Dockside (2016 rewrite)

I came to see that I was, as time drifted so lazily by, inside the eye of a hurricane. Just outside the woods, in raging winds, amid thunderous destruction, the world I had known was being torn asunder by furies easily recognizable as my own creation -- yet a fury subtly transformed. People I had known in my life, and loved, were embedded within the raging storm, their faces full of twisted, black malevolence -- yet they were the very essence of this storm. Their words lashed the landscape, anger tore homes from their foundations and scattered them as dust, hatred and betrayal spilled from wounded eyes -- yet still the two women stood in silent majesty, watching me, waiting, just inside my silence.

If I made as to move toward one woman the furies rose and screamed, winds ate away at the edge of my wood, howls of anguish filled the air and tore at my mind with nauseating power; if I stepped toward the other, from the very heart of the wood I could feel a desolate, wounded moan rise from the very earth upon which I stood, leaves on trees began to wilt and curl, petals fell from dying flowers, the grass beneath my feet turned brown and hard.

There was a choice to be made, yet it seemed so obvious. Why was it so hard to choose? Would the rising storm tear into these woods, would vanquished fury leave a world unrecognizable and in pain, be a world worth living in? Would the trees and the grass and the blooming flowers take root again, and grow -- in the desolate emptiness after the storm's eventual retreat?

I woke to the sounds of wind driven rain lashing ancient windows and growing thunder. Lightning lit the room and frenzied shadows danced across out bed. A tree bent to the storm, naked branches scraped against glass.

I rose, walked to the window and looked into the clouds for the faces of people I had once known, and dared to love.

+++++

Michelle flew back to London, I returned to Honfleur and my boat. A day later I sailed north across the channel, back up the Thames and through St Katherine's lock to the marina. The next morning as I was waking, I felt the boat move and knew someone had boarded. I put on some clothes and walked to the galley and looked through a port-light into the cockpit.

Ted Sunderland was sitting there, a long cigarette dripping from his hand.

I slid the companionway hatch back and stuck my head up. "Coffee?" I asked.

"Please. Yes."

I opened up the boat and let some fresh air in, got coffee going, and Ted stuck his head down and looked around. "Make yourself at home," I said, and he clambered down the steps.

"Cozy," he said as he looked around.

"Cream or sugar?"

"Black, please."

"Well, what's on your mind Ted, beside the obvious."

He smiled. "I've done a little checking up on you. While you were away."

"That was decent of you. How am I doing?"

"You were considered a pretty fair architect. Why did you ditch it all and leave?"

"You want to talk about my . . . architecture?"

"Why not? I'd like to know more about . . ."

"About what you're up against?"

"No, not at all. You might think me a hypocrite, and I may well be, but I think we both know the outraged husband routine has little pertinence here." He took some coffee, looked around the boat again. "Yes, I quite like it down here. I can see the attraction."

"Alright."

"No, well, I could understand, as an architect, if you'd been an abject failure, why you might choose to drop it all. I assume your marriage is over, was over, but you really do seem very highly regarded, and in a city well known for good architecture. It seems strange. A conundrum, and I wanted to know, that's all. Thought I might get a handle on where things stand."

I couldn't decide what to do, what to say. Was he on the level? What was his angle?

"So," he continued, "you graduated from Northwestern, then the University of Chicago. Take it from there."

"Alright, Ted, I'll give you the condensed version."

"I like condensed. Fire away."

"I got out, worked for a large firm a few years . . ."

"Yes, yes, I know all that, man. Get on with it, to the meat of the matter!"

"Well, once upon a time I considered myself principled. I know that must sound rather bland and boring to you, but there you have it. I always identified with Howard Roark, Ayn Rand's architect in The Fountainhead. Familiar with it?"

"No. Never my thing, reading fiction."

"Of course. Well, I used to think Frank Lloyd Wright was the unshelled nuts, uh, the very thing I longed to be as an architect, and I drew fanciful homes and buildings, and all very true to Wright's vision. Critics soon labeled me Frank Lloyd Wrong, peers thought my work dull and pretentious, yet I continued, true to my ideas, true to what I thought most important as a designer. I made a living; not a great one, but there were enough people around wanting some connection to Wright's style . . . and well, anyway, I managed to keep us in clothes."

