The Lighthouse

At the end of the catwalk was a landing and an office, but Patrick led her through a door and up a flight of stairs. The building was old, almost antique, but smelled fresh, of olive oil and paint. He unlocked the door at the head of the stairs and stood aside.

"This is where I live," he said. "Owner-on-premises. When the boats come in, we go twenty-four hours, so I like to be on hand."

She stepped into a magnificent loft bathed in spring sunlight—exposed brick, polished hardwood floors with Turkish rugs. The furnishings were Spartan and undistinguished except for the kitchen, which was had new industrial-quality appliances and was gleaming. There was a large aquarium in the living room—very large—in which she could see vague, translucent shapes swimming or pulsing about, and she remembered Patrick with his bucket and net. The place had the calm austere feeling of a monastery, a place open and uncluttered enough to allow the spirit to expand, and Julia had a moment of regret for the way she's decorated the lighthouse cottages with all this New England nautical gimcrackery and French farmhouse touches.

Patrick walked over to a stainless steel bucket sitting on the sink. "I use the state lab in Bangor for the real analysis, but every batch that I process goes through me too. Have a seat. This won't take long."

Julia sat at the kitchen table as he turned on the industrial range and got out a large frying pan and threw half a stick of butter in, followed by olive oil from a gallon can. He was telling her about pilchards, about how no one eats them fresh anymore but only canned, and about what they're missing, but Julia was captivated with watching him work. His shirt was old and worn, and hung tenderly off his shoulders and back. She was aware that she was in another man's apartment alone, and that she didn't mind it. When he offered her a glass of wine though, she balked.

"It's not even noon," she said.

He smiled at her again, the cork already out of the bottle. "You are a city girl, aren't you? Out here the fish set the clock, and the fish say it's time to drink wine. The boys you saw on the boat have been sloshed since sun-up."

She let him pour her a glass, and then he turned to the sink. He pulled a fish from the bucket and deftly cut its head off with a scissors, then slid the blade into its belly, cut it open, and let the guts fall into the sink. In a matter of seconds he had it butterflied and sizzling in the pan and he reached for another. Julia felt nothing watching him work—no squeamishness, no pang of conscience, no disgust—just a stunned admiration for his grace and efficiency, his artistry.

"Now taste that," he said, slipping a gleaming white plate of sautéed pilchard in front of her.

"No, really. I couldn't," she said. "Besides, I just had breakfast."

"Julia, don't insult me and don't insult my fish. They just gave their all for you. If I'm going to come to your restaurant and eat fried tofu, the least you can do is taste my sardines."

His eyes were gray, the same gray as the ocean when the clouds covered the sun. She remembered from somewhere the superstition that people whose eyes were the color of the sea could see into the depths.

She picked up her fork and tasted the fish.

It was exquisite—fresh and clean and just a bit salty, with the vague coppery taste of the ocean that evaporated on her tongue in a buttery memory—fleeting and evanescent. It yielded to her teeth without complaint, unlike any meat she'd ever eaten, as if eager to be swallowed. She felt like she was eating some memory of the sea.

"Oh my," she said. "Oh my, that is good."

He went to work on his plate and quickly and deftly boned half a dozen and gave them to her, then took hers and tasted each one, chewing thoughtfully and chasing each bite down with the wine.

He nodded with satisfaction. They are good, aren't they? The law allows us to call any of half a dozen species sardines once they're in the can, but pilchards are the best."

He raised his wine and they touched glasses without a word, Julia slightly embarrassed by the sensual, almost greedy pleasure she took from eating the fish. The wine was the perfect accompaniment—tangy, complex and quizzical against the simple elegance of the pilchard.

Satisfied that he'd made a convert, he refilled her glass. "They used to tell stories about your lighthouse. They decommissioned it when the fleet dissolved after the fish left, but even before then there was some controversy."

Julia listened to him, but only with half an ear. This was so unlike her—sitting with a strange man, eating and drinking wine at eleven in the morning, unanxious. She wasn't the person she was familiar with, and she wondered if Seth were waiting for her, but she doubted it. He'd be involved in his menu planning by now, or haranguing the local girls who cleaned the rooms. In any case, her cell was in her pocket, and he'd call her if he needed her.

