Michelangelo's Shoulder

by John Moncure Wetterau

I borrowed my buddy Morgan's truck on a clear evening in late July and picked up Jamie. Madaket was her favorite beach, less known, wilder. We drove out and made a driftwood fire, opened a bottle of wine, and talked as the sun went down and the moon rose. We were easy with each other by then, although we had never touched, let alone hugged or kissed. The swordfish was a success. The moon sent its ivory path over the wave tops, inviting and promising. Jamie told me how she liked to swim that path and how, several times, she nearly hadn't made it back. We were young.

I was giddy with accomplishment as we finished a second bottle of wine. She was wearing a tight T-shirt and shorts, apparently unaware of the effect her body had on me as she told me about her parents and her friends on the island. She had summered on Nantucket for years. She was in a suspended state—too heavy for ballet, too young for graduate school. She did not want to marry an engineer and live in a suburb of Philadelphia. She was clear about that. I offered a possible alternative: an honest life built one stone at a time.

We put out the fire and walked along the beach. Fog blew in, softening the lines of the horizon and dune, thickening as we reached the truck. We drove back happily involved with each other, unconcerned with anything else. A telephone pole appeared directly in front of me. I whipped the steering wheel to the left and almost missed the pole. The right headlight smashed and I was thrown against the wheel, striking it with my shoulder and bending it nearly double. Jamie went through the windshield. After the crash, there were only hot sounds of metal uncrinkling and moans from Jamie. Don't let me die, she was saying over and over.

I pulled her back on to the seat and reassured her. Her hair was bloody and glinted with broken glass. She was half-conscious. I took her in my arms and walked away from the wreck. We were at a tiny unmarked traffic circle with a house nearby. Lights were on in the house. I carried Jamie to the front door which was opened by a woman who had heard the crash. I waited while she spread newspapers on the floor, and then I brought Jamie inside. An ambulance came within a few minutes and took her to the hospital. I was taken to the police station to answer questions.

She was all right, thank God, after a few days in the hospital. Some dental work, a small scar. I had bruises. We got off easy. Morgan's truck was totaled. The cop was tired and made a typo on the accident form. I paid a fine and didn't even get a mark on my out of state license. The little traffic circle was notorious, I learned. I went back and nailed reflectors all over the place.

Every afternoon I visited Jamie in the hospital, and we became close. Two days after she was released and life was getting back to normal, I took a walk during the break between lunch and dinner. Things had been happening fast; I needed to slow down. I followed a stream through a marshy area to a dry bank shaded by a tree where I stretched out and listened to the sounds of birds and insects. It was hot and the sounds began to still. A dragonfly darted back and forth above the stream. Movement caught my eye. A snake, three feet long, was winding along the opposite bank, unhurried, almost casual. A dark snake, unremarkable. It struck, too fast to see. It was falling back to the ground before I could focus, the dragonfly in its mouth. The snake caught the dragonfly in midair without coiling. Impossible. The most athletic move I've ever seen. It was as though the universe had stopped, allowed the snake to strike, and then started again for everyone else.

We made plans, Jamie and I, to be together in the fall in the mountains. I turned down a flattering offer to follow Harry to a hunting lodge in New Hampshire and from there to Florida for the winter season. I had a different future. Jamie was coming.

I caught the ferry to Woods Hole on a foggy morning. It was chilly; the passengers stayed inside. I went out on deck and heard jazz coming from the stern. A man with his feet up on a chair was playing a trumpet pointed toward the ocean and an American flag fluttering in the fog. He played freely, a concert for the two of us, a farewell to the island and summer.

Jamie arrived for a day several weeks later. When I put her on the bus to Philadelphia to go home for her stuff, life was bright. I met her bus that weekend, but she wasn't on it. A terrible emptiness spread through me.

We wrote to each other for a year. She did, eventually, step down from that bus. Two weeks later I put her back on. It had all been a kind of sexual mirage, a passion that had nothing to do with who she was. Watch out when your throat goes dry and you begin to shake!