Siren

by John Everson

  “Well, fog or no fog, first stop is the wharf,” Evan declared. “I’m dying for some crab!”

  Evan always called “first stop” as Fisherman’s Wharf—where they would grab a claw or two of crabmeat from one of the vendors along the sidewalk. Then, fortified with the tender, rich meat, they’d browse past the line of wax museum/T-shirt shops/boat-ride tourist traps, and walk up past the cable car drop-off to Ghirardelli Square for Sarah’s weakness. Chocolate.

  San Francisco was all about the food for them in the first few hours, as they snacked and shopped and slowly made their way to Chinatown, where they’d lunch on dim sum.

  Today, the wharf was quieter than usual…the fog still lay heavy on the street, giving everything a gray, indistinct, dreamlike feel. Sarah held his hand as they walked down the sidewalk, taking in all of the tourist shops selling cheap fleece jackets to combat the unpredictable cold spells. You never knew if two hours from now the weather was going to warm up or drop twenty degrees when you were down near the bay.

  They walked down to one of the piers and Evan got a cup of crabmeat, but Sarah strayed from her usual and asked for a crab cake.

  “Cake?” he ribbed her. “What is this, a birthday party?”

  She leaned up and kissed him on the lips with a knowing look in her eyes. “No,” she said. “Anniversary.”

  “Huh?”

  “I figured you forgot but…our first date was twenty-four years ago today.”

  “It was?” Evan frowned, trying to remember.

  “Lout.” She punched him. “Glad it made such an impression on you. I used to get cards and fancy dinners on this date to commemorate it, but now”—she sighed dramatically—“he doesn’t even remember.”

  “No wait, I do, I do,” he said, starting to nod.

  “I’ve heard that before. What did it get me? Laundry to do and dishes to wash. Woo-hoo.”

  Evan leaned in and bit off a piece of her crab cake just before she put it in her mouth. “There,” he said. “We shared our anniversary cake, just like at the wedding. And I’ve given you a lot more than dirty dishes.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “I forgot. You give me a dirty bathroom too.”

  He shook his head and dodged. “I remember that trip. We went to the wax museum and took the ferry out to Alcatraz. God, we were tourists.”

  Evan moaned in pleasure at a bite of crabmeat. “Damn,” he said. “I can never get enough of this place though.”

  They ate and walked, enjoying the smells and quiet conversations and rows of fresh crabs on display, aproned kiosk keepers hawking their particular stylings of the ubiquitous sea creature. Evan at last tossed his napkin and shell into a garbage can. “Do you want to go to the wax museum today, for old time’s sake?”

  “Are you serious?” Sarah laughed, looking at him sideways to see if he was pulling her leg. They’d both avoided the waterfront display of kitsch for years.

  “Yeah, why not?” he asked. “They might have a statue of Johnny Depp by now for you to drool over.”

  “You just want to see if they have Paris Hilton,” she answered, rolling her eyes. “Trust me, she’ll be dressed in this display.”

  “Actually, I was hoping for a Jenna Jameson career retrospective.” He grinned.

  She punched him in the shoulder and yanked his hand, pulling him toward the crosswalk. “Let’s go before you make me mad.”

  The museum felt old. Even though it had been completely renovated at the end of the ’90s, walking inside its doors was like stepping into another world; one that had been mothballed for decades. Whether it was the velvet drapes or the fixtures or the shadows that rested dully on everything but the spotlighted displays, Evan just felt like they had stepped off the street and directly into the past.

  “Wow, some things never change, huh?” They stood in front of a display recreating the pitchforked farm couple from the painting American Gothic. The dour look of the two figures gave him the creeps.

  Sarah squeezed his hand. “It looks just like us!”

  “What, old and crotchety?”

  She laughed. “No, old and still in love, silly!” She leaned up to kiss him.

  “Hmmm,” he answered, after her lips broke away. “I’m not sure anybody has ever intimated that American Gothic exudes romance.”

