Forget the Sleepless Shores

by Sonya Taaffe

  But he asked her what had happened, a little before midnight, after she had switched out the bedside lamp and not yet pulled down the shade against the sodium-starred dark of Cambridge, and the wind creaked against the panes for a long minute before she answered. “I dreamed last night I was dead. You buried me in the earth and I could taste it in my mouth, I could feel it in my hair. There were”—she swallowed between words and he kissed her temple, the nearest piece of her—“roots growing through my ribs and grasses locked my skull in place, so I couldn’t even turn my head to follow you, as you walked away. I could see up through the ground and my daughter had forgotten my name. I was turning into weeds and dirt and earthworms and you didn’t remember me.”

  He pushed the word seasick away from the skipped and sinking beat in his stomach. “I consider that highly unlikely.”

  “It was a bad dream; it didn’t have to be likely.” But he drew more reassurance from her irritable reply than from the warmth of their bed under grandmother-crocheted afghans and new down comforters, all folded back onto Annata’s side; turning toward him, she offered her face in charcoal smudges of shadow, collarbones and cheekbones and the shower-damp braid of her hair stippled with light. The sea and the land that her dreams always seemed to return to, or at least the ones she told him about, and no help in any of the dozen things he might have said. Promises, remembrance, the knife-twist of mistrust; ashes scattered to the withdrawing tide. “I remembered it when you were talking about Joseph and God, is all. And I thought…. It’s not profound, Alex. Just we love the people who are there to be loved. We forget the ones who aren’t. That’s all.”

  “Then you will always be there to be loved. Which means if you die first, I expect you to haunt me. Keep up those family traditions.” Her mouth moved faintly in a smile; idyllic. He murmured into her ear, the wet plumeria sweetness of her hair, “I’ll be disappointed if you don’t,” and kissed her wrist as it passed him, her fingers disembodied, self-possessed in the streetlight, reaching across him for the bottom edge of the shade.

  **

  In the end, they walked only far enough up the beach for him to buy her fried shrimp from the lobster shack that overlooked the next and gentler crescent of sand, anchored in the tasseled grasses and the gravelly road that ran back into the highway, the terrestrial world. Down the gull-white sand where parents basked on towels and children dug to China with plastic shovels and sunscreened hands, the wind blew back shouts like the last crashes of surf; the tall ship and the tanker had disappeared in the parchment haze at the horizon, poured off the edge of the world into the haunted stars below. Shamefacedly, he found himself glancing over to see if her hair had streaked lightly with the summer’s sun and salt, her arms tanned closer to the dust underfoot, each step away from the blue-skinned sea. She tucked her feet up underneath herself as they sat, ankles palely boned against the split, sun-hot wood. The shrimp she scraped the breading off, curiously, fastidiously, ignoring the plastic fork and knife in their packet of napkin, were pinker than her nails.

  Alex did not ask how they had found him, or even known that he was still alive; she asked first, and he knew too many wrong answers. I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle. He reads the writing on the water, and the sky. Kagan, Kagan— He said, “I had a letter. In this day and age, so I knew there had to be something going on…. It was postmarked Tauranga, with an old stamp of Queen Elizabeth, and it was written on what looked like photograph paper. The handwriting was hers. The last—the last time I saw you, it was a postcard from Housay. Very ordinary, a sea-coast with turf and whitewashed houses and clouds to hook your fingers into. The letter was in pencil. They felt like pieces out of time, anyway.” He had taken off his windbreaker as they walked and still felt the weight of the sun on his shoulders, slowing his steps, dragging at his hands, the college canvas backpack he had almost forgotten he was carrying: an old man in a seaside season. Thirty-three, thirty-four, he had lazed away late mornings and early nights casting their faces into the future, the fair grey that might settle onto Annata’s hair and the arroyo furrows of his smile, whose eyesight or chin or sense of humor their daughter might grow into, or skip in passing down to her children. He pushed one hand against his face, eyes closed behind the spread of his fingers. The sunlight beat on them like a heart. “I had been arrogant enough to assume that if she ever came back out of the sea, it would be to contact me. And instead I realized I couldn’t even begin to imagine what her life—your life—was like. If you summered in Tierra del Fuego and wintered off the Cape of Good Hope, if you followed shoals of herring into the Gulf of St. Lawrence or harvested seaweed around Hokkaido, if there was any one strait or shelf or abyssal wasteland or if everywhere was home. How much the land mattered; if it mattered at all. I had thought there were bindings. Seven years, ten years, the phase of the moon, the neap tide…. The postcard asked if I wanted to see you. The letter said you wanted to see me. So it was as simple as that after all.”

  Opening his eyes, he saw her briefly in afterimage shades of slate and overcast, oyster shells for her skin, her lips lead-blue, the storm-coming translucence of her gaze. She was touching her tongue curiously to the ice water in its cardboard cup, as though sweet were stranger than salt; an eel-slick flicker, not a cat’s rough-petaled lap, and he shivered: a ghost setting foot on his grave.

