It begins as the old story, I've told so many stories of divorce and pain: six months back, David Kahn read by accident the wrong letter, and it was as if he'd already known, as if he finally had to open the door to the closet where the monster squatted. His wife in love with somebody, somebody brilliant, supervisor of her cases as a therapist. This guy also happened to be David's tennis partner. And in a rage, as if surprised, as if betrayed, as if such a thing had never entered his mind, he packed up, moved to a motel, drank -- and fell apart.
The usual divorce story, dismal, of pain and humiliation, his family broken, ahh, you could write it yourself. Then David takes a leave from his high-powered job -- selling main-frames and networks for corporations -- drops everything, to live the winter like a monk at his cottage in Truro, on Cape Cod.
Why is he leaving? Revulsion, he'd tell you for the whole megillah. Secretly, he's in panic for his life. And maybe, too, he knows, could even tell you, he's leaving out of spite; he's punishing Sarah. All these years, he's been a Good Provider. While she became the intellectual, the PhD psychologist, he provided. Let somebody else do the providing.
But there's more to it. There's this. He isn't willing to be bullied anymore by the vague dream of making it, sick of working so hard -- working not just to succeed but to make himself worthy in his own eyes, or really in his dead father's eyes -- ghost father from childhood. What he really wants, David, is just to clear the books, to live an honorable life.
In my story he stops drinking, gets into shape. In Truro, early spring, he plants a garden: It makes him happy, on knees in old jeans, to break up the cold, sandy soil with garden fork, mix in bags of peat moss, top soil, manure. Occupational therapy.
Big chest, heavy shoulders -- funny to think of a guy like him on his knees with a young plant between his fingers, planting, then patting down the soil. A big man, David played high school football, went to Deerfield Academy for a thirteenth year on football scholarship. Though it was track he was really good at — always a man who lugged weights: the hammer throw, the shot-put, the discus. A lot of guys still take him for an athlete with his big frame and heavy neck. But since the time in the hospital for his back, he feels like a sandcastle against an incoming tide, like the way his chest has started to slip and sink. Bags under his eyes, and the skin between eyelids and eyebrows beginning to go limp; hair graying and the gray strands lightening, growing light as smoke, angel hair -- silly when it isn't combed into place.
The gardening calms him, the beach runs clean out his head. He doesn't think so much about Sarah and Nick. Gulls and terns and the spastic little sandpipers rise up as he lumbers their way. He watches for seaweed hiding glass or shells that could cut his feet. But soon his mind falls away, the watching happens without him. A dream is how it feels. And now he begins to get peculiar intimations, as he's chopping onions, say, that everything has happened beyond his willing. Intimations that these past months of pain, the dream-maker, dream-writer, knew all along where David was going.
Climbing to the top of the dunes, he can see more than a mile of beach. Cracking explosions of surf -- small charges going off together all along the beach -- and then the hiss of water rushing to the high tide line.
It scares him a little, becoming aware of this...presence, this dreamer of David's own life. His script writer. Night of a full moon, and David wonders whose hands he's in. If, just maybe, the hands might be tender, holding him, not dangling him like a puppet but holding, and he could relax and let the guy take over. . . .
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