Landscapes in August

By Naomi Gayle

Recovering from a bad divorce, artist Susan Miner, has retreated to a cottage by the beach to work and heal, but when she finds a young man asleep on the rocks near her home, she begins to realize that there is more to life than the beautiful view outside her window.

The disappearance of this mysterious young man who has unsettled her life, leads Susan on a journey along which she encounters her past in the form of her ex-husband and an impossible future in the person of Peter Ashby, the father of the boy who had brought her back to life. Their lives continue to intersect across the globe as they each try to find a way to cope with loss and love.
When her young companion disappears, she tries to escape her loneliness by travelling through Europe and Manhattan. But she keeps runing into her past--in the form of her ex-husband, even as she tries to run away from her future--in the form of her young friend's well-known father, until she is forced to stop and consider what she really wants in her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468563047

Naomi Gayle

NAOMI GAYLE has published articles in local and national magazines and newspapers. She has written lyrics for children’s TV and film. A lover of travel, she has been on a perpetual journey, both spiritual and actual, to discover herself even as she explores the world around her. She has lived, loved, and worked in Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv and the South of France, but her heart belongs to the island of Manhattan to which she always returns.

Book preview

Contents

PREFACE

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

1

2

3

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

I remember writing this story, believing in impossible love and coincidences and an imagined future full of adventure. I’ve had adventures, and challenges, and love, and loss, and I’m not sure how I would write it now, except that I still want to believe in impossible love and coincidences and a life full of adventure.

Naomi Gayle

March 2012

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

I wrote the first draft of this book in the 1980s and it is true to its time and place. I thought about updating it to take into account all the changes that have taken place in the world since then, but I decided not to. So many things have altered in the intervening years in technology, lifestyle and world view, that to address them all would have changed this book beyond recognition. Some of the obvious differences are the introduction of cell phones and the disappearance of smoking from public places. But there was also another mindset. Viet Nam and the draft were very different from Iraq and a volunteer army. Social attitudes, customs and mores were both more rigid and, in retrospect, perhaps a bit more naïve.

So, while I did not intend to write an historical novel, in the end this is a piece of history, a fictional version of times I lived through, and I have chosen to leave it as it was written.

1

Her bare feet left wet footprints in the sand at the water’s edge. The trail of prints led from the gray sea-washed wooden steps descending from the edge of her property to the beach to this spot just short of the first outcropping of rocks along the coast line. Turning around to face where she had been and squinting into the sun, her hand raised in salute as a visor above her brows above the blue tinted lenses of her glasses, she saw that the water had already washed away most of the footprints. For a moment she felt as she imagined Gretel must have felt on discovering that the birds had eaten her trail of crumbs and she had no markers to guide her back out of the forest.

The house she had left behind, locked and shuttered against the sea and the salt and the sand carried by the fresh intruding breeze, perched solid on the rocks beyond the wide expanse of beach, behind a waving man and bounding dog. Safety, said the house, and solidity and solitude, abundant solitude, and the sound of the surf and the dog’s bark and a screeching bird in flight spoke too, but the woman standing barefoot on the beach and shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare didn’t answer because no answer was demanded of her.

To her left the ocean pounded against itself and the jutting rocks; to her right, beyond the stretch of sand, rose low cliffs of red stone, and further down the beach, in the pathway to the sun, the man and the dog frolicked. Man and dog and she had shared this beach for five years now in morning and evening ritual to salute the rising and the setting sun. Man and dog and she and an endless succession of days that went on not caring whether man nor dog nor she existed. The man, raised an arm and moved his hand from side to side, and she did the same, and they signaled in semaphore that once again the day had begun. The dog, a setter the rust color of the rocks, bounded to her and then back again to the man and the sun and the routine of days that began and ended just this way.

The rocks spanning the shore tempted her to explore. She climbed carefully, feeling sharp edges beneath the callused soles of her feet. Five years of calluses, five years since she had worn high heels and stockings, five years of solitude and fresh air and a man and a dog and the sun rising somewhere in the east.

Nestled in a hollow just beyond the top of the rocks was an amorphous lump of soft gray fabric, gray as the sea-washed sun-drenched steps she had descended from her house to begin the journey to this moment. Where she stood, silhouetted against the sky, she could see, and be seen by, walkers on either side of the rocks, but the lump was huddled down into a niche between two piles of rocks and could be seen only by her.

