The Opposite of Drowning

by Erin McRae

  She had just finished putting her earrings in when there was a tap at her door. If that’s Jonathan, I’m going to kill him. But when she called “Come in!” there was Harry, immaculate in a somewhat retro shawl-collared tux. He looked as shyly embarrassed as she felt.

  “You look lovely,” he said, at the same time she blurted, “I’m not ready yet.” She nodded for him to come in.

  “I should have thought to bring some of Philippe’s latest food truck adventures for us to discuss,” he said as stepped inside and let the door close behind him.

  Eliza scoffed. “Please. If we’re going to have a fun night out, no work talk.”

  “Is that an order?” Harry leaned against her desk, his eyes sweeping up and down her body before landing on her face. Eliza knew she looked good, but she couldn’t help a bit of self-satisfaction at the open admiration in his expression.

  “If you like.” Eliza slipped on her shoes – strappy black ones to coordinate with her clingy grey golden-age-of-Hollywood gown – and grabbed her clutch and her wrap off her desk.

  “Ready?”

  “I am if you are.” Harry straightened up and offered her his arm.

  To Eliza’s relief they encountered no one on their way out of the building. Also to her relief, the walk from work to the venue was not a long one. Her shoes were comfortable enough for being on her feet all night – she’d worn them to many functions with Cody – but not built for extensive walking, especially not over subway grates and uneven pavement.

  She didn’t let go of Harry’s arm. She liked how the warmth of his body and the wool of his tuxedo jacket felt against her skin. They talked about little things: The weather (predictably hot and sticky for New York in July), the nonsense they’d both dealt with at work, the novel Eliza was reading for a lunchtime book club with her work friends. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the topics, but it was lovely to hear Harry’s voice and feel his presence next to her. She had missed this. The sound of Harry’s voice. The sense of his presence. Their easy conversation. Their even easier silences.

  Eliza was almost sad when they reached their destination. She caught Harry’s eye as he held the door for her, and thought she saw a similar regret written on his face. But then he smiled and his whole being seemed to brighten.

  “What is it?” Eliza asked. “You look like you’ve remembered it’s Christmas.”

  “I’ve remembered this is a ball,” Harry said, still alight. “Which means there will be dancing.”

  BEFORE DANCING, HOWEVER, there was dinner and the sort of small talk Eliza and Harry were both way too practiced at. They made friends, such as it was, with the other people at their table, and when the meal was over, set about dividing and conquering. There was no real plan to it, but a lifetime of training resulted in unavoidable habits.

  Harry had gone to the bar for a scotch and Eliza was in the midst of talking to a friend of a friend of one of their tablemates about children’s publishing, which was not where her own expertise lay. Across the room she saw what looked like a familiar head of hair. It couldn’t possibly be – Cody had absolutely no reason to be at this event.

  Eliza tried hard to ignore the shade of her past, come to haunt her now that she and Harry were possibly starting to make some sort of sense. She was wearing her evil eye. Whatever ghosts lurked, surely it would send them off? Harry had promised as much after all.

  But the social swirl of the room only brought the too-familiar figure closer. Eliza glanced around for Harry. But in the sea of people and the chaos of the event, she couldn’t find him.

  “Eliza?”

  Fingers – not her date’s – touched her back. She shrugged them off immediately.

  She turned to see Cody, handsome as ever, and with an extra shine to him, now that he was some sort of celebrity congressman. But it was all gloss. Not real, and not for her. And not just because she had dumped him. But because Alice Wolcott, a woman Eliza had known for years, was on his arm.

  “Cody,” Eliza said, somewhere between shocked and dismayed.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  Eliza blinked. He couldn’t possibly be serious. “What am I doing here? I live in New York, I work in publishing, and this is a literacy benefit. What are you doing here?”

  Cody scratched awkwardly at the back of his neck and emitted several syllables which didn’t quite come together as words.

  Alice stepped in on his behalf. “Well, all the big donors are here in New York. Cody has to think about his next steps. Of course.”

