The Memory of Place Ch. 01

So, was our marriage was like a mirror of our times? I don't know. Maybe.

We'd sold out once before for the path to suburban conformity, then dropped out, tried to rekindle the spark that defined those years in Berkeley. We moved out into the world, searching, but ultimately we were lost, just lost, and we knew it. Like all of us who sold out, we tried to come back to the reality of what we'd lost, only to find that we'd become anachronisms, our dissolution as a generation complete. And what had we learned along the way?

Maybe by turning our backs on the choices we made, to the choices that defined a generations need, we repudiated the very meaning of our lives. In the vacuum that was left, all manner of crazy extremism rushed in to fill the void. No amount of running from that simple truth could take us back to the truth we'd found out there on the ocean. No amount of self-deluding existentialist bullshit could erase the reality of what we'd come to.

And now it was all over.

It was unnerving, moving back on the boat, putting my shirts back into the same old drawers - drawers that had been Liz's for so many years - then laying out navigation instruments . . . like I really knew where I was headed. I did, however, have a ton of boxes up on the dock to move back on-board. Anyway, it gave me time to think about the options.

Money wasn't a problem, but staying here would be. Charleston was a small town, and I wasn't a local. That's always a bad mix. There were still lots of places I wanted to sail to. I'd never considered ding that alone, but it could be done.

I walked up to the car and brought another box down to the boat. Mullins, the lawyer, was waiting by the boat when I walked back down the ramp.

"Hi," she said. "Nice day for a sail. Wanna go out?"

I looked at her. Dressed just like a freshly-minted boaty out of an L L Bean catalog. Red shorts, new Sperry Topsiders, white Polo shirt. Every fucking cliché in the book. She looked kinda cute, though, in a preppy kind of way. Clean, ya know.

"Yeah, it looks nice out there. I'd love to but I've got stuff all over the place down there, things not stowed yet. Maybe in a week or so . . ."

"Let's take mine. It's just over there." She pointed across the way to little brown-hulled double ender.

"Oh? Is she yours. What is that? A WestSail?"

"Yeah, an old 28. I picked her up a couple years ago, been cleaning her up."

You know, all of a sudden I felt like going out for a sail.

"Yeah, sounds good. Let me get this box below and I'll be there in a minute."

"OK," she said. I heard her walking away down the dock.

"And, Lisa," I said to her, not really knowing why, "Thanks."

"No problem."

_______________________________

She came down every Sunday, she said, and took Soliloquy out for a spin on the harbor. No matter, if the weather was foul she came down and sat on her, read a book; it was symbiosis, she said, they both gained from their time together. She'd come down today, saw me loading boxes on board and decided to ask me to go out with her. No pre-arranged agenda at work, just a simple gesture. She had a quiet smile on her face.

She wasn't a bad seaman, either. I don't know why that surprised me. I stood out of the way as she took the boat out, kept out of her way as much as I could as she hoisted sail, just watched and enjoyed the day as it unfolded like any other guest on her boat. It was a cool Spring day, a fresh breeze was coming out of the northwest, and a couple of whitecaps dotted the distant harbor. A handful of other sailboats were out, and their sails stood in bold relief against the stark, clear sky.

"There are a couple of cinnamon rolls down on the table," she said as she watched for traffic in the Ashley River channel. "Wanna bring 'em up?"

I dropped down the companionway, picked up the sack and turned to climb back out into the sunshine, but something caught my eye. A little plaque mounted by one of the portlights; a diploma from an Outward Bound School in Colorado, dated January, 1977. A winter mountaineering program. Now I was impressed.

Lisa sheeted off the genoa and we munched on cinnamon rolls for a while as Soliloquy reached across the harbor towards Fort Sumter, and I watched her quietly as she steered with her foot on the tiller, her eye on the sails. She seemed to be communing with the boat; I knew the feeling well. Or, and I was shocked that I felt this in that crystalline moment, I used to know that feeling well. Somewhere, somehow, that simple symbiosis had left my life.

Instead of reveling in the audacity of our choice, Liz and I had grown complacent, begun to take for granted the so many beautiful things in our life, and in that complacency the meaning of those things was lost. The purpose of our life grew vague and obscure.

No compass had helped us find our way back. There had been no course to steer.

