The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

“I’m sorry we couldn’t get separate beds,” he whispers.

  I shrug. I’m not.

  “Are you all right?” he whispers. He doesn’t stutter when he whispers.

  I shrug again. He reaches his hand out to me but then puts it back down. “Goodnight,” he says.

  I’m not ready for “goodnight.” I watch him shift and close his eyes and my heart starts racing. This can’t be it. I stand up on the bed, take a couple wobbly steps in his direction so my legs are towering over his head. I inspect the painting he’d been looking at earlier, run my fingers over the bumpy surface of the canvas. Even in the dark I can tell that it’s a sailboat on an ocean. At home, in Mom’s room, we have a big oceanscape that my grandfather painted. It’s funny to think that I hadn’t seen the real ocean until I visited Dennis.

  I glance down at Charlie’s face. Is he asleep? No, but his eyes are closed. I poke his shoulder with my big toe.

  “What?” he whispers. I poke him again. “What?” He smiles, but keeps his eyes closed, wraps his hand around my foot.

  “Uh… Have you ever been sailing?” I ask. I can’t think of anything else, and I don’t want him to go to sleep. He doesn’t let go of my foot. He’s stroking the bottom of it with his thumb. I hold my breath and hope that he won’t stop.

  “Mmhm,” he finally says, “I have.” And then when I can’t think of anything else to say, he says: “We should get some sleep.”

  Disappointment swells in my throat. Does he really mean it? I keep standing there in the dark. I won’t move until he touches me again. 1…2…3…4…5…6. He shifts and looks up. The whites of his eyes glint like a knife. I put my foot on his neck, feel his pulse against my arch. Is it fast? Will he touch me? I feel him swallow. We’re both very still, the feeling between us that has been building over the long car ride… Or am I just imagining this? No. He wraps his hand around my ankle and slides it up my leg.

  A weird croak comes out of me, not mine exactly. Maybe I should be embarrassed but I’m not. His hand stops mid-thigh, I step harder onto his throat. He licks his lips. Reach your hand farther, I want to say, but he stays very still, then suddenly he arches his back and grabs my hips, pulling me down onto his face. He kisses me through my underwear. He kisses hard, with his teeth, and sucks through the fabric. He slips his hand under the elastic, puts a finger inside of me. I lean my forehead against the wicker headboard. It feels so good what he’s doing, hot breath between my legs, a finger swirling in a circle, wider and wider. Nobody’s ever gone down on me before, not for real, not like this.

  Charlie pushes me onto the bed and gets on top. His mouth, a minty ashtray and also something else. Me? It makes me feel like a cannibal, knowing what I taste like.

  “Are you sure—” Charlie starts to say.

  “Yes,” I interrupt and jam my tongue in his mouth before he has a chance to change his mind. I reach down and wrap my hand around his dick. It surprises me. From the way it felt against my leg I hadn’t expected it to be so big. Thick and heavy. Markus was always kind of half-mast wobbly. This thing is a cudgel. I squeeze it and watch his face. He closes his eyes, but not all the way, there’s a flutter of white eyeball. It feels powerful, holding him there, like he’s on a leash. So this is what it’s like with a man. I remember that part in Dennis’s book, the part Mae read to me.

  His eyes go wide. “Not so hard,” he says. No trace of the stutter. His face looks different in the dark. I don’t know him at all. It’s a stranger who’s pulling off my soggy underwear. Charlie is locked in the bathroom and this is his double, nudging the tip of his dick against me, pushing it in. He gasps, transformed again, another unfamiliar mask, eyes rolled back, jaw clenched. I feel myself stretching and his dick creeping deeper into me, inch by inch. It’s impaling me, I think, as it finally hits against something. A lung? This is how I’d like to die, death by dick, mind totally blank. He puts his hands over my breasts. His hands are rough, like gloves. I don’t like this at all, but as I try to move them, he pinches my nipples harder than I thought would feel good. The pain shoots through me and transforms into something else. Why has nobody done this to me before? I hear a moan. He pulls out a little.

  “No, don’t take it away,” I try to say but my mouth trembles in a silent stutter. Is this an orgasm? Pinpricks in my face, like it’s fallen asleep. I try to catch my breath but he stuffs his fingers in my mouth, pushes them towards my throat, and thrusts. Our bones slam. And again. I’m choking and contracting. Nothing exists.

