The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

“Are you all right?” he says. “I d-d-didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Have I been here long?

  “An orderly told me that they start taking visitors at 10 a.m. tomorrow. I caught him on his s-s-s-smoke break.”

  I don’t want to leave yet. Charlie stands there and looks at me. I smile. I smile so that he’ll stop looking so closely.

  A thump. The sound of a bird flying into glass. And then again. The sound is coming from the top floor. A woman’s face slams into the window, over and over. I feel the smile quivering on my mouth as Charlie pulls me away from the hedge. Two nurses inside rush to the woman, lower the blinds.

  For a second, I thought that woman was Mom. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t Mom at all. Just some crazy person. Charlie is guiding me back to the truck, but I’m walking sideways because I can’t stop looking at the wall of windows.

  On the fifth floor, I think I see the blinds shift, a shadow move. I stop.

  Charlie lets go of my elbow.

  “W-w-what?” he says, turns around and squints at where I’m looking.

  It’s her. I’m sure of it somehow.

  “Nothing,” I say, and get into the truck.

  “We’ll c-c-come back in the morning,” he says and starts the engine.

  MAE

  One evening, Dad was late picking me up from my photography class. I waited and waited outside the building. When he finally showed, there was something about his face that scared me. It looked literally darker. His skin, his eyes, even his beard, had a gloom to them I’d never seen before.

  He said that the deadline was approaching and he had nothing to give his publisher. What he’d written was utter shit. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of his first book. The critics wouldn’t even bother tearing it apart. It wouldn’t be worth the newsprint. He was giving up.

  He’d never talked to me about his writing before, and it was thrilling that he was confiding in me about his fears.

  “Fuck the critics,” I said, feeling rather bold, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

  He could never ask me to do what I was about to do, but I knew that he needed me to do it.

  I swung my camera over my shoulder and said, in a voice not my own: I don’t want to go home yet, take me somewhere else. It was not a question. It was a command.

  The street lamps had been switched on, though it was not dark yet. The sun was beginning to set somewhere on the other side of the buildings. Dad looked at me oddly. I wasn’t going to wait for the hesitation, the hedging. I took his hand and walked a few paces ahead of him.

  Was this intentional? I don’t know. I don’t think I was conscious of it. I don’t think I was thinking: from behind, with my hair falling down my back and my new walk, borrowed much like my voice, I would transform into the spitting image of my mother.

  I led us downtown, past the East Village tenements. How had I known which building to go to? How had I known which was the one he’d lived in with her? Which rooftop had been the site of their first kiss? How had I known there would be paper jammed into the lock, so that it would open and we would be able to walk up the stairs, six flights, and then another, until we were standing on the tar paper roof under an orange sky?

  I just knew.

  A skeptic might say that he’d been guiding me, despite my walking ahead of him, that I was no different from a shopping cart or a baby carriage. That dogs can’t count, that I was responding subconsciously to his slight movements, to the tensing and twitching of his warm hand. But I don’t think this is true. I think, I really do, that my mother was sitting in her hospital room, melding her mind into mine. I was there, but someone else was there too, someone who knew exactly where to go and what to do.

  Up on the roof, Dad and I stood facing each other. I pushed his hair back with my wrist the way Mom would have. He stared at me with his cloudy, miserable eyes. The sun was a bloody orb hanging in the sky behind us.

  It’s possible that up until that point I’d been playing a part, but on the roof, I can say with certainty that what happened was not in my control. The words coming out of me were not my own.

  “Marianne,” Dad said, grabbing me by the wrist. And as he said it, the lunacy of the situation must have dawned on him because he shuddered. He dropped my hand and backed away from me as if I was some kind of black hole that was pulling him in. His own daughter. When I tried to put my arms around his neck, he pushed me, hard enough that I fell and skinned my knee.

  He left me on the roof, and I became myself again. I was too ashamed to move. I thought: he’s finally seen how sick and disgusting I am. This was Mom’s way of punishing me for choosing him over her.

