The Lighthouse Keeper
by Neale McDevitt
The night before she left forever, her smarmy friends staged a dinner party and dubbed it the Last Supper. They had seen Grace come and go a dozen times before and they were annoyingly adept at the grand gesture. Some guy I didn’t know hoisted his glass and toasted her sense of adventure. "I’m not sure how you two hooked up," he smirked over his black-framed hipster glasses, "Grace is a child of the world, McVie, and you’ve hardly stepped outside that little neighborhood of yours."
Everyone laughed, except me. I took a mouthful of Italian red and let it sit until it bit at my gums. "I’m the fucking lighthouse, dickhead," I finally said long after people had started talking about other things. "I don’t move and I don’t change. The light on the rock." The whole pinch-faced crew stared at me like I was a frozen caveman all thawed out and stinking up their smoked salmon send-off. Everyone except her. Her small hand squeezed my knee under the table.
But Dickhead was right, Grace and I were as different as right and wrong. She was one of those rare flowers that busts up through our cities of ice and concrete spreading nothing but wild fragrance and color. A real jar of honey, with a big belly laugh that rolled out of her small frame to bathe us all in a perfect happiness that wasn’t even our own. Like God splashing warm summer rain on undeserving faces.
Me? I was just a low-rent grunt who ate from tin cans and followed sports in which men bled and broke each other’s bodies. I was, as my granny liked to say, "a drinker" and, as such, I was yoked with many of the unsavory qualities so often found in men of my disposition: I was unkempt, unpunctual and entirely unambitious.
I’d been in love with Grace for 22 years, starting when she first appeared in Grade 11 English class wearing white painter pants and a checkered shirt. It was early fall and as she walked toward her desk through the beams of sunlight, golden particles of chalk dust swirled halos in her wake. My boy’s heart didn’t stand a chance.
We sat beside each other that year, but we never dated or anything like that. I was too shit-scared to ask. She went to the Grad with some knob who anchored our Debate Team and who eventually toodled off to Yale or Harvard. I got drunk on beer and teenage angst and missed the whole dance snoring on the floor of a buddy’s basement.
Grace flitted in and out of my life for the next two decades. You know how hummingbirds look perfectly motionless even though they’re whizzing at 1,000 wingbeats a second? That was Grace. Interested and in front of you one minute and - whoosh - gone in a slash of color the next. She had happy feet and a curious mind. She believed in the world and in all the lessons to be gleaned from its good and bad.
Personally, I didn’t trust the fucking place, good or bad. Too many toothy creatures crouching in the reedy unknown. Instead, I grew fond of the familiar sounds and smells of my Montreal neighborhood, N.D.G. To me, nothing was as comforting as sitting down on my regular stool in my regular bar and having my regular beer - a cold Molson Ex - appear without having to ask. While Grace filled her years dancing through Europe, doing theater in New York, and living on an ashram in India, I dug in and let my roots grow long and stubborn.
Sometimes we’d go years without seeing each other and then, suddenly, I’d get a homemade postcard from her. They never said where she was or what she was doing, usually just a line or two that twanged at my heart. "Thought I’d return some of my happiness back to its source," she wrote in one, signing it with a "G" and some hand-drawn palm trees.
Another time, we bumped into each other on the street and grabbed a bite to eat. She sat there laughing and shaking the snow from her close-cropped blond hair. She looked great, all lean and wide-eyed and sporting the greatest smile to ever split open a face. I sucked in my rolling gut and swallowed a rye-flavored burp from the previous night. In a single instant I understood why I never ended up in the arms of graceful women like her. It was like being shot between the eyes with a diamond-tipped bullet of complete understanding.
****
But sometimes the gods give you a sip of the good stuff. Sometimes, after a month or so of ground beef and onions, they slide an expensive slip of Swiss chocolate into your mouth to momentarily cleanse your workaday palate. A beggar’s tour of Heaven.
Just before last Christmas, Grace and I met at a bar where some band was launching an album. Grace knew the drummer and I was there because my buddy, the guy with the basement, was the president of the record label - another one from high school who had worked his way to success and happiness. Fucker. He always made sure I got invites to the events with free booze and finger food.