"Oh?" she asked, calling herself back to the present.

"Pilchard are attracted to light. There's some evidence that they navigate by the light of the moon, and fishermen complained that the fish were attracted to the light from your lighthouse as it swept over the water. All night long, they said, the fish were swimming back and forth, great herds of fish chasing that infernal light. The fishermen wanted it shut down in favor of a mercury strobe—that's what they use these days—so they decommissioned it and put in the new strobe at Pennicott Point."

The image struck her with unusual clarity. There was life in the water—unseen, undetected—great currents of fish rushing back and forth like tides, chasing the light. The image gave her chills. This was all so unlike what she'd expected when they'd lived in the city.

"You'll excuse me for a moment?" he asked. "I really have to shower. I'm covered in scales. I feel like Poseidon."

"Oh, I really should go."

"No, stay. Really. I'll just be a minutes. Finish your food. I have to get back to work myself, but it's nice to visit."

She excused him and sat in the sunny kitchen eating her fish, mopping up the buttery sauce with a crust of bread, strangely at peace. No, not at peace—more like filled with a sensual fullness. The room was so full of spring sunlight that it felt like it might float away, and right outside the big, sparkling windows she could see the aching blue of the sky and the more serious darkness of the ocean, the trails of lighter blue in the sea running out to the horizon. The machinery of the cannery hummed gently below her, a soothing industrious sound.

She knew it was odd that she should feel so comfortable here, and yet she had no desire to think about it. She finished her food and wine and walked to the tank in the living room. There were jellyfish inside, strange, transparent things no bigger than her fist, pulsing and trembling and propelling themselves randomly around with powerful contractions of their delicate translucent organs. There was something fascinating about them, and something vaguely obscene.

Patrick came out of the bathroom in jeans and a black turtleneck. He was barefoot and his dark hair was plastered to his head like seaweed, his smile was as bright as the sunlight. He was devilishly handsome, she decided in a kind of gut way, without really thinking about it. When she realized what she was thinking, she grew embarrassed and turned away, looking into the tank again.

He stared to say something, then saw her change of mood and stopped. He went to the kitchen and put the plates in the sink, finished his wine, then came back into the living room.

"Fascinating, aren't they?" he asked softly.

"Everything is fascinating lately," she said, not taking her eyes away from the jellies. They seemed to move like dreams, like ghosts, or memories of old feelings, and yet there was that urgent, almost sexual thrust as they moved. "I don't know what to make of it. I don't seem to be capable of doing anything anymore but just staring."

Without looking at him she could feel him smile. He sat down in the old leather sofa and she heard it sigh under his weight.

"I got very sick some years ago," he said. "They thought I was going to die. I didn't, but ever since then I've been the same way—just looking at things, fascinated. Famished. It isn't so bad in the city, but out here, it's like my eyes are just starving, or my heart."

Julia looked at him. The mention of the word "heart" should have embarrassed her, but it didn't. People didn't talk that way anymore, but she understood. "What did you look at?"

He laughed. "Everything. The sea, the sky, the rocks. Fish, trees, the wind in the grass, snow and rain. The world. I'm still looking. You caught me the other day."

"The jellyfish?"

"Yes. Jellyfish too."

She raised her arms and hugged herself. "Why do you keep them?"

"Why do you think?" he asked.

Julia watched one creature, shaped like a bell. Little tentacles around the opening whirred with mad life while the body of the creature pulsed with slow, regular contractions. It was mindless, she knew, without brain or nerves, but it throbbed with an urgency that made her ache in some deep, unknown part of herself. It felt like a part of her, like she had that very thing inside her too.

"Do you kill those fish here?" she asked. "The pilchards you were unloading."

"A lot of them are dead when they come in, but the rest of them are killed, yes. They're put into a parboil vat before processing. Cooked."

"Don't you think that's horrible?"

He sat forward. "I don't know," he said seriously. "I've thought about it a lot, and the more I think about it the more I have to say I just don't know. I don't know what they think or what they feel, and to assume that they fear and feel like we do is kind of silly, don't you think? Almost arrogant?"

