CHAPTER ONE
He was wrong about her age, guessing that she was almost thirty when she was actually older, he wasn’t wrong about her availability. He had picked up on it immediately; it was there in her eyes, in the steadiness of her gaze. She was sitting with a couple of friends, both of them women far less interesting-looking than herself, sipping a tall glass full of something orange with fruit in it. The wide-brim straw hat she wore gave her face a look of mystery that Noah Green was a sucker for. Her face was generous, roundish, womanly, with flaring nostrils and full lips. He had no idea what her eyes were like because they were hidden behind blue tinted lenses. When the sun touched on the fall of her hair that extended halfway down her bare back it turned the color of a shiny copper penny.
He couldn’t help looking at her and she, not at all annoyed by the intensity of his stare, began to look back. It surprised him that there were so few truly attractive women on the island though the island was incredibly popular this summer. Noah was not really searching for a woman but that didn’t mean he wasn’t ready to find one. He was obliged to be here for the next several weeks -- until the beginning of September -- and he could see how the company of a woman might make the time pass more pleasantly.
What might ensue from these repeated glances in his direction he had no idea. Once she and her friends had finished their drinks they paid and began to leave. But the pretty woman lingered for a moment on the steps as if she had forgotten something. Then she took off her tinted glasses and turned back to look at Noah. He had a feeling he knew what she meant by that look too: it said: I can handle you better than you think.
In the poster taped to the front wall of Captain Nick’s, where he was playing an extended engagement every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday night, Noah bore only a vague resemblance to the way he looked now, like a brother or first cousin of his former self. With his beard shorn, he no longer gave the appearance of a shiftless bohemian. Also, he’d regained some of his health, he’d subdued the drinking, quelled his fervor for illicit substances. The puffiness was gone from his face, the shadows receded from around his eyes. He’d put on some weight, and if he wasn’t exactly robust, at least he didn’t give the impression of someone who would keel over the first time a good strong wind came along. It was peculiar, he thought, that when he looked at that old face of his it was like seeing himself in the future, aged badly, hopelessly debauched.
Few people remembered his name from the days when he was famous, or relatively famous; fewer still recalled his blues band or the two albums he’d made with it. And if they did remember they might very well wonder why his fortunes had declined to the point where he was obliged to make a circuit of undistinguished bars and taverns up and down the east coast, from Key West to Provincetown, eking out a living from songs he’d played a million times in the past, using up whatever voice he still had left.
He spotted her again in the back of the bar the same night. She was wearing a different outfit, he saw: something blue and white and sultry, and her hair was swept up and pinned back. It occurred to him after a while that he was playing for her. It helped to be playing for someone because otherwise he didn’t particularly give a damn.
Between sets she stepped up to him and said, “I enjoyed it. I’ve been meaning to get over to listen to you before but never had the chance.” She gave her name as Kate Littlefield.
He hoped she wouldn’t ask him what had happened to his career. Luckily, she did not. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.
“Oh no, please,” she insisted, “let me buy you a drink.”
He was going to say that he no longer drank when he was playing because of what drinking had done to him in the past, but he didn’t wish to offend her. “How long are you on the island for?” he asked, thinking that she looked like a woman who would be gone in the morning without a forwarding address.
“I live here all year round.”
He had met only one other person who had identified himself as a native Block Islander and he was in his seventies and mowed lawns for a living. “It must be tough here in the winters.”
“Sometimes, yes, but you get used to it. It’s worse if you’re dead.”
“How’s that?” He was thinking that this was a weird thing to bring up at the beginning of an acquaintance, but he had to admit that this only made her more intriguing in his eyes.
“We had one funeral parlor here and it closed down. And in the winter, sometimes, the weather turns bad, and boats can’t make it over from the mainland and neither can any planes.”
“What do you do with them? The dead I mean?”
“We freeze them.”
“Where?”
“It’s kind of a secret,” she said but in a teasing way that suggested that maybe it wasn’t such a big secret after all. “There’s a restaurant in town that closes down when the season’s over and they let out the freezer if such a need arises. But they don’t want it known, understandably. You can imagine what kind of jokes people would make about the entrees when they opened up for business again.”
Noah would like to ask her if she had a husband or a lover. His last girlfriend Rose had given him every impression that she was free, alluding only to an acrimonious breakup that had occurred a couple of years ago, only to surprise him one day by revealing that the ex was back and that she’d been in contact with him all along. So he’d learned that just because someone said that she was single (or even believed she was) didn’t necessarily mean that an estranged boyfriend or a new man altogether wouldn’t suddenly appear like the proverbial rabbit pulled out of a hat. But if Kate offered him a chance to ask her about her love life that chance slipped by between their second and third drinks.
She asked whether he’d ever had his fortune read. Before he could answer she reached into her bag for a deck of cards. Removing them from the box, she shuffled the cards – Tarot cards. “I read fortunes as a kind of hobby,” she said.
“I don’t know whether I want my fortune read.”
“You don’t have to believe my reading, it’s not mandatory.”
But she was going to give him a reading regardless of whether he wanted one or not.
She deployed the cards according to some scheme with which Noah was unfamiliar, some face-up – The Tower, The Star, The Hanged Man and the Priestess -- the others face-down.
She studied the ones she’d revealed – the major trumps she explained – and then, methodically, turned the others over, a mixture of cups, swords, knaves and pentacles. He was caught between cycles, she said, still clinging to the past, reluctant to confront the future, his career was going to be rough, full of ups and downs (mostly the latter), and if it was a passionate love affair he was looking for, he was in for a disappointment, but he shouldn’t give up hope entirely.
“Could you give me some specifics?”
“I could, but I don’t think you’re ready.”
He was about to protest that he was as ready as he would ever be, a little angry, but the manager reminded him that his next set was about to start.
He liked her; he was convinced that she was the sort of woman who could always take him by surprise, that there would be no anticipating her next move, and that appealed to him. It also kind of scared him. But that was all right too; he had a thing for scary women. He gladly would have put aside his guitar and drink away the night with her, but there was no escaping the need for money. When he was done with his last set, he went looking for her again. But she was gone.
A young man courted me, and we intended to be married, but he prepared to go on another voyage to sea first. And one evening he went aboard his Ship. About eleven o’clock, going to look for my mother, I saw him standing at his mother’s door with his hands in his pockets, and his hat pulled over his eyes. I went to him, and reached up my hand to pull up his hat, but he went swiftly by me; and I saw the wall on the other side of the Lane parting: in a few moments he went through it, and immediately closing it after him. The next morning he died.
A few days after, Johann, one of our neighbors, a man who feared God, and one with whom I was well acquainted, went to Sea. He sailed out on a Tuesday. Following between eleven and twelve o’ clock at night, I heard a man walking in my Room, and every step sounded as if he walked in water.
