Land's End Part 1

Land's End_ A Walk in Provincetown.

by Michael Cunningham.

PROLOGUE

THERE IS A short interval on clear summer evenings in Provincetown, after the sun has set, when the sky is deep blue but the hulls of the boats in the harbor retain a last vestige of light that is visible nowhere else. They become briefly phosph.o.r.escent in a dim blue world. Last summer as I stood on the beach of the harbor, watching the boats, I found a coffee cup in the shallows. It's not unusual to find bits of crockery on this beach (Provincetown's harbor, being shaped like an enormous ladle, catches much of what the tides stir landward from the waters that surround Cape Cod), but a whole cup is rare. It was not, I'm sorry to say, the perfect little white china cup that poetry demands. It was in fact a cheap thing, made in the seventies I suppose, a graceless shallow oval, plastic (hence its practical but unflattering ability to survive intact), covered with garish orange and yellow daisies; the official flowers of the insistent, high-gloss optimism I remember from my adolescence, as talk of revolution dimmed and we all started, simply, to dance. It wasn't much of a cup, though it would outlast many of humankind's more vulnerable attempts to embody the notion of hope in everyday objects. It had gotten onto the beach in one piece, while its lovelier counterparts, concoctions of clay and powdered bone, white as moons, lay in fragments on the ocean floor. This cup contained a prim little clamsh.e.l.l, pewter-colored, with a tiny flourish of violet at its broken hinge, and a scattering of iridescent, mica-ish grit, like tea leaves, at its shallow bottom. I held it up, as if I expected to drink from it, as the boats put out their light. short interval on clear summer evenings in Provincetown, after the sun has set, when the sky is deep blue but the hulls of the boats in the harbor retain a last vestige of light that is visible nowhere else. They become briefly phosph.o.r.escent in a dim blue world. Last summer as I stood on the beach of the harbor, watching the boats, I found a coffee cup in the shallows. It's not unusual to find bits of crockery on this beach (Provincetown's harbor, being shaped like an enormous ladle, catches much of what the tides stir landward from the waters that surround Cape Cod), but a whole cup is rare. It was not, I'm sorry to say, the perfect little white china cup that poetry demands. It was in fact a cheap thing, made in the seventies I suppose, a graceless shallow oval, plastic (hence its practical but unflattering ability to survive intact), covered with garish orange and yellow daisies; the official flowers of the insistent, high-gloss optimism I remember from my adolescence, as talk of revolution dimmed and we all started, simply, to dance. It wasn't much of a cup, though it would outlast many of humankind's more vulnerable attempts to embody the notion of hope in everyday objects. It had gotten onto the beach in one piece, while its lovelier counterparts, concoctions of clay and powdered bone, white as moons, lay in fragments on the ocean floor. This cup contained a prim little clamsh.e.l.l, pewter-colored, with a tiny flourish of violet at its broken hinge, and a scattering of iridescent, mica-ish grit, like tea leaves, at its shallow bottom. I held it up, as if I expected to drink from it, as the boats put out their light.

Land's End

PROVINCETOWN STANDS ON a finger of land at the tip of Cape Cod, the barb at the hook's end, a fragile and low-lying geological a.s.sertion that was once knitted together by the roots of trees. Most of the trees, however, were felled by early settlers, and now, with the forests gone, the land on which Provincetown is built is essentially a sandbar, tenuously connected to the mainland, continually reconfigured by the actions of tides. When Th.o.r.eau went there in the mid-1800s, he called it "a filmy sliver of land lying flat on the ocean, a mere reflection of a sand-bar on the haze above." It has not changed much since then, at least not when seen from a distance. Built as it is at the very end of the Cape, which unfurls like a genie's shoe from the coastline of Ma.s.sachusetts, it follows the curve of a long, lazy spiral and looks not out to sea but in, toward the thicker arm of the Cape. The distant lights you see at night across the bay are the neighboring towns of Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham. If you stand on the beach on the harbor side, the ocean proper is behind you. If you turned around, walked diagonally through town and across the dunes to the other side, and sailed east, you'd dock eventually in Lisbon. By land, the only way back from Provincetown is the way you've come. a finger of land at the tip of Cape Cod, the barb at the hook's end, a fragile and low-lying geological a.s.sertion that was once knitted together by the roots of trees. Most of the trees, however, were felled by early settlers, and now, with the forests gone, the land on which Provincetown is built is essentially a sandbar, tenuously connected to the mainland, continually reconfigured by the actions of tides. When Th.o.r.eau went there in the mid-1800s, he called it "a filmy sliver of land lying flat on the ocean, a mere reflection of a sand-bar on the haze above." It has not changed much since then, at least not when seen from a distance. Built as it is at the very end of the Cape, which unfurls like a genie's shoe from the coastline of Ma.s.sachusetts, it follows the curve of a long, lazy spiral and looks not out to sea but in, toward the thicker arm of the Cape. The distant lights you see at night across the bay are the neighboring towns of Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham. If you stand on the beach on the harbor side, the ocean proper is behind you. If you turned around, walked diagonally through town and across the dunes to the other side, and sailed east, you'd dock eventually in Lisbon. By land, the only way back from Provincetown is the way you've come.It is by no means inaccessible, but neither is it particularly easy to reach. In the 1700s storms or changes in currents sometimes washed away the single road that connected Provincetown to the rest of Cape Cod, and during those times it was reachable only by boat. Even when the weather and the ocean permitted, carriages that negotiated the sandy road often got stuck and sometimes capsized into the surf. Provincetown is now more firmly and reliably attached. You can drive there. It's almost exactly two hours from both Boston and Providence, if you don't hit traffic, though in summer that's unlikely. You can fly over from Boston, twenty-five minutes across the bay, and if you're lucky you might see whales breaching from the plane. In summer, from mid-May to Columbus Day, a ferry sails twice a day from Boston. Provincetown is by nature a destination. It is the land's end; it is not en route to anywhere else. One of its charms is the fact that those who go there have made some effort to do so.Provincetown is three miles long and just slightly more than two blocks wide. Two streets run its entire length from east to west: Commercial, a narrow one-way street where almost all the businesses are, and Bradford, a more utilitarian two-way street a block north of Commercial. Residential roads, some of them barely one car wide, run at right angles on a semiregular grid between Commercial and Bradford streets and then, north of Bradford, meander out into dunes or modest hollows of surviving forest, as the terrain dictates. Although the town has been there since before 1720 (the year it was incorporated) and has survived any number of disastrous storms, it is still possible that a major hurricane, if it hit head-on, would simply sweep everything away, since Provincetown has no bedrock, no firm purchase of any kind. It is a city of sand, more or less the way Arctic settlements are cities of ice. A visitor in 1808 wrote to friends in England that the sand was "so light that it drifts about the houses... similar to snow in a driving storm. There were no hard surfaces; upon stepping from the houses the foot sinks in the sand." Th.o.r.eau noted some forty years later, "The sand is the great enemy here.... There was a schoolhouse filled with sand up to the tops of the desks."The sand has, by now, been domesticated, and Provincetown floats on layers of asphalt, pavement, and brick. Still, any house with a garden has had its soil brought in from elsewhere. Some of the older houses produce their offerings of gra.s.s and flowers from earth brought over as ballast in the holds of s.h.i.+ps in the 1800s-it is soil that originated in Europe, Asia, or South America. On stormy days gusts of sand still blow through the streets.