  It was dark when I finally came down and found Dad sitting in a taxicab with the meter running. I got in and we rode home in silence. I was humiliated. I couldn’t look at him. I went straight to bed without saying a word. I lay there stiffly, fully clothed, thinking I’d ruined my one chance at happiness.

  And then, I heard him begin to type. There had never been a more beautiful sound than the typewriter that night, pounding through the wall into the morning.

  The next day, Dad was sweet and considerate and we acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, as if things were back to how they were before Edie left. He even took me to the Film Forum to see a Fellini film, and I put my head on his shoulder and everything was fine.

  AMANDA

  I’d bring Rose lunch at her dingy law firm in Queens. Her clients were court appointed—rapists, gang bangers, small-time drug dealers. The waiting room was crowded and smelled like cat piss. Rose’s default expression was sour and pinched, but when she’d see me her demeanor would change completely. Once her face relaxed, there was even a familial resemblance to her brother. She loved talking about Dennis. As a boy, she said that he’d been sickly and imaginative, an inveterate liar, who, despite being the youngest, would always tell the most engrossing bedtime stories. She invited me to her place on Long Island where, she told me, she had various Dennis-related artifacts. I took the train out to her large Victorian on the grounds of Montauk Academy, an elite boarding school where her husband was the headmaster. Rose served me coffee and took me into a room that had been arranged like a museum exhibit.

  There, on display, was Dennis’s very first book, which he’d written at the age of eight and illustrated himself. It was an adventure story about a man who becomes a ghost and then haunts the woman he loves—thematically in keeping with his later work. And next to it on the shelf, forgotten and gathering dust, the slim volume of his fairytale translations. The text was rare. I had only seen Prof. Jones’ photocopy. And, it had a sentimental dimension for me, since it was my entry point into Dennis’s life. I’d banked on it being an obscure enough choice of study to pique his interest and differentiate me from the throng of other graduate students who wanted to talk to him about Yesterday’s Bonfires.

  Rose saw that I was lingering with the book so she offered to lend it to me. She wanted my full attention as she complained about Dennis’s ex-wife. She had not approved of his marriage to Marianne and didn’t shy away from saying so.

  She showed me a photograph of Dennis and Marianne in New York, standing on the steps of a courthouse. It took me a moment to realize that it was their wedding, since it was such a casual snapshot—no white gown, no tuxedo. Marianne was wearing some sort of Indian hippie caftan, and he was wearing jeans and a tweed jacket. The only thing that indicated it was a wedding photo was the blurred bouquet of flowers Marianne was getting ready to throw toward the camera.

  I much prefer the solid, adult Dennis to that beardless creature, the expression on his face so bare, so disgustingly earnest, that I felt embarrassed for him. The way he was looking at Marianne in the photo made my hands shake and I spilled coffee down the front of my dress.

  My jealousy only increased, when on my train ride home, I discovered what must have been Marianne’s notes in the margins of the book. The handwriting was feminine—tight and neat:

&nb
sp; the witch & i lay by the river.

  i held her by her hair so she wouldn’t fly away.

  i whispered:

  “i have done everything you’ve asked. have i not done everything you’ve asked? why have you always,

  why have you always hated me?

  i have loved nothing & nobody but you.

  the smallest grain of sand that you’ve given me,

  i’ve carved into a castle.

  the smallest feather,

  i’ve turned into a flock of birds.

  the smallest glance,

  i’ve turned into a child.

  i have given you all of these things.”

  “but i did not want any of those things,” said the witch.

  The text continued on the next page:

  “what is it that you want?” i asked. “i’ll give you anything you want.”

  the witch turned into a termite & crawled into my ear. she chewed tunnels through my brain & down my throat, through my guts & into my cock. she chewed through every organ & blood vessel. the last thing she ate was my heart.

  “now we’re even,” she said in her tiny termite voice.

