If you want the truth, I really don’t think Maggie Elliot was trying to kill herself. Or she was, but only in order to do something else entirely. Something a lot less tortured. And I know that’s hard to believe and all, seeing as she was a beautiful lady, slipping naked and weeping out of her lover’s car and into the Atlantic. But I think Charlie only says she was weeping because he assumes she was. The truth is, and he told me this, he wasn’t even in earshot for most of it. And I don’t think it was his fault either, even if I did think Maggie was trying to kill herself. But I don’t. That just feels like a needlessly vulgar way to describe it.
Charlie came over to my place at maybe 4 pm a couple of days after it happened. He tells me I’m the first person he talked to about it other than, you know, the police and the parents and all the sorts of people he had to talk to about it. Charlie exaggerates though––I’m sure he made a comment or two about it to his neighbors who I’m sure came knocking, and I’m sure he’s been out drinking and grumbling to the bartenders, and I’m sure he’s called Terry who’s been living in Portland, but he just doesn’t count these people because they didn’t know Maggie and so he can say whatever he wants to them really.
I’ve known Charlie for a long time, and I’ve known Maggie for longer. If you’re asking me, I never thought they should get together, and I don’t say that to make it sound like they were awful together. They were nothing together. Maggie is brilliant and Charlie is dumb and that’s the end of it. Charlie was too dumb to fight with her or really even make her sad. I used to ask her all the time if he ever bothered her, being so dumb and talking so much and saying so little, and she said, “No. Seriously, no. He’s perfectly inoffensive, and you know he adores me perfectly too.”
In any case, Charlie brought me a plate of cookies when he came over. I asked him why the gesture and he acted like there was no gesture at all. I agreed because the cookies in question were about as appetizing as horse treats, and we interrogated that subject no further.
Charlie wasn’t pale or emaciated like I expected him to be. He was in fact more colorful than usual, like he was running over in excess, like he was grateful to still be capable of feeling many different ways when he was supposed to feel only one type of way and he was constantly trying to make sure he was still capable indeed. It didn’t take long for him to get to talking. I really think he was eager to tell me everything because then someone else who knew Maggie would know, and we could figure it out together.
Charlie, regrettably, started by telling me that Maggie had always wanted to make love to him in the daylight near the seaside. Alright, go figure, if that’s what it takes to make sleeping with Charlie tolerable, I guess that’s what it takes. And so one day, this day, this Saturday, they made a plan to head to the coast in the morning and didn’t end up getting out there until about 6 pm because, oh, you know–– because mom called and someone’s shift ran late and the dog needed to be walked three times and someone got a headache and needed to take a nap. But they had a pleasant drive out there anyhow, only about an hour, and arrived with plenty of daylight left to burn, and I guess they had a real nice time burning it in the backseat of Charlie’s horrible orange Jeep Wrangler, because I guess it was dark by the time it was over.
Charlie swears that the only real difference he noticed in Maggie at the time was that she wasn’t very talkative like she usually was after the fact. He had chalked this up to an excellent performance on his part, and he just talked to her, talked enough for the both of them, and I guess she was laughing and nodding and chiming in every now and again like she was really enjoying it, so what difference really did it make that she wasn’t personally monologuing. She was enjoying herself.
And then, what do you know, it started to rain––that silvery kind of rain which comes down through a purple night and a full moon. And if there’s one thing in the world that gets Maggie going, it’s rain. Maggie would move under the sound of the rain, in a way that used to make me feel like I ought to give her some alone time. So, naturally, they started going at it again, and Charlie had such a funny glimmer in his eye when he told me that part, as if he expected a high five, as if it mattered at all anymore how much Maggie liked him or didn’t like him or wanted him or didn’t want him. Really, I don’t think it ever did. I really don’t think Charlie has anything to do with this.