There could be no other town like it. If you were sensitive to crowds, you might expire in summer from human propinquity. On the other hand, if you were unable to endure loneliness, the vessel of your person could fill with dread during the long winter. Martha's Vineyard, not fifty miles to the south and west, had lived through the upsurge of mountains and their erosion, through the rise and fall of oceans, the life and death of great forests and swamps. Dinosaurs had pa.s.sed over Martha's Vineyard, and their bones were compacted into the bedrock. Glaciers had come and gone, sucking the island to the north, pus.h.i.+ng it like a ferry to the south again. Martha's Vineyard had fossil deposits one million centuries old. The northern reach of Cape Cod, however, on which my house sat, the land I inhabited-that long curving spit of shrub and dune that curves in upon itself in a spiral at the tip of the Cape-had only been formed by wind and sea over the last ten thousand years. That cannot amount to more than a night of geological time.Perhaps this is why Provincetown is so beautiful. Conceived at night (for one would swear it was created in the course of one dark storm) its sand flats still glistened in the dawn with the moist primeval innocence of land exposing itself to the sun for the first time. Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. One remembered then that the land was only ten thousand years old, and one's ghosts had no roots. We did not have old Martha's Vineyard's fossil remains to subdue each spirit, no, there was nothing to domicile our specters who careened with the wind down the two long streets of our town which curved together around the bay like two spinsters on their promenade to church land exposing itself to the sun for the first time. Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. One remembered then that the land was only ten thousand years old, and one's ghosts had no roots. We did not have old Martha's Vineyard's fossil remains to subdue each spirit, no, there was nothing to domicile our specters who careened with the wind down the two long streets of our town which curved together around the bay like two spinsters on their promenade to church.

NORMAN M MAILER,.

from Tough Guys Don't Dance Tough Guys Don't Dance

The Seasons.

IN HIGH SUMMER, Provincetown's tourist population is incalculable. In winter it shrinks to just more than 3,800 souls. I find it spectacular in all weathers, but for people looking for a conventional week or two at the beach, it is reliably sunny only in July, August, and early September, and even then days or weeks of rain can blow in from the Atlantic. In summer the days are warm and occasionally hot, the nights almost always cool. In winter it usually snows. Because the town is surrounded by ocean, it never gets as bone-chillingly cold as it does in Boston, twenty-seven miles across the bay.

I grew up in southern California, where the fact that January closely resembles June is generally reckoned a good thing, and a part of my coming of age seems to have involved the development of a low-grade horror of mild weather that pleasantly duplicates itself day after day after day. Provincetown satisfies my appet.i.te for volatility. A curtain of cold rain may sweep through the middle of a sunny summer afternoon, leaving a cooler, clearer version of the same suns.h.i.+ne in its wake. In February a few days of brilliant clarity and relative warmth are not unknown. There are, according to my own private record-keeping, two annual periods of equipoise. There is deep winter, during which a great Arctic curve of frigid quiet obtains. The sky goes as brightly, blankly white as the screen of the drive-in movie theater in Wellfleet. The town is immersed in a low incandescence, as if the light fell not only down from the sky but up from the brown and gray earth as well-from the winter lawns and the silent facades of houses, from the bare branches of trees and the blue-gray bay and the dull pewter of the streets. The air is utterly still; colors are almost violently bright. We who are there then tend to walk the streets carefully, respectfully, as if we feared waking someone. To whatever extent beauty resides in permanence, this is Provincetown at its most beautiful-it seems, in its winter slumber, to be revealed in its actual state, without its jewelry or feathers, like a white marble queen; a woman who, in life, may have been irritable and erratic, p.r.o.ne to sulks, too easily cheered by velvets and brocades; now asleep forever in a cathedral close, her eyes peacefully shut, her face arranged in an expression of mournful bemus.e.m.e.nt as the living flit by with their cameras and candles, their little prayers.

Then there is the heart of summer, which occurs sometime on or before the middle of August. Provincetown is far north, nearer to Nova Scotia than it is to Florida-fall comes early there. By Labor Day some of the leaves are already showing hints of red and yellow at their edges. But during the second week of August (sometimes earlier, sometimes later), there is a deep blue bowl of perfect days, noisier than winter but possessed of a similar underlying silence; a similar sense that the world is and will always be just this way-calm and warm, bleached with brightness, its contrasts subdued by a s.h.i.+mmer that makes it difficult to determine precisely where the ocean ends and the sky begins. One August afternoon several years ago I was reading on a pier and felt, suddenly, that I was in the middle of an enormous clock and that it was, at that moment, precisely noon; that I was present for the exact middle of the vernal year. A minute before it had still been rising summer; a minute later summer's decline would start, though nothing would appear to have changed.

I love these periods of stillness, look forward to them, though the weather is most wonderful, to me, in late spring and early fall. May and June in Provincetown tend to mists and fogs, and the town is as greenly muted as a village in the Scottish highlands. The foghorn blows all day as well as all night. The town has opened for the summer-stores and restaurants are lit, the single surviving movie theater is back in business-but few tourists have arrived yet. The town is made up, for these weeks, almost entirely of its year-round and its full-time summer population, the people who work in the stores and restaurants, and they walk on Commercial Street through the mist exclaiming over one another, inquiring about how the winter went, full of a buoyancy that will erode steadily away until it reaches the point of exhaustion and exasperation that arrives on or near Labor Day weekend. But for now, during these weeks, there's all that s.e.x and dancing ahead; there's all that money to be made. Hundreds of thousands of strangers are on their way-anyone could fall in love. There's a low spark, a hazy green glow, all the more potent for the drizzle that pervades. At this time of year you might stroll down Commercial Street after midnight, when the streetlamps illuminate little more than circles of fog, and find yourself entirely alone save for the foraging skunks; a man named Butchy, who wears a blue motorcycle helmet and a chest-length beard, and wanders the streets at night with a black plastic trash bag full of something; and another man in a blond wig and a silver lame dress, walking unaccompanied twenty paces ahead, singing "Loving You" like a crackpot Lorelei, still trying to lure sailors to their deaths though she's no longer what she was.