  “Bindings.” This time, she might have been trying to hurt him. She had missed all the usual chances, over the years. “You make it sound like a folktale.”

  As simply as someone else had written, he said, “Then it was.”

  She picked at another shrimp while he drank the last of his Coke, turned the bottle back and forth between his hands, shining with condensation, an ocean-trace of green: everything old become trendy again, hipster glasses and shirtwaist dresses and the whisper and wail of music he had mostly ignored its first time around in favor of John Fahey and Carl Orff; the crosscurrents of anachronism. Things that floated up out of millions of unremarked years, or drifted down into silt-fall and silence. He had stopped hearing the tourists and locals that shifted around them like dunes rearranging under the constant wind, summer flotsam in cutoffs and swimsuits and hiking sneakers; their conversations faded back in with the color of his daughter’s eyes. He had an uncharitable impulse to interrupt her as she dipped a fingertip into the tartar sauce, rubbed it off against the weathered tabletop. As though she were a sounding wire, a labyrinth thread at whose other end his lost and undrowned wife might startle to remember he was still holding on, but the line ran both ways. “You might not have wanted to see me,” she was saying, striking out again at nothing he had asked her, so ordinarily sixteen years old that Alex wanted to smack something, the salt-corroded wood, his own thoughtless flesh; how many times she, too, might have rehearsed this meeting. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know if you had anyone else.”

  There was a gull on the far side of the bench, white-headed and battleship grey, as neat as a painted model, large enough for even a grown girl to catch ungainly in her arms; its beak was dotted redly as a buoy, and he could not remember when it had landed there. “Any other daughters?”

  “You could have remarried.”

  “No. I couldn’t have.” He had gotten nothing off his chest, the anchor-weight that now and then and always sank his dreams down, but the gentleness in his voice surprised him. Staring down into the glass eye of the Coke bottle, “I think your mother….” but his daughter and the gull were as unblinking and Alex did not want to know what she would have heard: the breaking and diminishing articles in City and Region, the soundbites on Channel 5, the controversy and contrapasso of the rising playwright whose actress wife had taken their three-year-old daughter and walked into the winter-grey waves of Buzzards Bay. No folktale, but one of his own neoclassical heroines reincarnated in the patient questioning of policemen and phone calls fielded by lawyers, beautiful, god-mad, dying in her element, the stichomythia he could have framed for Ino and Medea. Or the night he drank a
ll the brandy they had been saving against Christmas and plum puddings, as old-fashioned and English as no one in their family, and the gust and slither of sleet against the windows still sounded like the sea, crashing endlessly in the dark, filling his mouth and eyes and he could not drown. Not since yesterday morning. She was dropping Adrian off at her play group. Watertown. No. No one. I’d have said if anyone called. I was still at the Lyric, I got a ride home. Steve. Arkady. Spelled with a ph. I don’t know, Andy or Victorine. They were working out some light cues. I don’t know. I don’t know, gasping into his clenched fists in the familiar grassblade light, the unmade sheets that smelled of her. There were cassettes and album covers scattered on the hardwood at his feet and before someone had finished his name, Mr. Marcinko, he screamed so starkly that his voice was no one’s he knew, She left me, do you understand? She thought she belonged to the sea. She thought they belonged. Oh, God, I thought— and everything he could not say to the detectives or the reporters, the friends and colleagues who slept in shifts on his floor and kept his appointments and made him remember to eat, he had choked up into the sink along with an empty stomach’s brandy and tears. I can only sing this song to one who understands it. But she had already vanished from the story.

  Across the table, his daughter bit at her thumbnail with the dry click of pebbles, working out a flamingo-pink fragment of shrimp shell. The seagull had flapped away unnoticed, if it had not melted into the heat-honeyed air; the family at the next table had gone. Alex’s sigh caught halfway through, closer to a laugh than any sound he had made all day: the mild lift of her brows, querying, was neither of her parents. Gently, she said, “I think my mother would have understood.”

  Alex nodded, the moment it took him to remember the sentence he had begun, she had changed in completing. “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” he said. The slowly westering sky at her back, the sea-ribbed sand at his, “Not to me.” Not so simply, he rose to throw out the trash of their meal, red-and-white checkered clam boxes and a half-full cup of water, the Coke bottle that chinked into the recycling like cheap treasure, paste gems, gilt and costume glass.

