Love and Glory

Chapter Nineteen

“Conduct,” Scott Fitzgerald had written, “may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes.” The phrase was with me as I woke at sunrise. I sat smelling and crusted, with sand layered over the dirt and vomit, the nasal drainage and the dried semen, and thought about the phrase and about The Great Gatsby and marveled at how it could come back through the years since I’d read it, just like that, as clear as if I’d read it this morning. “Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes.” I got to my feet unsteadily with my body shrieking for a drink and my throat clenched with the desire for a cigarette. In front of me the Pacific was calm in the early light and entirely empty to the horizon. I felt my stomach turn. I sank to my knees, then hands and knees, and vomited. There wasn’t much down there, so not much came up. But it took a long time. When it was over I felt dizzy. I crawled toward the ocean and then got to my feet and walked toward it and into it. There was night chill to it and the shock of it centralized me a little. I kept moving as the water came up over my thighs and then sat down in the water, neck-deep a yard from shore. The silence seemed to stretch up to the arch of sky and echo back. My wet clothes seemed to be shrinking in on me and I tore them off and threw them from me toward the open sea, shoes and all. I had a sort of a festered sore on my stomach and the salt water stung it sharply. The sensation was one of the first I’d felt, and I liked it. I began to take handfuls of clean, fine sand from the sea floor and scrub myself with it, scouring my face and hair and body with it, and as I felt the faint tingle of it where the sand scraped my skin and the salt water worked on it, I began to scour harder, all over, everywhere, again and again. I sank my face and head underwater and scrubbed it with the sand and then rinsed it with violent rubbing. For maybe an hour, until the sun was full above the horizon, I scrubbed and rinsed until my body was sanded clean. I gargled with seawater again and again, and finally dove beneath the sea and stayed under as long as I could, rolling slowly in the water. When I could stay under no longer, I stood up with my wet hair plastered to my scalp and the water streaming off my body. Conduct had been too long in the marshes. I stared at the shore and beyond it, eastward across the almost endless range of the republic toward Jennifer. I will get you back, I said. You will be the rock.

To my right was a small pier and on one of the pilings someone had left a bathing suit to dry. I waded over and stole it. Up close it turned out to be a pair of cut-off jeans and not really a bathing suit. So much the better. They were a little large, but they covered me. I walked back and retrieved my journal, a collection of cardboard-covered notebooks packaged together with string. They were dog-eared and stained, but I had hung on to them since I’d begun them, even when the blackout periods started coming. It struck me that I didn’t know how long I’d been keeping them because I didn’t know what year it was. I couldn’t even remember the date I’d seen on the newspaper yesterday — or was it the day before? The sun was high enough now to dry me. The sore on my stomach looked clean for the first time in months. It had started as a simple boil. I walked up the beach and across a short stretch of grass to the road that ran along the water. I had no money. I was on my second day without a drink or a smoke. In the daylight my bare upper body was thin and flabby. Hard to be both, I thought. Takes a lot of careful planning to be skinny and fat together. My forearms and hands and face and neck were tan; the rest of me was grayish-white except the pinkish flare of the sore on my stomach. But I was clean. I found a newspaper in a trash barrel that said it was September 12, 1961. I was twenty-nine.