Lisa Mullins hadn't lost that sense of purpose. Somehow, she held on to life just as she held on to Soliloquy - firmly, symbiotically.

"Where are you?" I heard a voice, and I looked at Mullins. She was looking ahead, looking at the set of her sails.

"Did you say something?" I asked.

"Yeah, where are you? You look lost."

There is was. It was so obvious.

"Yes, I suppose I am."

She turned to look at me.

"Is it Liz?" Are you so lost without her? So obvious.

"I don't know. I don't think it's that simple."

"Maybe you just need some sea time." She chuckled a little.

"Yeah, that's got a be it." I looked at her and smiled. "So, where we headed, skipper?"

"You up for a little adventure."

"Always."

"Let's head down the ICW a couple of miles, down Stono's Creek. There's a good dive down there on the water. Shrimp and grits kinda place."

"A what?"

"Shrimp and cheese grits. Oh, I forgot, you a California boy, ain't you." She gazed at me for a moment, and a thrill passed through me. I hadn't felt one of those in years. Amazing.

"Is that a Charleston kinda thing?"

"Low country, you poor white boy. You ever read Pat Conroy?"

"Nope."

"Poor stupid white boy." She laughed, and her eyes sparkled as she tacked the boat through the wind, heading back up for the Intra-Coastal Waterway.

"Sorry. Man's got to know his limitations."

"Yeah? That must be a guy thing."

So, she wanted to play dirty, huh. "Where'd you go to school?" This could be fun . . .

"School? You mean like high school?"

"College."

"Tulane. Then Penn for law. Why?"

"Just wondered."

"Wondered? You wonderin' about 'lil ole me?" she said in a Carolina accent that seemed a little thick all of a sudden. She was looking right at me, though, with an intensity I found a little amusing. She was definitely alpha-chick, and enjoying herself.

"Yeah, well, it's not everyday I get to go sailing with an Ivy league lawyer into cheese grits, know what I mean?"

"Yeah, yo ain't lived till you et cheese grits wityo lawya."

"I hope they have cold beer."

"Shit, white boy, you almost dumb, you know it? People breast fed on beer 'round these parts." Now she was smiling, truly enjoying the persona she had so easily slipped on. I think she was trying to make me comfortable, me being a foreigner and all, but this really was a world apart from anything I'd ever seen before. It felt comfortable. Like an old pair of shoes. But it didn't feel like home.

"I've never been on the ICW before. Have you done much of it?"

"Naw, not too much. You have to motor, so what's the point. I like blue water."

"Done much of that?"

"Nope. That's the dream, though."

"What? Sailing off into the sunset?"

"Yeah, something like that. Got to finish up some things first, then I'm gonna head off, look around for a while."

"Not your everyday kinda dream, you know."

"What, for a girl, you mean?" She took a sidelong glance at me, then focused on traffic in the channel ahead.

"I didn't say that. It's just that not many people have that dream anymore, you know. It was a sixties kind of thing. Drop out and see the world."

"That's bullshit, and you know it. Why is that dropping out?"

"It's turning your back on what society expects of you."

"So?"

"Well, that's kinda frowned on, ya know."

"So what? Who gives a shit?"

"I don't know, isn't that what the law is? I mean, think about it." I looked off at the sky, the water, looked back on all the implications of our choice to leave, to sail away. "That's what it's all about, isn't it? Conformity? Conforming to the will of the group, to the rule of law. It's pretty off the wall for someone who represents the force of conformity to be a non-conformist. If you think about it, I mean."

"Hmm. I don't know that I buy that. But I'll think about it." She looked ahead, adjusted her course to scoot behind a trawler crossing ahead of us. "So, is that what it was all about? For you and Liz? Non-conformity?"

"No. I didn't mean to frame it in just those terms. It wasn't about what other people thought about what we were doing, about why we were doing it. It was the act of doing it - of leaving - that was, I think, a statement of, oh, I don't know. Rebellion, maybe. Getting out there and doing it. Experiencing the world while everyone else watched it unfold on television. We chose not to live on anyone else's terms. I don't think we cared about what other people thought about us, about what we were doing."

"So, what, you and Liz had a monopoly on that dream? No one else can take a shot at it?"

Our eyes met. I laughed; she didn't.