  “It’s all how you look at it,” Sarah explained. “See, you’re seeing them as a grumpy old couple, and I’m seeing them as two people who’ve faced the world together and won…and now, weapon in hand, it’s like they’re giving the world a dare. Just try to stop us.”

  “Um, right,” Evan said. “I’m sure that’s exactly what Grant Wood meant when he painted it. C’mon.”

  They walked through the Hall of Religions, which included the long table with wax figures of Christ and all of his apostles. “That was here the first time we came,” Sarah said.

  “That was probably here fifty years ago when they opened this place,” Evan laughed. “I’m telling you, except for the Titanic display, I think all this stuff was here before.”

  “No way,” she said. “Beyoncé, Mike Myers, Angelina Jolie—and yes, I saw how you studied her lips—there’s a ton of new stuff.”

  “Well, it all seems old!”

  They circled around the red velvet drapes and stepped into the wide circle of the Chamber of Horrors, where stacks of skulls lined the walls and a guillotine hung at the ready. “This has gotten a lot bigger,” Sarah said.

  Evan nodded, looking at the grim, manic skull of the Crypt Keeper, a persona replicated from the classic HBO Tales From the Crypt series. It seemed a little ironic that a figure replicated in a wax museum was that of a fake creation in the first place. “Yes, I guess it has. And bloodier, I think!”

  In the corner, an ax-murdered victim grasped for purchase at a rope with hands that no longer were connected to a full body. The man was missing below the waist, where the “flesh” was red and ragged. Sometimes wax could be too realistic.

  “Ew,” Sarah said, and moved closer to Evan. He stepped her through the horror show display and into another small, dark room. Here, the tableau was of a rocky seaside. The back wall was painted a deep midnight blue, and tiny pin lights reflected back from a faraway horizon that was supposed to represent a town.

  In the foreground, a woman lay on her side, head on her hand. She was nude, and Evan’s eyes were drawn to her instantly. The sculptor had gone into great detail on the figure, capturing a mole on the woman’s left breast and even the tiny ripples of pink that made her nipples look truly human. Her hair hung in long black ringlets over her shoulder, nearly covering her right breast, and her abdomen was pocked by a thin shadow of a belly button. But beyond there, her figure grew strange, as her skin changed to silver scales at her hips. In place of a woman’s legs and most private part, she was transfigured into fish, with a long silver tail.

  “There’s your boobage,” Sarah laughed, as she read from the display sign about the figure. “You can look all you want but you’ll never get any from her! She’s a woman with no entry.”

  “Just my kind of luck,” he laughed. “I finally find the perfect woman, and she’s built like a Barbie.” He dodged a backhand, and observed, “Kind of racy for the wax museum to do a naked mermaid.”

  “Not a mermaid,” Sarah said. “She’s a Siren.”

  Evan’s heart tripped. Sarah didn’t notice his face lose color as she was looking at the sign.

  “‘The Siren has been represented in many ways through the years,’” Sarah read. “‘While initially depicted as a bird or fish with the head of a woman, over the centuries in art and mythology the Siren became more humanized. Some accounts described her as either completely female, or most similar to the mermaid, with alluring upper-body female features, but with a fish tail in lieu of legs. In one famous painting, she and her two sisters are shown lying sated on a beach filled with the corpses of the men they have lured with their song to serve as their dinner. This depiction is shown here, in a famous
creation on loan from the Française Museum de la Wax.’”

  Around the wax woman, the beach was littered with the torsos of men, some of them showing the yellowed struts of ribs peeking through mangled, half-chewed flesh.

  “Kind of puts a whole new spin on fishing, doesn’t it?” Sarah asked. “Here you men are always out there reeling in the fish, and here’s a half-fish woman who’s reeling in the men. And not because she likes ’em or wants to date ’em…she’s just hungry.”

