All the Water in the World

by Karen Raney

  People had emptied from the galleries back to the reception. The speeches were about to start. It dawned on me then that Antonio had maneuvered me away from the others so we could be alone. I started to laugh. I slipped my arm out of his.

  “Want to see something?”

  35

  We took the stairwell instead of the elevator to ground level. The gift shop was dark and so was the cloakroom. Too late I remembered our coats on the racks upstairs. Side lights marked out the sloping floor of the Turbine Hall under five stories of empty space.

  “Did you ever sneak around your house at night when everyone was asleep?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Antonio.

  “I was scared, but I liked having the place to myself.”

  We reached the arch in the foyer to the Tanks. A single security guard sat at the outer desk, punching the keys of his phone.

  “Where are we?” Antonio’s voice was slightly blurred from three glasses of wine. I had stopped at one.

  I sent the light of my phone running across the naked ceiling pipes and down the walls where the mouths of torn-out ducts gaped in the stained cement. Antonio aimed his own light above the arch. A row of sunken squares with bolts for eyes.

  “They look like Iberian masks.”

  “I think they are the ends of T-beams.”

  “The South Tank is through there. It’s where the oil was stored in the old power station. It’s the only museum space in Europe made for installation and performance.” We stood in silence. The Tanks had been opened for viewing, but everyone was upstairs now. We were out of sight of the guard. “Want to go in?”

  I switched off my phone and made Antonio do the same. The foyer lights penetrated a short distance into the gloom. I released the prop at the bottom of the door, and as it swung shut I waited for sirens, running footsteps, the ignominy of being found out. Nothing happened. The door sealed with a clunk and darkness came at me like a cloth pressed to my face. No space, no distance; only the sharp mineral smell of liquids oozing in to reclaim their rightful place.

  Nearby Antonio chuckled.

  “Shhh . . .” I whispered, though with the thickness of the walls and the seal of the door, I knew we could have shouted in there and not been heard.

  “Let’s find our way to the other side. Want to? No lights.”

  “Is this . . . performance art, Eve?” His hand glanced off my shoulder and moved down, groping for my hand.

  I snatched it away. “No hands.”

  I led the way with a halting gait, arms extended, waiting for something or someone to stop me. No point in opening my eyes. No way to tell if I was walking a straight line or not. The floor was hard and sticky underfoot. Twice my shoe caught and I saved myself from falling at the last minute. Each time I stopped to let my heart rate return to normal. After a while the dark became a friendly soft material that parted to let me pass and closed behind me.

  “Antonio?”

  “I am here.” His voice was off to my right, not where I thought he was at all. The tank did strange things to sound, swallowed it up or moved it from one place to another. “This is crazy.”

  “Just keep going. We’re almost there.”

  After a moment he said tersely: “I don’t like this. I’m turning on the light.”

  “No! Don’t! Please, Antonio.”

  Cats had whiskers, bats had sonic radar; I had whatever skills had been forced on me in the last two years to navigate darkness. I no longer knew where Antonio was. I could hear only my breathing and the sound of my shoes, which left tracks on the air, like smudges of charcoal that vanished as soon as they appeared. How far had we come? Impossible to keep track of time in an empty oil tank. Impossible to know how long it was before my arms went out again of their own accord: a coolness, a thickening of the odor; my hand struck the wall.

  “I’m here! Found it!”

  From the angle, I knew I had veered to the left rather than traveling the full diameter of the tank. I was exploring the ledges that covered the sides, gauges for the depth of oil, I guessed, or for extracting machines to latch on to, when Antonio lost patience and switched on his light. Without warning, my pale hands were before me, groping the rusty wall. Everything was smaller, dirtier, and more ugly than it felt in the dark.

  “This is really crazy.” He made his way to me, bringing his jagged shadows with him. “You could have hurt yourself.”

  I turned and fitted my back to the wall. “Maddy had this thing,” I said, “when she was three or so and we were at the lake, she used to float around in one of those inflatable rings. She wanted me exactly the right distance away. ‘Go back, Mom, back. There! By that cloud! Now close your eyes.’ Then she’d paddle over and pounce. When she was six, she’d turn off the lights in the basement and make me stand by the door. Then she’d spin around to make herself dizzy and find me in total darkness.”

  “I see,” said Antonio. The light made strange shapes on his neck and face.

  “What do you think that was about?”

  “I don’t know. Did she learn that from you?”

  “She didn’t get it from you.”

  “Eve?” He sounded out of breath. He slipped his phone in his pocket, and the dark closed around us again.

  I spoke rapidly, whatever came into my head. “Have I told you that when Maddy was born I thought I already knew her?”

  “E-vie . . .” said Antonio softly, separating the syllables.

  Words were all I had to put between us, to keep him from coming any closer. “How far can newborns see, maybe a foot, foot and a half? I think it’s the distance to the face of a person who’s holding them. So this nurse put her in my arms.” The wall pressed into my back. “I swear Maddy gave me this look: It’s me. Mama, it’s me.”

  “Eve.” His voice was low and warm and very near. “What’s going on?”