  He takes his hand out of my mouth, wipes the strands of saliva on his chest, wipes my stomach with the corner of the sheet. I can’t move. I’m limp, but he’s efficient, like he’s clearing the table. Feeling comes back to my face slowly. He gets up to get the ashtray and his cigarettes from the pocket of his pants, lies back next to me, and pulls me into his chest. My cheek is resting against my own spit. I hear the click of the lighter, the inhale.

  “Happiness is like a bull,” he says as he exhales.

  I look up at him, and he blows the smoke out the side of his mouth.

  “You’re happy?” I ask.

  “Yes.” He kisses the top of my head.

  I want to ask him if that’s why he’s not stuttering, but I don’t really want to bring it up. Maybe I’ve cured him. Or maybe he’s been faking the whole time. This bunny on crutches is actually a wolf.

  “What?”

  “What?”

  “You were smiling.”

  I nod. I feel light, like if not for his arm, I could float up, up, up.

  He stubs the cigarette out and sets the ashtray on the bedside table. I look at his hand, the same hand that had just been in my mouth, and the muscles inside of me tremble. The aftershock.

  “Goodnight,” he says. He closes his eyes and slides down into his pillow.

  I might as well tell him now about my mother, while he’s too tired to ask me questions.

  “St. Vincent’s is a mental hospital,” I say quietly, in case he’s already asleep.

  He doesn’t respond. A light whistle in his breath.

  There are 127 ceiling tiles. Seven of them are stained. I count again, 129. I start to count a third time but lose interest. I’m not going to be able to fall asleep.

  I get up and put on his flannel shirt, stand by the window. The street is empty and the air is wet. The fog is making a halo of green light over the neon sign. I think if I squint, I can see the street the hospital is on. What if Mom is different when I see her tomorrow? What if she has become a stranger? That’s stupid. She will never be a stranger. She will be so happy to see me. So relieved. There are cigarette holes in the hem of the curtain. Someone before must have been standing here, just like me, looking out this window.

  “I know,” I hear Charlie say. It takes me a moment to realize he is saying that he knows about St. Vincent’s. I don’t know if he is awake or asleep, but he sits up and reaches for me and so I get back into bed and lie for a long time in the pocket of warmth he created under the sheet. I finally fall asleep as it’s starting to get light out.

  CHARLIE

  I often feel betrayed by my body because of my stutter but when I was with Edie I felt in control. The sensation of being choked by my own tongue would disappear. I felt powerful being able to give her what she needed.

  Women my own age usually fuss over me like I’m their sick poodle. That kind of thing drives me crazy. All my resentment gets funneled into fucking them, which is what they secretly want, I think, to be fucked like that because they think it’s “passionate.” But it’s not. It’s just rough. Passion is what Edie and I had.

  The morning after our first night together, I waited for her at the diner down the street while she went to visit her mother. I ordered a breakfast so big that it took the waitress several trips to bring it all to my table. I was in a very good mood. There was a couple sitting at a nearby booth. Nurses or doctors, I don’t know, clearly just off a shift. They were still in their scrubs, and they looked tired, but also happy.
They were feeding each other pie, and I thought, that could be Edie and me one day. Why not?

  I still wonder why not, sometimes, though of course I know the answer to this question. For me, Edie will forever exist as she was at 16, feet on the dashboard of that truck, the wind whipping through her hair.

  ROSE

  Denny kept me waiting in front of the Guggenheim for almost an hour. We’d made plans to see the Balthus exhibit and he was usually very punctual. I tried not to worry at first, maybe he took the train and it got stuck underground, it’s not uncommon. But when he showed up looking as he did, disheveled and unkempt, with only one of his daughters in tow, I knew something was wrong.

  Where was Edie? What happened? I was on him immediately. He told me very calmly that she’d left.

  Left where? It seemed incongruous that he could be so calm. Left when?

  He told me that she wanted to go back to Louisiana, so she left.

  And you just let her go?

  Denny bristled at this. He said it would have been hypocritical for him to try to stop her. Most of the people on the Freedom Rides weren’t much older than she, and when he was her age he’d run off to Montreal for a while.

