Because I'd never handled rentals, hadn't visited northern California, and wasn't an especially resourceful agent, I had little advice to give her. Hesitantly, I suggested she might try to find something in Maine; at least she'd save the cost of airfare.
She looked over my shoulder-at the map on the wall, or out the window behind me, or perhaps into the traumas of her imagined inmates-and explained that she'd gone to Maine the two previous summers and was seeking a locale that offered fresh inspiration. In her sorrowful voice, she described her Down East rental: a ramshackle house on a tiny island about 10 miles off the coast of Portland. She mentioned a leaking roof, temperamental plumbing, unreliable electricity, lumpy mattresses, and a sulfurous well that frequently ran dry.
"But beautiful," she sighed. "Almost like a dream."
This was in the early 1980's. I was still in my twenties and making not much above minimum wage. Because I was unhappy in my work and unresolved in my relationships, I'd convinced myself that the life I was living was merely a practice session for the genuine item, a warm-up act. All my fantasies of coaxing my fate, my real life, out of hiding revolved around retreat to a weather worn house on the ocean. "Was it ... expensive?" I asked the writer.
"A hundred twenty-five a week," she said. She reached into her knapsack and rummaged through papers, magazines, dog-eared books. "I might have the owner's number with me."
It turned out she did. That summer, a friend and I rented the house for the last two weeks in August.
The only way to reach the island was on a small ferry that departed Portland's waterfront from a wharf that appeared to be falling into the ocean. Sitting in the waiting area on benches resembling church pews, you could look through the spaces between the floorboards at the oily water of the harbor sloshing against the pilings. A small crowd had gathered-the ferry stopped at five other islands in Casco Bay before it reached our destination, the last on the route-and we sat with pillows and bags of food and thousands of pages of difficult fiction heaped around us, trying to appear seasoned and familiar with the surroundings.
In fact, the total of what I knew about the island was this: once it had been called Crotch Island, but at some point, the name had been changed to Cliff. Either appellation seemed apt. On maps, it looked like a capital H with one game leg, barely two miles from end to end at its longest point, and so thin that if you stood smack in the middle of its widest bulge, you'd be less than half a mile from the ocean. There were, I had read, two beaches, one in the north crotch of the island and one in the south, but for the most part, the land and the houses on it were protected from the waves by jagged, striated cliffs.
The ferry was almost empty by the time it reached our destination. The only people to disembark with us were an elderly woman in stretch pants, adolescent twin brothers who hadn't looked at or spoken to each other during the entire hour-and-a-half trip, and two families loaded down with board games and bicycles, which labeled them summer vacationers. There was an unpromising-looking sandwich shop near the dock. In the middle of the dirt road that looped around the perimeter of the island, a fat, muddy goose was tormenting a small child. The woman who owned the house had given me sketchy directions over the phone: "Walk along the road until you come to the post office. Beside it is a path that cuts through some raspberry bushes and leads down to the ocean. The key should be under the mat."
We followed the road until we spotted the post office. After a few false starts, we found the raspberry bushes and the path leading through them, followed it to the edge of the water and then sharply to the right up a steep embankment. The house appeared suddenly, a two-story wreck, half clapboard, half shingled, clinging to an outcropping of rock perched over the ocean. Some of the siding was painted gray, some a bleached, peeling yellow. A wide porch sagged off the front, weary as a sigh. A workman's scaffold leaned against the rear of the house, but it looked as weathered and exhausted as all the rest; it was obvious that the renovation project for which it had been erected would never be completed.
Standing on the path below and seeing the house for the first time, I was overcome by a wave of nostalgia so intense, I felt as if I had spent all of my childhood summers there and was making a longed-for return after a forced exile.
The door was unlocked (there was no mat, never mind a key), the windows were open, and the house was filled with late-afternoon sunlight and a damp, salty breeze. Clearly, all the furnishings were castoffs: a dilapidated fold out sofa, a few busted-up rattan chairs, a wobbly maple dining table. The kitchen was small and dank, with a tiny electric stove shoved into a corner, cabinets filled with rusted cans of cleaning products from another era, and a shallow sink with a faded, penciled note above it that read: "PLEASE use water SPARINGLY as we are on a WELL." Upstairs, there were three bedrooms with tongue-and groove paneled walls which, because there were no ceilings, suggested privacy, but obviously didn't deliver it.
The gauzy, sun-rotted curtains of the bedrooms were billowing in, lazily caressing the mattresses. I lay down on one of the uncomfortable beds and looked out the window. The view of the water was so dramatic and uninterrupted, so seductive, I had the feeling I was on a boat-a small, leaky boat, perhaps-gently rocking as it drifted carelessly out to sea.
Over the next 10 years I spent at least two weeks of each summer at that fantastic ruin of a house, lying on the small patch of grass surrounded by wild rosebushes, sitting on the rocks in the fog with waves hammering below, watching the distant, nightly passage of the ferry to Nova Scotia, arranging buckets on the floor of one of the bedrooms when it rained. The options for activity were severely limited. There was no television at the house, no radio, no telephone. (The pay phone outside the town assembly hall was out of order more often than it was working.) The other residents of the island the population of fewer than 90 swelled in summer to 250-were amicable but reserved, and the few community events planned over the years were usually canceled due to inclement weather. The sandwich shop near the dock served meatball subs and little else. Sometimes I went alone, but most often with an assortment of friends. The poor lighting and uncomfortable furniture made it hard to read in the evening, and we went to bed early, politely pretending that every cough, whisper, and groan of the bed frames wasn't audible over the open tops of the paneled walls.
Still, I loved the house more than any other in which I've spent time. Perhaps it was the view from the bedroom windows; or the cool, almost icy breezes that blew through each afternoon, even at the hot core of July; or the sound of the shutters slamming against the walls in a storm; or the way the tattered striped towels looked drying in the sun on the laundry line. Above all, I suspect the lure of the place was the feeling of floating out to sea that came over me upon entering and stayed with me every minute of each visit, a feeling the house's shabby condition and nunierous discomforts only intensified. Over the years, the waterfront in Portland was revitalized with bakeries and coffee bars, and the ferry dock was moved to a solid new pier with an attached parking garage. But the scaffold on the back of the house stayed where it was. The roof continued to leak. The shutters never stopped banging. The rent went up in such small increments, it was hard to imagine why the owner bothered to raise it at all. No one took the trouble to clean out the cabinets, replace the broken chairs, or rip up the buckled linoleum in the bathroom.
Initially, I rented the house thinking I would spend my time there plotting ways to alter the parts of my life I wasn't happy with, but mostly I spent the time drifting away from them. I did switch careers, save some money, resolve my unresolved relationships, but I doubt the house had anything to do with any of it. As the changes in my situation piled up, it became more and more difficult to go back to the island, and eventually, ironically, it became impossible.
I had followed from afar the career of the novelist who'd told me about the house. She produced her second and third books more quickly than her first, and I read that she moved for a time to France or maybe England. Last spring, I bumped into her at a literary gathering. She looked remarkably unchanged: as sad-eyed, distracted, and lovely as before. Belatedly, I thanked her for telling me about the house, and asked if she'd been back recently.
"I haven't," she said. "But I heard the owner died. An energetic young relative inherited it. He raised the rent, fixed the roof, repainted the porch."
She had more to say on the subject, but I excused myself and walked off.
It's been years now since I've been to the house, but on certain kinds of breezy days in late summer, I spend a considerable amount of time there, listening to the ocean and the rattling windows and watching the paint peel.