In fall, from mid-September through the end of October, the opposite process occurs. Fall is probably never so thoroughly suffused with its piquant, precarious beauty as it is in a town about to go to sleep for the winter. The lights are blinking out, one by one: first the movie theater closes, then some of the more ephemeral boutiques. Every week brings more absences. Still, most of the businesses hang on until Columbus Day weekend, but after that the town is in winter mode. It's much more a year-round proposition than it was when I arrived there twenty years ago-a fair number of places open on weekends through New Year's Day, and some open again as early as April; there are now two good year-round bookshops and a record store-but by mid-January there will be only a handful of bars, a restaurant or two, and a scattering of shops. By February you could walk down Commercial Street late on a weekday night and pa.s.s no one at all. Snow blows down from the rooftops, eddies, and glints in the empty streetlight.

But from Labor Day through Halloween, the place is almost unbearably beautiful. The air during these weeks seems less like ether and more like a semisolid, clear and yet dense somehow, as if it were filled with the finest imaginable golden pollen. The sky tends toward brilliant ice-blue, and every thing and being is invested with a soft, gold-ish glow. Tin cans look good in this light; discarded shopping bags do. I'm not poet enough to tell you what the salt marsh looks like at high tide. I confess that when I lived year-round in Provincetown, I tended to become irritable toward the end of October, when one supernal day after another seemed to imply that the only reasonable human act was to abandon your foolish errands and plans, go outside, and fall to your knees. I found myself looking forward to the relative drear of November, when the light whitened and the streets became papered with dead leaves; when cans and shopping bags looked like simple trash again. At least by November I could get some work done.

My First Time.

IFIRST CAME to Provincetown twenty years ago, in a state of such deep embarra.s.sment I could no longer imagine myself without it. I was twenty-eight. I had just finished two years at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and had been offered a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, which awards seven-month fellows.h.i.+ps, from October to May, to a small body of writers and visual artists, who are each given a studio apartment, a monthly stipend, and a full, uninterrupted span of time in which to work. It is a remarkable act of beneficence. For me it felt like nothing short of rescue, since I had ended my two years in Iowa with no money and no prospects. to Provincetown twenty years ago, in a state of such deep embarra.s.sment I could no longer imagine myself without it. I was twenty-eight. I had just finished two years at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and had been offered a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, which awards seven-month fellows.h.i.+ps, from October to May, to a small body of writers and visual artists, who are each given a studio apartment, a monthly stipend, and a full, uninterrupted span of time in which to work. It is a remarkable act of beneficence. For me it felt like nothing short of rescue, since I had ended my two years in Iowa with no money and no prospects.

Still, I felt old in a way only the young can feel. I would be thirty soon and had not attained anything even my mother could bring herself to call success. Before going to graduate school, I had wandered around the West, getting odd jobs, trying to write. I had published a couple of short stories and begun several novels, the kind young men tend to write, meant to teach the reading public a lesson or two about how to live. Each time I'd realized that I had no idea how people should live, abandoned the book in question, and started another. I was furious and full of shame. I could, for the first time, imagine myself a failure.

Before I applied for the fellows.h.i.+p, I had never heard of Provincetown. I had never been east of Chicago. I drove there with my cartons of books and clothes, accompanied by two friends from graduate school who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. As we drove in their van down Commercial Street, my friend Sarah put her hands over her eyes and said, "G.o.d, it's like the set of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." Sarah was p.r.o.ne to hyperbole (we all were), but I couldn't disagree with her. I had pictured a small New England town like the ones I'd seen in movies. I had expected prim white saltboxes with well-tended gardens, a modest white church surrounded by modest old tombstones, and a central square of some sort with a white bandstand quietly fading on a square of bright green lawn. Sarah was p.r.o.ne to hyperbole (we all were), but I couldn't disagree with her. I had pictured a small New England town like the ones I'd seen in movies. I had expected prim white saltboxes with well-tended gardens, a modest white church surrounded by modest old tombstones, and a central square of some sort with a white bandstand quietly fading on a square of bright green lawn.

Instead I found Commercial Street, which curves as it runs its course from east to west, so there's no horizon line-as you drive along, the street closes off behind you and ahead of you. Most of the houses and shops front right up on the narrow sidewalk, standing shoulder to shoulder. The stores, generally, are serviceable clapboard buildings, unornamented, innocent of the cupolas and widows' walks I'd expected before I came. There were, on that day in late September, many signs advertising end-of-season sales, and occasional strings of colored pennants like the ones strung over used-car lots. The stores all looked slightly smaller than life size, the way the buildings on Main Street USA in Disneyland are built at eleven inches to the foot, so as to appear less inhibiting than real buildings in an actual town, though the effect here, at least on me, was not at all comforting. The ocean was nowhere in sight. The people we pa.s.sed were not the prosperous, slightly hippie-fied citizens I'd expected. They were mostly tourists, pus.h.i.+ng children in strollers past the souvenir shops. They looked generally as baffled and disappointed as we were.

I moved into my studio and said good-bye to Sarah and Jamie the way a child says good-bye to his parents as they leave him at a doubtful-looking summer camp. It was late afternoon, just beginning to get dark. I went off to explore the town.

On foot the initial signs were more encouraging than they'd been from Sarah and Jamie's van. I learned that if you found your way down among the buildings, you soon reached the bay, a vast body of dark blue water where a foghorn blew like a ba.s.soon and where, as evening progressed, a single green light, like the one Gatsby wors.h.i.+ped, shone on a peninsula several hundred yards out. I discovered a movie theater in the center of town, a stalwart red-brick building in the tradition of small-town American movie palaces (it has since burned down), which was showing Gone With the Wind Gone With the Wind. The show started in twenty minutes. I saw Gone With the Wind Gone With the Wind among five or six other patrons, and it was thoroughly satisfying, even if the print was rather old and patched together, so that when Scarlett O'Hara stumbled on the landing in her Atlanta mansion, she was teleported instantaneously to the bottom of the stairs. among five or six other patrons, and it was thoroughly satisfying, even if the print was rather old and patched together, so that when Scarlett O'Hara stumbled on the landing in her Atlanta mansion, she was teleported instantaneously to the bottom of the stairs.