  Sarah laughed, pleased with herself, but Evan didn’t join her. He was staring at the dark eyes of the Siren, and picturing Ligeia on the beach. He heard Bill’s voice insisting that Delilah had a Siren. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay away from that beach at night or you’re going to be fish bait,” Bill had said at one point. “She may be putting out right now, but in the end, it’s you that’s going to be giving it up. You can’t trust her.”

  Evan’s reverie was snapped by a punch in the shoulder.

  “…Evan!” Sarah stood next to him expectantly. “Hello, earth to Evan? Could you take your eyes off the wax boobs for a minute?”

  “Sorry,” he recovered. “I was just thinking of something.”

  “What you could do with a wax woman in your bed after the lights go out?”

  “Hmmm? No, I’ve got one of those already, who needs two?” He dodged away from her, and kept moving right into the next display, which thankfully included nothing horrific at all. Unless you considered the clown grin of Lucille Ball horrible.

  They moved through the rest of the museum quickly; Sarah was anxious to get down to Chinatown, and Evan was anxious to just…get away from the place. For some reason, seeing the depiction of the Siren had really bothered him. In the back of his head a nagging voice kept asking, “So what, Evan, do you really believe that the girl you’re banging is a mythological harpy?” He shook his head absently, trying to remember the feel of her hands on his back. No, she was no Siren, but he had to admit…she was a little strange.

  “How many women do you s’pose sit out on the point singing every night in the nude,” Bill had asked him at one point, and Evan had shrugged. “It only takes one,” he’d said. “Yeah, one to lure you into the water just before she eats you,” Bill had said. “That’s the only one you’ll ever need.”

  When they stepped out of the shadowed confines of the museum back onto Beach Street, it was as if they had exited into a different city from the one they had entered. Instead of the dreary gray morning, the sky shone a rich, bright blue, as the last wisps of white cloud fled like lost sheep across the sky.

  “And here’s why I love this place.” Sarah smiled, turning around and around on the sidewalk, with her palms to the sky. “It’s a mystery and an enigma.”

  “Four seasons in one day?” Evan smiled.

  “Yes. And…chocolate. So much good chocolate. If only I could find my way…”

  He laughed, took her by the shoulders and pointed her the opposite direction down Beach. “You’ll find your Ghirardelli that way, ma’am,” he said, and in minutes they were trudging up the hill toward Ghirardelli Square. Not much later, they were trudging again uphill toward Columbus, and then after passing the tempting street-side cafés of North Beach they started down the other side of the hill toward Chinatown. No matter how much amazing food you ate in San Francisco, you were always hungry for more, because you just…kept…walking…

  Sarah and Evan walked all afternoon, picking up a full bag of junk along the way, from chocolates to small wooden Buddhas to a couple books from City Lights Bookstore, the classic beatnik book haunt in North Beach that Ginsberg once had called home. They lunched in Chinatown and then walked back toward the wharf to have a beer at the San Francisco Brewing Company’s dark wood bar. Evan had threatened to play the piano, but Sarah’s impending embarrassment was saved by a man from the Netherlands who struck up a conversation with them about the difference between American microbrew beer and Scandinavian outlets. Hops was mentioned frequently, and Sarah looked increasingly bored as the men’s discussion grew ever more animated.

  Finally, after they’d left the bar to walk back toward the center of the city, as the sun set and the breeze blew in the crisp, cool hint of night, Evan threw in the towel.

  “I’m not going to be a hero,” he gasped. “I’ll admit it. I can’t walk anymore. I vote for a taxi to dinner.”

  Sarah laughed, but she didn’t protest. “I’m with you. I don’t think I have any heels left.”

  Evan hailed a cab, and they both groaned a sigh of relief as they sank into the vinyl of the car’s backseat. Evan gave the cabbie the address, but needn’t have. They were headed to one of the prime tourist traps of the city, and the driver would have known it simply by name. Dinner, of course, had to be at the Beach Chalet. After a short ride through the mess of the trolley tracks and tourists and heavy traffic of Market Street, they had left the core of the city behind and were soon sitting at a table overlooking the dark, ominous shimmer of the ocean. Just down the beach, someone had built a small bonfire, and the smoke from that flickering orange flame, mixed with the twilight fog, gave everything around them a surreal vibe. The beach had an eerie stillness here at dusk, with a couple of joggers passing by as if moving through the vague backdrop of a dream, but otherwise, there was nothing between them and the night but the tiny lights of a boat, seemingly sitting still out in the water. Sarah pulled Evan away from the cool wind and the sand and up the steps to dinner.

