Continental Divide

The day after Spence graduated from college, he told his parents he was tired of missing the thrill of the sun setting over the ocean, and was immediately moving to California with his girlfriend, Melissa.

“California is so far away,” his mother said. “And sunsets so ephemeral. Have you considered the Gulf Coast of Florida? Best of both worlds.”

Spence affected a blank stare and explained he had to leave immediately.

The drive from Charleston to San Francisco took seven days. Somewhere West of Kansas City, Melissa broke up with him at a rest area. In Utah, they got back together, after deciding Monument Valley was better to experience as current lovers, instead of embittered, carsick exes.

In Reno, Melissa bought them a night at the Nugget on her mother’s American Express Card. They pretended to be newlyweds, and were nearly drunk enough to elope when she ran into Thad, her former counselor from Christian Summer Camp, working a craps table.

As it happened, Thad was on his way out of town, having come to Reno in a fit of apostasy two years ago, after failing to bring wayward Mormons back into the Evangelical Baptist Fold. God was dead, he said, and therefore he turned himself over to vice, working in a casino, blowing his paycheck on high-quality, Humboldt County marijuana smuggled over the border by a couple white Rastafarians, and boning (his words) a Guatemalan hairdresser named Lux.

“But I got this place in San Francisco,” he said. “An old buddy of mine from Campus Ministry gotta job with a software company out there, but he got transferred back east. Told me I could sublet. It’s plenty big, but more money than I wanted to spend, so if you guys don’t know where you want to live . . .”

Spence knew where this was going. On the faded florescence of the casino floor, he thought Thad, with his oily moustache and over prominent forehead, looked a little like a catfish. He spoke in slow motion, and every time Melissa said his name, Spence swore he could detect a previously unnoticed lisp, which complicated things immensely.

It’s so great to see you sad.

He felt sorry for the guy.

Still, he didn’t want to live with him.

That night, in the honeymoon suite, Spence explained his reservations to Melissa. She, in turn, put his doubts to rest by maligning Thad for a solid hour and declaring her love to Spence in at least four languages, at least one, non-verbal.

The next morning, he woke to find her suitcase missing and a clumsy note scrawled across a wrinkled sheet of Nugget stationary,

It read:

Moving in with Thad. Breaking up with you. Monument Valley can’t support a long-term relationship. If you need a place to crash, Thad says you can stay with us. You can call me on the cell if you want.

Spence left the note shredded in the toilet bowl, packed the car, and drove three-thousand miles back in the direction he came.

The drive from Reno to Charleston took three days and six packets of over-the-counter speed purchased at truck stop counters.

When he arrived at his parent’s house, his mother took him for a walk through her garden.

“Thad sounds like a toad,” she said. “And Melissa was a hussy. I never liked her. Why don’t you move into the rental out on the Island? It needs repairs, and I’m sure your father wouldn’t mind. Get your wits about you.”

“I can do repairs,” said Spence.

“Of course you can,” said his mother, patting his hand.


His father bought the rental years ago, back before the resort built their gates at the North End of the Island, and the address became synonymous with wealthy beachcombers. The rental was ugly, three blocks back off the beach, and two blocks in from the waterway, in a thicket of stunted brown palmettos that had hovered indefinitely between life and death since the last big hurricane when Spence was sixteen.

The house itself consisted of whitewashed cinderblock walls, and an uninspired porch that ran the length of the backside, which his father had the good sense to screen in, after finding the soggy back yard a ripe breeding ground for mosquitoes of Jurassic proportions. The interior smelled like mildew, and was furnished with cast-offs from secondhand furniture stores. Plastic chairs molded to resemble wicker, and a vinyl sofa printed with giant orange flowers resembling either neon squids or mushroom clouds, depending on how you looked at them.

Years ago, before the big hurricane, almost all the houses on the Island looked like the rental. Dumpy cottages, a step up from camp barracks, situated squarely on small lots on gridded streets. The Island was a low-brow version of the 1950s suburb it emulated, so middle class Cleavers wouldn’t be alienated on their vacations. Then came the resort, and Nature, not to be outdone, followed with the worst Hurricane in fifty years. Every third house was destroyed, and the cunning owners found themselves instant tycoons on the heels of insurance money. For every barrack destroyed, a pastel mansion, replete with landscaped gardens, turrets, and complicated porticos rose in its place.

