The Mermaid Chair (12 page)

I
n the strange days that followed my encounter with Brother Thomas in the abbey church, the rains began. Cold February monsoons. The island sloshed around in the Atlantic.

I remembered the winter rains from my childhood as grim, torrential episodes: Mike and I hurrying down the road to school huddled under an old boat tarp while the rain lashed at our legs and, when we were older, crossing the bay to meet the bus, the ferry bobbing around like a rubber duck.

For more than a week, I stood at the window in Mother's house watching the water fall through the oaks and spatter against the bathtub grotto out front. I cooked lackluster dinners out of the stockpile of food in the pantry, changed Mother's bandage, and methodically brought her cinnamon-colored pills and red-and-white capsules, but I always seemed to end up back at one of the windows, subdued and staring. I could feel myself receding to a place inside that was new to me. It was like slipping into a nautilus shell. I simply withdrew, winding down through the spiraling passageway to a small, dark hospice.

Some days Mother and I watched the Winter Olympics on her little television. It was a way to sit in a room together and carry on as if everything were normal. Mother would watch the screen while working her rosary, attacking the decades of red beads, and when she got through all five of them, twisting the Rubik's Cube Dee had sent her at least five Christmases ago, working it awkwardly with one hand. Eventually she would let the cube tumble out of her lap, then sit with her fingers still fidgeting.

We were both caught, I suppose, in our private distractions. Mother in her commonplace torments, her buried finger, her pastness. And me in growing thoughts of Brother Thomas, in a kind of incessant desiring I could not banish. And I tried, I
did
try.

I'd forgotten how that sort of craving felt, how it rose suddenly and loudly from the pit of my stomach like a flock of startled birds, then floated back down in the slow, beguiling way of feathers.

Where had all this sexual longing come from anyway? I used to imagine that women had a little tank of it lodged back behind their navels somewhere, a kind of erotic gas tank they'd come into the world with, and that I had used the entire contents of mine on Hugh those first years we were together. I'd recklessly emptied it out, and there was nothing I could do to refill it. I told Hugh once that I'd gotten the quart-size tank instead of the gallon-size, that it was like having a small bladder—some women had them and some didn't. He'd looked at me like I was crazy.

“Men don't have this situation,” I'd explained to him. “You don't have to conserve the way we do. Your sexual appetite comes through a faucet you can turn on whenever you want. There's an unending supply; it's like getting water from a sink.”

“Really?” he'd said. “Did you get all this in biology class?”

“There are things
not
recorded in books,” I'd said.

“Apparently.” He'd laughed as if I were kidding around.

I sort of was, and I sort of wasn't. I did believe that women had only so much libido, and when it was used up, it was used up.

Now I saw I'd had it wrong. There were no tanks, small or otherwise, just faucets. All of them connected to a bottomless erotic sea. Perhaps I'd let my faucet rust shut, or something had clogged it up. I didn't know.

Mother grew quiet during those days, too. She stopped talking about going back to the abbey to resume cooking for the monks. She consigned them to the miserable efforts of Brother Timothy. I kept thinking about what Hugh had said, how her need to rid herself of guilt could build up again. I worried. Every time I looked at her, I got the impression of something large and menacing locked in a cellar, wanting in.

For a day or so after she'd buried her finger, there had been a brief revival of her old self. She'd talked in her usual scattershot way about converting recipes for six into forty, about Julia Child, about the infallibility of the pope, about Mike. Thankfully she had not gotten wind of his Buddhism experiment. My mother did not typically have an unarticulated thought, and now she was all but silent. It was not a good sign.

I couldn't muster the energy, or the courage, to ask her again about Dominic or bring up the matter of my father's pipe.

Kat called almost every day. “Are you two still alive over there?” she'd ask. “Maybe I ought to come check on you.” I would reassure her we were fine. I didn't want company, and she picked up on that.

Hugh called also. But only once. The phone rang two or three days after I'd sat in the mermaid chair and felt the floodgates open. Mother and I were watching a bobsled race.

The first words out of Hugh's mouth were, “Let's not fight.” He wanted me to apologize for before. I could tell. He waited patiently.

“I don't want to fight either.” That's all I could manage.

He waited some more. After a pointed sigh, he said, “I hope you've thought it over and changed your mind about my coming.”

“I haven't changed my mind at all,” I said. “I still think I should do this by myself.” It sounded harsh, so I tried to soften it up. “Try to understand it from my side, okay?”

He said automatically, “Okay,” but I knew he wouldn't. That's one of the worst things about living with brilliant people—they're so used to being right they don't really have experience being anything else.

A blinding-white tiredness came over me as we talked. I didn't mention Dominic and how I suspected he was involved somehow because Hugh would have dissected it half to death. He would have told me how to proceed. I wanted to navigate by my own instincts.

“When are you coming home?” Hugh wanted to know.

Home. How could I tell him that at this moment I had an unbearable need to flee it. I had an urge to say,
Please, I want to be alone with my life right now, to go down into my nautilus shell and see what's there.
But I didn't say anything.

I was driven by a deep, sickening selfishness and that same discontent I'd felt back at home, but also by a kind of sorrowing love for myself. My life seemed sweet and dull and small and repellent. So much of it unused.

The last few days, I'd been thinking about the life I'd meant to live, the one that had shone in my head a long time ago, full of art and sex and mesmerizing discussions about philosophy and politics and God. I'd owned my own gallery in that nonexistent life. I'd painted surrealistic works full of startling, dreamlike imagery.