"Ah, you were married then?"

"Right after graduating from Northwestern. Before architecture school. I met Claire at Northwestern, in the library of all things. She was very studious, quite bright. . ."

"I know. We've talked. Your Claire and I."

I felt a chill of cold anger run down my back.

"Oh do go on, Jones. The excitement is killing me."

I think I may have been angry at this point; I know I was red-faced and staring at him. Ted looked at me, hastily turned away, and seemed genuinely upset.

"I'm sorry, Jones. Please. Do finish."

"Yeah. Well, I guess after a time I got tired of all the Frank Lloyd Wrong stuff, sometimes the out and out scorn of my fellows around Chicago. I went out on my own then, too; started my own firm. Anyway, a client came to me, oh, about ten years ago, and asked me to design a new office building for his company up in Madison. Wisconsin. I listened to this man, a moron, really, to his ideas about design, life, all of it, and I hated myself but took the commission. I vowed to myself that I was going to design the most hideous, atrocious building man had ever laid eyes on, and of course he loved it.

"It was built, and critics labeled the design a work of genius. Somehow I wasn't shocked. We live in a world that accepts mediocrity as the norm, so why shouldn't that be the case, right? But this design was conceived as a blatant affront to everything I loved about design, and people loved it. New clients came, quietly at first, then in a rush. Some begged, threw obscene numbers my way, offered any amount of money, and I forced myself to design the ugliest houses, the most terrifyingly gaudy structures I could imagine, and each new design was praised as the work of an inspired über-architect. Kids fresh out of school came to me, wanted to join me, wanted to become a disciple to this new movement I had come to represent, hell, that I had created. The New Prairie School, they called it. I called it Fugly.

"Fugly?"

"Fucking-Ugly."

"I see. And what of Claire?"

"She went to work for a large firm after law school, corporate mergers principally, but you already know that, right?"

He nodded.

"She got pregnant, miscarried, and that was the end of that. Got her tubes tied. A few years later, well, I'm not sure when, really, but I began to hear rumors she was sleeping around. A lot."

"Curious. Do you think she was sleeping around before you abandoned your principles?"

His words hit like a hammer blow.

"I mean, Jones, did she fall out of love with you about the same time you fell out of love with yourself? When you abandoned the ideas she had always known you stood for? The ideas you had embraced as your own when the two of you met, when the two of you fell in love?"

"I don't know."

"You should ask your wife that question some day. Really, you might do that. Well, good coffee and all, but I must dash."

"Is that what she told you?" I felt hollow inside, like I had betrayed a friend.

"Sorry. Must go. Appointments and all that." He put his cup on the counter and held out his hand.

I took it. His skin was cool, dry, alien.

"I'm sure you'll do the right thing, old boy. But you always have, haven't you?"

He climbed up into the gray morning, and left me standing in a pool of doubt.

+++++

Michelle came that evening. She looked unnerved, her eyes were lined with dark circles and seemed dull, almost lifeless.

"How have you been," I asked. I doubted I looked any better.

"Difficult. Ted is being difficult. Playing the reformed, possessive, all attentive husband. And you? I wanted to come earlier, but could not."

"He came by this morning. Ted did. We talked."

"And?"

"I think he's taking a different tack on me. Trying to appeal to my sense of obligation to my wife, to Claire. He wants to say, or implies, I think, that she still loves me."

"How on earth would he know that?"

"Well, it seems he's talked with her, so perhaps he thinks he's done his homework."

"Mon dieu."

"So, what would you like to do? What would make you happy?"

"Me? Now? If I could do anything, anything at all, to be happy again?"

"Anything."

"Ah, well, there is a lane, a road, in the hills outside Avignon. I would walk with you down this lane, to my grandfather's house. He is very old, my grandfather, but I would talk to him, with you. And I would listen to what he had to say."

"That sounds like a good thing."

"Yes. He is a wise old man. And a smart-ass. You would love him."

"Ah, well. Shall we go?"

"What? Now?"

"Yes."

"Is it always so easy?"

"Isn't that what the old man said? In the dining room?"

"I don't know. I don't know anything anymore?"

"Don't you?"