The rental was left untouched.

“A godsend,” Spence’s mother had said. “A genuine miracle.”

His father had affected a blank stare, and departed to water the lawn, leaving Spence to elaborate.

The first night Spence spends in the rental, he lies awake on damp sheets, and tries to hear the distant roar of the ocean over passing cars. He tries to read the Russian novel he bought at a used bookstore in Nashville. In the living room bookcase, he finds a dogeared mystery with broken binding left by a previous week’s tenant. By the end of the first paragraph, the girlfriend and her lover are dead. Spence grins, and totes it back to the bedroom.

Four hours later he tosses the completed novel against the opposite wall, and carps about the ending to the empty house. The clock says 5:15. Spence slides out of bed, pulls on a pair of shorts and goes out for a run.

The streets are empty, the summer houses dark with sleeping tourists, and there is the slightest chill in the pre-dawn air, not yet warmed for high summer. He glides past outstretched palmetto fronds and the glossy-leaved oleander to the boardwalk, the beach, and the fishermen standing silent at the gray ebbing tide of the Atlantic.

It’s four miles to curve of the island, where the ocean rolls into the inlet, and he’s stopped by the intrusion of swampgrass in the sand before the sun rises over the horizon. It’s a hazy white dawn, lacking theatrical colors—good for sailors, but disappointing to displaced recent graduates aching to see something glorious rise out of the water.

The rising temperature combines with insomniac exhaustion to force a fast deceleration. He staggers red-faced to the waters edge, and wades out into the breaking waves without removing his shoes.

Somewhere, all the way across the continent, Melissa is probably just now going to sleep, after staying out all night with her likely gilled paramour. They are climbing into bed, in the cool California darkness, while he flails clumsily in the waves, and wonders if he can evade sleep for long enough to get back to the rental.

The nearest line of fishermen bristles at the sound of a yapping dog. Spence shields his eyes to locate the source and sees a brilliant speck of white speeding over the dunes. A barefoot woman in a long pink silk dress teeters over the broken shells at the base of the boardwalk, and follows.

The closer she gets the younger her face appears, the wider her stride over the sand.

When she whistles, the dog races back to her feet.

Spence stands. “Morning.”

She startles at his voice and hikes up her skirt to wade into the surf beside him. Her face is shiny with perspiration, hair blown back off her forehead. She wears only one earring—an elaborate bauble of shining stones—and reeks of liquor and stale cigarette smoke. The dog plays between her legs. “He’s Ambrose,” she says. “The dog.”

Spence looks down, noting the sandy black nose, and matted white fur. “He’s cute.”

“He’s horrible,” says the woman.

She speaks like an actor. All over-enunciation and elongated vowels.

“And inconvenient and terribly expensive,” she says. “You know, my father’s.”

Spence nods, even though he doesn’t know whether it is, in this woman’s opinion, that all fathers are horrible, inconvenient, and expensive, or just hers. Her elaborate costume sits awkwardly on her bare shoulders, as if she were a child playing dress up. The skirt is notably ripped in several locations and bears a single prominent stain—dark purple—that extends from her waist to her kneecaps.

“Red wine,” she says.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Me too. I loved this dress. It’s a one of a kind, I’m told, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to afford couture again.” She extends her hand. “I’m Moira.”

Her palms are clammy, and grip deadening. He eyes her claws on his knuckles. “Spence.”

“Are you here on vacation?” she asks.

“For the summer,” he says. “Give or take.”

“Marvelous.”

The dog—Ambrose—runs off after a scuttling crab, and she smiles. “When I was a child, we summered here every year. My father owned a house.” She gestures, and sunlight catches on a diamond ring. “North part of the Island. I used to come here with my brother and sisters. Now I’m here alone. Are you here alone?”

It’s an odd question, quite forward, and Spence leans forward, slightly, to investigate the curves of her body in the event of a sudden proposition. To his bleary, sleep-deprived eyes her conditions seem favorable, despite her odd dress and pretentious way of speaking. And she looks nothing like Melissa—a relief and a disappointment.

“Yes,” he says.

She purses her lips, and smiles. “Would you like to walk with me for a while? Just down the pier.”