When I left the theater, however, I learned that it was screening Gone With the Wind Gone With the Wind one more time, the following night, and then closing until May. The other two theaters had already closed for the season. All right, I thought. Who needs movies? I'll read every night. I walked on and found a nice little bar where lean women in leather jackets played pool and a covey of men sat by the fireplace, laughing at jokes so familiar they barely needed to be told at all. I ordered a beer and learned from the bartender that the bar would be open until the end of the week and would then close until May. one more time, the following night, and then closing until May. The other two theaters had already closed for the season. All right, I thought. Who needs movies? I'll read every night. I walked on and found a nice little bar where lean women in leather jackets played pool and a covey of men sat by the fireplace, laughing at jokes so familiar they barely needed to be told at all. I ordered a beer and learned from the bartender that the bar would be open until the end of the week and would then close until May.

Over the next few days it became apparent that the entire town, with the exception of essentials like the grocery and drug stores and, bless it, a courageous little bookshop, intended to close from early October until mid-May. There would be fewer and fewer tourists. There would soon be only, as I quickly learned, the handful of local residents, bundled against the increasingly cold weather, most of them vanished by nightfall except the town's most visible disturbed person, a handsome, disheveled man who looked slightly scorched, as if he had just escaped from a fire, and who walked up and down Commercial Street all day and into the night, in the same dark jeans and flannel s.h.i.+rt, muttering ferociously into the gelid air. There would be two bars, both of which catered to fishermen, and one struggling vegetarian cafe. All right, I thought. No distractions. I'll just write and read for seven months.

I did read, though restlessly and randomly-half of The Charterhouse of Parma The Charterhouse of Parma, some Philip Roth, some Dorothy Sayers. I had trouble concentrating. I did not write, although I tried my hardest to. My bluff had been called. Given the ideal circ.u.mstances, a room of my own, free of distractions, I found I could not write at all. I stayed up late and slept as late as I could, but I had to wake eventually and face another empty day during which I would stare at my typewriter, put down and cross out a sentence or two, then walk along the bay and the empty street, past the boarded-up souvenir shops and the muttering man, until it was night and I could make dinner, start drinking, and read, or try to read. I bought an old black-and-white television set and watched it for hours and hours, with an addict's hopeless pleasure, derived in part from my own willingness to let things slide. That winter I lost not only what felt like my last hold on optimism but my belief in optimism itself. At the end of my twenties, I believed I was being given an early tour of the old age home, one endless day followed by another, sleep the only conceivable reward. On one particularly bleak night in February, I sat on my scratchy plaid sofabed with a vodka in my hand, rocking slightly as the television droned, and promised that if I survived the next few months, I would leave Provincetown and not only never return but never again go to any human settlement with a population under one million.

And somehow, in the end, I fell in love with Provincetown, the way you might meet someone you consider strange, irritating, potentially dangerous but whom, eventually, you find yourself marrying. I stayed for the summer, after my fellows.h.i.+p ran out, working in a bar-I had once again gotten myself to a remote place with no money and no obvious next move. I went to New York in the fall, liked New York, but found to my surprise that I missed Provincetown, against my will, the way you begin to recognize the early symptoms of love or the flu. Certain images had taken up particularly stubborn residence in my mind. There had been a moment in mid-December, at dusk, at the far west end of town, where the street dead-ends at a salt marsh and curves back on itself, attended only by an illuminated telephone booth, a perfect box of wan yellow light against the black-green marsh and the purpled sky. I had stood and watched that rectangle of light and the marsh behind it as if they contained some beauty too final and bleak to articulate. A month or so later I had watched a great silver barge of a nocturnal cloud moving serenely across the frozen stars as I stood s.h.i.+vering at the end of a pier, trying and failing to cry, staring at the green light on Long Point and hearing the foghorn blow its ba.s.soon note over and over again-come home, child, the ice mother is waiting for you, and she doesn't need you to strive or accomplish, she only wants you to sleep. Provincetown had offered its demonstrations of frigid, off-season grandeur, and then it had offered the spring thaw, when people began to appear on the streets again, more of them every weekend. The salty silence dissipated; smells of popcorn and fried food stirred themselves up. Music sifted out of the bars, and the town began to fill with the possibility of s.e.x. I took all that with me to New York. As I walked the streets of New York, I began to wonder if, for the first time in my life, I had been reduced that winter to so little that I could see the dreadful, rock-hard opulence of the world, that which remains when idealism and sentimentality have fallen away. Provincetown in its winter desolation and its subsequent, temporary revival came to seem more real, or at least more trustworthy, than any other place I'd ever been. It began to feel (though I'd never have used this word then) like home.

I went back the following summer, telling myself I was going only to make money and have s.e.x. I fell in love with a handsome, highly dramatic man who owned a cafe on the East End. I insisted I couldn't ever live in Provincetown again, but ultimately moved there to live with him. Several years later I left him but kept coming back to the town.

Now I go there every chance I get. Kenny, the man with whom I live, and I have bought a house on the East End. If I die tomorrow, Provincetown is where I'd want my ashes scattered. Who knows why we fall in love, with places or people, with objects or ideas? Thirty centuries of literature haven't begun to solve the mystery; nor have they in any way slaked our interest in it.

Provincetown is a mysterious place, and those of us who love it tend to do so with a peculiar, inscrutable intensity. With this book I hope to offer neither more nor less than the story of my own particular devotion, with the understanding that my Provincetown differs profoundly from the Provincetown of others. It is not a place that inspires objectivity-even its history is as much speculation and rumor as it is recorded fact-and the Provincetown you get from me, aside from certain particulars of geography and weather, will not resemble the Provincetown you would get from the head librarian, from the native-born fisherman who still struggles to make a living from the depleted waters of the North Atlantic, or from the woman who moved there twenty years ago to live as much apart from men as she possibly could. This book is a little plastic cup with a clamsh.e.l.l in it, found in the tidal shallows, raised in slightly bewildered homage as the boats in the harbor s.h.i.+ne like ghosts.

LONG P POINT L LIGHTLong Point's apparitional this warm spring morning, the strand a blur of sandy light,and the square white of the lighthouse-separated from us by the bay's ultramarineas if it were nowhere we could ever go-gleams like a tower's ghost, hazinginto the rinsed blue of March, our last outpost in the huge indetermination of sea.It seems cheerful enough, in the strengthening sunlight, fixed point accompanying our walkalong the sh.o.r.e. Sometimes I think it's the where-we-will-be, only not yet, like some visible outcroppingof the afterlife. In the dark its deeper invitations emerge: green witness at night's end,flickering margin of horizon, marker of safety and limit.

But limitless, the way it calls us,and where it seems to want us to come. And so I invite it into the poem, to speak,and the lighthouse says: Here is the world you asked for, gorgeous and opportune,here is nine o'clock harbor-wide, and a glinting code: promise and warning.

