Between the Tides Read Free Page B

people go when they are successful, Lainie. You’ll be getting a new life, a greener life—isn’t that what we strive for?”
    I grew up on the Jersey Shore and know nothing of a backyard—who needs a backyard when your front yard is the beach, the ocean, infinity? A place I stay in the summer with the children while Charles comes and goes, bobbing on his own raft and never a swimmer. If Charles is not enamored with the seaside, he appreciates Cape May enough for our family to go every summer.
    There I spend hours painting by the jetties, facing the open sky. Along the coastline I’m in search of scraps of beach life. Each day I swim wherever and however I can. If it’s the ocean I do the Australian crawl beyond the lifeguards’ buoys and fight the undertow; in the bay I swim on my back and the minnows beneath tickle me. In a pool I take over the fast lane. I smash through, doing a butterfly, while dreaming of bodies of water, the ones you cannot claim as your own.
    Charles is neither a New Yorker nor an island child and has been a bystander since he arrived in the city. That’s what comes of growing up in Utica, on his grandfather’s dairy farm. He has some twisted form of Heidi inside him. He drinks whole milk with abandon, not fat free, eats Swiss cheese, and believes in a simple life that he isn’t able to define. He was going to be a veterinarian until he realized the only way to be a luminary in medicine was to be a surgeon. Cutting humans, not animals. While Charles hungers for farm life, to this day I long to jump out of bed and race along the ocean. I want nothing more than to dive in and swim until I forget about places enclosed by land and privilege.
    His eyes bore into mine. He begins his mantra, one I have heard for what seems years but with a new spin. “Lainie, we have our chance. The city isn’t an ideal place to raise kids, you know that. Remember the pervert on West End Avenue when you were with the twins? Wasn’t there that child stalker by Gracie Mansion? Tom has been mugged twice. Matilde sees a rat family right on Broadway and Ninety-first Street almost daily. The children need fresh air, room, nature, pets—a real life. New York isn’t real. I have been asked to chair a department.”
    I listen to his persuasion, knowing that when Charles speaks to an audience, most heads in the room nod in approval at his words, whatever they are. I’ve been in the marriage for too many years; I have radar for false promises, I’m not part of his constituency. Besides, what is he talking about and how does he know where the other artists will be?
    He tugs at my camisole and pushes my boxer shorts to the floor. He starts stroking my breast. I open my eyes and his face is precariously close to mine. I can’t recognize his bone structure in the shadows and I’m confused for a brief second. Has Charles’s affection not seen me through the ups and downs of our marriage? Being close to Charles is a sensation that I crave, a method of outlasting the lost hours, the frictions over money, children, his work, my work, in the same order. I settle in. Sex has always worked between us. I surrender to his caress partly because I’m hooked on the sex, partly because I won’t win this one. I want to be like other wives, where the passion fades first, not last.
    His voice has that raspiness that I know too well in sleep or in the waking hours. “You are beautiful,” he says.
    The moonlight is low through the largest window to the right of our bed, facing west. Charles doesn’t appear to be in husband mode. He climbs on top of me and I place my hands on his neck and then on his biceps. I move toward him, hoping he means it about being beautiful since yesterday he remarked that I was tired and wan. My body yields to what was; I sell out in the midst of Charles’s master plan. I bend into him as best I know how.
    After Charles