Moira walks with her feet splayed wide apart, leaving deep impressions of her narrow heels in the wet sand.

Spence lags slightly behind, oblivious to most of what she has to say. Some idle chatter about the way the Island used to be and some social occasion the night before, the one for which she was still dressed. He couldn’t make out the nature, mostly because he could only really think about crawling into the lumpy bed at the rental and losing consciousness until sunset. In sleep, he could let weird, overdressed, drunk Moira flicker and fade into the gray eyed, blue-jeaned bitch, Melissa, who wasn’t even going to California until he suggested it, and whose midnight flight with the Catfish, left him stymied, in self-imposed exile at the last place he ever wanted to be.

“My girlfriend recently left me,” he said.

Moira stopped, mouth still open in mid-word, and turned to him. Her eyes widened, and he anticipated something in the way of “so sorry to hear that.” Maybe a gentle pat on the shoulder, so he could revel in his bruised ego, and reap the benefits of a sympathetic female ear.

He sighs and turns his eyes downward.

Her reply:

“Why?”

Spence squints up at her. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why did she leave you?” asks Moira. “Were you mean, or adulterous, or sadistic, or irresponsible, or were you not good enough for her—not rich enough or smart enough or handsome enough?”

His feet sink into the sand. He closes his eyes and exhales.

“Was she a lesbian?”

“No,” says Spence, and before Moira can over enunciate her next syllable he raises his hand. “She left me for a has-been, a washed-up Jesus freak, working the craps table in Reno.”

Moira purses her lips. “Was he attractive?”

“I don’t know. I’m a straight man. I don’t notice these things.”

“Was he more attractive than you?”

Spence turns toward the inlet to see the long shadow of an ocean liner manifest on the horizon. “He looked like a catfish.”

She laughs and steps closer. Her cheeks are faintly freckled and he detects tiny lines around her eyes.

Her claw finds his collarbone, tracing the sweaty semi-circle round the neck of his t-shirt.
“You look a little like a duck,” she says. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

He blushes and steps backward.

She grabs his arm. “Don’t be offended. I’m a little drunk. You probably noticed. And I’m a little tactless when I’m drunk. But still—" She lifts her finger to his lips, his cheek, his brow. “Some women prefer catfish.”

They hover inches apart, close enough for him to feel her hot breath in his mouth, close enough for him to get drunk through his pores from the touch of her skin.

The dog yaps down the beach. She steps away.

He sees the first real wave of morning joggers appear on the beach.

“You want to have dinner?” she asks. “Tonight? At my house?”

Spence swallows, looks on down the beach toward the pier, the path back to the rental, and turns back to study the tilt of her head. He has nothing better to do. “Sure.”

“Seven o’clock,” she says. “508 Palms Boulevard. It’s a pink house with white shutters. Bring wine.”

Ambrose barks and scurries up over the dunes, and she coughs. “I’m getting off here.”

“Tonight then,” he says.

She nods, and smiles and turns to follow the dog over the dunes, her pink skirts flapping in the breeze. Before she crests the dune, he calls her name.

She turns.

“Why?” he asks.

“Why what?” she says.

“You asked me.”

When she steps back toward him, she lets her skirts trail over the sand. “Because I’m lonely,” she says. “And you’re lonely.”

He jogs closer.

“Because,” she says, skirts billowing in the breeze like the sail on a ship, like the heroine in a novel, “because I prefer ducks.”


At 6:55pm, Spence stands on the sidewalk in front of 508 Palms Boulevard—an elaborate multi-storied stucco structure with Spanish tile roof, painted the a shade just this side of sunburn, wedged on a tiny lot, between two split levels, of similar style to the rental. He chuckles a little, in spite of himself. It’s the sort of ostentation his father railed about at dinner parties. Like someone’s idea of Hollywood transported to a South Carolina barrier island.

He dials in on an intercom at the gate, and is buzzed in wordlessly, onto a tiled driveway, and into a green jungle of exotic plant life filled with nude statuary. A fat, loin-clothed Cupid, frozen at lift-off, leers down at him from the center of a fountain at the bottom of the stairs.
Spence clutches the bottle of wine—supermarket special—in his sweaty right hand, and grows self-conscious at the sound of his flip-flops slapping against the marble steps.

