
EX-LIBRARY
by Chet Williamson
It was not, Kendall Harris thought, the ideal place for a fam-ily vacation, and he would damn well let Riggs know it
when he got back to Boston. The SeaHarp Hotel, despite Riggs's paeans of praise, struck Harris as little cheerier than a
mau-soleum, and the town of Greystone Bay was not so much "charmingly caught in time," as Riggs had put it, as it
was embalmed, like a long-dead insect trapped in amber.
Every face Harris had seen in the hotel, including his own in the mirror, had a pale, sickly cast that unerringly
reflected the pallor of the sky. Was it ever blue over Greystone Bay? Harris wondered. And was there any haven in
this great pile of a building where you could not hear that damned surf? The pounding of each wave on the strand
seemed to mock the pounding of each worry, every concern that beat against the rickety seawall that was all that was
left of his relationship with Maureen and David.
His wife. His son. He said those words to himself over and over, trying to find in them something that moved him,
some saving grace that would make things the way they had been before Deborah had come into his life, Deborah with
her heart-shaped face, her willowy form, and her heart of oak that would brook no rival, not even a wife. She had
refused to be a mistress, and for that Harris loved her all the more.
But his family was too important to him to give up, even for Deborah, and he told her that, and told her that it had to
end between them. She had understood and had walked away, leaving his life emptier than it had been before, the
memories of his happiness with her creating an abyss in which the small amount of affection he still had left for
Maureen was totally swallowed up.
Maureen had known that he was having an affair. She was neither dumb nor blind, and her pain had lashed out at
him, and he had returned word for word, curse for curse, until there was nothing left but legalities to bind them
together. They had gone to a counselor, and the counselor had said to get away, go on a vacation together, escape
the petty pres-sures of everyday life.
And so they had come to Greystone Bay, where the petty
pressures vanished, making room for the huge and deeper pres-
sures that Harris carried inescapably within him, the pressures
that now boiled inside his brain as the foam boiled on the
rocky strand.
They had arrived only that morning, and already the large, second-floor suite they occupied seemed tight and
claustro-phobic. Christ, Harris thought, the Superdome would have seemed claustrophobic if both he and Maureen
had been in it. Her presence, smoldering with disgust toward him, filled the room, leaving him no air to breathe, and the
way in which she sheltered David, as though his father were some brute who might devour him, both saddened and
angered Harris. The worst of it was that the boy had begun to share his mother's aversion, and in the presence of his
wife and child Harris now felt leprous, monstrous, murderous.
So much, he thought bitterly, for a fucking family vaca-tion. And this was only the first evening. Ten more days to
go. Jesus God, he wondered, grimacing inwardly at the ab-surd melodrama of the thought, will I be able to get through
this vacation without killing somebody?
He shook his head at the idea, wondered if a third drink would be too many, decided that it would not, and ordered
another Glenfiddich. He drank it in less time than he had taken with its two predecessors, and after it was gone he
decided that he would drain his bladder before adding any more fluid to its contents. It was a long way to the door of
the bar, but he made the trip easily, and just as easily found his way to the men's room beneath the staircase. No, he
thought, not drunk yet. He sighed. Not drunk enough. Never drunk enough.
He urinated, washed his hands, splashed some water on his cheeks, and ran a comb through his graying hair, trying
not to look at the haggard face that suddenly seemed so old and sad. Forty-two, he thought. Only forty-fucking-two
and everything is over? He slipped the comb back into his pocket and listened for a moment.
It was there. The sound of the breakers. He had heard it in the bar, and could even now hear it in here, in a room
with no windows. Maybe through the pipes, he thought. Je-sus, was there any place you couldn't hear those
goddamned waves crashing?
Harris went back into the hall and took a few steps toward the bar, but then stopped and looked to the right down
the corridor. Was there someplace down there, he wondered, someplace quiet, where a man could stop thinking about
those waves?