  “Of course,” Eliza echoed, a little sarcastically. The unkindness wasn’t for Alice. Eliza didn’t dislike her and, moreover, she was only doing what she was trained to do. It wasn’t Alice’s fault if it actually made her happy. Cody, on the other hand, was an absurd human being who wanted to be a Kennedy when he grew up.

  Before Eliza could offer further commentary on the situation in her outloud voice, Harry appeared at her side and snaked the hand that wasn’t holding a drink around her waist.

  You perfect, ridiculous person, you, Eliza thought.

  “New friends?” he asked with a casual, and completely duplicitous, shrug.

  Eliza beamed at him. “You remember Cody,” she said.

  Harry acknowledged that he did only by taking a sip of his drink.

  “And this is Alice Wolcott,” Eliza continued. “We were debutantes together.”

  “How delightful.” Harry’s tone suggested he’d rather be dissecting lizards.

  Eliza couldn’t help herself. She had to ask. “How long have you two been...” She trailed off; she didn’t know what Cody and Alice were to each other.

  Cody coughed. “Engaged,” he managed, still coughing.

  Harry offered him his scotch, which he actually took.

  “How lovely!” Eliza said, before looking at Alice’s hand, which featured a very familiar ring. Oh, Cody. “A bold choice,” she continued. “It suits you.” She turned to Harry. “I’d like to dance,” she said. “Right now.” If she didn’t get out of this situation immediately she was going to start laughing uncontrollably.

  “As you wish,” Harry winked at Cody before whisking Eliza away to the dance floor.

  It was so easy to follow him to the parquet and be spun into his arms, and Eliza was too grateful. Harry’s hand was warm and so was his shoulder, the heat bleeding through the fabric of his shirt and jacket.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  “Yes. My God. Any emotion I’m evincing is entirely in response to the comedy of... of that!” She choked back a wild giggle.

  Harry looked like he was on the verge of laughter himself. “Is Alice a close friend?”

  “She’s not even a friend, Harry. She’s just someone I know. I never knew how to have friends ’til I came here, because it was always like that.”

  “Like how?” he asked.

  Eliza sighed as she looked for the metaphor. “Like we were all crabs, climbing over each other in a bucket in hopes no one would reach a prize none of us even wanted.” Eliza huffed softly and stared off into the distance over Harry’s shoulder for a moment. “I feel bad for her, you know. For him too. They’re going to be so bored.”

  “Not everyone cares for excitement,” Harry said.

  There was the faint sheen at his temples from the too-warm ballroom and the exertion of dancing in so many layers. For a moment, Eliza had the completely unhelpful memory of Harry in bed, sweaty and sated. She felt her cheeks grow warm, and from the way Harry’s eyes went soft, it was clear he noticed.

  “You have no idea how to navigate any of this, do you?” she asked. They had reached some sort of juncture, and while she knew which path she wanted to follow, she did not know if Harry were truly up to the wilds of those woods.

  “Not in the least.” They danced in silence for a few moments. Their breath fell into a synchronized rhythm as easily as their feet did. Finally, Harry said, “Do you have any advice?”

&nbs
p; “For dealing with the ghosts of Boston past?” Eliza teased.

  “No,” Harry said. “Not with them.”

  Eliza shook her head. “No. I don’t have any guidance to give,” she said. “As angry as I’ve been with you, if our positions were reversed, I might well have done the same.”

  “I really am sorry. Not only about the book. About everything. Everything I said to you. It was horrid of me.”

  “Yes, it was.” Eliza firmly agreed.

  “I didn’t mean it,” Harry said. “I just knew it would work.”

  “Has it worked though? Because I am right here in your arms. I have a hard time believing that’s happened just because you wanted to help me out of an awkward social situation.”

  “Do you remember the hail? In Paris.”

  “Of course I do.” Eliza remembered everything about Paris. Everything it had cost her. And everything it had given her.