The morning's the size of heaven.What will you do with it?

MARK D DOTY.

Wilderness.

ALTHOUGH THE DESKS in the schools are no longer half buried in sand, and sand-drifts no longer pile up against the walls of houses, Provincetown is still thoroughly infiltrated by its skittish, sandy wilderness. Auto body shops stand in the shadows of dunes; the waterfront houses are built directly on sand and have sh.e.l.ls and beach gra.s.s where their inland sisters would have lawns. There is no place where you can't hear the foghorn. The wilderness offers escape from the noise and commerce; town offers at least partial sanctuary from the abiding patience out there, that which sifts through your windows at night and will be there long after you are gone. in the schools are no longer half buried in sand, and sand-drifts no longer pile up against the walls of houses, Provincetown is still thoroughly infiltrated by its skittish, sandy wilderness. Auto body shops stand in the shadows of dunes; the waterfront houses are built directly on sand and have sh.e.l.ls and beach gra.s.s where their inland sisters would have lawns. There is no place where you can't hear the foghorn. The wilderness offers escape from the noise and commerce; town offers at least partial sanctuary from the abiding patience out there, that which sifts through your windows at night and will be there long after you are gone.

In a sense Provincetown is is a beach. If you stand on the sh.o.r.e watching the tide recede, you are merely that much closer to the water and that much more available to weather than you would be in the middle of town. All along the bay side, the entire length of town, the beach slopes gently, bearded with kelp and dry sea gra.s.s. Because Provincetown stands low on the continental shelf, it is profoundly affected by tides, which can exceed a twelve-foot drop at the syzygy of sun, moon, and earth. Interludes of beach that are more than a hundred yards wide at low tide vanish entirely when the tide is high. The water of the bay is utterly calm in most weathers and warmer than that of the ocean beaches, but this being the North Atlantic, no water anywhere is ever what you could rightfully call warm, not even in August. Except in extreme weather the bay beach is entirely domesticated, the backyard of the town, never empty but never crowded, either; there is no surf there, and the water that laps docilely up against the sh.o.r.e is always full of boats. The bay beach is especially good for dogs and small children, whose only other access to large, untrammeled s.p.a.ce is the playing field of the high school on the hill. The bay beach is also good for strolling along in solitude, which is most satisfying, to me, on clear winter days, when the air is almost painfully sharp and sc.r.a.ps of snow linger on the sand. The beach is strewn with sh.e.l.ls, but they are New England sh.e.l.ls, almost exclusively bivalves, running from gray to brown to lighter brown with minor hints of mauve or deep, dusty purple. This is not a marine landscape p.r.o.ne to pinks or pale blues. The beach does yield the occasional treasure, an old clay pipe or a whole gla.s.s bottle that the ocean has turned opalescent. Paul Bowen, a sculptor who combs the beaches incessantly, has even found a few porcelain dolls' heads, arms, and legs over the years, and I always walk along that section hoping to see a tiny white face, half buried in sand, offering prim scarlet lips and one empty blue eye from among the stones and shards. a beach. If you stand on the sh.o.r.e watching the tide recede, you are merely that much closer to the water and that much more available to weather than you would be in the middle of town. All along the bay side, the entire length of town, the beach slopes gently, bearded with kelp and dry sea gra.s.s. Because Provincetown stands low on the continental shelf, it is profoundly affected by tides, which can exceed a twelve-foot drop at the syzygy of sun, moon, and earth. Interludes of beach that are more than a hundred yards wide at low tide vanish entirely when the tide is high. The water of the bay is utterly calm in most weathers and warmer than that of the ocean beaches, but this being the North Atlantic, no water anywhere is ever what you could rightfully call warm, not even in August. Except in extreme weather the bay beach is entirely domesticated, the backyard of the town, never empty but never crowded, either; there is no surf there, and the water that laps docilely up against the sh.o.r.e is always full of boats. The bay beach is especially good for dogs and small children, whose only other access to large, untrammeled s.p.a.ce is the playing field of the high school on the hill. The bay beach is also good for strolling along in solitude, which is most satisfying, to me, on clear winter days, when the air is almost painfully sharp and sc.r.a.ps of snow linger on the sand. The beach is strewn with sh.e.l.ls, but they are New England sh.e.l.ls, almost exclusively bivalves, running from gray to brown to lighter brown with minor hints of mauve or deep, dusty purple. This is not a marine landscape p.r.o.ne to pinks or pale blues. The beach does yield the occasional treasure, an old clay pipe or a whole gla.s.s bottle that the ocean has turned opalescent. Paul Bowen, a sculptor who combs the beaches incessantly, has even found a few porcelain dolls' heads, arms, and legs over the years, and I always walk along that section hoping to see a tiny white face, half buried in sand, offering prim scarlet lips and one empty blue eye from among the stones and shards.

LONG P POINT.

The remotest end of the sandy spiral on which Provincetown stands-the very tip of the Cape's languidly unfurling hook-is called Long Point, a narrow sc.r.a.p of dunes and gra.s.s. It is tentatively part of the mainland, but centuries ago the ocean dissolved most of the scrawny neck of sand that connected it. There is now a jetty that attaches Long Point to the far West End, built in 1911. In the 1700s, though, when Long Point was essentially an island, a community started up there, and eventually it grew to about two hundred people, most of whom operated salt works, where sea water was evaporated for salt. Everything these citizens needed, everything the Atlantic didn't provide, was brought over by boat from Provincetown proper.

During the War of 1812 the British occupied Provincetown and cut off supplies to the people on Long Point. When the Civil War broke out, the people of Provincetown, fearing that the Confederate Army would invade and set up a similar blockade, built two fortresses of sand on Long Point, with a cannon in each. The Confederates never came anywhere near Provincetown, however, and as volunteers stood guard day after day and night after night over an uncontested stretch of salt water, the fortresses came to be known as Fort Useless and Fort Ridiculous.

Before the Civil War, toward the middle of the 1800s, the citizens of Long Point began to feel that they'd made a mistake in settling there at all. Their houses were almost flirtatiously available to gales and hurricanes, their salt wasn't selling as it once had, and the notion that every egg, darning needle, or pair of socks had to be ordered and delivered by boat had lost its charm. So they had their houses, forty-eight of them, jacked up, loaded onto barges, and floated over to the mainland. Most of the old houses in Provincetown, being built on sand, had no foundations at all and could be moved from one place to another without much more difficulty than what would be involved in transporting a drydocked boat across land. On the mainland houses perched at the tops of dunes were known sometimes to work their way down slowly, over the years, until they rested at the feet of the dunes they had once crested.

