Warm November Afternoon

Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can.

—Nicholas Sparks, At First Sight

          The beach on the southern shore of Donnell Pond lies like a cresent moon between two mountains, laid between them like a long, bone-colored necklace—just a band of pale sediment at the bottom of a vast, bottle green cup. There is no road in.

          At the summit of the western mountain we ate our sandwiches in the wind. About halfway up, I did a strip tease: sitting on a rock, I peeled off my soaked T-shirt and wished I had worn shorts. We laughed that I might have to finish the hike in my underwear. 

          But I had dressed for a Maine November day and had stopped short of packing a wool scarf. 

          Harold produced from his pack three coconut macaroons dipped in chocolate, and we ate them on the granite, looking down on a misty canopy of ponds and woods, the horizonless bay, and a bog with an abandoned right of way from the Maine Central Railroad cutting through the center like an old wound. I thought, or half-spoke, a prayer.

          On the way down, a thick stand of oaks grew like an orchard on the sheer face of the cliff as if they could break your fall—a hammock of bare branches. Gauging every step on the piles of brown leaves that covered the rock, I was relieved to see the first patch of blue water through the tree trunks. Yet, it never seemed to be nearer, and I remarked to Marie that I believed someone kept moving it further away as we descended. 

          I was on 100 mg of gabapentin a day and not at my best.

          We crossed the little log bridge just before the beach, and through the trees I could hear male laughter. We reached a picnic bench, and I sat down and took out my thermos of tea. My heart was breaking. 

          They were swimming.

* * *

          Last year, in September, we came off of the same mountain. I had worn my trunks under my jeans, and I stripped down and waded without hesitation into the water, forcing my head under the surface, thrashing my arms, and feeling the unreality of the water's buoyancy, of the out-of-focus banks of green rising up to the treeline we had an hour ago surmounted. No one but my hiking partners sat on the vastness of the sand, watching me and patiently waiting to start the 20-minute walk through the woods back to the car. The beach—always so crowded in July—was deserted. I told my friends, as we shared a bottle of red wine, that this had been the best day of the summer. But, to myself, I reflected that it had been one of the best days of my life.

          The year had been unpredictably good. I lost 40 pounds and—sitting in the waiting room in a sort of film noir outfit of gray tweeds and Persian lamb—surprised my diabetes nurse. Every week I was a little slimmer, I stayed in the crowd a little longer, and I quietly smiled where before I would have effused—shaking out my adjectives like aspirins. With nicer clothes came a kind of self-composure I had experienced in my life only intermittently—proof that props make the play.

          The summer that followed was the undoing not only of my new look but the removal of things I had assumed were permanent possessions—vouchsafed, like the color of my eyes, or memories of my mother. I lost my position as president of a small nonprofit and the chairmanship of a city committee; and Gary finally informed me that—as Nancy Wilson sang so flawlessly (and so much more graciously)—the masquerade was over. 

          In August, almost a year after my golden afternoon swim, I admitted myself into the Mount Desert Island Hospital emergency room for alcohol detox, to say goodbye—after a few starts and stops—to the thing I had come to live for, the liquid sunset that had been at my elbow through every change in fortune, every poem or vacation or friendship.

          For a couple of weeks, I never left the house without a little plastic sandwich bag of Kleenex.

* * * 

           Exhausted, I limped to the edge of the water, knelt down, and touched it with the pinched fingers of my right hand. 

          A few yards down the beach, a group of about 10 young men had made camp and were tossing a ball in the water. A nearly audible voice inside of me was saying that if I didn't take this freakishly warm November day to have a last swim I would regret it all winter long. But it simply wasn't practical with the clothes I had on, and I had brought no towel. When I walked back to the picnic bench Marie told me she'd rather not have a damp spot on her car seat.

          I never turn down a chance to swim.

          I held them up while I poured some more tea, searching my mind for some resolution to the afternoon other than the one presenting itself. I gazed past the two figures, now standing, toward the water, sipping my tea. There was no wind—the atmosphere was still and warm, and the water touched the sand in shallow arcs that were like the half circles of a protractor.

          The time came for me to screw the top onto my thermos, and we made our way down the beach, passing behind the little campsite.

          At once, we noticed there were no girls in the boisterous group—setting up tents, emptying their backpacks, rummaging in coolers—all about 20 years old. "There's going to be a party tonight!" Marie joked. As we walked into the woods, I looked back for the last time and, framed by birches, saw the heads of two more swimmers deep in the pond water. I was sick with longing.

          A solitary young man passed us descending the trail to the beach, a late arrival with a towel slung over his shoulder. Marie called out something to him about the fun that was waiting down at the water. But I thought he didn't look like the others in the group—not as tall, and with an oval face whose softness struck me as pliant and uncertain.

          And I thought of the night they would have, under a moon waxing gibbous, caught in a torn, gauzy bag of evanescent clouds, and the stars shining as they can only in Maine, in the wild, like usher's flashlights running up and down the sky—disappearing, reappearing, changing like luminous cordial glasses being filled and emptied throughout the night, their reflection on the black, motionless surface of the pond broken only by dawn.

          And after the beers and burgers and pot and the Fireball nips, after the stories had all been told, where would the halting conversations wander, the lightweights passing out one after another, crawling off to tents until only a few are left, speaking in disjunctive, drunken phrases to be forgotten in the morning—the blanket of the surrounding woods at once so vast and intimate?

          It seemed to me each of the boys in that group had reached an age, a status, at which there really was no past and, certainly, no future time. To them, or about them, even as they sat around the fire, were scores of hopeful (or bitter) text messages, calls, and emails being addressed—by parents, coaches, and, most of all, girlfriends—as their phones sat unpacked, their batteries disgorging the charge.

          Still not at the parking lot, as we walked I imagined something being said after midnight, after the exhaustion of the day's swimming and hiking, in the abandonment of rationality that drinking—or sensitivity—brings, a confession that was all too human, and not altogether cut from the same cloth as the group's casual, jocular etiquette. I wondered whether even at that careless, perfect age—desirable young gods wiping their asses in the woods for a weekend—the defects that characterize adult life, that color it, could be spoken out loud. Or whether it was all just the assurance of the group, gathered at the foot of two ageless mountains, that the butt-slapping and good-natured mockery were the sum total of what it meant to be an individual among other people.

          If they had looked over and saw me crawling into the water in my underwear—so marked by the color and indelible texture of experience, of bad and good fortune—would all of them have laughed? Or just a few?