Shere in the Beginning of the End
We come back from the beach around 4pm. I’m tired, so I go into the bedroom and take a nap. I wake up about 30 minutes later, Shere licking my ears. I grab her, twisting around, and we begin wrestling. Her smell is all over me, her silky hair brushing my bare chest. The grasping becomes softer and softer until it’s little more than gentle groping: bare arms and legs, hands clasping, wet lips, breath. I give up and lay on my back. She puts her head on my chest.
“I can hear your heart,” she says. “It sounds big.”
“It is big. You could fit your whole head inside it. Then again, you do have a bird head.”
She slaps my chest, and though I can’t see her face, I can tell she’s smiling.
“I don’t have a bird head.”
“Fine, you don’t have a bird head. It’s more like a squirrel’s actually…”
Another slap.
A breeze comes in off the water and the cream-colored curtains breathe. Outside, the sun is reflecting off the bay, giving the water a shimmering, disco reflection. The silhouette of a sailboat drifts in the distance.
“What do you want to do for dinner?”
“I was thinking of making those sausages,” I say, “tomato-basil salad, greens.”
“Mmm.”
“Mmm-what?”
“Just mmm. Sounds good. Wine?”
“Do we still have that Barolo?”
“Drank it last week.”
“I think you’ll have to go get some then.”
She turns over and kisses my chest, then my neck, cheek, hair, ear. She really goes to town on my ear because she knows it drives me crazy. I start breathing heavy. My hands trace the length of her body. Pulling up her dress I see that she’s wearing no underwear.
*
*
We put on some Alice Coltrane, open the wine, and throw the sausages on the grill. Sitting on the deck, watching the sun melt into the ocean, I can’t think of a single place in the universe I’d rather be. Still, “Secret” is lingering in the back of my mind… I push it out as much as I can.
“I was reading this book today that said that there are a million possible futures,” I say, “each co-existing in parallel dimensions. As we move forward in time, we close off each of the futures, collapsing dimensions, until we end up with the one true path we actually follow.”
“Each decision is a thousand renunciations,” Shere says staring out into the water.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see into the future and choose which one best suited your tastes? Better yet, clone yourself, send the clones into the future to experience each of those possible futures, then report back on which path is the best to follow. That would be rad.”
Standing still in the fading light with her Wayfarers hiding her eyes, Shere looks like a Terminator. “Sure,” she says without a hint of emotion, “but that’s fantasy.” She sips her wine. “Each of us has to make decisions without pre-cognition; without clones. The definition of maturity is someone who can make a decision that they know to be the best, and then stick to it, whether it feels good later or not.”
Shere can be such a realist sometimes. Such a buzz kill.
When the food is ready, she pours us more wine. We eat, chat, chill, laugh, and enjoy each other’s company.
*
After dinner, I’m sitting on the deck, spacing out. Shere emerges from the bungalow with a joint. It’s dark, but the horizon is still emanating an indigo glow and the water reflects the light in cool tones of blue and violet. In the distance we can see squid boats, their underwater lights attracting the evening’s catch. We go down to walk along the beach.
“Nights like this make me wonder if there’s anything in the world we can ever truly know,” Shere says.
“Hmm,” I say, “interesting.”
“Is there anything in the world you want to know?”
“Many things,” I say, “but tonight, I’m just going to ask you one thing: you don’t keep secrets from me, do you?”
She looks at me, hurt. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“I don’t know. No reason. Just wondering, I guess. Wondering what’s next… Where do we go now?”
“What do you mean?” she says. “Why do you want to ‘go’ anywhere? Things are cool right here, right now, aren’t they? Can’t we just ride for a while? Isn’t this enough?”
I smile, knowing she is right, knowing it was a mistake to bring it up. But Shere won’t let it go.
“Why did you ask me that?” she says after a tense silence. “If there’s something on your mind, just say it.”
I’ve seen her like this before and it worries me, because when she gets like this, she can go really weird. She has the potential to go ballistic. I judge it best just to tell the truth.
“Look,” I say as sweetly as I can, “I looked at your phone and saw that you had some missed calls from… a number I didn’t recognize. ‘Secret.’ I guess it just bugged me out a little.”
“You looked through my phone? What the fuck? That’s not cool.” She walks ahead of me on the beach, then turns around, her face twisted with fury. “Shit. Why the fuck did you do that?”
“I don’t know. I called you when you were out and you left your phone upstairs. I went and looked at it, and then… I don’t know.”
“’Secret’ is my mom’s home line, OK? She lives in Secret Glen, that’s why. It’s not… whatever you thought it was.”
“I’m sorry, Shere. I guess I just… I wonder sometimes. But not because of you... it’s me. I’m just an insecure asshole. I’m sorry. That’s the truth.”
“Just…” She shakes her head, trying to blow it off, but I can tell it really bothers her. “It’s fine… just relax, OK?”
I feel terrible. The damage is done. This is the moment, I think, praying I’m wrong.
*
We go back to the house and watch a movie. It isn’t great. I fall asleep in the middle, and when I wake up, Shere had already gone to bed. The TV is a blue screen and I’m sprawled out on the couch in the dark. I get up, go outside and smoke a cigarette. The ocean is quiet. I can feel something in the air, a secret energy. The wind is changing.
*
That was the calm before the storm. Before everything changed. Shere got her contract with Ford in September, and we broke up soon after that. She would move to New York to start her career as an anorexic cokehead, and a beautiful one at that. I would move to Nepal to teach English for a year, then… well, that’s another story, I guess. But I often think back to that summer at the beach house. Those were good times. Magical times. What could have happened if I never looked at her cell phone while she was out? What would have happened if I never brought up the “Secret?” What if we decided to just sit up there on the deck instead of walking down the beach? If we never went down there, maybe I would have forgotten about it completely. Maybe.
So many maybes.
I have to keep reminding myself that this is our destiny. We are all where we are meant to be, no matter how many different ways we try to look at it.
Now is all we have to argue with.
