Book III Of Pilgrims, Self-Centered Bitches (Peregrine Women?), and Hard Nuts

58

Catherine is sleeping on the terrace in the lounge chair, leaning back, her mouth slightly open. Ernest goes over and touches her forehead and kisses her. She doesn’t wake up, but the lines in her forehead deepen.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” he asks, turning to me.

“Will she be all right?”

“Let’s go for a walk.”

“Okay,” I say, rising and putting my notebook on the table.

Ernest takes my arm and we go through the living room and down the stairs into the street. I glance back at the terrace, imagining Catherine awake and peering over the railing at us. But she’s still sleeping, the sunlight in her hair, making ordinary eyes almost see the yellow aura.

There she is. Queen of the hill.

“You’re a hard nut to crack,” Ernest says, still holding my arm.

“What?”

“I’ve known you for years, and you’re still like a perfect stranger.”

On the beach, he puts his jacket down for me to sit on. He calls me “Pilgrim.” I sit up, holding my knees, staring out at the bathers—multinational. Most of them are not swimming but sitting in the water. A white-haired Ibizan sits on a boat with “Charter” printed on a white, homemade sign on its deck. The white sails are rolled. Ernest stretches out, rests on his elbow, looks toward me.

“I don’t feel I know any longer what’s best for Catherine,” he says. “This seesaw . . .”

“Are you going to put her away again?”

He stares at the sea.

“That’s an awful expression,” he says.

We’re silent. I watch the man help a woman climb into the boat. A man in the water hands up her straw hat and straw pocketbook. He climbs up, without the aid of anyone.

“What are you thinking?” I ask Ernest.

“I’m thinking I don’t know how I can spend the rest of my days like this. All these scrambled years. If you weren’t in them . . .”

“But you love her. And you know that whenever she’s . . . in the hospital . . . she won’t work. You take her out so she can do her work too.”

“And be dangerous.”

I feel his hand on my cheek.

“It’s time for us to go,” he says.

“What?”

“You were sleeping.”

“I slept?”

I raise up. “What time is it?” I see the sun sitting on the water. “Oh, no, why didn’t you wake me?”

He smiles, takes my hand as I stand up. I lift his jacket, brush the sand off, and give it back to him, but he drapes it across my shoulders. We climb back to the road.

“Did you call me ‘Pilgrim’?” I ask.

“What?”

“I thought that when we were on the beach, when we’d just sat down, that you’d called me ‘Pilgrim.’ I must have dreamed it.” “No, I called you ‘peregrine.’ Do you know what a peregrine is?”