  Her assertion that she had hollowed out Dennis infuriated me. I would have given anything to be “held down” by him. And her choice to write these “poems” from Dennis’s point of view was irritating—meek and presumptuous at the same time.

  That evening, as I scrubbed the coffee stain from my dress in the motel sink, I considered abandoning my project. I’ve always been a jealous person, so prying into Dennis’s love life was unpleasant. However, I decided it was crucial to be fully informed and prepared because I knew that I would probably only have one more opportunity to be with him and I couldn’t blow it.

  EDITH (1997)

  I take Charlie on a night tour of my empty town.

  “It’s all on the way,” I lie as I direct him to Old Metairie Rd. I make him slow down as we pass my high school. I point out the adjacent field where people go to dry hump, watch his face as I say the words “dry hump,” but he just yawns. I make him drive past my favorite record store, which is closed, of course, the metal grate down, covering the windows. I make him drive to the abandoned house by Lake Pontchartrain, where you can jump right off the splintery dock into the water.

  “Want to go for a dip?” I ask. We can swim naked in the cold lake, have our first kiss in the moonlight while treading water.

  “No, Edie. I’m t-t-t-tired. Let’s go home.” He holds my hand as he shifts the truck into gear. It’s sweet the way he said “home,” not “your house.” He hasn’t realized yet that this is it. This is really our last night together. There’ll be no place for us out here. He won’t fit in with my life, with caring for Mom, and once he sees how I am with my friends he’ll realize that I’ve only been pretending to be someone interesting and grown up.

  He drives down Crescent Blvd. We’re getting closer and closer to the end of all this, whatever “this” is. We turn onto my street. It looks the same. The Lewises are watching TV in their upstairs bedroom. I can tell by the flickering blue light. The other houses are dark. This isn’t New Orleans. People turn into pumpkins at midnight.

  I don’t point my house out to him, let him drive past it. I can’t go back yet. I just can’t. I’m not ready. Dennis had been in such a hurry to get us out that who knows what kind of mess we left in there. A bowl of rotting fruit on the kitchen table, the bread knife on the floor where I dropped it next to a puddle of piss. No. I want to have one last night that’s my own. Is that horrible? Tomorrow, I’ll come home and deal with everything. But tonight I’m not going to be weighed down by that stuff.

  I make a production of looking for my key. “I’m sorry, I guess I forgot it,” I say and give him directions to a motel by the hospital.

  “Really? You d-don’t have a spare h-hidden?” He seems a little put out by these drives, these loops, but that’s all he says. I pretend I didn’t hear him, stick my head out the window and close my eyes, let the warm wind hit my face.

  LETTER FROM

  DENNIS LOMACK TO MARIANNE LOUISE MCLEAN

  [1985]

  Dear M—

  The keys are on the counter. Doreen says they’re releasing you tomorrow. I promised her I’d be gone by the time you came home. I don’t want to go but I see myself draining you of everything good and I don’t know if it will ever come back. Edie is so tiny and worried. Mae cries inconsolably because your misery is poisoning your milk. She literally chokes on your unhappiness. (What if it had been the girls who found you and not Doreen? Do you not think about these things? You don’t. Of course you don’t.)

  And all these dramatics because of what, exactly? That stupid letter?

  First of all: I loved you more than anything, anything. Second of all: I would have tried to stay away, probably, but, if you remember, it was you who came to me. YOU on MY doorstep, not the other way around. Standing there, wet. Walked all the way from Port Authority in the rain. And I still remember your hair matted to your neck and that stupid tiny suitcase. What can a person even fit into a suitcase that small? Thirdly: What did he know? That’s what I had thought. What did your father really know? You always magnified him into a seer-god-saint-prophet. But, really, what could he know about our happiness?

  I loved you, Marianne. I still do. You’ve accused me of loving not you, but rather, of loving how you make me feel. What an absurd distinction. And not even accurate. You make me feel terrible most of the time! But I can’t imagine feeling anything without you. I can’t imagine being away from you. But I don’t have to imagine it, I suppose, because I’m leaving. You’re right, I don’t know how to be with you without wanting to take everything, without wanting to kill you and devour you and then bring you back to life, and then write about you and do it all again. Isn’t that love?