"And killing them's not?"

"Everything dies," he said. "You just pray that they do it peacefully and without fear. I don't know what those fish feel or think about swimming down there in the deep water with no light and no sound, feeling things through their bodies. Pilchards seem to want one thing, and that's to surround themselves with more pilchards, to get inside the middle of the school. Do they fear death? Do they know what it is? Do they fear the net? Or are they just reacting, the way they chase the light of the moon through the water?

"With all the looking and studying and watching I've done, the one thing I know for sure is that things aren't what we think. We insult nature when we pretend we understand, because it's a mystery, Julia. It's all a fantastic mystery."

At another time and another place she might have laughed at his talk, but now, looking into this tank of blind, pulsing life, his words were just what she wanted to hear. When she took her eyes from the tank and turned them out his windows to the long lines of white surf battering the rocks on this scrubbed and perfectly blue day, she ached. She ached in a way she couldn't describe, for the sheer beauty of it, the majesty of the world in which she lived.

He seemed to know what she was feeling.

"When I thought I was dying, I went through all the stages," he said. "Just like on some TV docudrama. I just couldn't believe all this would be taken from me, that I'd have to leave it all, and I went through my rage and resentment and self-pity and all that. But you know what I discovered? What being so sick taught me? Should I tell you?"

She looked at him and waited for him to continue.

He smiled. "You'll never understand, but I discovered that when I died I wouldn't have to be trapped in my body anymore. All unconscious things are the same, and that's what I'd be too—unconscious. So Patrick Malone might no longer exist, but I'd be part of all that out there—the great out-there—part of the rain and the wind and the rocks, and the surf that beats upon them. I'll be the sea and the fishes in it. I'll be free of myself and free to be everything. Being nothing's the same as being everything, do you see?"

She looked at him sitting there smiling at her, his hair still plastered in curls to his handsome face. The light in his eyes told her there were fires burning back there, and the amusement told her he didn't expect her to understand, although strangely enough, she did.

"Let me get this straight," she said. "You run a sardine cannery, right?"

Patrick smiled at her and then exploded with laughter. "Yes. I think I'm probably the only mystic in the world with a fish factory and a payroll to meet, but yes, I run a sardine cannery." He laughed again. "That's all right. Don't mind my bullshit. I get carried away sometimes. But I should get down there and you probably have to get back home."

She was about to tell him no, there was no hurry, when her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She reached into her jeans and turned it off.

"That'll be Seth. Yes, I suppose I'd better go." She cast a longing glance at the wine bottle, but it was empty. "But do come out for dinner, Patrick, please? Would you believe it, but you're the only one I've talked to in weeks who seems to make sense."

He smiled in understanding, stood up and walked her to the door.

"Really," she said. "I mean that. I need to talk to you."

She was alarmed by the edge of panic in her voice, and he seemed to notice it too. He opened the door and leaned against it and his eyes were deep yet gentle.

"Of course I will. But there's something else that near-death experience did to me that you should know about. Made me totally immoral. Husbands, wives, they mean nothing to me anymore. I function on an animal level." He smiled at her. Perhaps it was a joke.

It didn't feel like a joke to her, and his words sent a sharp thrill knifing through her stomach and between her legs. She looked up into his gray eyes but couldn't read them, and she realized with a kind of soft horror that what he was saying made sense to her too, that in the face of what they were talking about, formalities like marriage seemed very trivial.

For a moment they stood there, their heads almost touching. Julia felt herself drawn forward as if by some tidal force, pulled towards him and about to fall— and then her cell phone abruptly buzzed in her pocket again quite audibly, making her jump.

She tried to laugh—"Seth again"—but it came out as a quivering sigh. The mood was broken, though, and Patrick straightened up as if awakening from a trance.

He smiled, then laughed nervously. "Better get going then. Let me finish this batch—should take a couple days—and then I'll come out and see you for dinner."

"That would be nice." She was ashamed at how warm his smile made her feel.