There had been a moment a couple of years earlier when I might have reached for that life, at least for a little piece of it. Two days before Christmas, I'd crawled into a storage space beneath a dormer to retrieve my good china—a fine bone Lenox pattern that had been discontinued and was thus irreplaceable. It was packed and stored in boxes, brought out for major holidays and the occasional wedding anniversary.

Dee saw me and knew instantly what I was doing. “Mom,” she said, “why don't you use it more often? What are you saving it for?” Her voice was full of what I recognized instantly as pity.

Yes, what indeed? I didn't know, couldn't begin to say. My own funeral, perhaps. Dee would throw a wake, and people would stand around talking about how outstanding it was that I still had a complete twelve-piece set after all these years. What a tribute.

For days after that, I'd been deflated by my own shrunken world. When had my fear of broken plates gotten so grandiose? My desire for extravagant moments so small? After that, I'd made room for the china in one of the kitchen cabinets and used it indiscriminately. Because it was Wednesday. Because someone had purchased one of my art boxes. Because it appeared that on
Cheers
Sam was finally going to marry Diane. It hadn't gone much beyond the china, though, that good impulse toward largeness.

As I held the phone, I wanted to tell Hugh about it, the dormer and the china, but I wasn't sure it made any sense.

“Jessie,” Hugh was saying, “did you hear me? When are you coming home?”

“I can't possibly know when I'll come home. Not yet. I could be here—I don't know—a long time.”

“I see.”

I think he did see, too. He saw that my being on the island was about more than taking care of Mother; it was about the disquiet I'd felt all winter. It was about me, about us.

But he didn't say that. He said, “Jessie, I love you.”

This will come out sounding terrible, but I felt he said it to test me, to see if I would say it back to him.

“I'll call you in a few days,” I said.

When we hung up, I watched the window silver over with water, then walked back to the living room, to Mother and the TV and the bobsled race.

About four o'clock every afternoon, I would smell night coming. It would curl under the doors and windows—a wet, black smell. Wanting Thomas was worse at night.

I began to take long, involved baths at the first graying shade of darkness. I pilfered one of the emergency candles from Mother's old hurricane box and set it on the ledge of the tub. I lit it, then made the water as hot as I could stand, until the room swirled with steam. I often sprinkled cedar leaves from the backyard onto the water, or a handful of salt, or spoonfuls of Mother's lavender oil, as if I were creating a brew. The fragrance was sometimes overpowering.

I would slide down into it with only my nostrils sticking out. You would think I'd only now discovered water, its hot, silky feel.

Submerged, I would go off into a dreamy state. I had always loved Chagall's
Lovers in the Red Sky,
his painting of an entwined couple soaring above rooftops, above the moon. The image would come to me each time I sank into the water, the couple sometimes flying through a red sky but more often swimming in searing blue water.

Other times I would think of the mermaid Chagall had painted, suspended above the water, above the trees, a flying mermaid, but without wings, and I would think of Thomas saying he envied mermaids who belonged equally to the sea and to the sky.

 

One night I sat up in bed. Something was different. It was, I realized, the silence on the roof. I looked toward the window and saw that the clouds had parted. Moonlight was falling into the room like bits of mica.

I got up and went plundering through the house for something, anything, to draw with. I found a decrepit box of colored pencils in Mike's desk, where he must have left them two decades before. I stood at the kitchen table and sharpened them with a fish knife.

Unable to locate anything but notebook paper, I took down the large, framed picture of the Morris Island Lighthouse from over the mantel, wrestled out the print, and began to sketch impatiently on the back side of it, with a ravenous kind of movement that was commanding and completely foreign to me.

I covered the canvas with sweeping flows of blue water. In each corner I drew a nautilus shell with an orange light cracking out of it, and along the bottom turtle skulls, heaps of them rising in columns like a sunken civilization, the lost Atlantis. In the very center, I sketched the lovers. Their torsos were pressed together, their limbs braided. The woman's hair wound around them both like May ribbons. They were flying. Waterborne.

The work was exhilarating—and a little scary. Like driving a car and having a blowout. When I finished, I returned the lighthouse print to its frame and hung it back over the mantel, the lovers facing the wall.

It was impossible to go back to sleep. I was wildly keyed up. I went into the kitchen to make tea. I was sitting at the table, sipping chamomile from a chipped mug, when I heard scratching at the door, a pronounced, deliberate sound. Flipping on the porch light, I peered out the kitchen window. Max sat on the porch, his black coat bedraggled and sodden.

I opened the door. “Oh, Max, look at you.” He peered up at me with questioning eyes. “All right, come on in.”

He was known to sleep at different homes on the island on a rotating basis, the schedule known only to him. Mother once said he showed up here every couple of months wanting a bed, but I doubted he arrived in the middle of the night. I wondered if his current landlord had turned him out. Had he seen the light on here?

I pulled out the old bedspread Mother kept for him in the pantry. As he curled up on it, I sat on the floor and dried him with a dish towel.

“What are you doing roaming around in the middle of the night?” I said. He pricked up his ears a little, then laid his head across my thigh.

I stroked his ears, remembering what Thomas had said about Max going out in the boat with him when he did his rookery duties.

“You like Brother Thomas?” I said. He thumped his tail, I imagine because of the syrup that had taken over my voice—the tone used for newborn babies, puppies, kittens. “I know, I like him, too.”

Rubbing Max's head worked better than the tea. The wired feeling started to ebb.

“Max, what am I going to do?” I said. “I'm falling in love.”

I'd come to this truth while sitting in the mermaid chair, but I hadn't said it aloud. It surprised me what a relief it was to make the confession, even to a dog.