Grace looked beautiful as always, but I saw a dorsal fin of sadness circle in her eyes. Her fiancé had pulled the rug out from under her and she was nursing some big, bad wounds. I made it my mission to make her laugh. I listed off a string of my monumental romantic failures: of moving in with a woman whom I met on the subway only to find that she was frightfully insane; of professing my love to another woman the exact moment she was to tell me that she finally realized she was gay; and of the drunken night I fell asleep between my lover’s thighs while giving her head. Oh Grace laughed big and hard all right, I have a knack for making women do that.
We hung out in a corner and laughed all night. Laughed through the pomp, laughed through the circumstance. Laughed through her drummer friend’s glare when we wouldn’t shut up during the introductions. For first time in my life, I was OK with who I was around her, OK being the only bowling shirt in a sea of designer clothes, OK with not having a cell phone or aspirations or a crushed velvet loft.
As the band rolled into its second set, Grace got serious. "It’s all such a mystery, isn’t it, McVie?" she asked.
"I spend most of my waking moments completely mystified," I replied honestly, absolutely no clue as to what she was talking about.
"Finding a partner and making things work. There’s so much effort. Remember when we were kids, how simple it was?"
Swigging some beer, I shook my head. "Simple? I dunno. Love was always kind of rough on my boyhood self. It gave me the stutters and a goofy heart."
"Sure, but it was all just instinct, right? Your heart raced involuntarily. You couldn’t help yourself. Love didn’t have to be negotiated, it just happened."
I nodded, "Oh yeah. Love always just kind of kicked down my door and bitch slapped me silly."
She smiled large but her eyes looked beaten. "I don’t think I believe in true love anymore. Just the temporary, transient stuff."
I wanted to tell her to go right ahead and believe in big, true, fulltime love, wanted to tell her that I’d loved her forever. Instead I just stared through my beer. She sensed something and touched my hand. It gave me guts. "You know what I’ve always loved about me and you?" I asked, "I’ve never needed you to be mine - just knowing you were out there, somewhere, doing your thing, was good enough for me."
With that, she smiled a slice of magic into my eyes, took me by the hand and led me to the exit. In the background her drummer clanged a cymbal and shook his rock ‘n roll hair.
****
The next morning I lay on my back with my heavy arms looped up over my head. Her small breath warmed my shoulder and her hand pressed up against my heartbeat.
When I was a young giant, my heart tossed its thumps and bumps into the air with unthinking arrogance. That’s OK, you know? OK to place your confidence in Chance when you’re a cocky and resilient kid. It’s a thrill to see where each beat might land. Sometimes they would float down from the clouds like downy feathers off the swifts and swallows, landing lightly in the hair of perfumed ladies.
And sometimes my huge heartbeats were like darts from a blowgun. Zip. Bingo! Love in the afternoon. Sex later that night.
But in recent years, each beat lit up like a string of fireworks, jumping and arching high into the sky. The colored explosions fanned ever-outward and cast the women below in a distant lusty red. Yet each brilliant fireball would drop and drop and drop until it hissed goodbye in an anonymous lake below. It made me feel small and alone.
But there she was, asleep and freckled with heavenly blessings, catching each fading, loving, mighty, fragile beat in her hand. Just like that. She received my heart with absolute sleeping innocence and I was a giant again.
****
And so we happily rolled along for the next two weeks. I had never really bought into Christmas and that over-hyped injection of happiness we’re supposed to mainline every year. But this time, wow. Days with her. Afternoons. Nights. Mornings together just laughing and writing and kissing and drinking cold tap water in her bed. We even snuck into our old high school and necked in the stairwell. Circle closed.
On Christmas day I woke up before her. Aside from the lucky sheet twisted around one thigh, she was naked and exposed to all. The sun, ever her admirer, poured in through the slats of her old bamboo blinds, bathing her in delicate rays and tracing thin fingers along her glorious back and legs and shoulders and neck.
I propped myself up on an elbow and ran my undeserving eyes up and down her skin. She was so thin, so delicate, so vulnerable, so unlike the fleshy neighborhood women I was usually drawn to. A sliver of grace and love and song and statuette carved by unseen hands. The centerpiece jewel in God’s crown.
