The air was windless, but out beyond the breakers the swells were long and deep, and the boat rose and fell like a yellow balloon.
“There’s a storm somewhere,” Mrs. Wakefield said, as if to herself. “Perhaps a thousand miles away, but still we feel it in the swells; the whole sea is disturbed.”
The rubber bottom of the boat was thin and pliable. It moved as the sea moved, it breathed under the soles of her bare feet. She stood up, and it was like walking on the water; she felt the storm a thousand miles away with the soles of her feet.
“Sit down,” Mark said.
His voice startled her. In the prow of the boat with her back to him, she had almost forgotten he was there.
“Sorry,” she said.
“If you’re tired of paddling I’ll put out the sea-anchor.”
“That would be nice.”
She sat down facing him, with the paddle across her knees.
He threw out the funnel-shaped piece of canvas to keep the boat from drifting, and in a few minutes the rope tautened and pointed the prow shoreward.
Twenty yards away, on a clump of kelp, a pelican sat, curious and unafraid, eyeing the fat yellow monster with two heads and four arms. The pelican meditated, moving his beak like an aged man chewing his gums. The sea monster did not alarm or surprise him. He was an old bird and knew his enemies.
She would have liked to take the pelican and make it her own, but she knew he was more powerful than she was; and so she shouted at him and waved the paddle to frighten him away.
“Leave him,” Mark said. “Pretend he’s an albatross.”
Her smile was faint, fleeting. “You’re not ancient enough to be the mariner.” But she put the paddle down again, and the old bird sat ruminating, until the yellow monster drifted slowly away, its four arms quiet.
She couldn’t own the pelican, but the storm was hers alone. Sliding under her feet from a thousand miles away, the storm belonged to her; she owned the weather. It was as if no one knew about the storm, or felt it, except herself and Mark, whom she had told. Just the two of them, sharing a secret. . . .
“Your—wife is very sweet,” she said, looking a little self-conscious. “It’s kind of her to put up with me like this.”
“No trouble at all.”
“And Jessie—I’d almost forgotten there were children like—like that.” She pressed her hand against her forehead. “Really, I think I’m getting a little—seasick.”
“We can go back.”
“No, not yet. I’ll get over it.”
“Breathe as deeply as you can.”
“I’ll try.”
She breathed deeply, through her mouth, and her full mature breasts rose and fell. He turned his eyes away, a little disturbed and a little angry at himself, too, as if he’d been caught staring down the front of a blouse.
“Feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you. I’d hate to turn back now. I love it out here.” Her arm drifted in the water like a pale floating eel. “John and I used to row out here sometimes and dive for lobsters. But Carmelita would never cook them, she thinks they’re poisonous unless they come from a fish market or out of a can. So we cooked them ourselves while Carmelita stood around expecting us to drop dead.”
“She’s a little eccentric,” Mark said.
“Oh, no. She merely has convictions.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
Mrs. Wakefield smiled. “She’s a happy woman, though. She has built her own life and she needs no expansion. Not another brick is necessary. Perhaps some day some of it will fall away, like mine, and repairs will have to be done. But meanwhile—meanwhile, she is a happy woman.”
“I can’t see life as a series of man-made structures. It’s fluid.”
“No. Rigid and mechanical. Once I thought different, but that was a long time ago. Some of us,” she said, “can build like Carmelita. But the rest are like the hermit crabs you see along the shore. They live in one borrowed shell after another.”
“And where do you live?”
She turned her eyes toward the cliff. “That’s my house up there,” she said somberly.
“You built it?”
“John and I together.”
“Why? Why there, I mean?”
The question slid off her like oil. “Why anywhere, for that matter? The water’s cold out here. Colder than the surf. Are you going in?”
“I’m too comfortable.”
“I think I’ll try it for a little while.”
She pulled the black rubber swim fins over her feet and strapped the face glass around her head. It covered her nose and eyes.
“You look terrible in that get-up,” Mark said.
“I know, but I don’t care. There’s no one to see.”
“How about me?”
“You don’t have to look.”
“I won’t.”
But he watched her as she slid over the side of the boat into the water. She surface-dived, her fins flicking like a shark’s tail. To Mark it seemed a reverse step in evolution, the return of the amphibians to the sea.
When she came back to the surface, he said, “Cold?”
“Paralyzing.”
“What do you see?”
“Nothing much, so far.”
She submerged again and came up a minute later on the other side of the boat with a sprig of kelp caught in the strap of her bathing suit.
She stayed in the water for a long time, not swimming on the surface, but continually diving under and coming up for air, as if she was searching for something she had lost.
When she finally climbed back into the boat her lips were blue and her skin rough with cold.
“Did you find it?” he asked.
She pulled off the face glass and rubbed her eyes before she answered: “I wasn’t looking for anything.”
Briny tears dropped down her face leaving trails of salt.
“What would I be looking for?” she said. “Anyway, the sea’s too murky today. I couldn’t see anything.”