The houses that were floated over from Long Point still stand, mostly in the West End of Provincetown, though there are a few in the East End as well. Each of them bears a blue plaque, with a picture of a house on a barge floating calmly over white squiggles of unprotesting waves.

At the tide's lowest point you can walk to Long Point from the West End, over the expanse of wet sand. You can walk there, regardless of the tides, across the jetty that starts at the far west end of Commercial Street. The jetty is a thirty-foot-wide ribbon of rough granite blocks that extends almost to its own vanis.h.i.+ng point when you stand on the mainland looking out to Long Point. You may want to walk all the way to the point, or you may just want to go partway out and sit on the rocks for a while. In summer, an hour or so before high tide, when the water is moving in, you can slide in from the rocks and let yourself be carried along by the tide, almost all the way back to sh.o.r.e.

If you do walk to Long Point, you will find yourself on a spit of sand about three hundred yards wide, with bay beach on one side, ocean beach on the other, and a swatch of dune gra.s.s running down the middle. It sports, like an austere ornament, a lighthouse and a long-empty shed once used to store oil for the light. You will be almost alone there, though the water around you will be thoroughly populated by boats. It is a favorite nesting ground for terns and gulls. When I went out there years ago with Christy, the man with whom I lived then, he strode into the dune gra.s.s and stirred up the birds. If I tell you that he stood exultantly among hundreds of shrieking white birds that circled and swooped furiously around him, looking just like a figure out of Dante, grinning majestically, while I stood by and worried about what it was doing to the birds, you may know everything you need to know about why we were together and why we had to part.

THE S SALT M MARSH.

Just beyond the jetty, past the hairpin curve Commercial Street makes as it turns back on itself and changes its name to Bradford Street, is the salt marsh. The long road that starts at the landward end of Cape Cod ends here, at this wild lawn of sea gra.s.s. The marsh reliably tells the time, the state of the weather, and the season: emerald in spring and summer, gold in fall, various browns in winter. Wind when it blows raises flashes and swells of paler color among the gra.s.ses and reeds, so you can stand at the edge of the marsh and see just how strongly the wind is blowing, and in what direction. Because the marsh is always at least partly flooded, reflected sky lights the gra.s.s from below. On sunny days it can seem unnaturally bright, and on cloudy days it looks even brighter.

It is puddled during low tides, inundated when the tide is high. It terminates in a range of dunes, beyond which is the ocean, though you can't see it from where you now stand. You may see a heron or two, wading among the tidal pools. You will a.s.suredly see the little white thumb of Wood End lighthouse, far away. (It is not the one on Long Point.) I've never gone there and don't intend to. I know-or rather, I can imagine-that up close it's merely an old plaster tower, its paint cracked and peeling, spattered all over its concrete base with seagull s.h.i.+t. I prefer that it remain a distant object, its romance undiluted, an image out of Virginia Woolf. I believe every city and town should contain at least one remote spot, preferably a beautiful and mysterious one, that you see but never visit.

HERRING C COVE.

Herring Cove is one of Provincetown's two official public beaches. The other is Race Point. Herring Cove is the nearer of the two to town-you can walk or bike there. In summer, the town loop bus will take you there for free. From the salt marsh it's about a half mile to the official public entrance, with its parking lot and snack bar, but my preferred point of ingress is the nearer one, across the dunes.

Go north from the salt marsh, past a small, murky lagoon to the right of the road, into a stand of trees, and stop where you see all the bicycles parked. There's an unambiguous entrance there, between the trees.

It takes about fifteen minutes to get to the beach. You will find yourself in tidal flats, with high dunes on either side and the curving wall of dunes that line the ocean straight ahead. You may see the masts and upper deck of a boat sailing by, and that is a good if slightly surreal sight, a half-boat skimming placidly along over the sand.

There is a vague but discernible path, and you should stay on it. The landscape is fragile-it does not respond well to footsteps. If you're walking out at low tide, the sand will be mostly dry, dotted here and there with clear pools. If you're walking out at high tide, you will have to wade. If you go there in late afternoon or early evening, the dunes will glow with a pink-orange light like the inside of a conch sh.e.l.l.

The tidal pools, if it's medium or high tide, will be full of minnows and little blue-black crabs. It is possible, though very rare, to see schools of squid that have gotten trapped by the receding tide and are waiting for the ocean to return. Squid alive are nothing like the ones in fish markets. They go opaque when they die. Alive, they are translucent, like jellyfish, and their eyes, though utterly unmammalian, are pale blue. When they swim, you see their eyes most clearly, and the spark of their tentacles.

Because this terrain is periodically submerged, you'll find a good deal of what the ocean contains as you go along. The path is strewn with the bodies of crabs, which bleach to a freckled salmon color that they do not possess in life and ultimately to alabaster. You may see a dead ba.s.s or two, in the process of being picked clean by the gulls. You will see kelp and driftwood, sometimes in considerable piles, and you will see strands of rope torn from fishermen's nets, black or yellow or turquoise or orange. I once found the end of a seagull's wing out there, a harp of white feathers, and took it home to Kenny, glad not only to have happened upon such a thing but to be a man carrying a wing home to his lover, who would not be repelled by its gruesome beauty.

This walk, and the beach it leads to, is largely the province of gay men. As you near the beach and the dunes dwindle down into a broad, shallow basin, you'll pa.s.s paths that meander out into the gra.s.s. They are dry at low tide. At high tide the water is as high as a man's waist. These paths, this whole arena, is thoroughly populated on summer days-it is the Piazza San Marco of gay male Provincetown. Men walk to and from the beach. Men browse among the dunes, lounge on the small temporary islands that stand among the pools when the tide is in, wade or swim in the deeper parts. The paths that snake through the tall gra.s.ses form an elaborate series of mazes, and if you follow the paths at medium to high tide, you will find yourself up to your knees or waist in gently moving water surrounded on both sides by hedges of high gra.s.s. Men go into the gra.s.ses to have s.e.x, and if you are uninterested in having s.e.x with strangers or are bothered by the sight of other people doing it, you should avoid the gra.s.s maze and proceed directly to the beach, though even if you eschew the remoter reaches, you might pa.s.s two or more men sporting together, out in the open. In this bright, tidal landscape the men having s.e.x always seem, at least to me, innocently baccha.n.a.lian-more creaturely than lewd. They seem to belong to a different version of the world, a more sylvan and semicla.s.sical one, shameless and wild. They seem to have been freed from their labors and sorrows, their fears, even their hopes, and been given a summer hour or two in which desire is all that matters. I would be happy if the men who have s.e.x in the salt marsh could be persuaded to wear fur leggings with hooves over their feet, attach little nubs of horns to their foreheads, and blow wistful tunes on pipes as they wander through the labyrinths of gra.s.s and water.

