Maine

He took me to Maine for our honeymoon.

“It’s a hotel on the water,” I recalled one night, as we were holding hands, on the way back from a show I was in at the Ballroom:

“The breakfast area was all glass that overlooked the ocean. So far over the water that you could not see the beach below. Only the water.

“I remember going down once in the middle of a rainy day to see what it must look like to be on a ship without ever fearing sinking. I think I fell in love with Melville, then, even before I ever read him, because there really is nothing like the northern sea.

“The storms there hold a grandeur, a realness, and a danger…I imagined a whole world of ice, a little ice age in midsummer. I felt my winter wonderland of Frankensteins and all such things up there.”

We went in late June because, unfortunately, I’m not a warm blooded creature and all my childish imaginings of arctic adventures went up with the first puff of winter’s samovar breath.

He went along the beach and my eyes combed it for the seaweed. I am a glutton for good and natural things; and my stomach made a small racket, kicking at the sight of them.

‘I want to boil some in a pot. I want to throw all my favorite things in a pot. A new hot pot! Grape leaves, saag, kombu! A little rice! A little squash! A little pumpkin! Matzoballs with miso!’

I nursed that strand of thought as we walked down the shoreline. 

I turned to him to preoccupy my little, gluttonous thoughts and his kisses were salty from the wind.

When we returned to the hotel, we made love the way we did when we were immortal beings before time began. It felt sweet to be with a man who loved me as pure energy and exhilaration, outside the confines of our body, outside the space of this universe, which in our connection, ran between us.

It rained and thundered that night of our lovemaking. And the rocks cracked so strong was the wind and whims of Scylla. Underneath the fury of lovemaking, the peace that was made swam in my ocean, a contented coo in the morning of seagulls, and a refreshing peaceful gust with no cold nor heat, but right enough for the day.

A mercurial twinkle in the eye of the ocean, the leaping of dolphins and their silvered backs, giggling in my grey sweatshirt and shorts, the ocean spray and sand flying like diamond dust, the glitter of the sun over the star sapphire of the diamond engagement ring I stole off my mother’s dresser.

I laughed because I won a battle deep in my soul. It had taken all my cunning to love born out of a loveless wedlock.

Through the long and winding roads of those dark Maine roads, our headlights—only a foxfire shining in the eery, thin-trunked, endless northern forest, we drove home, window down, I recited poetry to him until I fell asleep in the passenger seat. We were driving to Montréal for the second half of our trip.

My mind drifted and drifted out until lost in the sea of dreams and the St. Elmo’s Fire of highway lights passing over my closed eyes roused me back from a tempestuous sleep of trees as thin as lightning in the woods and the burning pine barrens of my native land, a dream of my great-grandfather’s  regret that I understood fully in my subconscious scrabble, but not at all as the haze and humidity of early morning on the highway asserted its reality in its uncomfortable stick to my flesh.

‘My darling,’ I whispered, ‘Good morning.’

He turned his head slightly, not taking his eyes from off the road. “Morning, my love.”

‘Do you want to switch off?’ I asked hoarsely.

We stopped somewhere shortly after for breakfast. Pancakes and french fries. I worried I was stress eating again, but I couldn’t stop. I had cravings like I did before I got my period—oh.

“Can we stop over at that pharmacy we passed on our way over here?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I want to pick up a pregnancy test.”

He put his fork down and in his straight forward way; in his way of simple loving, beamed: 

“I knew it. F*ck yeah, (etc.). I f*ckin’ did it.”

We’re in Montréal and I don’t get a glass of red wine or dessert wine. I can’t eat meat for some reason; I wonder if it will be a veggie lover later on. Only sweets can sit well with me and they seem to come in pairs of lava cakes and ice cream heaped up and heated—the ice cream boils down to a milky simmer that baby will drink down a few months from now.

We are at a museum my mother promised to take me. My father promised to get his passport and never did, so we only ever got as close as the border, but never over. The exhibits twist and turn like the paths of life and the overlapping of bodies in love and agony; bare steel and painted clothes that peel off like lead in the pantomime of men’s industrial age Pygmalions—a watered down Claudel—figures that in their rough edges support nothing, no architecture, no passion, no meaning, but the grit that men love because it is vulgar and foul and shocking and they think in that dark mirror is reflected the truest reality of life, but Kerouac only knows drugs. An escapism, art is not life nor imitation of life when as abstract as this, it is only a Rorschach.

It is loud and painful in this room of “art”; its bare walls without paintings, its concepts without sympathy, only the apathy of a capitalist century’s lies’ ruin hangs in the air.

I am happy to have come, anyway, because it is with him. He doesn’t think this way about things. He is simple and he is man and he is sex and he is family. And because he is all those things and happy, the spew of tangled steel sculptures looks like the mental illness of the discontented ends and oddities of mankind. The rooms of flowers and later the botanical gardens are a better fit for him.

He will grow tomatoes at our house, he says, but later he grows orchids and grapes, what attracts him to these impractical things, I do not know, but that I never thought he would have been attracted to them is why I fell in love with him in the first place.