She approached it cautiously, hoping and not hoping for the thrill of discovering a dead body on the beach. It seemed to breathe, a gray lump that rose and fell with the constant rhythm of a child asleep. The gray separated itself into other colors, other parts, a soiled tan jacket, the kind she had considered ordering from a mail order catalogue, faded blue jeans, black scuffed wing-tip shoes. Those shoes, so incongruous on the beach, so wrong for every other part of the lump she had now identified as a sleeping boy, those shoes belonged to the world she had left behind, the world of high heels and stockings and people she could no longer remember.

Gently she prodded the sleeve of the jacket and the creature inside stirred like a hermit crab disturbed from its shell house. A face appeared, barely old enough, she thought, to warrant a stubble, although a grimy hand emerged from another part of the bundle to stroke the chin and check for stray whiskers. The mouth moved in circles and squares, a jaw testing itself in motion, and then with a rasp as if the gears that produce sound had not quite meshed, the boy said, What do you want? in a manner that suggested he had a perfect right to be there, and she had no business disturbing his slumber.

Who are you? she asked, having no other answer ready and feeling at a disadvantage with this intruder on what she claimed as her property, although her ownership of those rocks extended no further than her imagination and the proprietorship that comes from having sat and sketched in that spot for five years now.

The eyes that appeared when the face stopped grimacing were an iridescent blue that sparkled like sapphires in sunlight. Those eyes studied her while their owner seemed to contemplate whether or not to answer her question.

Who are you? the voice that now matched the eyes in clarity and coldness asked.

I live here, she said, trying to be stern, trying to convey that it was she, not he, who was in charge. The pounding of her heart made her aware she was afraid.

Here? In this very spot? he asked, teasing her. Then you had no place to stay last night. I am sorry. There was no sign or anything, so I assumed the place was vacant.

She smiled in spite of herself. That’s not what I meant.

No? He sat up showing her how well the parts of him fitted together, then stood and stretched against the horizon, and she discovered she came just to his shoulders.

‘For thou art long and lank and brown as is the ribbed sea sand’, she said, forgetting she was not alone.

But he said only, Coleridge, and reached his arms out as if he would embrace the world.

She realized he must be older than she had thought when she had first seen his still sleepy face, the features barely sketched in, a face waiting for the imprint of experience so that others might see the history of his life etched into lines and eventually wrinkles. Yet the sadness he carried with him did not suit him, the way his shoes did not match his clothes. Standing, he reminded her of a Giacometti sculpture, a man with his feet glued to his shadow and no place to go except to fall forward into that shadow and dissolve into a formless blur.

She turned to peer back over the rocks to see if anyone was watching them, aware that she wanted to experience this moment of meeting unobserved. No man, no russet canine, occupied the bare stretch of sand between herself and her house and beyond, only streaks of paw prints and foot prints and the slowly shifting sands.

The boy stretched again and smiled and held out his hand, bending low before her in what, in another place and time, might have been considered a bow. How do you do. I’m Rolls.

She took his hand with mock solemnity. I’m Susan.

His grasp was firm and direct and like his eyes.

Susan what? His eyes never left her face, his hand stayed clasped to hers.

Susan Miner. And Rolls . . . Royce?

Yes. The smile crinkled the skin under his eyes, and she saw that he might have been crying.

Really?

It’s a nickname. My real name’s Peter, but they call me Rolls because my last name’s Royce. I sort of like it.

She could feel his enjoyment in the warmth of his hand still pressed firmly to her own.

Slowly he separated their hands, one finger at a time, then the palms. Is there some place I can get breakfast around here?

She wasn’t sure whether she had been set up, a suspicious feeling in the pit of her stomach sent a warning signal to her brain. Beware. Watch out. He could be a thief. He could be dangerous. Her system short-circuited, her brain refused to respond to the messages.

You can have breakfast at my place, she said.

He looked almost embarrassed. Oh, no. I couldn’t. I didn’t mean . . . I can pay. He pulled out a wad of bills that, even if they had been ones, would have been sufficient for many meals.

She put out her hand to refuse, then turned towards the empty strip of beach and the house beyond. Follow me, she said, walking boldly across the rocks, forgetting her bare feet, and then, Ouch, as her foot slipped between two rocks. For a moment she saw a flash of white and pictured herself plunging head first down the rocks, landing flat out on the wet sand, a trickle of blood on her forehead and the water lapping gently over her. Instead she felt herself grabbed by strong arms, slender arms, and held up against a warm, wiry body.

Okay? he asked.

She extracted her foot, felt her ankle, pushed against the ground to test it. I think so.

They walked back slowly, she leaning a little against him on alternate steps although the ankle did not hurt. Their footsteps recreated the path the water had wiped away.