"You know, we met tons of people out there. Mainly from Europe. A lot from France, lots of Germans and Swiss. Bunch of Brits. Most of the people out there, and I hate to generalize about something like this, but here goes, most of the folks out there were tired of conforming to arbitrary rules set out for them by bureaucrats and governments, they just wanted to live their lives without governments and jobs breathing down the necks all the time. I think all of us were looking for something simpler."

"Amen to that."

"So, doesn't that make you the non-conforming conformist? Or are you a conforming non-conformist?"

"Asshole."

"Who, me?"

"Yeah, you. Like I said, I'll have to give that one some thought."

"Take your time." I was laughing again.

"You're bad, you know it?" She was still smiling as she said that. That was a good thing. I didn't want to swim back to town.

"Don't you have any beer on this tub?"

"Tub? Tub!? You callin' my baby a tub?" She leaned over a rubbed a patch of teak. "There, there, girl," she cooed to the boat, "don't let the mean asshole hurt your feelings." I just shook my head, grinned at her.

"So, you gonna take this girl out on your trip?"

"I don't know. She's about as big as I can handle alone, you know. I wouldn't mind something bigger." She let that thought hang in the air for a minute. "I don't know, Tom. I always thought I'd end up doing this . . . I always saw myself doing this alone."

"No boyfriend?"

"I was married once."

"Oh? Didn't take?"

"No. Leukemia. About ten years ago."

"Oh, God, Lisa. I didn't . . ."

"I know that, Tom. I know you're not from around here, don't know all the local gossip. Don't worry about it. And," she said as she looked at me again, "I know you're not mean."

We settled on a course down the middle of the waterway and she asked me to take the tiller for a minute. She went down below for what seemed like an hour, then came back up, her face scrubbed, her eyes a little puffy. She'd been crying. She looked around, took in the surroundings.

"Almost there," she said. "About another half mile." She looked at me while she sat down, didn't take her eyes from me. "Man, it's nice to have someone around to take the stick for a while."

"You really sail around here by yourself all the time?"

She nodded her head, smiled defiantly at me. "You betcha."

"I don't know, Lisa, but I think I admire you."

"Admire me? Oh, boy. That's not was I was hoping for, Tommy-boy."

"Oh, what were you hoping for?" Then it hit me: I had smiled as her words hit me.

"Yeah, Tom. I was hoping - I was hoping I'd finally met someone who likes cheese grits as much as I do."

"Well, like you said. We'll have to give that one some thought."

She just looked at me for a minute. Then she smiled.

"There it is. Hope you're ready for this, white boy!"

_________________________________

She was right. I felt there was something mystical about the South as I sat in the screened-in porch overlooking the waterway. Everything about the place felt like a proud anachronism, with more than a little paradox thrown in for good measure. On one side of this bifurcated terrain you had a fairy-tale land of overt meanness, the sidelong suspicions of in-your-face rednecks, the really uncool vibes of down-home racism that still bubbled in near-dormant malevolence to the surface from time to time, and perhaps most disconcerting of all, an easy acceptance of intolerance that was utterly unnerving when you saw it in action. Not exactly Gone With The Wind, but not too far removed when you got right down to it. On the other you had, you had people like Lisa Mullins. Bright, articulate, compassionate, accepting. She was everything the South was not, except she was the South, and it was this contradiction that had me baffled.

Whatever it was about these contradictions that fascinated me, it was all soon forgotten as she sat across from me, leaning over the driftwood-planked table pointing out some of the good things on the menu, and hinting that there were some really, really good things for the asking. If you knew who to ask, and what for. She leaned closer to me as she talked about her love of place, this place in particular.

I could feel heat in the air between us. I was getting warm. Unsettled. So many contradictions alive in the air.

I looked out across the river. Motorboats droned along under the intense afternoon sun - buzzing like insects - while an occasional sailboat drifted by in hot silence. Both these forms of moving across the water embodied contradictions too, didn't they? Ultimately, they were one and the same, people moving across the water from point A to point B, people looking for some time alone or with friends away from the noise of everyday life, but were there contradictions inherent within the choice to sail or burn gas? Something about purpose? Looking for that place?

