Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown Read Free Page A

typewriter, put down and cross out a sentence or two, then walk along the bay and the empty street, past the boarded-up souvenir shops and the muttering man, until it was night and I could make dinner, start drinking, and read, or try to read. I bought an old black-and-white television set and watched it for hours and hours, with an addict’s hopeless pleasure, derived in part from my own willingness to let things slide. That winter I lost not only what felt like my last hold on optimism but my belief in optimism itself. At the end of my twenties, I believed I was being given an early tour of the old age home, one endless day followed by another, sleep the only conceivable reward. On one particularly bleak night in February, I sat on my scratchy plaid sofabed with a vodka in my hand, rocking slightly as the television droned, and promised that if I survived the next few months, I would leave Provincetown and not only never return but never again go to any human settlement with a population under one million.
    And somehow, in the end, I fell in love with Provincetown, the way you might meet someone you consider strange, irritating, potentially dangerous but whom, eventually, you find yourself marrying. I stayed for the summer, after my fellowship ran out, working in a bar—I had once again gotten myself to a remote place with no money and no obvious next move. I went to New York in the fall, liked New York, but found to my surprise that I missed Provincetown, against my will, the way you begin to recognize the early symptoms of love or the flu. Certain images had taken up particularly stubborn residence in my mind. There had been a moment in mid-December, at dusk, at the far west end of town, where the street dead-ends at a salt marsh and curves back on itself, attended only by an illuminated telephone booth, a perfect box of wan yellow light against the black-green marsh and the purpled sky. I had stood and watched that rectangle of light and the marsh behind it as if they contained some beauty too final and bleak to articulate. A month or so later I had watched a great silver barge of a nocturnal cloud moving serenely across the frozen stars as I stood shivering at the end of a pier, trying and failing to cry, staring at the green light on Long Point and hearing the foghorn blow its bassoon note over and over again—come home, child, the ice mother is waiting for you, and she doesn’t need you to strive or accomplish, she only wants you to sleep. Provincetown had offered its demonstrations of frigid, off-season grandeur, and then it had offered the spring thaw, when people began to appear on the streets again, more of them every weekend. The salty silence dissipated; smells of popcorn and fried food stirred themselves up. Music sifted out of the bars, and the town began to fill with the possibility of sex. I took all that with me to New York. As I walked the streets of New York, I began to wonder if, for the first time in my life, I had been reduced that winter to so little that I could see the dreadful, rock-hard opulence of the world, that which remains when idealism and sentimentality have fallen away. Provincetown in its winter desolation and its subsequent, temporary revival came to seem more real, or at least more trustworthy, than any other place I’d ever been. It began to feel (though I’d never have used this word then) like home.
    I went back the following summer, telling myself I was going only to make money and have sex. I fell in love with a handsome, highly dramatic man who owned a café on the East End. I insisted I couldn’t ever live in Provincetown again, but ultimately moved there to live with him. Several years later I left him but kept coming back to the town.
    Now I go there every chance I get. Kenny, the man with whom I live, and I have bought a house on the East End. If I die tomorrow, Provincetown is where I’d want my ashes scattered. Who knows why we fall in love, with places or people,