As they neared the house, she had a sense of violation. For the first time in five years she was inviting someone else to enter her home. A stranger. The house had been her sanctuary, but from the moment the boy entered with her it would no longer be hers alone. Someone else would have stepped across its threshold, sat in its furniture, breathed its air. When he was gone she would remember that.

At the foot of the stairs, they paused and looked back at the sand and the sea and the rough red rocks.

Thank you, he said, but not to her.

She knew he meant more than the moment, more than the invitation to breakfast. It sounded like the conclusion of a prayer, the ‘Amen’ that means I accept with thanks whatever will be, or perhaps it was an expression of gratitude for some gift requested and bestowed.

Walking ahead alone, she led the way up the gray stairs and along the path to the house. There she paused, breathing deeply, waiting a minute before entering, silently inventorying the house, remembering how she had left it only an hour ago, what doors were closed, what rooms open, what books and papers and unwashed dishes cluttered the kitchen table. Then, as if it were a part of some greater ritual, she slowly unlocked each lock sealing the house from the sea and the sand and intruders she could not have even anticipated, stepped back and took his hand, the hand of this intruder she had invited to intrude, and together they entered the house.

Over breakfast they were silent. He helped himself to milk and cereal and still warm coffee, then pulled the curtains back from the window and sat staring at the sea beyond the shore. She sat by his side, studying his profile outlined in shadow against the panes and the glass and the external seascape. She wanted to sketch him at that moment, that first moment of meeting before time and knowledge transformed him. For that beginning she knew him fully, knew all she had to know, the firm jaw slowly masticating, the clear eyes, the high forehead, the too long since the last hair cut flowing dirty blond hair, the sensuous lips, the hollow in the cheeks from not enough home cooked meals, the slight stubble of a boy who had spent more than one night on the beach, the muscular arms, the erect carriage of an athlete. The portrait now would not be tinged with anger and sadness. The hint of tears was only a hint of tears, it had no substance, a stroke of pen or brush could capture the look not the reason.

Have you ever wondered what’s under the ocean? he asked, Or where waves start?

She shook her head and suddenly wanted to cry and bit her lips and gave no answer.

He looked at her then, as if he could see whatever it was she couldn’t say, and smiled, reversing their roles.

She tried to think of something else, but a sadness that had no reason attached to it kept coming back, and she knew her picture of him had already changed and it was too late to get the original back again.

They have submarines and robots that go along the sea floor. Men live on the bottom of the ocean for days, studying what goes on. He stared out the window over the edge of his coffee cup.

She stared too, still unable to speak.

Men train for that, to live alone, confined under the sea, all that weight pressing down on them. I wonder if I could?

I couldn’t. Thinking about it, she could picture it, could put herself in the picture and feel fear and claustrophobia and the weight of the water, feel panic and the need to run away. She stood up.

But you live alone, he said, looking up at her.

I’m not completely alone. I’ve got neighbors. I’ve got places I can go to. I can go out whenever I want. She walked around the room needing to move. The kitchen had become smaller, as small as a diver’s bell on the ocean floor.

You keep the place all locked up. The door’s locked. The windows are closed. Even inside you wear those dark glasses. He was still staring at her.

She poured herself coffee and sat down again. That’s different.

Is it? He stood up and started to open the window.

Don’t.

He half sat on the sill, back against the window, hands clasped on the ledge, jean-clad legs stretched out. Why not?

She focused on his ridiculous black shoes. Sand gets in the house. Suddenly everything I eat tastes of sand, like uncleaned mussels or unwashed spinach. That gritty taste you get in your mouth and the feel of sand grinding between your teeth.

He did what she would have done, ground his teeth together and grimaced at the remembered taste and sound and feel of sand in his mouth. What’s even worse is biting on a piece of silver foil.

She nodded feeling the chill up her spine. Especially if it’s a tooth that has a filling.

They were laughing together.

What about an egg shell in egg salad? he said.

Or unpeeled shrimp.

Fish bones.

Chicken feathers.

Ugh.

They laughed and laughed and then they stopped. Just stopped and breathed and this time they were both sad, but no one spoke and a cloud covered the sun and went away and Rolls formed a dark shape in the window casting his shadow on the table and on into the kitchen, and Susan squinted into the sun and felt the brightness blind her so that things were only light or dark, good or evil, and Rolls’ face was hidden in darkness although light surrounded him.