Lisa ordered her low-country favorites, cheese-grits with shrimp, some Gulf lump crabmeat sauteed in butter and Jack Daniels, with some chopped pecan and cilantro thrown in for good measure. We ate and talked, talked and ate. The beer was bitterly cold, and it felt good going down even though we were sitting in the shade. The sun arced across the sky as we sat there, but time had long since stopped having any real meaning. We were lost within that arc of time. I was soon lost in her story.

Her parents were evangelicals, and she grew up hating everything about them. She had considered herself a hard corp agnostic all through high school, and flirted with being a full time atheist by the time she moved away from home. By the time she finished law school she knew enough about the world to understand you didn't make these kinds of choices lightly, and seeing how other people's faiths sustained them had made an indelible impression on her. She envied people whose faith seemed pure, unassailable - at least on the surface - but the more she scratched that surface the uglier faith became to her. Religion, she said, would be the central paradox of her life, one she felt would never be resolved.

The law had become her religion. I could see that plainly as she talked over shrimp and crab that afternoon. When she talked about the law, she would become assertive, almost masculine. She picked up her long-neck beer by the top of the bottle and swung it up to her lips with two-fingered ease. Nothing feminine or dainty about the way she did that; no, plainly she just felt so at ease in these surroundings that all pretension melted away.

It was inevitable that as she talked I drew comparisons to Liz.

While Liz had always been open - even vivacious - in public, she was really quite shy around people she cared about. She cared a lot about what others thought of her, about the way she looked. She watched television but hated movies, hadn't read a book since college, and loved to invite strangers to the boat for dinner whenever we pulled into a new anchorage. She hated that I listened to the BBC on the boat's shortwave radio while we sat in some remote anchorage at night, and thought my interest in the stars was pathologically weird. But we cared about social justice, about finding common ground for the disenfranchised, and we argued about things we held in common, challenged our preconceptions. We had always found it easy to talk to one another, even when we knew things between us were turning sour. And there was that history between us, those California afternoons that seemed to linger like her breath on my neck in almost every memory I have of those days. Liz was a fragile, almost willowy blond that always seemed to stand deep in the middle of life . . . but then again, I always thought she had embraced life on her own terms. As the tears and years swept by, I realized she had been holding on to me through my dreams, following in my wake, resenting the implications of my choices on our lives. She was, I had come to realize, a pretender. And now she was bitter about it.

As I listened to Lisa, I had the feeling she had had her fill of pretension, her fill of men who sought power for power's sake, and that she'd also had a belly full of life in the sewers. She made it clear that while almost all legal professionals have to deal with the sewer from time to time, she had embraced criminal law, knew the implications, but made her choice and stuck to it. It was amazing to me that she wasn't more jaded than she appeared to be. Sure, she was rough around the edges, but hell, who isn't . . . I mean, life does that to you, it grinds away at you. But . . . she still wanted to go after her dreams, and in my experience not too many people can claim to hang on to those by the time they hit forty. Conforming to expectation chews away at your dreams until one day they're gone.

I was pretty sure that was what killed our marriage. I asked Lisa what she thought of marriage. Surely she'd seen enough marital bliss in family court to have a fair understanding of the terrain.

"You know," she began, "most marriages fail for a simple reason. People play games with one another. Power games, dominance games. Con games. They get used to conning people for what they want, and sooner or later all honestly leaves the relationship. There's not an honest emotion left in the marriages I see falling apart. Everyone I see says the same thing: 'I can't believe I married that son-of-a-bitch'. Is it that? Is it that they didn't know the truth when they got married, or is it that the truth got lost in all the lies and games?"

"Truth gets lost? That's an interesting insight."

"Have you thought much about Liz, and you. What happened, I mean?"

I looked at her. There was no hesitation on her face, no regret for having asked the question. "I don't guess I'm too different from most people, Lisa. For a while it's all I thought about. It hurts. It seemed so unexpected, yet so inevitable. I don't think we got caught up in lies, I think they caught up with us."

"That's a subtle distinction. You were running? Is that what the boat was all about?"

"I'd never thought about it in those terms. And I'm not sure it's accurate, either. But I'm willing to think about it." I think I was smiling as I said that.

"So, what are you going to do?"

"I've been wanting to get a smaller boat, shallower draft. I want to go to Europe, wander through the canals in France, then go to Greece." Liz and I had always talked about doing that someday. I guess our dream was mine after all.