  His arms and long body drew me to him. I tipped back my head. We were the only things in here made of flesh. We began to kiss the way we used to. Blood in my ears; taste of desire in my mouth. I felt him swelling, strangely high against me, and pressed myself there, courting ruin. I sensed rather than saw the forms against the dark: the heaving shoulders of my mother, my father’s backhanded salute, Robin lying wounded under the water-grained slab. Antonio’s mouth was taut and leathery, tasting of wine and peanut skins. No one knew we were here. Smiling Erica didn’t know, and neither did her boys, flinging themselves across the grass. I had hunted him down, I had brought him here. I had the power to make things happen, to fling and smash, to inflict damage.

  His hands cupped my jaw and neck. He came up for air to murmur, “It’s still—” or maybe “You’re still—” and in a panic I shoved him to pry us apart. But Antonio would not hear of it. He was gathering me up, finding my lips again, pressing on with the drama we had both started, as he’d always done and I’d always let him, as though it was unstoppable. He inched his hand down the front of my body, whispering. I was weak. We had done it standing up before, in the shower or the kitchen, laying ourselves down to finish. The channels were already cut. We would remember what worked, what pushed us over the edge.

  Antonio began kissing me again, his fingers locked behind my neck, both of us straining to get to what we needed in this underground place where everything echoed and nothing rang true. His hand slid into my blouse and found the naked point of my breast. I jumped as though stung, and shrank away. Desire swerved and stalled. No! Not there. Not for you. He moved his hand to the small of my back.

  The darkness enclosed us, a barrier nothing could pass through. All I wanted was her shy, shining face, in pencil so hard to look at and impossible to reach. Beseeching eyes, stubborn lips, smooth young features in the skull of babyhood and death. We wanted things from each other we could only partially and poorly give. She was with me. She was watching me. She was waiting for me to speak. Longing shuddered up my spine, numbing my arms, blocking my throat, trying to escape from my feeding mouth. She was spoken for. She w
as gone.

  I forced him away, violently this time. “Sorry,” I whispered. “I can’t.”

  Antonio let me go. He was breathing hard.

  “Oh, Evie,” he said at last, arms at his sides, knowing better than to touch me. “We are only human.”

  His accent had always given clichés the patina of wisdom. I set off along the perimeter, groping in my pocket for the light. “Speak for yourself.”

  • • •

  Antonio followed me back across the tank. Our lights found the chrome bar of the door at the same time. We propped it back open. When we passed the desk, the guard gave us a sharp look but didn’t stop us. As we climbed the stairs to the third floor, I tripped and had to lunge for the railing. Antonio put his hand out but did not touch me. He’d done the same thing when I broke down that first night and told him about Maddy. On that occasion he had stopped short of touching me out of confusion and respect. Now he was letting me know that his body was no longer available to me. From the gallery came the hum of voices. I fumbled with my coat. The sleeve seemed to have been sewn shut. I pushed at it with my fist, panicked that someone would come out and find us there. Antonio righted the sleeve and held it for me from behind. I wanted to sink back into him and be indulged and forgiven, but he had already moved away.

  “I’ll walk you to St. Paul’s.”

  “You’re going in the other direction. I’ll be fine. Really.”

  “No,” he said. “I will.”

  We crossed the bridge and the two intervening streets, and circled the empty steps of the cathedral. The dome above was dark and remote and looked to be carved from solid stone. It was the station entrance around the corner that was alive, lit up and noisy, sucking passengers in from every direction. We stood at the top of the stairs. In Antonio’s eyes I read puzzlement, pride, and something more sorrowful. In all likelihood I would never see him again.

  “I’m sorry, Antonio.”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Well.” I tried a smile. “We can both be sorry.” The uselessness of words! I cast my eyes over a darkened coffee shop and a lit-up pub, refuges barred to us now, and waited for him to speak. Antonio had removed himself from our drama already and was waiting for the moment when he could take his leave without giving anything away.

  After a minute, I said: “I saw them, you know.”

  “Saw who?”

  “Your boys. I went to their school.”

  He shot me a look of warning.

  “Don’t worry. They didn’t know who I was. Neither did your wife.” People in dreadlocks, torn jeans, suits, and stilettos detoured around us and down the stairs, scowling at the obstruction we made. I risked a glance up into his angry face.

  “You wait ’til now to tell me?”

  I said nothing.

  “You got me to say the name of their school. Didn’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Maddy would have loved a brother or two.”

  “Was that a good thing to do, Eve?”

  “Don’t I get some credit for discretion?”

  Coldly: “You had no right. And you know it.”

  I stared at him. “I had no right? What about you? Would your wife be interested to know what just went on over there?”

  Antonio’s face was rigid. “You play games with me, Eve.” He started to speak again and stopped himself, scanning the pavement up and down Cheapside. “Should we be talking about this now? Here?”

  “When else will we talk about it?” I tried to sound challenging. “Do you think it was easy? I thought I would feel connected to your boys through Maddy. I did in a way. But they’re your kids. They don’t have anything to do with her. Not really.”

  “No,” said Antonio.

  “At first I thought—There’s a piece of Maddy! She’s not completely gone! She’s still walking around, just in a different form.”

  His eyes were glistening under the station lights.