He reaches the front door and inspects his reflection in the transom. He thinks, duck, not unattractive, in blue jeans and band t-shirt. He thinks, further up the evolutionary scale from catfish.

Moira comes to the door as he wraps his fingers round the tail of the mermaid shaped door knocker.

She’s wearing cut-offs and a white sleeveless blouse—which he finds oddly disappointing—but she smells nice—like oranges and coconut. She takes his proffered wine bottle and smirks.

“Are you old enough to listen to that band?” she asks, pointing at his t-shirt.

“I was old enough to buy this bottle of wine,” he says, and hands it to her.

She reads the label. “But not old enough to be a connoisseur.”

He relaxes in the doorframe, tries to summon a seductive mystery. “I can learn.”

“Of course you can,” she says, and gestures him into the house.

The foyer is high and drenched in light. Spence looks up to see skylights and curving staircases.

“Nice house.”

She’s barefoot, and pads soundlessly over the cool marble floor, still the same heavy heeled stride. The Same skinny calves and splayed feet. Like a duck, he thinks, and then studies his own feet to compare.

“It’s not mine,” she says. “A fact that will either disappoint or relieve you.”

He doesn’t respond. Almost everything about Moira has either disappointed or relieved him, and in more cases than not, he’s felt both.

“I don’t really care,” he says; as he follows her into the kitchen—a vast, chrome infested galley—and stares out over the ocean to see the evening sky.

She pulls two glasses from a cabinet and sets about opening the bottle of wine.

He leans against the counter, and tries to find something to say, but flummoxed, reaches out to touch her hair—a single soft black curl, slipping from her ponytail.

She hands him a glass of wine and faces him. “I’m thirty-two,” she says. “I think you should know that.”

“I’m recently graduated,” he says. “From college.”

“I’m recently divorced,” she says. “From an unassailable asshole.” She takes a sip of the wine and grimaces. “This wine is awful.”

“Why?” he asks.

“It’s too sweet, for one thing. Tastes not unlike Kool-Aid, or maybe cough syrup.”

“No,” he says. “Why was he an asshole? Why did you divorce him?”

She scoffs, rolls her eyes, and softens for a moment, the blue hues of the fading sky coloring her cheeks. “I divorced him because he didn’t love me; he’s an asshole because he never told me, and let me go on believing that he did.”

He takes a long swig of his wine, and doesn’t mind the taste.

Moira pulls herself onto a countertop and lets her legs swing over the edge.

He notices, for the first time, that there is music playing in the background, and taps his foot in time.

“Did you love her?” she asks. “The girl who left you.”

He swishes his wine around in the glass, until the rim is colored purple. “We were going to California. I’d packed the car; she’d found the apartment. I wanted to live where I could see the sun set over the ocean. After we graduated, the two of us drove out—it took us a week—and broke up once over something stupid, something not even worth it to discuss, and got back together, driving through Monument Valley at night. It was so clear and quiet, and magnificent, seemed a waste to spend it alone, even though we were together in the car. Then came Reno and the rest is history.”

“You didn’t go to California,” she says.

“I couldn’t go after she left with the Catfish. It would have felt wrong,” he says.

“But you still want to be in California?” she asks.

“I still want to see the sun set into the Pacific. And I’d like to stand on the Golden Gate Bridge like anyone else from the East Coast who thinks California might change their life.” He smiles, spins his glass against the glossy counter. “Sounds dumb, right?”

Moira slides off the counter, and turns on a light over the stove. “I lived in California for a little while. When I was about your age.” She turns on the flames, and stands back.

“Did it change your life?”

Ambrose, resting in the corner, rouses, and totters over to sit at Spence’s feet.

“I met my husband there,” says Moira.



She serves curried shrimp and rice, and they dine on a screened-in porch, overlooking the ocean, now black swells against a violet sky.

He tells her about the rental, the swampy backyard, and his plans for repair, which she calls ambitious. She tells him about her father, how his death coincided with her separation, how the whole of his estate, at the end, consisted of little more than various knick-knacks, and one small dog.

The house belongs to friends of her fathers. A restraunteur and his much younger wife, who took pity on her the day the divorce was finalized, and offered their house for two weeks in June, in exchange for her appearing in their television ads.