She was crying now, and I held her.

"Is there one thing you know?" she asked me then. "Do you love me?"

"Yes," I said. "That's the one thing that seems clear to me."

"Does anything else matter right now?"

"No, not to me."

She looked at me, into my eyes. "Then we should go. To Avignon. Now, tonight."

"Yes," I said. This was a simple choice, to walk down a country lane in France. To be with the woman I loved, to hold her in my arms.

So simple. Such an easy choice.

And so, we went.

+++++

As the little jet rolled down the runway, fat drops of rain streaked across the windows as our speed increased; they vanished into the night as we climbed into the sky. Michelle sat beside me, her hand in mine, while the jet bounced and rolled into heavy gray clouds. Clouds that had brought sleeting rain to London that afternoon, clouds that seemed to chase us wherever we ran. Lightning lit the insides of clouds, cast oblique shadows through the cabin, then the entire aircraft seemed to lurch upward, slowly upward, then slam down several hundred feet. Michelle squeezed my hand, the woman across the aisle from us screamed, and within a moment we saw her reaching for the "sick-sack". She almost got the thing out in time, too.

A few more bounces and rolls, a mild climbing turn to the left, then fragments of starlight just glimpsed, the moon overhead now casting a milky glow through the cloud, then we were up and out of the cloud completely, bursting free into a clear, starry night. I looked out the window; huge towers of cloud rose beside and ahead of us, their pale interiors glowing with lightning that occasionally ripped from somewhere deep inside and jumped from cloud to cloud, or down to an unseen earth, now far below.

The pilots steered between clouds as one late for work might drive through slow traffic. That is to say, they were weaving and dodging between roiling towers, the jet still lurching and dropping from time to time, and all the while the woman across the aisle sat miserably, waiting to make her way to the head. The flight attendant, sitting on her fold-down seat by the cockpit door, looked mildly bored and amused until one downdraft shook the jet and cast us down once again, but this time violently, and the left wing rolled down sickeningly. Now even she looked terrified, and the woman across the aisle was openly weeping.

And as suddenly as it had come on, the violent weather receded; we resumed climbing, and soon Calais and the French coast slid below, little amber lights twinkling on a vast plain of black velvet. Bright cabin lights came on a minute later, the flight attendant began readying her cart and the woman across the aisle dashed for the head when the seatbelt light winked out.

Such is the order of our universe.

Michelle snuggled into my side and I pulled up the little blanket she had draped over herself when we'd boarded. She was fast asleep within moments, while I looked up at the stars.

+++++

We made our way from the airport in Lyon to the station downtown and managed to get on a late night TGV that stopped in Avignon, and so of course arrived there in the wee hours. Perhaps arriving at four in the morning, in mid-November no less, was a mildly stupid thing to do, but travel on impulse often presents you with such confounding realities. There wasn't a taxi to be found, of course, and the station's lobby was preposterously small and almost empty: a couple of men loading sacks of mail onto a cart, a man collecting garbage, a woman dozing on a bench beside a wire rack of light blue rail schedules. The white terrazzo floor was all echoes and dull wax, which is to say I felt like it looked.

But of course, Michelle had a friend in mind. What else are friends for if not to call from the train station at four in the morning and, as if everything's fine and dandy, ask if they might not mind a trip into town.

And of course, friends being friends and all, she came.

Her name, it turned out, was Leslie Dufour, and I saw she was seriously tired when she pulled into the broad circular drive in front of the station and opened her door. She bounded around and hugged Michelle, and then, with her shoulders scrunched up and giggling shyly, slipped over and hugged me too. It all felt very good, this friend thing, and we piled into Leslie's tinier than tiny blue Renault and drove for a half hour until we arrived at her equally tiny house. The sun was coming up over the alps, the air was cool and full of promise, and I was about to pass out I was so tired. The girls wanted to talk, of course, and I assume they were more than understanding when I stretched out on the little beige sofa and closed my eyes, because when I awoke it was past noon. They were, however, still at it, merrily talking away while drinking black coffee and munching dark chocolate; but food was on their mind.