When you climb over the dunes that front on the ocean, you arrive at the beach, where the water is almost always calm, since Herring Cove lies on the inward curl of the Cape and faces southwest rather than east. By international standards Herring Cove is not much of a beach. It is relatively narrow, and the sand near the water is almost entirely covered with stones that are difficult to walk on. New England, even at its most sybaritic, usually involves some measure of challenge or inconvenience; it is not p.r.o.ne to dropping ripe fruit straight from the tree into your outstretched hand. The stones themselves are lovely, for whatever comfort that may offer. They are consistently smooth and oval, shaped by the water-the most symmetrical of them are like Noguchi sculptures. If you are inclined to pick up stones from the beach, I should warn you that many of them, when wet, appear to be fantastic shades of ochre or deep red or dark green, but they lose their color after they dry. I prefer the glossy black ones, which dry to various shades of gray, from yellow-gray to a satisfying milky gray like chalk erased from a blackboard. I keep a bowl of them on my desk.

The southern part of the beach, in summer, is full of men. You will see almost no one there who is not a man. Men lie on the sand in groups, talking and laughing, listening to music. They promenade, wearing very little, and some of them are beautiful, though the whole notion of strolling lithely and muscularly along the sand, looking to populate strangers' dreams, is complicated by the stones, which effectively eliminate the possibility of maintaining regal composure for more than a few paces at a time. The whole business of cruising and being cruised at Herring Cove is a slightly comic one, very different from, say, the broad sandy highway of a beach at Fire Island, where ambitious objects of desire can saunter from east to west and back again as imperturbably as floats in a military parade.

If you walk along the beach to your left, you'll get, eventually, to the Wood End lighthouse and, ultimately, out to Long Point. If you walk to your right, you'll reach the beach's official entrance, where the parking lot is. Close to the entrance is the women's section.

The transformation is fairly abrupt. For some time you will have walked among men lying on towels (with a few of the braver specimens splas.h.i.+ng around in the chilly water); then you will pa.s.s through a short intermediate strip of men mixed with women; and then the beach will be full, almost exclusively, of women.

It is considered a truism in Provincetown that gay men go to the beach with Speedos and a towel, while lesbians take as much as they can carry. One resists generalities (and is attracted to generalities), but it is undeniable that here, in the women's section, you are much more likely to see folding beach chairs, umbrellas, coolers, inflatable rafts, rubber sandals for walking over the stones, and other appurtenances. The women arrayed on the sand here are, to roughly equal extents, domestic and Amazonian. As a man walking through their sector, I always feel that I'm in a foreign country-a Sapphic society every bit as strange and fabulous, and just as particular unto itself, as the tribes of satyrs roaming the watery paths in the dunes. Bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s are more the norm than the exception here, and for some of us it is a unique opportunity to understand that the female breast is among the more profoundly variable of human wonders. Here are women with b.r.e.a.s.t.s firm as pears. Here are women whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s are mere pale rises of flesh, more modest by far than the pectorals of most of the men lounging and romping just up the beach, with pert and defiant cantaloupe-colored nipples the size of fingertips. Here are women with majestic moons, tropically pink, marbled by traceries of blue-green veins, topped with low-lying, elliptical aureoles of creamy brown. The women in the women's section are more likely than the men to be throwing b.a.l.l.s or Frisbees at the water's edge. They are more likely to be swimming with dogs. They are far more likely to have children, who are entirely absent in the men's section. The women's part of the beach is a welter of children, of all races, and there are more of them every year.

If you continue on, you will pa.s.s an unfortunate asphalt embankment-atop it is a snack bar, bathrooms, and showers. Farther still you will find yourself on a long stretch of beach dominated by straight families who have parked their campers or trailers and more or less settled in. Some of the campers and trailers have awnings, where grandparents sit in the shade admiring the view or reading or tending to barbecue grills. Men and women fish from the beach and often wait for a strike sitting on aluminum lawn chairs. Kids run all over the place. The people on this part of the beach are noisier, less s.e.xual, more communal. The gay and lesbian sections are, to a certain extent, feudal-each encampment of friends and lovers and children and pets tends to regard only itself, to speak only to acquaintances as they pa.s.s, and to observe strangers either surrept.i.tiously or not at all. While I'm certain that these straight families don't know each other and probably don't mingle, they require so much more s.p.a.ce, with their campers and barbecues and fis.h.i.+ng gear, their three or four generations, that turf lines are impossible to maintain. Compared with the gay men and lesbians up the beach, they are differently yoked into their lives. They are ostentatiously available to their spouses and parents and children, and so, to an outsider anyway, they seem more like a village, with all that villages imply about common purpose. It seems-though I don't imagine this is literally true-that one mother will casually pluck another woman's child from the surf, and that one grandfather will offhandedly flip the burgers of another man's son as the two middle-aged boys in question reel in a bluefish.

Farther down the beach is Hatches Harbor, one of the lesser-known wonders of Provincetown.

HATCHES H HARBOR.

Although I am agnostic on the subjects of magic, earth spirits, and conscious but invisible forces, I can't deny that several places in Provincetown possess some sort of power beyond their physical attributes. Hatches Harbor is one such place. It is some distance beyond the public beach, well past the outer reaches of the parking lot, so the only way to get there is by walking on the sand. It is, as its name implies, a natural harbor, a vulnerable point in the land ma.s.s where the ocean has curled its way in. It was once an estuary that extended inland for over a mile, but a dike built in the 1930s reduced it to a series of braided tidal channels.

Hatches Harbor is not well known. You are likely to find, at most, a few other people there, and you are at least as likely to be entirely alone. The harbor is dominated by an enormous sandbar that stretches across it like the broad back of a whale, albeit the placid, utterly smooth whale's back you might find in a children's book. To the north stands still another lighthouse, bigger than the other two in Provincetown, a serious lighthouse, tall and staunch, neither sweet nor toylike as the other two are, meant to warn big s.h.i.+ps of true dangers. (Over the centuries at least a hundred s.h.i.+ps have sunk in these waters.) Inland, directly behind you as you face the ocean, are dunes and scrub pine. None of this is especially dramatic or spectacular, not in the way of Delphi or the Oregon coast. Surf doesn't crash against cliffs here, eagles don't wheel in the sky. It has a spare and subtle beauty, more nearly related to parts of the New Mexico desert or the lakes of Finland. The harbor, the horizon, and the dunes are all in perfect proportion, visibly part of the same overarching idea. It has a way of gently insisting on the beauty of the small-look here, three round stones in a round cup of clear water. Like any proper mystery, it can't be adequately described or explained. I can only tell you that it is a place of great tranquillity, and that if you go there and stay for an hour or longer, you may feel, when you walk back, that you've been farther and longer away than you have actually been.