  “You’re going to think I’m utterly mad. And you may not be wrong. At the very least I’m letting superstition make a fool of me.”

  “I already think you’re mad for all sorts of reasons. What are you talking about?”

  “One more question first. Do you remember the night we heard Jonathan and Malik? And you kept complaining about the bells?”

  “Yes?”

  “There weren’t any bells.”

  “So you think I’m going mad, too.”

  “No.” Harry said. “I don’t. I think you did hear bells. But I think they were from the drowned churches of Ys.”

  Eliza wanted to laugh, but when she thought of letting the noise bubble up through her body, it was tinged with panic. Her arms broke out in goosebumps.

  “You know that’s not rational,” she said as much to herself as to Harry.

  “I do.”

  “But I did hear bells.”

  “I’m sure you did. Paris was flooding.” He spun her around.

  “So Ys was rising, you’re saying? Is this why nothing you do makes sense? Why you don’t want to be with me? Or rather, why you told me you didn’t want to be with me, gave me this –” she touched the necklace at her throat “– and asked me to come here with you tonight?”

  Harry shook his head. “It isn’t that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Whether you heard bells or not, whether anything I’ve said tonight makes sense – you and I are deadly serious, without room for error, and filled with dire consequence. I think of everything that’s happened since I met you... in the water no less –”

  “That’s not true,” Eliza said. “We met in a hallway.”

  “And then in a swimming pool.”

  “We chatted.”

  “You kicked water at me.”

  “You were in love with me even then,” Eliza challenged. This conversation had become too peculiar for her to have anything to lose, and in Harry’s arms, she didn’t feel like she could.

  “Stephen died. You left your fiancé. A hailstorm cost Paris millions of euros. And I’ve become some sort of odd celebrity. Because our fingers brushed while we shared a meal, because I will never stop thinking I’ve met you somewhere before. And because I am convinced that, you with your key, you’re Dahut. The girl in the story who lets the waters in.”

  “And that frightens you?” Eliza asked.

  Harry shook his head. “No. It delights me. And that frightens me.”

  Harry

  FRIGHTENED OR NOT, there was nothing for them to do after that conversation but flee together. Eliza was laughing as Harry led her out onto the humid sidewalks.

  “We should get a cab,” he said, tugging her towards the most likely spot.

  Eliza locked her knees and looked up at the sky. “I think it’s about to rain.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Harry could already feel the thick drops of drizzle that presaged New York’s deluges. He looked down the avenue. The traffic was thin and there wasn’t a cab in sight; peak hours for Midtown had ended long ago. The wind picked up, and Eliza folded herself into his side.

  “It’s going to pour,” he said.

  “Of course it is.” Eliza’s smile was unsettling. If she had once been Dahut, she was surely her again now. She bent over to slip off her shoes there in the street.

  “Eliza,” Harry’s voice was warning, but he didn’t know from what.

  She straightened up, her shoes slung over her fingers. “We’re going to have to make a run for it,” she said, as the sky split open.

  Harry looked at her, soaked already and feral in the street lights, and then they ran west.

  “Are your feet all right?” Harry asked her over the roar of the storm. The rough concrete and debris of their city wouldn’t be kind to them.

  Eliza ignored him and leapt into the road, the hand that wasn’t held tight in his shooting into the air, shoes dangling wildly. A cab, finally. With relief, Harry let Eliza pull him into the backseat.

  It was still pouring when they pulled up to the curb in the middle of a block in the West Village.

  “I Iive in a mews,” Harry told Eliza, as he handed the driver the fare and an exorbitant but perfectly deserved tip.

  “I don’t understand,” Eliza said as she gathered her dress in her hands to step out again into the downpour. The front that had brought the rain had also brought cold, and even in the lights from the street Harry could see goosebumps on her pale, streaming arms.

  Harry fumbled for his keys. “Behind an iron gate. It’s famous, one of New York’s secret places. I always thought – maybe in another life – if things were different – you’d let me show you sometime.”

  “Well, I’m here now.”