The sun rose to noon and then descended on the other side of the house while they changed places in the kitchen. Susan felt in that one day she had learned all the spaces of that room in which she had spent so many other days alone unaware. In that day, she had felt the hardness of each wooden chair, knew the way each fit her, supported her back or the back of her neck when she slid down stretching her legs out before her. During moments of silence she had counted every tile on the floor, there were two hundred whole ones and twenty-six pieces, there were twelve blue cornflowers in each trellis diamond on the beige wallpaper. The refrigerator hummed and then stopped regularly like a union musician guaranteed a break. She and Rolls drank coffee and tea and as the sun descended were about to switch to wine. But in all that day she had learned nothing more about Rolls, had told him nothing more about herself, than the names they had exchanged that morning on the rocks at the end of the beach.

Maybe with the wine, she thought, reluctant to end their anonymity. Do I really want him to know about me? What will I tell him? The whole story or only part? Which part? She was contemplating the start of night and the comfort of sharing the kitchen when the lights clicked on. Bright light illuminated the tiles and the cornflowers and hurt her eyes even through the tinted protection of her glasses.

What shall we have for dinner? I’m cooking. Rolls had tied a blue-checked cotton dish towel around his waist.

Can you?

Don’t know. Never tried. He was trying to toss a saucepan by the handle and catch it again. It clattered to the floor.

Don’t. She put her hands to her head, pulling away from the noise.

Sorry.

Her eyes were closed. She didn’t see him pick up the pan or walk over to her, but she heard him put the pan down on the table and felt his hand on her shoulder.

Are you okay?

She forced the smile. Sure. Just a headache, I guess. The noise had reminded her of other noises, noises that got louder and went on longer. That was a part of the part she wouldn’t tell even when they began to tell each other other things.

I’m really sorry.

She knew he was. Why don’t I cook and you watch, and then tomorrow . . .

They both stopped.

Look, I thought . . . He unwrapped the dish towel from his waist. If you’re not using that spot on the rocks tonight, I might stay there. The price is right, and they know me by now.

She wanted to say so many things. Who’s they?

You know. He laughed. The creatures of the night.

She shivered. You can stay here. She had to say it not looking at him.

Thanks, but I’ll be okay.

She was angry. She had offered him a place in her house, the first time in five years she had done that for anyone. He couldn’t refuse. You have to.

As she turned to face him, he turned his back to her, that back so straight, straighter now. I don’t have to do anything.

How old are you? She felt her nostrils flare, remembered how her mother’s nostrils had flared in anger.

It’s none of your business. Straighter even than before.

Unfair, she said.

He turned back, his face still in shadow, acknowledging her point. It doesn’t matter.

It does. It does. It did.

Why?

She didn’t know. It just does.

This is how they had begun the day.

I’ll sleep outside. He walked to the door.

Don’t you want dinner?

The door was shut, and he was on the other side of it. It doesn’t matter.

2

As a hint of light slipped across the surface of the sea and the soft breeze wrapped itself around her, Susan found herself standing again over a sleeping bundle nestled in the rocks.

Breakfast is ready. She enjoyed watching the boy separate himself from the background. He’s a chameleon, she thought, envying him the camouflage of the anonymous gray stones.

He looked at her as if he might protest, continue the discussion of the night before, then he paused, reconsidered perhaps, and said, Great. I’m starved.

Testing her, she thought, to see if she would comment on the missed dinner. She bit her lip and silently led the way. I will not be his parent, she told herself, he is not my son. She repeated the words to herself in time to her steps in the sand, step, drag her foot and think, and step again, and step.

He followed behind, slowly, a night creature adjusting to daylight, stretching his muscles, rubbing slightly more pale stubble on his chin.

She turned around occasionally to watch the process of young man awakening and enjoyed studying his unselfconscious gestures. He reached one arm up to touch the sun and then the other, and then he twirled around, arms outstretched towards the edges of the earth, and threw his head back to laugh into the sun’s face, and then he ran his long fingers through his hair making it stand up in little spikes and then he smoothed it down again.

Before the house, she paused, breathed and then pushed open the door.

You didn’t lock it, he said.

She had forgotten he was perceptive. I knew I wouldn’t be gone long.

Ummm. He stood there still outside the door only looking at her, she looking down, away.

If you want to wash up . . . She gestured towards a partly open door within the house.

Thanks.

From the kitchen she could hear the sounds of a boy showering, shaving—she had left him a pink plastic disposable razor, the kind she used to shave her legs and under her arms, when she bothered—brushing his teeth, her eyes fixed on the strawberry magnet holding a list on the refrigerator door. Eggs, milk, juice, laundry soap, cerulean blue, cadmium yellow.

Why do you wear your hair short like a man? he asked as he poured coffee.