  “But she’s not,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “She’s not.”

  “The older one takes after you. The younger one is more like Maddy, in temperament, I mean. You need to watch out for him. Don’t assume he’s okay just because he doesn’t give you any trouble.”

  “I told Maddy about the boys,” he said tersely. “She asked me about them.”

  “And you wrote to her behind my back. And you did meet me. Not just once.” For your own complicated reasons, I thought, you did offer yourself to me. I could only hope his reasons were complicated. “Of course she would have asked about your boys. She would have been desperately interested in them.”

  “I guess so.”

  “But you know what would have been the main thing, for Maddy?”

  “What?”

  “She knew you loved them more than you loved her.”

  There was nothing to say to that, and Antonio said nothing. The passengers parted and flowed around us. Robin stepped into my mind, as if he could see us standing at the top of the station stairs, not knowing how to end this.

  Antonio’s hands were back in his pockets. My tone had reassured him I was not going to tear his family apart. He looked cold and forlorn. I felt sorry for him. I no longer wanted to know why he was with me, or what mix of vanity, curiosity, marital stasis, lost youth, true love, or the glamour of tragedy had been behind his passion in the Tanks. I had no urge to explain what he meant to me. Let him tell himself what he wanted about our encounter. I would keep to myself what I knew, or refused to know, or barely knew about it. We had met, and we had done nothing irreversible.

  What is it about tall men that always makes me think they can help? I reached for Antonio, and was surprised by how long and how tightly he held me, pressing my face sideways into the rough wool of his coat. When he let me go I rushed down the steps as if released by a spring, waving one hand behind my back in case he was still watching.

  36

  The airplane’s shadow rushed sideways over grass and runway apparatus, growing smaller and more uncertain, an earthbound version of itself that the plane was shedding as it rose up. In London the winter sun never parted from the horizon for long, and set at four in the afternoon. But up here the sun was high and unblinking, and it hunted down every line and curve of water and silvered it fleetingly.

  I had spoken to Robin the night before. He couldn’t wait to see me, he said. With many air miles already between me and Antonio, everything I had been tamping down erupted to the surface. The unnatural darkness and inhuman smell; backing up to the laddered wall . . . The images were powerful enough, it seemed likely that Robin, wherever he was, would be able to see them.

  Maddy put a high value on loyalty. She once told me that cheating on someone was the meanest thing she could think of anyone doing. Would she be appalled, or would she exempt me because I was her mother or because she longed for a parental reunion, something children of divided families supposedly do?

  When I closed my eyes, Robin was there, gaining volume and definition as the plane hurtled toward him. I hoped time spent at the lake had put him in a philosophical frame of mind. Robin would understand. He would have to. Maybe Norma, who had planted the idea in the first place, could explain the nuances better than I could. They had met. The subject must have come up. I would impress on him how essential it had been to see Antonio, how the echoes of Maddy had unhinged me a little but it was all behind me now, as far as London was behind me and the Atlantic was below, shifting its miniature waves. How much would I say? A conversation with Robin was not something to rehearse for.

  Clouds were moving in like a slowly gathering herd, packing together to hide the earth from view. Don’t look. Don’t be fooled by the magical sight of what we were about to destroy. Sip cheap wine, feed from a tray, spin tales until the real tragedy swallows up our little personal ones. Don’t think about pulling up to the silent house and going inside. I began my special pleading to Maddy, wherever she was, in whatever form. Forgive the missing father, the faulty genes, the late diagnosis.
Forgive me for being stubborn, divided, bitter, alive. And a new one: Forgive me my trespasses.

  • • •

  In the pickup zone outside Dulles airport, I was lifted off the ground and given a midair kiss that had more pressure behind it than passion. When Robin was nervous, he went in for theatrical gestures. We stood apart, breathing white shapes into the cold air. He clapped his gloved hands together. So surprising was it to be on the ground in the presence of Robin, large as life and all in one piece, that it took me a moment to notice the beard, an elfish goatee grayer than his hair.

  “Very cute,” I said.

  “Cute? I was aiming a bit higher than cute.”

  “Dashing, then. Mysterious.”

  Robin loaded my bags and slammed the trunk and we got in. “Turns out,” he said, starting the engine, “the line between stylish and homeless is a thin one. I see people staring at me: Is this urban chic, or is it that living in your car makes it hard to shave?”

  I laughed in the old way. “Do I have a say in it?”

  “I thought you’d like a change.”

  “No, I like it. I do.”

  “The thing about facial hair,” said Robin, “it’s zero commitment. It can go at any time.” Easily he laid his hand on my knee. “Feels like just yesterday I was seeing you off.”

  “I know.”

  “And it feels like it’s been years.”

  “I know.”

  He took his hand back to change lanes. The freeway signs wheeled past, Bethesda, Baltimore, white letters on green, the places we had to circle around to get home. His eyes never stopped moving, making their private, minute-to-minute decisions. Inside the ring of beard, his lips were fuller and more self-possessed. Why had a beard never occurred to me before? He looked like a very good likeness of Robin. No matter how close you get to someone, the deep strangeness of the other person is always there, waiting to rush in.