  Harry smiled. “Yes, you are.” He handed her his keys.

  For a moment the weather ebbed but then redoubled as Eliza finally found the right one and managed the lock. She held the gate open for him before turning back to the mews and marching right up to the house that was Harry’s.

  “Why do I know this?” she asked.

  Harry smiled. “Because you know me. Because you always have.”

  THEY STRIPPED IN THE foyer, letting their clothes pool on the floor. The garments would need more care after being so inundated than could be provided in this moment.

  “My bedroom’s upstairs,” Harry said, taking Eliza’s hand. Her hair trailed water behind them as they went. He tried not to comment, or fret that her heavy locks contained all the water of Douarnenez Bay.

  “I should hope,” she said. “The storm is amazing, but I want to be in your bed, not to fuck on the roof.”

  Harry laughed at that and exhaled in relief. She was just mortal and strange.

  Inside his room, Eliza walked around to the far side of the bed closer to the windows, like it had always been hers. It has; it has. She sat with her back to him and swept her hair forward over one shoulder before reaching behind her to undo the necklace he’d given her. Once she got it off, she set it on the little night table and looked over her shoulder at him.

  “I don’t want to be safe from you,” she said. “I don’t want you to be safe from me either.”

  Harry felt all the air leave his lungs in a rush of relief. “We’re on the same page then.”

  Eliza

  HAVING SEX WITH HARRY somewhere they would remain felt strange. In that hotel in Paris all trace of their presence had surely been washed away as soon as they had left. But she was glad to leave her mark on Harry’s house with her still-wet hair and the scent of her perfume, and on Harry’s body with her desperate nails and eager mouth.

  The storm went on through the night while she tasted him and rode him and told him everything he could do for her. He did all of it, with duty and joy and laughter, with reverence and relief.

  If they slept, they slept fitfully in brief patches because nothing they wanted from each other was enough. Sometimes Harry woke her with a touch or a kiss. Sometimes Eliza woke him with reminders of the world beyond the storm.

  “The offer I’ve accepted in Berlin,” sh
e whispered up at the ceiling, remembering the way the timing of the opportunity had seemed to save her. Even now, with Harry beside her, she didn’t regret it.

  “There are planes,” he replied, against her skin.

  “There are.” She took a deep breath. “I hope you like them.”

  “I hate them,” Harry said. “A thousand times, I hate them. And if I have to fly in them a thousand times to be with you, I will.”

  Eliza smiled into the dark.

  Chapter 18

  Every Day for the Rest of Forever

  Harry

  IN THE MORNING, HARRY finally had to let Eliza go. She insisted – and Harry, reluctantly, agreed – that the way to avoid further gossip was not to show up at the office together.

  “Also,” she said, as she stood in Harry’s foyer in her damp evening gown and slid her shoes back on. “I need to change. We really did not plan this well.”

  “Now we know for next time?” Harry said, trying to keep his voice casual and not sound as hopeful as he was.

  He knew he had failed, though, when Eliza glanced up and gave him a broad if exasperated smile. “Yes. Yes, we do. Starting with carrying umbrellas.”

  THE NEXT FEW WEEKS were some of the happiest Harry had ever known, even if it rained and rained so that steam poured off the hot streets of the city every time it stopped. He and Eliza, it seemed, were an honest-to-God ecological disaster. And in the rain that he was sure they caused, all his secrets were stripped away and all his sins confessed and forgiven.

  At work, they were exceptionally discreet. Many of their colleagues, especially those that knew they’d gone to the ball together, asked if they were seeing each other – or assumed as much without asking. If pressed, Harry always denied that there was any relationship whatsoever, but no one ever believed him, which was sort of the point.

  “It’s not like we’re lying,” Harry insisted one sultry Saturday afternoon in August. Eliza was spread across his sheets, wonderfully naked. There were goosebumps on her bare skin from the overcranked air conditioning unit and Harry tried to warm them away with his mouth. “Whatever this is, isn’t ‘dating.’”