

‘Jesus, Lou.’

‘He’s just jealous,’ said Lucy, turning to Hollis. ‘She’s one of the few women in town who never succumbed to his dubious charms. And, believe me, he tried.’

‘Is that what she told you?’

‘I remember you trying.’

‘I meant the bit about not succumbing.’

Hollis laughed. Abel was indomitable in these situations.

‘Don’t,’ said Lucy, ‘you’ll only encourage him.’

At that moment the waiter appeared at their table with the bottle of wine. He cast a surly eye over their unopened menus and left.

‘It’s okay, we’ll pour,’ said Abel, just loud enough for the departing youth to hear.

Hollis filled their glasses and insisted that they order whatever they wanted from the menu—it was his treat. There was nothing magnanimous in this gesture. He was painfully aware that he’d been living off their hospitality since Lydia had left him. A meal out was the least he could offer them.

His stated intention of getting them round to his house had somehow amounted to nothing, maybe because he had lost the desire to prove to himself that life went on. It didn’t. He knew that now. It stalled, shuddering towards inertia.

He was shocked by the speed with which the house had descended into a state of dereliction. Dust heaped up in corners he could swear he’d just swept. Clutter multiplied, begetting yet more clutter with no apparent involvement on his part. Without Lydia to spur him into action, hinges creaked, window sills leaked, taps dripped and bulbs went unchanged.

At first Hollis had battled bravely against this creeping decay, but at a certain point he had conceded defeat, contenting himself with an uneasy coexistence, singling out a room and concentrating all his efforts there, allowing the dust and detritus free run of the other areas of the house. The kitchen had been his first place of refuge, then the living room, but he’d recently retreated to the bedroom. He had plans to break out soon and reclaim the kitchen. But right now, number 4 Indian Hill Road was not a fit place to entertain one’s friends—in fact, it was hardly a fit place for anything—hence the dinner at the 1770 House.

Hollis and Abel opted for the steak; Lucy ordered the bluefish before announcing that she was going to ‘powder her nose’. Abel suggested she take a leak while she was at it.

‘You want to tell me what’s up?’ asked Hollis as soon as she had left.

Abel lit another cigarette and eyed him suspiciously, almost aggressively. ‘Who said anything was up?’

‘You seem a little edgy is all.’

‘Yeah?’

Hollis didn’t mind being shut out. He knew Abel well enough to accept that he’d tell him in his own time. This turned out to be about twenty seconds (and three large gulps of red wine) later.

‘She mentioned the M-word.’

‘Ah,’ said Hollis.

‘A couple of nights back. Just dropped it in there. Caught me on the hop. Guess I’m still hopping.’

‘Marriage, huh?’

Abel winced at the word. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘You brought it up.’

‘She brought it up. I’m just…relaying it to you. Forget I ever mentioned it, okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Hollis. He waited, relishing his friend’s discomfort, trying not to smile. Abel snuck a look at the rest-room door.

‘So what do you think?’ he mumbled.

‘About what?’ asked Hollis innocently.

‘You know…the M-thing?’

‘What do I think? I think she’s crazy.’

‘Come on, Tom, seriously.’

‘Abel,’ he said despairingly, ‘she’s smart, talented, funny and very, very beautiful.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘She’s too good to be true. And she’s chosen you.’

‘That’s the point.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you see?’

‘No.’

‘I wanted…’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know…to amount to something first. Then think about it. Maybe. Or not. I don’t know.’

‘Abel, you’re a great photographer.’

‘Bullshit. And I’m not fishing for compliments.’

‘Let me lay some on you anyway.’

Abel wagged a hand, cutting him dead. Hollis didn’t persist. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t had the conversation before. Abel judged himself far too harshly. How many other photographers would have been mortified at getting their work on the front cover of Life magazine? How many would actually have given thanks for the fact that the photo wasn’t credited directly to them but to the US Army Signal Corps? Most would have had that front cover framed and hanging on the wall of their shop for all to see, not moldering amongst a pile of other magazines on a shelf back at their house.

It was Lucy who first drew Hollis’ attention to the magazine cover. Lydia was also present at the time. Abel wasn’t. He was in the kitchen, preparing dinner—their first dinner together, two couples tentatively getting to know each other. Taken in a small town in Germany, the photo showed a GI leaning against a halftrack, muffled up against the cold, and smiling. Abel’s reaction when he wandered through and found the three of them bent over the copy of Life almost soured the evening. He dismissed their compliments, cutting Lydia quite dead, something for which she never really forgave him.

Abel explained that the officer in the photo had bugged him to fire off a couple of shots, and he’d only done so to shut the guy up. The reel of film was then tossed into the photographic pool, and that was the last he’d expected to hear of it. Next thing he knew, there was the smiling GI on the front of Life, some idiot at the War Department having decided that his grin struck just the right note of cheeky triumphalism for the folks back home. Abel rated the photo as one of the blandest he had taken during the long push eastwards from the beaches of Normandy—devoid of any technical or artistic merit—but what annoyed him most was its dishonesty.

The man whom he’d immortalized for the home-front readership had played no part in the fighting they’d just come through, the hell that was the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. He was from a relief unit sent in at the end, 33,000 men having already died or been incapacitated in a few brief months, swallowed up in five hundred acres of densely wooded real estate of little or no tactical value.

Some weeks after that first dinner, Abel dug out and showed Hollis a folder of shots he had taken in Hürtgen Forest, photos he’d held back for himself rather than consign them to the nearcertain oblivion of the photographic pool.

The forest itself was the stuff of fairy tales, those of the more nightmarish kind—a dark, dense underworld, the dwelling place of witches and wolves. Towering pine trees, tight-packed so that their branches interlaced, formed a gloomy canopy through which stray shafts of sunlight barely penetrated to the forest floor. What the photos didn’t show were the German anti-personnel mines lurking beneath the spongy carpet of pine needles, or the trip wires rigged to the assault course of fallen wood that anyone passing through the forest was obliged to negotiate. The greatest danger, Abel explained, came from above, from the deadly hail of wood unleashed by artillery tree-bursts. In one of the shots a soldier was literally hugging a tree, while all around him death whirled like a blizzard. It was an image that brought to mind a terrified child clutching at his mother’s thigh.

Most of the photos, though, were of GIs at rest, stuffed into slit-trenches and foxholes, tending to their feet or their weapons, seeking comfort in the little routines of life. One GI was even plucking at his nose hairs, using the inside of a tobacco tin as a mirror.

By the time Hollis had worked his way through to the end of the batch, the forest was all but gone, the noble pines reduced to matchwood, their shattered trunks poking through the surrounding debris. Light flooded the photos, the roll of the land was revealed. The final shot was of three tall pines outlined on a bald crest, beheaded and stripped of all but their lower branches. There was no mistaking the parallel with the three crosses of Calvary.

Abel had been right. The photo selected for the front cover of Life magazine was inert and empty when set alongside those other images. But he was wrong if he thought he had yet to prove himself as a photographer.

‘It’s a poor excuse,’ said Hollis.

‘What’s that?’

‘Your work. For not getting married.’

‘Right now it’s the best I can come up with.’

‘What if she leaves you?’

‘That’s her choice.’

‘I hope she does.’

‘You fancy a shot at her yourself?’