“Here, you’d better put on my sweater.”
“I’ll get it wet.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She put his old grey sweater around her shoulders. The color made her look sallow and emphasized the pallor of her full mouth. She didn’t seem to care much about her appearance, and it irked Mark a little that she didn’t put on some lipstick or comb her hair or indicate, in any of a hundred female ways, that he was a man. The evening before she had been almost coquettish in her eagerness to please. He wondered what had caused the change.
In the west a single cloud rode the sky.
“I hope the storm comes our way,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “We’ve had three dry years in a row now. We couldn’t afford to waste any water irrigating, so we kept some of the plants alive by siphoning out the bathwater and the rinse water from the washing Carmelita did. But it was never enough. Only a few things survived. The geraniums—they never give up—and the weeds, of course.”
She hesitated, pulling the sweater closer around her. “You asked me a while ago why we wanted to build the house here. There were many reasons, but I think the chief one was the trees. They aren’t all wild trees, you know. Many of them were planted there years and years ago by the man who owned the land. It’s funny, he had that valuable stretch of coastline, yet he lived all by himself in a shed. The shed is still there. Whenever I look at it I think of the old man living there watching his trees grow, and hoping, as we kept hoping, for a storm to pass this way.”
The cloud divided, cut in two by a wind they couldn’t feel.
“It’s incongruous, isn’t it? To have things die for lack of water when the sea is right beside us.”
He said, so abruptly that her eyes widened in surprise, “Where do you come from?”
“A place you never heard of. It’s just a small town in Nebraska.”
“Has it got a name?”
“Of course.”
“Why not name it then? You don’t have to be cagey. Nobody’s going to Nebraska to check up on your past.”
“It’s very difficult to acquire a past,” she said blandly, “in Broken Bow, Nebraska.”
“Broken Bow, Nebraska.”
“Population, three thousand. On the Burlington line about two hundred miles from Thedford. The home of . . .”
“I get it.”
“. . . the home of Beeman’s Sandwich Bags. I’m thirty-six. I was married eleven years, four months, and three days ago. Before that I taught school in Omaha, which is also in Nebraska, on the Missouri River, population a quarter of a million. The principal industries . . .”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Satisfied?”
“Partly.”
“You wouldn’t like any more straight answers to straight questions?”
“I might. It’s a long way out here from Broken Bow, population three thousand, the home of Beeman’s Sandwich Bags. What happened along the road?”
She sat in silence for a minute, rubbing the flecks of salt off her forearm.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” Mark said in apology. “Maybe that’s how it sounded, but I was actually trying to be funny.”
“We’d better start back now.”
“All right.”
“As for what happened along the road, I can’t tell you. I don’t like revisiting places. I’m not a romantic.”
“You’re revisiting now.”
“Only because I have to.”
It was strange to Mark that she repudiated the one word that he thought described her. She was a romantic. The rhythm of her voice echoed with lost music, vanished loves and an obbligato of death.
He pulled in the sea anchor and flung it on the bottom of the boat.
He said, “Just what kind of a spot are you in?”
“Trouble, you mean? None. None at all.”
“Then what are you covering up?”
“What I choose to.”
Unanchored and unguided, the boat was tossing like a cork. Mrs. Wakefield turned around on the seat and picked up the paddle again.
“What side do you want me to paddle on?”
“Whatever you like.”
“The left, then.”
“Your lie about the watch didn’t fool anyone except Jessie,” Mark said. “To Jessie anything is possible—you can find a ton of ambergris in the middle of Central Park or a gold watch growing on the side of a cliff.”
“The watch belonged to my husband,” she said. “I don’t know exactly how it got on the cliff.”
“You told Jessie she could keep it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Children like watches. Anyway, I don’t believe in mementoes. They’re too painful. I know that the past is dead,” she said grimly. “I don’t have to keep reminding myself.”
“I’m very glad you’re not in any kind of trouble.”
She shook her head, rejecting the least sign of sympathy. It was the one thing in the world that she knew could break her down; especially sympathy from a man like Mark whose very maleness, powerful and a little rough, made her realize her vulnerability.
“Keep your damned sympathy to yourself.”
“As you wish.”
A gull circled the boat, squawking. He was young and bold and could outfly the wind.
Mark said, impersonally, “I was hoping we’d catch sight of a sea lion. I heard one last night. It sounded pretty close, though Mr. Roma said there aren’t any around here.”
“He’s mistaken. I heard it, too.”
“It’s a hell of a noise.”
“Yes, isn’t it? Almost like a woman crying,” she added. “Did you ever see a dugong?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Sea cows, they’re sometimes called. I saw one once, long ago. We were on our honeymoon, John and I, on a cruise. It was at sunrise and the ship was passing an atoll in the South Pacific. We saw the dugong from our porthole. She was sitting on a rock nursing her child. It was terrible, she was so huge and incredibly ugly, yet oddly like a woman, moving her thick lips as if she were talking to the child, and fondling it with her flippers. The child clung to her, unaware of her ugliness or its own.”
