The Whore's Child

chairs, he decided. He didn’t want the chairs. He wanted June. He thought about how, just a short time ago, they had embraced in the waves, and about his sudden optimism. Had he been foolish to think that all could be made right between them? To imagine their marriage was buoyant as water, their mistakes weightless and inconsequential in the sudden swell of affection?
    And so he started down the beach, the hot sand giving beneath his feet with every step. The rocky promontory was farther away than it looked. Much. By the time he’d gone fifty yards, the top of the lighthouse had disappeared, and the cliffs themselves loomed up above him, high and jagged and steep. In some stretches the clay was bright red, in others gray. From a distance these alternating striations appeared to be narrow ribbons, but in actuality they were thirty yards wide. He kept an eye out for a path, but every place that looked promising had a sign forbidding climbing on the fragile cliffs.
    What had appeared to be a concentration of bathers at the foot of the cliff turned out to be isolated groups of privacy-seeking nudists. Despite this, Snow continued down the narrowing beach, the bright blue ocean on his left, the cliffs looming ever higher on his right, the hot sun at his back. He’d forgotten what it was like to hurry through sand, and when his calf muscles began to throb, he slowed, fearing he wouldn’t have enough strength left to climb the cliff when he finally found the path.
    But within three hundred yards or so—his lower back pulsating, his breathing labored—he saw the error of his reasoning. At the promontory the beach turned north, and before him lay another stretch of sand as long as the one he’d just traversed, this one entirely devoid of people. Staring up at the cliffs, he realized there
was
no shortcut. The top of the lighthouse had come back into view, behind him now, and his heart plunged at the sight of it. How far he’d come! He’d be lucky to make it back to the beach chairs, much less to the boardwalk that led toward whatever remained of his marriage.
    And what did remain? Even in his exhaustion Snow could clearly recall the litany of anguish and accusation that June had laid before him years ago in the hospital. By marrying her, he had stolen her own bright career, made her a dinner-party hostess to people who would’ve been her colleagues. Had he any idea how badly she’d wanted children? And did he realize that she knew, had known for years, about the long affair he’d had with one of his graduate students? When he told her that no words could express how ashamed he was, how bitterly he regretted this infidelity, June had said, with genuine ran-cor, that she was sorry to hear it, because she’d had an affair of her own that she didn’t regret in the least. Snow had not believed this, concluding that she simply wanted to wound him; and later, when she asked him to forget everything she’d said, to write it off as menopause, he found to his surprise that he was able—no, eager—to.
    It was almost out of reach now, he thought, staring up the beach and into the immediate future. There would be the drive back to the ridiculous Captain Clement and, a day later, the complicated journey to Manhattan, which seemed more confusing each time he visited, where he sometimes got lost and no longer possessed the knack of knowing where he and June would be safe. Then the return to Ithaca, a place far too familiar and claustrophobic ever to get lost in, no matter how much one might wish to.
    As he started back, knees jellied and back throbbing, Snow discovered that even now he felt lost, despite knowing that all he had to do was retrace his steps. With the cliffs on one side and the sea on the other, there was no possibility of a wrong turn, but the sun was in his eyes now—doubly, it seemed, because of the glare off the water—and if he wasn’t careful he’d walk right past the beach chairs in their secluded alcove. And how would he know when he’d arrived at the place where the boardwalk joined that beach? The huge beach was impossible to miss from the boardwalk, but the boardwalk might be virtually imperceptible among the dunes. He imagined himself marching doggedly, stupidly, up this beach forever.
    Still, there was nothing to do but keep moving. Because of the blinding glare and the sting of sweat in his eyes, he sometimes didn’t see