I guess Charlie hadn’t taken off her dress the first time and so he decided, why not the second time, and that was when something came over her. At least, that’s how Charlie described it, because at the time there was hardly any perceptible effect. All he said was that Maggie broke away from him, looked at him in some way one could feasibly interpret as loving, kissed him on the cheek, and opened the car door. Charlie, indecent as he was, shied away from the elements; he shut the door behind her and rolled down the window and hollered at her to come inside, but the thing was he was more amused than anything else, and he knew how Maggie got ideas into her head. He had watched her eat tree moss once.
“I’m telling you, Tammy, and I’m telling you honestly, she seemed so, so happy.”
He said she stood just outside the car, and she was, I don’t know, hooting and laughing and twirling herself around in the rain, in the middle of the parking lot, and then she had just stood still for quite some time enjoying it, and letting Charlie watch her, and so Charlie assumed that was the entire point. Then Charlie got all drunk on the moment and started fumbling around for his clothes so he could join her, and he was probably grinning like a bobcat, because he assumed she would chide him for being so prudish and take them all right back off again, right out there in the open. And it was then, when he punched on the overhead and began fumbling around for his T-shirt, jeans, belt, windbreaker, and a partridge in a pear tree, that Maggie found the time to head for the water.
Charlie sort of assumed it was all part of the dance, so to speak, when he tumbled out of the car and saw that she had taken off down the hill––that awful slimy thing that hoists the concrete from high tide, that rolls straight down into the waves without a walking path because who would ever bother. She would, and she was, and she was clearing the hill now, and closing in on a sparse patch of sand in what was otherwise a total boulder beach. He said she wasn’t running, wasn’t walking either (Charlie typically deals in this sort of ambiguity). And in any case, he was too busy gleefully chasing after her and calling her name to notice what the heck she was doing anyway.
As he gained on her, Charlie said he heard her voice for a moment, and that’s what he figured was the weeping, though at the time he swore it was laughter. Charlie had never heard Maggie cry before, is the thing. Nor have I, to be perfectly honest. This was just before she got in, started swimming, I guess.
“I trusted her,” Charlie said, in a rare moment of blame, or something close. “I really thought wherever Maggie went it was surely safe to go.”
And Charlie continued to think that way, and Charlie didn’t worry about Maggie until maybe five minutes after she had gotten in the water. Instead he waded all the way out to the sandbar, in the middle of a gathering storm in his windbreaker and his belt and his jeans, honest to God thinking she would be waiting for him there, that she would emerge from the deep, a siren with her mouth wide open like a hurricane’s eye, the only piece of ocean that night that cared whether he lived or died or felt good.
They haven’t found Maggie yet, and Charlie and I are honestly just grateful, because it means she didn’t get flung back onshore headfirst into the cliffside.
People are asking Charlie all sorts of questions now, and Charlie can’t answer them because the truth is he has no idea what happened. Part of him, I would say most of him, is so bewildered that he thinks it was an accident, that she just got carried away, and that she fully intended to meet him there on that sandbar, but maybe some Great White came trekking along. Which seems an unlikely fate to befall the daughter of Maine’s chattiest marine, but what do I know. And then you’ve got everybody else, and they’re all becoming more and more seduced by the possibility that tragedy struck a beautiful naked lady again, that her light was snuffed somehow someway in the throes of a lethal love affair, and maybe I would be less immune to this most attractive of possibilities if I didn’t know Charlie, and how profoundly incapable he would ever be of inducing even the tenderest of nymphomaniacs to any display of passion greater than a sigh.
In any case, people think he did it. Or drove her to it. Literally. Chief among them, her parents. And the police. Because he was stupid enough to dither. He didn’t call the authorities. Charlie was, and clearly still is, one of those spoiled children who genuinely doesn’t think 911 works when dialed on the phones of those under the age of 30. Instead, he drove, still soaking wet, all the way to her folks in Rockport, and he stood on their front door, wind-torn and horrific, and said as though possessed, “Maggie’s gone.”
“It was, perfectly, emotionless,” Mrs. Elliot told me on the phone that night. “What am I supposed to make of a scene like that?”