  Inside the restaurant, they sat in warm lighting, with a revolving team of waitresses willing to cater to their every whim.

  “I love this place,” Sarah said for the fifth time that day.

  “I’m with you,” Evan said, reaching his hand out to take hers. “And I love you.”

  She put her hand on his, resting against the table. “I love you too, Evan. I know I haven’t been any good these past few months. Thanks for sticking with me through all of this.”

  A chill froze Evan’s heart as he thought about just how he’d been sticking with his wife lately. He wasn’t proud of what he’d done with Ligeia. And yet, as he sat there looking at the faint crow’s-feet playing into the skin beside his wife’s eyes, and took in the love that stared back at him, colored by a constant sadness, he knew that he wouldn’t take it back if he could. He loved Sarah. He owed her almost every happiness in life that he could remember. But right now, he was itching to get back in the car and drive an hour north to Delilah, so that he could get out on the beach at nightfall. Because there was another woman who was giving him some happiness that Sarah, for all her well-meaning heart, could never give.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, the dark slowly swallowed everything around the Beach Chalet as they sat at a table by the window and looked out on the ocean.

  After dinner, Sarah pulled him down the wooden steps and onto the sand. “Let’s take a walk,” she suggested.

  “Haven’t we done enough of that today?”

  “Not on a beach,” she reminded.

  They slipped off their shoes and walked barefoot in the sand down to the tide line. There the sand turned hard and walkable thanks to being saturated by the occasional wave that pushed up high onto the beach.

  “You can see my footprints in the sand,” Sarah enthused.

  “And you can see mine,” Evan said, grinding his heels in to make the imprints extra large. “We won’t be famous,” he said, “but at least someone will know we’ve been here.”

  “I don’t care if I was here,” Sarah said, her voice colored by sadness. “I just wish that Josh still was here. He deserves to be here. He should be with us.”

  Evan felt his throat fill with emotion, and his voice cracked when he first opened his mouth to answer. “I know,” he said. “I want that more than anything too. But I made sure that couldn’t happen.”

  A silence took over the moment. They had managed to avoid talking about Josh for most of the past six months, and whenever one of the
m brought it up, the conversation stalled. They had cried together in the beginning, before the guilt had overtaken Evan, and he couldn’t stand to talk about it anymore. It was all his fault, after all, he thought every time his son’s name came up between them. And she must hate him for that.

  “Evan, don’t think that way,” she said. “It was an accident. I know that.”

  He couldn’t answer her. After a few awkward moments, they turned and returned in silence to the deck of the chalet.

  After leaving the beach, they took a cab to the hotel, and Sarah undressed Evan at the foot of the bed, her brown eyes sparkling in the faint light that streamed in the windows from the city outside. “I love you,” she whispered, and leaned in to kiss him.

  In his heart, Evan felt a dagger stab and twist.

  “I love you too,” he said.

  In moments, he didn’t feel quite so much like a hypocrite, as his wife moaned her appreciation, and his own excitement peaked.

  Afterward, they lay together in bed, arms entwined, and Sarah cried, just a little while. “Sometimes it’s hard,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s like he’s with me every day, but every time I go to say something to him…I know he’s gone.”

  Her arms gripped him tighter, and her eyes closed. “It’s not right that we’re still here, and he’s not,” she whispered.

  Unbidden in his mind, Evan pictured himself naked on the sand, with Ligeia’s breasts rolling and moving provocatively in the air just tantalizing inches above his mouth. He struggled to blink away the obscenity.

  “No,” he said. “No, it’s not right. Not right at all.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four