“So you are an actress,” he says.

“What tipped you off?” she asks. “Was it my natural confidence? Or were you overwhelmed by my otherworldly glamour?”

“The way you talk. Only people I know that talk the way you do are actors.” Spence leans forward and dips his finger into wax of a burning candle. “You do movies?”

“A few,” she says.

“Anything I might have seen?”

“None that you would remember seeing me in,” she says. “My greatest theatrical triumphs have been lost to the cutting room floor. The rest is TV commercials, failed TV shows, the faceless checkout girl in the chase scene, the pregnant woman in the elevator. I live in New York now; no one expects me to do movies there. You don’t have theatrical aspirations, do you?”

“No.” He laughs. “I studied religion in school, but I don’t believe in God. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a fireman.”

“And now?”

He leans closer over the table. “I still sort of want to be a fireman, but I’m a chickenshit, so it’s going to have to be handyman for the time being. “

“What would you have done in California?” she asks. “If you’d gotten there.”

Spence sits back, feeling the wind up from the ocean, and tries to visualize his would-have life with Melissa. Long hours at some thankless job, schlepping coffee or selling knick-knacks or working the switchboard at an anonymous customer service center. Funny he’d never really thought about what he would do there, how he would make money—just assumed he’d find something, anything, to fund the off-hours—buy gas and beer and bottled water for afternoons sunning in Golden Gate Park with Melissa and the Russian novels from Nashville.
He’d constructed a geographic collage of his life there, taking fragments from tourist maps, guidebooks, and hours spent searching the internet his last semester of college, and felt as if he could describe his day to day down the street landmarks in his hypothetical neighborhood. And he would tear off to Melissa’s apartment, bearing brochures and postcards and free relocation packets accessed from the Student Career Services Center. She would listen as he built his white city on the hill, mining adjectives to shape his sense of wonder at what could be on the other side of the continent.

Moira taps her fingers over the table; Spence starts.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he says. “I wouldn’t have cared.”

She slides her hand into his, and traces the outline of his fingers with a fingernail. “You’re very young,” she says. “And I hope, for your sake, you don’t make it to California until you’re a little older and you have something you love more than the idea of a place.”

Feeling bold in the flickering candlelight, Spence touches her cheek and feels her soft skin, the angle of her chin, her warm lips. “May I kiss you?” he asks.

She narrows her eyes, blackened in the half-light. “If you really wanted to, you wouldn’t ask.”

He leans forward and presses his lips against hers. She feels warm and comfortable and tastes like curry.

After moments—suspended, all stops, including the breeze, except the ceaseless tide against the shore—she pushes him away, gently, and pours herself another glass of wine. “The girl who left you must have really liked catfish, because you’re one hell of a duck.”

He blushes, and reaches forward to touch her again.

Moira stops his hand. “You never answered my question before. About that girl.”

“Which question?” he asks.

“Did you love her?” she asks.

He pulls at her arm, coaxing her back into an embrace, and she yields, somewhat.

He thinks about Melissa, about the way she looked before she left him—her round shoulders and round breasts and round, childish face, and the image resolves into the view he imagines from atop an apartment building in San Francisco—all the distant hills and twinkling bridges and somewhere just out of his sightline, the darkened bay.

“Spence?”

Moira smoothes his hair back from his forehead, his head resting just north of her breast, and she suddenly feels not unlike his mother.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

She turns her eyes toward the ocean. “I’m leaving in a week. Going back to New York.”

The candles on the opposite wall flicker in the breeze; from inside he hears the jingle of dog tags.

“I’m not going to fall in love with you, Spence,” she says. “I want you to know that.”

He already knew that with certainty. She exudes it.

“I don’t care,” he says.

She runs her finger over his cheek. “Do you want to stay tonight?”

“Yes,” he says.

Moira sighs.

Shadows appear on the beach, a family with flashlights, walking noiselessly under the night sky. Spence turns slightly to feel the soft cotton of her blouse beneath his cheek. As they settle, bare feet sprawled side by side on a wicker Ottoman; she blows out the last candle on the dinner table, and tilts her head back over the chair.

He smiles.

“So what do you want to do?” she asks.

“Tell me a story,” he says. “About California.”

(