Sometimes in the night she revisited the rock where the dugong sat with its child, but the child had hands on the ends of its flippers, and it wore Billy’s face.
She began to paddle with furious speed, escaping the dugong and its child, the pelican, the arrogant gull, the man in the back of the boat.
Mark didn’t try to keep up with her. Partly irritated, partly amused at her sudden haste, he lifted his paddle out of the water. The boat began circling clockwise.
She made a half-turn toward him. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing some of the work?”
“I wanted to see where you’d get, all by yourself. You were in such a hurry.”
“Now that you’ve seen, shall we go on?”
“All right.”
When they had reached the shore and pulled the boat up on the sand, Mrs. Wakefield said, “Thank you for the ride. It was very pleasant, in some ways.”
“That’s good.”
“You’re really pretty curious about me, aren’t you?”
“People as deliberately vague as you are make other people curious, naturally.”
“I’ll try to be more specific,” Mrs. Wakefield said.
“No, don’t. I like you the way you are.”
Shaking her head, she picked up her fins and face glass from the bottom of the boat and walked away.
“I didn’t take a single peek,” Evelyn said. “I wish now I had. You’re looking quite cross.”
“Blow, will you, darling? I want to take a bath.”
“Don’t I even get a report?”
“Sighted sub, sank same,” he said. “No, really there’s nothing to report.”
“You must have talked.”
“Not being mutes, yes, we talked.”
She was afraid to ask him any more questions, but she couldn’t stop herself. “What about?”
“Dugongs,” he said. “Dugongs.”
“Is that a joke?”
“No.”
“Well,” she said painfully. “Some day you’ll have to tell me about them.”
“Evelyn. For crying in the sink. Listen. You’re not jealous of her, are you?”
“Horribly.”
“Can’t you control yourself?”
“I guess I’ll have to,” she said. “What are dugongs?”
“Sea cows. Amphibious mammals that give birth to living young.”
“She must be pretty fascinating to hold you spellbound for two hours talking about dugongs.”
“What do you want me to say . . . ? That she’s pretty fascinating? All right. I say it.”
“No one could talk about dugongs for two hours except a biologist.”
“Other topics were mentioned,” he said. “The weather. Pelicans. Broken Bow, Nebraska. The watch Jessie found. She admitted it belonged to her husband.”
“Why did she admit it?”
“I told her she wasn’t fooling anyone. Now, is the examination over, and what are my marks?”
“A mere pass.”
He went into the bathroom and closed the door, and a minute later he was singing in his heavy unmusical bass, “Oh my darling, Clementine.”
13
Mrs. Wakefield made no excuses to Mark and Evelyn; she merely sent Luisa with the message that she couldn’t have dinner with them. She ate, later, in the kitchen with the Romas.
They
drank red wine and hot strong tea, with plenty of tea leaves in each cup so that everyone would have fortunes for Carmelita to tell.
“Money,” Carmelita said, loud with wine. “See in my cup, all the money. Ho, I am a millionaire!”
She read all the cups, and they all had money and letters coming, and tall dark men, and trips to far places.
The millionaires sat with their elbows on the table poring over their wealth.
“And the news,” Carmelita said. “All good news, too, for everyone.”
Luisa blinked. “What kind?”
“Whatever kind you want. Yes, it’s going to be a good year.”
“Oh, it’s silly to believe in tea leaves, Mama.”
“Your mama is silly,” Carmelita agreed. For the occasion she had taken the bobby pins out of her hair and brushed it. But the hair was unaccustomed to freedom; it tried wildly to escape her scalp and would not lie down in orderly curls. “It’s like a party, except we must do the dishes.”
“Luisa will do the dishes,” Mr. Roma said.
Luisa let out a bleat. “I can’t, I just did my nails. I can’t put my hands in hot water!”
“Then wash them in cold.”
“That wouldn’t be sanitary. I mean really, if you ever looked through a microscope the way we do in chemistry class—everything’s just crawling with germs. Papa, you simply don’t understand about germs.”
“I understand about little girls, though.”
“You talk fresh to your papa,” Carmelita said, “and I will give you a smack on your bottom with the flyswatter.”
“All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the germs.”
Luisa did the dishes as she did everything else, with great expression. Fastidiously, she carried them to the sink. Wincing, she rinsed them. Averting her eyes in delicate anguish, she wrapped the garbage. And finally, with an air of sacrifice, she dipped her martyred hands into the hot water.
Now and then her groans penetrated the conversation like the notes of a French horn in a symphony.
“A good year,” Mrs. Wakefield said. The inside of her mouth felt limey from the strong tea, but she held out her cup for more. “I’m greedy. I want more letters and trips and good years.”
“More men, too,” Carmelita said, nudging her tipsily with her elbow. “Eh? More men?”
The Cannibal Heart Page 10