We drove down a narrow, tree-lined lane east of town and made our way to a tiny bistro that sat next to a modest square in the center of an impossibly small village. A stone-walled stream passed through the heart of the village, and though it lay on the far side of the square from the bistro, we could still hear the water as it slipped through on its way to the Rhone.

It was perfect.

The owner of the place came out of his kitchen when he heard us enter, and the man rubbed his eyes when he saw Michelle, then burst into tears and ran to her. This is, of course, not the behavior I typically associate with the proprietors of small country bistros. Ms Dufour stood by, beaming, while Michelle and the man hugged and cried; he stood back more than once, holding her face in his outstretched hands, then was hugging her again and again.

He was, it turned out and not unexpectedly, himself a celebrated chef.

And of course, as he had to be, this was Michelle's father.

+++++

Life is full of awkward moments, strained first meetings, uncomfortable silences. This was not to be, however, one of those occasions.

I suppose you could say that for some people life has passed them by. Such souls are often lonely, weather-beaten and lost, and perhaps ready for another life somewhere, somehow, if only, and then they might add: "I could have had this or that in life -- if only..." Then you might, and not unreasonably, expect to find there are others in the world who have embraced life on their own terms, found no small measure of happiness along the way, and indeed, perhaps even some success. No so satisfied that a valid working dichotomy had been established, you might be content to leave your examination of life among the living then and there and be done with it.

But there is another group, certainly less well known and consequently understood not at all. These people have at some point in their lives embraced life and succeeded, even flourished, but even then found something was missing from life. Or perhaps they found there was too much 'noise' in their life, too much money, too many insincere people, too much frivolity, or too little, and these people set out down a different path, a somewhat less conventional path, and, I suspect, what often turns out to be a very enjoyable path. Amongst this last group, along this other path, you would most certainly find Henri Ricard .

There are celebrated chefs, then there was Henri Ricard. He began working at a beachfront hotel in Cannes and developed a reputation in the seventies. Movie producers and other literati dined under Henri's care and word spread; one Hollywood mogul bankrolled construction of a restaurant in the hills above Cannes, then someone asked Henri to open up a place in Beverly Hills. Why not? Sounds like fun! Then a small place in St Moritz, because I like to ski! San Francisco, New York, Positano. It turned out to be quite a ride, and Henri Ricard loved every minute of it.

But it wasn't enough. Or perhaps it was too much.

He sold out one day. No warning, no mounting dissatisfaction, no agonizing second thoughts, and no doubts. He'd long ago bought this little hole in the wall in a forgotten corner of France and the time was right. He wanted a wife and a family, and he did not want to create one within the chaos of the glitterati.

In point of fact, the man flat disappeared. Nobody knew where he'd gone, or what had happened to him, but as it is among certain walks of life, within a few months nobody even remembered his name. Henri Ricard disappeared into blissful obscurity, and he loved every minute of it.

He was a happy man.

Then he cooked our lunch, and I was a happy man. Michelle and Leslie were happy, but Henri was happiest. Such is life with wine and food and love to keep you company. So many smiles.

And do you know what was funniest about that afternoon? Even odd, you might say?

He never questioned why I was there, what I was doing with his daughter, or what his daughter was doing with me. It seemed, for a fleeting moment, as if our presence that afternoon had somehow been predicted. Perhaps it's simply life; we were just living life and all was unfolding according to some vast impenetrable plan, and as we appeared to be happy that was all that mattered to him. By the time we rose to leave -- when sharp, black shadows had fallen across the little square -- I felt like I'd known the man all my life, and was the better for the knowing.

I guess it was around five or so that afternoon when Leslie dropped us off in the middle of nowhere and drove away with a wave and a smile. A small dirt lane cut away from the main road, stretched off into the distance and seemed to drift away into hazy blue shadows under a soft shouldered valley. I could see a village steeple well ahead in the smoky distance, autumn trees overhanging long stretches of the road ahead, cows standing on the other side of a stone wall, their heads hanging over, reaching for that last perfect bit of grass.

And then, the silence.

Complete and total -- silence. Embracing, penetrating, so foreign.

And we walked. Inside the silence -- though perhaps it was that silence walked with us, for there was nothing else. There was no need now. No need for words. No need for time.

Just soft footsteps on an old road, two people walking hand in hand, and very happy to be alive.