  But so is this: You’re free of me. I promise you. Completely free. I will not call. I will not write. I won’t come near you. You say that is what it takes for you to be better, it’s done. I’m gone.

  I love you.

  Dennis

  MAE

  That spring, Dad was the only thing that existed for me. I wanted very much to please him. I wanted his attention constantly. If his attention was on Mom, and it always seemed to be, well then I would become Marianne. I would defy logic, physics, the time-space continuum, whatever it took to get and hold his attention.

  After the incident on the roof, he would let me sit with him as he worked. He would talk to me sometimes, deep in thought, and I would answer him as Mom. I would come and light his cigarette and sit on his lap until he began typing again, and then I’d disappear for him, existing only in the sound of the keys. When Dad wasn’t looking at me or thinking about me I felt as though I wasn’t there all the way.

  We hadn’t been leaving the apartment much, so when one afternoon he took me to a horse track in Yonkers, I knew it was an important outing. He never asked me to become Marianne, instead, as we sat on the bleachers, he removed a black velvet pouch from his pocket and handed it to me. Inside was a pair of gold-plated binoculars. I can still imagine their weight in my hands, and that feeling as I held them, of me shrinking and Mom expanding inside of me.

  Dad barely looked at the track. He was watching me watch the horses through the binoculars. I’ve never liked horses but this didn’t matter because I was watching the races through Mom’s eyes and not my own, and thus I was able to find the horses beautiful and the races thrilling. I could feel Mom inside of me, guiding me to a small dappled horse named Eagle’s Dream. Even his name seemed like something out of one of her poems. When, despite the 20:1 odds, Eagle’s Dream leapt ahead to the finish line, Dad and I jumped up and down, clutching each other, flushed with excitement. I won $200. It was such a thrill being with Dad out in public on this invisible stage, with all the cigar-smoking men and the ticket-selling women as unwitting extras in our performance. I think Dad saw the win as a sign, divine permission for what he was asking me to do.
We began to go on other outings like this.

  I knew when I was channeling Mom well because there’d be a tremor in his face or in his hands that would’ve been imperceptible to anybody else. He missed her terribly, and having her back, even in these fleeting moments, meant a lot to him and to his work. After these scenes we would come home and he would type through the evening and into the night and I would scrub my face and change into pajamas and exhausted, be returned into my role as “Mae.”

  I had an incredible talent for being Dad’s muse. It was easy to convince myself that as Mom’s understudy his feelings for her were meant for me.

  EDITH (1997)

  The motel I take Charlie to is called The Aquarius. Markus and I once saw our physics teacher drive up here with the school secretary. We’d joked about getting a room for ourselves, but of course we didn’t. I didn’t have a fake ID and Markus is a coward.

  The room Charlie gets us is on the second floor. It looks just like in the movies—a dark green bedspread, wicker furniture, a glass ashtray on top of the television set. I get undressed and climb under the covers. Charlie pretends he isn’t looking at me. He slowly unlaces his boots and stares at the painting hanging over the bed.

  “How’s the b-b-bed,” he asks me only once I’m fully under the sheet.

  “Fine.” I stretch out like a starfish. “Comfortable.” I bounce a little and the springs creek.

  “You tired?” I say.

  “Mhhm,” Charlie says. He angles his body away from me as he gets undressed down to his boxer shorts. His back is pale and muscular. I want to tell him that he looks like a marble statue. He does—so white and hairless—but I’m too shy to say it out loud.

  He clicks the light off with the switch on his bedside table. The room goes dark, but then my eyes adjust to the greenish light coming in from the parking lot—from the streetlamps and the motel’s neon sign. Charlie is lying on his back as far away from me as possible.

  He turns to face me, hand under his cheek.