She stirred and I pressed my lips to her neck, my groin to her ass and everything else just fell into place. We lay there like two pieces of the most perfect jigsaw puzzle. At that moment I felt like we only needed one heart to keep us going.
"Who are you anyway, McVie?" she asked.
"For you, I’m the strongest man in the world." She chuckled and cupped my hand on her breast. And something about having her coiled safe in my arms and legs and feeling her tit beat in my hand made me feel like a strong man. Milos of Crete. Babe Ruth. John Wayne. A fucking Olympic champion.
"I’m helping you get ready," I whispered to the back of her head.
She gave a half turn and my dick slipped from between the warmth of her ass cheeks. "Ready for what?"
"True and ever-lasting happiness," I said.
She started to laugh, but suddenly stopped. In that muted morning sun, her sun, she looked me square in my face and we both knew that what I said was true. The little flicker of sadness in her eyes told me that she also realized that her ever-lasting happiness wouldn’t be with me.
But that was OK. I had known that all along.
****
See, all that loving was done in holiday time. Inflated time. All fat and succulent and slow moving - the perfect meal for the ravenous real world that was loping patiently along the game trail. It was just around the bend breathing hard and hungry.
"It’s coming," I said to myself with resignation and a soft shudder as a distant howl tore through my sleep one night. Just hours before, she had told me she was leaving for L.A. soon into the New Year. I pressed up against her warm skin and gave in to bittersweet melancholy, trying to savor that last taste of divine chocolate as it melted away on my lips.
****
I drove out to
the airport with her. "They're calling for snow," Grace said, peeking up at the
low-slung ceiling of cloud
from the back of the cab that was taking us to the airport. I didn't look and I didn't say
a word. Not even a grunt. Instead, I squeezed her deep into the crook of my arm. I felt
like my granny trying to preserve spring forever by pressing flowers in the
middle of fat dictionaries. But it was all in vain. Spring was nine inches deep in snow
and Grace's eyes were far away, far away from me again.
At the airport I carried the bags and checked her in. We had one last beer in the lounge. Her blue eyes ran with the planes as they heaved themselves into the grey bellies of the clouds. I must’ve looked pitiful because when she saw me her beautiful face went sad. Sad and beautiful, the deadliest poison of all. Up came her hand, lovely bouquet of fingers, and anointed my lips. We’d hug and kiss later, but that was the last time we really touched.
And we whispered stuff. I remember every word, every devotion, every promise, every gratitude, every singsong of absolution and eternity, but I’m not telling now. Not telling ever, because love, like myth, needs its secrets to survive.
Then she was striding down the tunnel to the plane. I was stuck clay-footed at the gate with the other leave-behinds. Most were waving like fools or bawling "I love you." Me, I just stood there marveling at her walk. She was excited, it showed in the double-time bob of her ass. Like the sooner she got her seat the sooner she’d be punching through new horizons. She wasn’t happy to leave me, she was just happy to leave.
I watched her ankles and hamstrings. Watched her thin arms swing in their sockets. Watched the fine muscles in her back pull tight with each stride. Watched that neck on which I had gladly sacrificed 1,000 breathless kisses. Watched her spun-gold hair. Watched it all disappear.
Sweet shit, who’s the cold bastard who drafted the rules for this game anyway? Into your life like a meteorite and then out again, just like that. Fuck Van Gogh and his petty gesture. Try having your heart carved out, you Dutch prick.
I was going to watch her plane take-off from the big window, but it suddenly felt like a cornball thing to do. She never would have done it. Instead, I took a long, mournful piss and left.
Back home, I sparked the nub of a candle and put it in my window. Yeah, big bad lighthouse all right. I sat in bed for hours watching that small beacon burn low. Eventually it fizzled and died and I lay my head down in the dark. A plane droned overhead. People going somewhere. Away.
I shut my eyes and felt her skin on me again.
Neale McDevitt is a 38-year-old Montrealer who has lived within the same four-block radius his entire life. A former member of the Canadian weightlifting team, he has also recently retired from playing rugby. He is finding writing easier on his knees. His work has been published in Pagitica and Exile.
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