THE D DUNES.

Behind the beach at Herring Cove, behind all of Provincetown, is the Cape Cod National Seash.o.r.e, established during the Kennedy administration as a recreation area and nature preserve. Whatever our feelings about John F. Kennedy as president, we can be grateful to him for that. The town cannot expand past a certain point; no one can build a resort hotel in the dunes or on the ocean beaches. The dunes are an intact ecosystem, as particular unto themselves as Zion in Utah or the Florida Everglades, though unlike Zion or the Everglades they were formed, in part, by man. Early settlers felled the trees for fuel and lumber, and replanted the landscape with pitch pine and scrub oak. With the big trees gone, a sand-sea began working its methodical way in from the beaches, and what you are seeing in this sedate landscape is actually an ongoing process of erosion.

The best way to go through the dunes is on a bicycle, which you can rent from one of four places in town. A single snake of trail, not conspicuously marked, starts from the far end of the parking lot at Herring Cove and winds through the dunes. The dunescape is simultaneously verdant and lunar. It is dotted with brush and scrubby, stunted pine. It has a smell: pine and salt, with an undercurrent of something I can only describe as dusty and green. In patches the landscape is almost pure sand, pristine as sugar. The sandy areas seem primeval in their silence and shadows, though they are, of course, not ancient at all-they weren't like this a hundred years ago; a century from now they will be visibly different. Still, I often feel when I'm out there that I'm palpably on the surface of a planet, with a thin illusion of blue overhead and the universe beyond. It is especially wonderful to ride through the dunes at night, when the moon is full.

In these same dunes but miles up Cape, too far for biking, is the place where Guglielmo Marconi first tested the telegraph-where a human being was able, for the first time, to send and receive wireless messages across the Atlantic. The building in which he conducted his experiment has since fallen into the ocean, but a weathered gazebo bearing a plaque stands today to commemorate the spot where, over a hundred years ago, Marconi sat day after day and night after night, convinced that he could communicate not only with those living on other continents but with the dead as well. He thought sound waves did not vanish over time; he believed he could find a way to hear the cries of men on s.h.i.+ps sunk long ago, the voices of children whose own children were ancient by then, the musket reports of Columbus's men as they showed the Tec.u.mwah tribe what terrible new G.o.ds had arrived on their sh.o.r.es.

The Marconi Station, however, is a separate trip altogether, one that would require a car. This trail you're on is merely a meandering, four-mile-long circle that takes you back, ultimately, to the East End of Provincetown. It offers only one choice, at roughly its midpoint. You can go straight ahead, through the beech forest and ultimately back to town, or you can turn left and ride out to Race Point.

RACE P POINT.

The beach at Race Point is, to my mind, superior to the one at Herring Cove, and I, who enjoy a beach full of gay men, have often wished my brothers had elected to colonize Race Point instead. Its sole disadvantage is the fact that it is several miles from town, and you can get there only on a bicycle or in a car. If you drive, you may very well find the parking lot full by ten A.M. A.M. on a summer day. on a summer day.

The beach at Race Point arcs north to northwest. It is more directly canted toward the open ocean than the one at Herring Cove, and so the water there is p.r.o.ne to do something more exciting than just plash quietly up against the sand. It has actual waves, though you'd have to go farther still, to the beaches of Truro and Wellfleet, before encountering anything that could be called surf. To get to the beach, you lope down a bank of dunes, on which patches of low gra.s.s have drawn windblown circles around themselves in the sand. The beach is broad and generous, at all tides, and not nearly so strewn with stones. Being less accessible, it is never as crowded as the beach at Herring Cove, and the people who go there are much more a mixed bag. You'll find yourself among tourist families, townies with or without families, and the occasional renegade gay man or lesbian. It was at Race Point, several years ago, that we encountered a lesson in the mutability of desire, courtesy of Uncle Donald.

Kenny and I had gone with our friend Melanie to Race Point on an August afternoon (Melanie has a car) and put down our towels near a small family gathering. Beaches are, of course, perfect sites for eavesdropping, and as we lay in the sun, we quickly discerned the following about our neighbors. They were a handsome, dark-haired Englishwoman, her American husband, their five-year-old son, and the woman's gay younger brother, Donald. We knew his name was Donald because the little boy, transported by love, said "Uncle Donald" whenever it was called for and sometimes when it was not. Uncle Donald was a lithe man in his early thirties, wearing blue Speedos. He was wonderful with the child. They played together in the water, played in the sand; Uncle Donald was patient if ironic about the child's endless a.s.sertion of suddenly devised games with arcane and elaborate rules. When Uncle Donald reached his limit, they lay down together on his towel. The boy announced that Uncle Donald was his mattress, sprawled on top of him, and fell asleep. Uncle Donald teased his sister, who teased him back. The phrase "looking for love in all the wrong places" was mentioned. In repose, with a slumbering child on his stomach, Donald might have been carved from pale pink marble. His lean, compact body was hairless except for two light-brown tufts in his armpits. His face, in profile, was angular, with a potent brow and a firm jut of chin. Kenny and I agreed, in whispers, that we wanted him and wanted, with roughly equivalent ardor, to be be him. Melanie declared her willingness to give up women, at least for a while. Donald was wry and kind; innocently virtuous the way a prince might be if princes ever managed to live unashamedly among fountains and marbled halls, so adored that they returned adoration automatically, as a matter of course, because they had known nothing else. him. Melanie declared her willingness to give up women, at least for a while. Donald was wry and kind; innocently virtuous the way a prince might be if princes ever managed to live unashamedly among fountains and marbled halls, so adored that they returned adoration automatically, as a matter of course, because they had known nothing else.

Less than an hour later the little extended family prepared to leave. We watched, surrept.i.tiously, as Uncle Donald woke the child, set him on his feet again, stroked his hair. We watched then as Donald put on baggy chinos and a polo s.h.i.+rt, as he plopped a dramatically unflattering canvas hat on his head. Standing, in clothes, he slouched. They departed, with the child scampering and cavorting around the object of his affections, who had by then transformed himself into a citizen in poly-blends; a regular guy, unenchanted, with ordinary features (we saw, once he was dressed, that he in fact had a pleasant but unremarkable face, with too much chin for its modest nose and too much forehead for its close-set eyes); someone you wouldn't glance at twice on the street. He went off (I imagine) to join the mult.i.tude of others cruising the streets or nursing beers in the semidark at the edges