Instinctively she patted the back and sides where once she had had long fly-away auburn hair to run her fingers through after the wind had blown it wild and free. It’s easier, she said, and then because he said nothing, added, It’s in style, or it was when I left.

He let the remark rest, not even asking where or when she had left. Assuming, she assumed, that she too had a past or a present she did not want to discuss.

I think women should be women, he said, as if his lifetime had encompassed experience enough to pass judgment on more than half the population.

And men should be men? She wanted to tease him, to see again his morning smile.

Yes. He leaned forward for emphasis. Men should be men. They should be strong and responsible and care for their families and work hard.

Are you a man?

He drew back, sat up straight. She could see someone telling him to sit up, telling him the clichés of manhood, that men don’t cry, that men must be strong and work hard and care for their families.

I try, he said. Only I don’t have a family. Not one of my own, I mean.

In the afternoon after lunch, they moved to the living room. The windows there looked out on an expanse of high grass and a few trees and beyond and then sand again and the ocean returning on the other side of the promontory. The afternoon light was harsher than the morning.

I think I’ve seen this before, he said, staring out the window. It’s like a place I’ve been, but I don’t know when or where or how. It was just like this, only it wasn’t, and I see people in the picture but they’re all wrong.

I do that too, she said, when I run into people I haven’t seen in a long time and don’t remember, I try to picture them in different surroundings till I find out where I used to know them.

That’s it. His eyes lit up. He could be just a happy boy. Sometimes you put them in the wrong place, and they look so silly. It’s like imagining someone you think is really clumsy trying to dance.

They were laughing together again, sharing thoughts and feelings and Susan wanted it to continue, wanted that moment to be part of a history of such moments, from his arrival to his leaving, and he too shared completely in that moment as if he were truly happy, were capable of happiness and sustaining it.

Please stay here tonight, she said while they were still laughing, when the laughing was easing and the pain in her side made her want to stop.

He stopped laughing. Because I have to?

Because I want you to. It’s lonely here, her head gestured to the lonely landscape leading nowhere, no house in sight. Sometimes at night I’m afraid.

Last night, she wanted to say, I was afraid. I was lonely, knowing you were there, outside, not here, inside. Not even knowing what she wanted or why, only knowing she had felt something, anything, for the first time in more than the five years she had lived there, alone, unafraid, unable to feel anything.

There was a man on the beach, he said, with a dog. I saw him today from the kitchen.

She had seen him, too. For the first time in years she had not been on the beach with him in their silent ritual. He lives miles away. They walk here, then back again. Sometimes we wave to each other.

Is he your friend?

In a way. He’s always there. We’ve never spoken.

Good.

She looked at Rolls then, sensing that his nervousness matched her own. They both did not want the man on the beach and the dog to know that Rolls was there. What was there to hide?

May I? He took out a pack of cigarettes, unfiltered, tapped one against the pack.

She nodded. She hated smoke. She had tried smoking herself at the age when teenagers try everything. She had decided it was not worth getting used to. Yet there was an image of herself, one in which she was competent and in control of her life. In that image she wore high heels and had long hair and smoked cigarettes, menthol filter slim cigarettes. Rolls with a cigarette seemed natural. Smoking focused his restless energy into deliberate gestures, busy fingers, raised and lowered arm, tense mouth drawing acrid smoke through the tongue moistened tip of the cigarette, inhaling with the deep breath of a yogi, then relaxing, smoke emerging slowly from a half smile.

He opened one window part way to draw out the smoke, standing by it to tap the ashes outside into the damp sandy earth.

I’ll stay, he said, but I want to pay.

The phone rang. She didn’t answer it. It was a bell signaling the end of the round.

For three days awake they ate and drank and shared funny moments, asleep they shared the house. She liked the feeling that he was there, tried not to think of him as a son grown, tried not to remember her own son not grown.

Rolls rationed the cigarettes in his one pack. There had been fifteen when he took the crushed packet out of his jacket pocket that afternoon in her living room. He had smoked three in a row. The second day, he had smoked one after each meal and one before bed. The third day he had smoked all the rest at breakfast and then paced the house and chewed on pencils.

Do you want to go for a walk? she suggested when he appeared in the living room after she had heard his footsteps descend the stairs for the sixteenth time although she hadn’t been counting.

Out? He stared out at the waving grass, browner that morning against a gray sky.

Along the beach. She felt her heart beat faster with his own.

No. He sank into a chair, head in his hands. Not today.

I have to go to town. She had been avoiding telling him.

He stared at her but said nothing, only looked as if