  His attitude struck me as cruel. I rarely fight with Denny but I couldn’t look at him then. I got ahead of them in the exhibit and cried for a while in front of a painting of a young girl playing with a cat. Denny’s job was to protect his daughters! Childhood is precious and there are no do-overs. Denny had missed out on the girls’ childhoods and by extension I had too. I could never get that back. Nor could I get back the chance to have my own children.

  Eventually I saw Denny and Mae coming up the ramp—the Guggenheim is designed in such a way that there aren’t nooks or crannies to hide in, only that one long circling ramp. I had to regain my composure and quickly, because I’d be no use to anyone if I was falling apart. I’ve always been the one who did the things that needed to be done: I took care of Mother when she was dying; I took care of Denny after his divorce. I needed to be someone Denny and his daughters could rely on.

  Once Denny and Mae joined me I tried to act like everything was normal, but I was disturbed by how much Mae looked like the girls in the paintings. Even her clothes—knee-high socks and some sort of plaid jumper—they were the kind of thing normal girls her age wouldn’t have been caught dead in.

  When I asked her what she thought of the artwork, she hesitated and then recited an answer that was clearly parroting whatever opinion Denny had just expressed to her. She was holding onto Denny’s hand with both of hers like she was a little kid. It seemed regressive. They were in their own world, talking only to each other as I trailed after them through the remainder of the exhibit.

  Afterward, we got lunch at the museum café. I avoided mentioning Edie again because I didn’t want to fight, but I had trouble thinking of other things to say. I told him about Amanda, what a pleasant time I’d been having with her, and he jumped down my throat, told me not to meddle in his affairs. I told him Marianne must’ve really done a number on him if he thought that if a woman was interested in him there had to be something wrong with her.

  After this, most of the meal went by in silence. Mae didn’t let go of his hand even as they ate. She watched him like he was the only thing in the room. Finally, he apologized for snapping at me. He explained that he had started writing again and that the publisher was breathing down his neck. It had been so long since Denny had written anything that I’d forgotten how crazy he got when he was in the throes of his creative process.

  I offered to have Mae come stay with us on Long Island while he wrote to free him up from any distractions. When I said this, Mae shrank from me as though I was offering to throw acid on her face.

  “No, no,” he told her reassuringly. “I couldn’t. I need her. She’s helping me.”

  There was something in their behavior that I found disturbing even at the time, but I told myself that I’m not a parent, that I don’t really know what it’s like to reunite with a long-lost child. I thought that if I could arrange for Amanda to be there, this might be enough. She had seemed so competent and down to earth, and I hoped that she would be able to keep things from going off the rails. I should have insisted on taking Mae. Of course I blame myself for not doing that.

  LETTER FROM

  MARIANNE LOUISE MCLEAN TO DENNIS LOMACK

  Aug 8, 1968

  Dear Mr. Dennis,

  I just came home from the lake. I’ve been practicing my backstroke the way you taught me. Remember when you showed me how to float? How did you hold me up with just two fingers—under the skull? The water was so warm that day it felt like I was the lake. I was hoping you would kiss me and then you could have become the lake too…

  Do you know that there is a sea called the Dead Sea where the water is denser because it’s full of salt, so everybody floats? Sometimes the liquids inside of me feel denser and other times like vapor. When I get your letters for instance… vapor! vapor! vapor!

  I read the book you sent. I liked it. The poor cockroach man. I don’t think the world is so cruel. Anyway, must go help my father stretch some canvases.

  Yours, forever and ever, until the cows come home (assuming that they never do.) m

  EDITH (1997)

  The nurse said Mom was in a session—with a psychiatrist, I’m assuming, but she didn’t specify. There’s a man waiting too. I guess we’re the only ones because it’s a weekday morning. The man has a gray beard over a fat red face and he looks very sad. He’s reading a magazine with a photograph of a cake on the cover. The magazines are all things I’ve never heard of: Cancer Today, Fat Free Digest, Cat Lovers. They’re warped with pages stuck together, like someone spilled water on them. Is this a sign of the kind of place this is—they can’t even get fresh magazines? Or maybe it just means the hospital is so efficient they don’t usually keep visitors waiting? How am I supposed to believe that a place with a soggy cat magazine in the waiting room could be the kind of place where Mom will get better?

