Read Online Storm Tide by Marge Piercy, Ira Wood - Free Book Online Page B

The idea of espaliered peach trees spurred him to build a wall blocking the north wind. The wall reminded him of a cottage in Taos—so he built one. Unable to house all the students like Marty who used to descend on him in summer and the colleagues who managed to appear without their wives, Gordon built a second main house larger than the first. He used massive beams from an abandoned mill in New Bedford which he floated across the inlet because the Squeer Island bridge couldn’t bear the weight of big trucks.
    Gordon had been fired from three colleges and written fourteen books. (Marty had all of them on a shelf in his study; signed first editions.) He had marched with Martin Luther King in Selma. When he was still healthy, Holly said, you might see him skirting the roof rim of some new building going up—shirtless, a hammer in his hand, a butt in his lips. Or he might be sitting on his deck, naked, in front of his typewriter, inhaling as if ideas could be dragged out of a Marlboro. Holly said that Gordon was still with Judith only because she was wife number four. Like a greyhound, he had needed to sprint for the better part of his life before he was tranquil enough to live with. He was over fifty when they married; she was in her twenties.
    Gordon had a reputation as a satyr, an American Picasso—tyrant, genius, egomaniac—an undisciplined savant who could not write in solitude but threw enormous parties in which he talked himself into an intellectual frenzy before stealing off to a shack with a bottle of scotch to pour out his book. Gordon was rumored to have lived with three women at once, and every night to choose the one with whom he shared his bed. Holly knew only that Judith had broken into his life like an ax through a window in a room full of gas. “Judith is not a warm person,” Holly said, before leaving me to contemplate my behavior. “But she’s been good to Gordon. At least until now.”
    Later that evening, I called Judith at her office to tell her we’d made the headlines in Donna Marie’s Beauty Salon.
    I was ready to concede we had to cool it for a while. Instead she said, “Come out to the house Saturday, can you?” Her voice trailed off as she checked the tide chart. “About one? Gordon’s been asking to meet you.”

D AVID
        The first thing I noticed was the pistol in Gordon Stone’s hand. He approached my car with a steady smile. Although Judith hadn’t warned me to expect something like this, I knew I deserved it. Half the town was talking about his wife and me.
    Judith protected Gordon. Once I’d asked her: “Do you sleep with your husband?”
    She grimaced. “Could you sleep with somebody who snores like a bull moose?”
    “But do you sleep in the same bed?”
    “How can I sleep if he keeps me awake?”
    “Judith, do you have sex with him?”
    “Does the idea make you jealous?”
    I didn’t think I had the right to be jealous. “Do you know that whenever you don’t want to answer my questions you ask me another one instead?”
    She seemed intrigued. “Does that annoy you?”
    “You’ve just done it again.”
    It had more to do with how I judged myself than anything I actually knew about Gordon, but I assumed that Judith had turned to me out of desperation. I invented an image of her husband as a man who depended on a regimen of drugs that erased his pain as well as his ability to satisfy his wife. I told myself they lived like dear friends, that affection had replaced passion. I simply had to picture Gordon as more intellect than flesh. I could not imagine him watching her dress, for instance. I refused to believe that any husband, however frail and disinterested, could bear to watch my Judith step into her black silk panties in the morning and know she would slide them to her knees for another man.
    I had left my house that afternoon as late as I dared and drove at a coward’s pace down the road to the island, only recently emerging from the last high tide. The