And so, I’m trying to get it through his head that he’s got to get a better story than, “No, no, I’m telling you, mister! You’ve got it all wrong! She was begging me to make love to her in a car by the seaside, and I just did such a good job that she superseded the fear of death and shimmied into the ocean, overcome as she was by a wave of orgasmic euphoria!” Because the truth is the only person who shimmied into the ocean that night due to a superseded fear of death in a wave of orgasmic euphoria was Charlie.
I’ve got to make it very clear that I think Maggie, for lack of a better term, killed herself. And I’ve got to make sure other people can see why I think that or else, I don’t know, it doesn’t look so great for Charlie. And I also want to say, for the record, I resent the argument that I’m just one of Charlie’s strategists because I’m not.
I’m Maggie’s best friend, and if anyone knows what happened, it’s me.
Not because she told me. Of course, I never thought she would do a thing like this or I would’ve said something. But what she did tell me was that when she really got worked up (which wasn’t very often at all), she could always calm herself down by thinking of floating completely alone in an empty ocean at nighttime, disturbing nothing but the swimming of the full moon.
So there’s my best guess, in any case.
It’s tricky to say that Maggie Elliot killed herself, just because Maggie would never want to be so disruptive as to kill anything. But what I can tell you is that Maggie didn’t like the feel of much. Maggie liked the feel of water and sex, and the messy kisses of coastal humidity that left her glistening and tousled her hair to mermaid, and that was all.
Good for her, she got what she wanted.
People have a hard time getting on board with this theory. Charlie struggles with it even, and I tell him he’d better keep his doubting to himself, but anyway. Everyone seems to agree unequivocally that Maggie just seemed so happy, and this is true. She wasn’t tortured. She was anything but. I honestly think she was just a bit inconvenienced.
It was little things. Maggie didn’t like hearing her own heart beat or anyone else’s. One time I clasped her to my chest when we were both freezing on a camping trip and she ended up sleeping outside the tent for the night. She didn’t like her knuckles or her snot, or the skin that peels and patchily flushes and grows unwelcome around weeping wounds and blisters. Headaches and social cigarettes could saw Maggie in half simply because she worried that they would, and lovers were sicknesses; she invariably ran fevers after every first date, I remember. Maybe that’s why she ended up picking out Charlie. He must be like sucking on lozenges, holding an ice cube to your wrist.
I don’t know. Maggie really was more macabre than anything. Of course everyone just treated this like part of her poetry, part of her wild. I guess it’s hard to take a lady all dressed in turtle green and teal who laughs her ribs to putty for a Wednesday Addams. But she was always yammering on about the Isdal woman and singing calamitous folk songs in the car, and she liked the fact that when she stood on the shoreline she stood in the same water that bathed rotten ships and christened sleeping bones. This made her unnerving company on a kayak. And I wonder if all that admiration just began souring to envy one day, that day, that Saturday.
Maggie collected antique photocards––people on their wedding days or girls straddling summertime fences cut down to the size of some soldier’s wallet, each one no more than 85 cents. I’ve got a box of them for myself now, and I’ve spent a lot of time since it happened looking at them, into those cool glassy eyes of postcard ladies, those eyes which seem to watch all the wonderful things. I think I’ve had the thought myself. How sweet it must be to live the way they do, and don’t; to be a thing to which the drama, the projectile vomit of consciousness merely clings.
What I think is, she wasn’t resigning herself. She was burning for it, like it was fame or something. And, of course, Charlie and I both wish she would’ve stuck it out, that if she had to go burning perhaps she could’ve worked a little harder to find that old fine line between a candle and a house fire, but oh well. She knows better than anyone what she can handle. And I don’t even know that she’s dead. She might just be floating out there, perfectly alone in some stretch of ocean, disturbing the swimming of the full moon.
You’re talking to Mrs. Elliot later. Send her my best. She won’t talk to me anymore. I asked her if I could play The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald at the funeral and then she refused to let me come at all.
What I’m saying is, what does she know about anything?