"I don't know much about organic food," he said. "But it would be my pleasure. As long as we don't have sardines."

*****

She left his place buzzing with excitement. The road back from town ran along the coast, with the rocky shore on one side and weedy, untilled fields fronting the other. Beyond the fields stretched the forest that seemed to extend forever as far as she knew, a lacey tangle of black and gray twigs, the trees just coming into leaf this time of year and dotted with tiny green buds.

The first flowers were coming up now, snow-drops and crocuses, and when she rounded a bend in the road she was struck with the sight of a field of wild daffodils in full bloom, yellow against the soft green of the new grass. She pulled the car over on impulse and turned off the engine and sat there, stunned. She opened the door and stepped out into the gratefully warm sun, crossed the cool asphalt and headed for the woods, not sure of where she was going. The sound of the surf faded behind her and was replaced by the sleepy buzz of the trees, a sound as warm as sunlight. The daffodils seemed to reach for her as she passed and nodded their approval, like a crowd of tiny, importuning lovers.

She crossed the field and walked into the woods, pushing aside the scrim of thin branches with their lime green leaf buds. She wasn't sure where she was going. It was just some stubborn refusal to go back coupled with an urge to explore, and she walked on as if something was calling her. At the same time, she almost felt as if she were intruding, as if she were upsetting the sleepy tranquility, but she walked on until she stopped in her tracks.

There in front of her was a wild crab apple tree, covered in white blossoms, and beyond it another, and another—a whole stand of them. They stood out from the gray twigs and the misty green of the woods like blazing torches, beautiful and strangely masculine, and the rest of the woods seemed to back off and make space for them, the trees drawing back to form a clearing, as if to give them space for their grand moment.

She felt something like a chill rise up the back of her neck and flood down her body, and suddenly she could see Patrick as he was when their eyes had locked at his door. She felt a pang of guilt but it could not find a purchase and slipped easily away, and she was left with the image of him and the certainty that he at least understood her, that he knew. She turned around to look for him—the feeling was that strong—but there was nothing but the stillness of the budding branches, a feeling of secrets being kept.

She turned back to the crab apple as if expecting an explanation, but there was nothing. It stood there in its private, blazing glory, and Julia felt tears welling up, something lifting and tightening in her chest. Yes, she knew what he meant. Her heart was hungry and famished too, and it was almost as if what she was now feeding it was too much, too rich for it to digest.

She turned away from the tree with the same feeling she'd had when she'd left Patrick, and reluctantly made her way back to the car. She'd have to remember this place. She knew she'd finally connected.

*****

Patrick showed up for dinner the following night, wearing a charming but ill-fitting suit. "You know, you'd get more business if it were easier to find your phone number."

Julia laughed. "My fault. I was supposed to have us listed with the chamber of commerce and it slipped my mind. We're on the internet though. Seth just finished the site."

Thank God she'd worn a nice dress tonight to hostess the dining room, a long velvety thing that set her apart and flattered her form, something she didn't have much cause to wear for going to town. She took the flowers from him with a smile she hoped didn't betray how moved she was by his little gesture.

He noticed her gratitude, though, and tried to joke it off. "When flowers go to visit each other, do you think they bring bouquets of human sex organs on sticks? Or is that something unique to our species?"

Seth greeted him effusively, the way he did with all visitors. He knew Julia had met an interesting sardine canner from town, and that's all he knew, and he was too busy supervising his new Guatemalan chef, who was having trouble with the whole concept of sushi and roasted root vegetables. He left them alone. They had only six couples for dinner that night, tourists all, and so there was nothing wrong with Julia sitting with her new friend as he ate clams and lobster steamed in kelp, though she knew their food was nothing compared to what he'd given her. Afterwards she showed him the grounds and the renovated guesthouses, and then took him up into the lighthouse.

It was a long climb up the spiral stairs and he didn't mind when she wanted to stop and rest. They were both winded when they reached the top. She didn't want him to look at her poor paintings, but he insisted, genuinely interested. He didn't have to say anything for her to know what he thought, but she was gratified by his honesty and even proud of him for not trying to flatter her as other often did. She led him outside.