  I come up to the nurse’s desk. She scratches her shiny forehead with a pencil. I can see the corner of the crossword she’s working on. “Just a few more minutes,” she says. I don’t want to sit back down, so I pace.

  I’ll have to figure out what paperwork I need to file in order to get her out of here. Doreen probably knows. Then I’ll go to the house and make sure it’s in order, ready for her. What does that mean? Lock up the steak knives? Watch her all the time. And what about school? I’ll start in the fall. By then everything will be back to normal. Maybe Charlie can help. No, that’s crazy. I’m sure he’ll want to leave soon. This was just a ride. Could that really be it? It wasn’t complicated the way it always felt with Markus, like everything was a negotiation, tit-for-tat with a measuring cup. I feel like he reached into my mouth and dislodged some sad, heavy stone. How is it possible for someone to make you feel that way and not really know you? It isn’t. So he must know me. I want him to do it again, to rip me out of my body…

  Distant screaming, muffled but terrifying. The nurse looks up from her crossword puzzle, and as though this was the cue, she says:

  “Ms. McLean is ready to see you now. Fifth floor.”

  She points me down a hall to the elevator. I shouldn’t be thinking about Charlie right now. What is wrong with me. The elevator stops on the second floor. There is the source: an old woman. She is screaming and her face looks like a hole. She’s being restrained but two orderlies. They’re not gentle. Her shirt is riding up and her belly is covered in scars. The smell is terrible. Like shit but worse. Hell. Literally, hell. I feel woozy. The spins. A male doctor steps into the elevator and the doors close behind him.

  “You all right?” the doctor says and steadies me by the elbow.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine.” I straighten up. I need to stop being stupid, how embarrassing. I don’t look at him and he lets go.

  When the doors open on the fifth floor, I’m scared that I’ll step out into a simila
r scene, but it’s quiet. The smell is regular, like a hospital, like cleaning products. A nurse is by the elevator banks, waiting for me.

  “You must be Ms. McLean’s daughter!”

  I follow her down the linoleum hallway. Her ponytail bounces with each step. She can’t possibly be one of the mean ones Mom wrote about, the ones who tortured her with cold baths.

  The nurse stops suddenly before turning down a new hallway and says: “I’ll come fetch you in 10 minutes. Dr. Gordon says that’s as much as she’s allowed right now.” I start to protest but she interrupts me. “Also, don’t be alarmed, we’re still adjusting her medication.” Alarmed how? Her shaking hands in the letters. What else? What else have they done to her?

  The nurse leads me to an open door at the end of the hallway. “Your visitor is here, Ms. McLean,” she says in a voice that’s too loud, the way you’d talk to someone who’s stupid and deaf. It makes me want to rip that ponytail right off her bitch head. I shove past her into the room.

  There, sitting on the edge of a metal bed, is Mom. She’s wearing the flowery pajamas I sent her and a weird silk scarf. They’ve cut her hair short, which is enough to make me tear up. That type of bowl cut you only see on retarded people.

  “I’ll be back,” the nurse says.

  It takes a moment for Mom’s eyes to find mine. She’s trembling. She reaches her arms out towards me.

  I feel a prickly fear that goes away as soon as I even recognize it, and it’s replaced with shame. I hug her. Hard. Harder to make up for not completely wanting to. Her hair was recently washed and it smells like fabric softener or a baby blanket. It’s a sweet smell that reeks of humiliation. I breathe through my mouth.

  “Nice scarf.” I force a smile and finger the silk fabric. It slips slightly and I see why she’s wearing it. The rope burns on her neck. They must have gotten infected, because they look scaly and red and glisten with some sort of cream. She reaches for her scarf self-consciously and won’t look at me.

  I start to talk, to talk like everything is normal, to fill the space between us with my words. I tell her that I’ve missed her, of course. And that I am so glad to see her. That I drove through West Virginia and saw some mountains. And I tell her about New York. But you know, postcard stuff. As soon as I say anything the least bit critical I can sense that I’m losing her, that her mind is drifting. So, I don’t complain. I don’t talk about Dennis. I just talk about museums and parks. She nods and nods, in this palsied way.