The Whore's Child

at him. “Poor Martin,” she’d said after telling him, with surprisingly little reluctance, where Robert Trevor was to be found. Almost as if she
wanted
Martin to meet the man. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
    Of all the things that Joyce’s sort of woman said about men, Martin disliked the he-just-doesn’t-get-it riff most of all. For one thing it presupposed there was something to get, usually something obvious, something you’d have to be blind not to see. And of course the reason you couldn’t see it—as women were happy to explain—was that you had a dick, as if that poor, maligned appendage were constantly in a man’s line of sight, blocking his view of what women, who were not similarly encumbered, wanted him to take notice of, something subtle or delicate or beautiful, at least to their way of thinking. If you didn’t agree that it was subtle or delicate or beautiful, it was because you had a dick. You just didn’t get it.
    But he
had
been wrong about the island. He’d imagined Monhegan as harboring some sort of retreat or commune inhabited by starving, self-deluded, talentless fringe painters like Joyce. Wannabes. (Not that Robert Trevor, alas, was one of those.) But a quick scan of the brochure had shown him that he was wrong. This was no commune. The artists who summered here were not hoping to “arrive” one day; they already had. The island’s other claim to fame was its hiking trails, for which he was grateful. Otherwise, how could he have explained to Beth his sudden urge to visit this particular island.
    The woman in question had closed her eyes and reclined her head over the back of the seat so that her smooth throat was exposed to the weakening September sun. Her long hair hung straight down, spilling onto the top of a backpack that a young man sitting behind them had wedged between the seats. Martin gave the boy an apologetic smile, and received in return a shrug of camaraderie that suggested the boy understood about pretty women who were careless with their hair.
    No, Beth was not the sort of girl, Martin reassured himself, who became suspicious. In fact, her ability to take in new data without apparent surprise was one of her great life skills. An arched eyebrow seemed to represent the extreme end of her emotional range when it came to revelation, and to Martin’s way of thinking, there was much to be said for such emotional economy, especially in a woman. Beth never said I-told-you-so, even in an I-TOLD-you-so situation, of which the ferry was the latest.
    The whole trip, hastily arranged after the shoot had wrapped, was not going smoothly. Both legs of the flight east had been full, which meant they’d not been able to sit together. Martin had been of the opinion that flyers were generally happy to switch seats so that people who were traveling together could sit together, but such requests, they discovered, were far more likely to be honored in order to seat a child next to his mother than to place a middle-aged man next to his fetching, far younger traveling companion. Martin had also been of the opinion that they’d have no trouble picking up a car in Portland, having no reason to know that there was a convention in town. So, instead of heading directly up the coast, they’d spent a day in Portland in a very shabby motel waiting for a rental to become available. And now the ferry.
    â€œI think I’ve discovered why they don’t take cars,” Martin told her, gesturing with the tourist brochure. He’d assured her yesterday that all the ferries along coastal Maine took automobiles, and that now, after Labor Day, they probably wouldn’t even need a reservation. “There are no roads on the island.”
    Of course there was a downside to Beth’s emotional reticence. That arched eyebrow of hers did manage to convey, perhaps by intention, perhaps not, that she wasn’t greatly surprised if you got something wrong, because she understood you, knew you better than you knew yourself, and therefore
expected
you to be wrong about a lot of things. Glancing over at her now, Martin was rewarded with the precise arched eyebrow he’d anticipated, its meaning unmistakable. Fortunately there was also a trace of a smile, and in that smile a hint of generosity that distinguished her from professional bitches like Joyce. Both might come to the same conclusion—that you