  **

  And it was not their last fight, the night after they struck the sets for The Tempest and he had come faithfully to see her as Caliban, applauding through the chill that crawled down his arms and farther beneath his skin with each familiar line. The wills above be done; but I would fain die a dry death. ’Tis as impossible that he’s undrown’d, As he that sleeps here swims. Of his bones are coral made. A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell, and the rest of the cast might have been phantoms, as delicately worked and insubstantial as spotlights through the stained-glass sets, Ariel’s shadowplay of prisms and rattan. Her clay-smeared body was handfuls of tidal flats, her hair plastered to eelgrass; her handprints shone dully, drying on the black boards of the stage. Crouched where the footlights made a tideline of mirrors, the monster muttered, You taught me language, and my profit on ’t Is, I know how to curse, and Alex creased back the pages of his program until the staples were tearing out of the glossy paper, hearing underneath her sullen growl another voice like a throatful of wet sand and slapping waves: the isle is full of noises. He could not laugh at the drunken golem, the zanni who swore they had fallen from the moon; the young lovers at their chess-game and the magician who watched from the wings, arms folded, in his puppeteer’s black. Therefore my son i’ th’ ooze is bedded; and I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded, And with him there lie mudded. Hands clasped with Colin Liem for the curtain call, unmasked of their sorcerous earth and air, Annata bowed and her hair swung like bell-ropes, tolling weeds. Alex had brought her orchids wrapped in butcher’s paper, leaves and hooded petals the same serpent’s-head green; he wished now that they had been any other color, even blue as a witch’s eyes, but she accepted them from him with a kiss on the mouth, hard and unexpected and he tasted greasepaint and salt: more astringent than crying, and they drove home silently in the late autumn rain.

  “You didn’t like it.” Coming out of the bathroom after Alex had seen the babysitter safely home, the Arkadys’ eldest daughter who in eighth grade wore safety pins for earrings and anarchy T-shirts with the sleeves scissored off and was teaching Adrian counting rhymes like five for fingers and fire in a fennel-stalk—seven for the sailors of the summer stars, a grunge fledgling who had giggled like a much younger girl when Alex asked her permission to steal a line—with her hair still in vivid, rusty coils, her imitation kimono of a bathrobe; her face unreadable and paler than her hands, as though she had scrubbed off more than Caliban with Dial soap and a washcloth. With no self-satisfaction at all, she repeated, “I didn’t think you would.”

  “You were very good.” Even to himself, he sounded like the husband in a nineteenth-century social drama, automatic and oblivious; he shuffled both hands through his rain-lank hair, less fiery than Annata’s and overdue for cutting. “Annata, I’m sorry. It’s not my favorite Shakespeare,” though he could not remember which one he had claimed to prefer when she was preparing for her audition, Much Ado About Nothing or Measure for Measure, something with no seasons or elementals underneath its prickly lovers and plots within plots. He slung his scarf over the seat of the nearest chair, pried off his shoes and tossed them past the closet’s sliding door. “Shakespeare isn’t even my favorite playwright. I’m a complete poseur.”

  Rain glittered on the windows, quicksilver and a razor tattoo. In the half-light through the doorway, Annata wrapped her arms abruptly in mock silk and sat down on the end of the bed. “Sophomore year at Harvard, you wrote a forty-five-page paper on A Winter’s Tale when all you had to do was ten to fifteen pages about its classical allusions and names. It’s your second most famous all-nighter story, after the one that involves being thrown out of the Tasty at a quarter to four.” So much more tiredly than the three words warranted, “It’s not Shakespeare.”

  “So it has to be you? Maybe I don’t like Bradley’s direction, all those gamelans and glass balls. Maybe I’m getting tired of viscera and porcelain masks. He wants all his actors to show off the undersides of their skins—”

  “Is that what this is about?” Her voice never rose with anger; darkened, tuned itself to strong emotion like the lowest string of a viol and he felt thin and flinty against her, a shattered handful of leaves. “This is part of me, Alex. It’s not going away just because you always wanted me to be Dianthus.”

  “I did not,” but she spoke as if he had never interrupted her, “Rooted. Beautiful. Faithful. Static. Everyone turns into a flower

  in the kind of story that finishes this way

  The story where you love a goddess

  and she bleeds you to death on the tusks of a boar

  the story where you love a god

  and he parches you to petals on a deserted beach

  and you turn your face back and forth across the day

  following the sun

  the sun’s reflection in the water

  the burning reflection of your heart—”

  She stopped, as if only then she had heard him. Her flowering face, her skylit brain: the first lines he had ever written just to hear his wife say them, and if there had been a copy of Full Stop within reach, he would have torn it in half. “Annata, give me a break! I never wanted you to be her. I wrote her. Where do you get this from?”

  “You buried me in the dirt.”

  “That was a dream!” His shirt pulled out, half-unbuttoned and a black sock still in one hand, he stood up so violently that he almost stepped into the dresser; he hissed rather than yelled, because it was past two in the morning and the neighbors had already complained more than once about Annata’s music, and if he started shouting, he might not be able to stop, “Can’t you tell the difference anymore?”

  The sea in her blood and the keys to the city and he might never have known from the way the night air drifted down between them. Atoms frayed one apart from the other; if he had ever lo
osened the belt of her robe, slipped peonies and Whistler-blue peacocks from her shoulders and kissed the heavy pigeon-softness of her breasts, now she looked at him as pitiless and alien as the ocean he did not want to hear about. But he did not believe in gods that answered prayers, and Annata said, “My grandfather thought his name was William Leonard until he was eighteen. They kept him away from the sea and my mother did the same to me. I never even heard the story from her; I had to find out from a drunk great-uncle at my cousin’s wedding and all he wanted to talk about was the scandal. I’m not doing that to a child of mine.”