The Mermaid Chair (16 page)

I
watched him for several moments, thinking,
Wait, wait, that can't be Hugh. Hugh is in Atlanta.

You know how it is when you see someone completely out of context, someone who isn't supposed to be there, how you're mildly disoriented, how it upends your sense of the moment? This was even a little worse than that for me. I sat at the table imagining that through some inexplicable amalgam of ESP, prescient insight, and suspicion,
he knew.

He knew I'd sat in a boat with another man and wished I could float away with him to the other side of the world. He knew about the scene I had visualized a dozen or more times—the impossible, unbearable one—packing a suitcase and calmly walking out of the house, leaving him. He knew. And he had come, summoned all the way from Atlanta by the stench of my guilt.

When he spotted me, though, he smiled. His normal smile, the mouth ends pulled down, stretched with amusement as if he were resisting the moment his teeth would break through, this smile that had swept over me so many times.

As he walked to the table, I smiled back, an
abnormal
smile. Someone
trying
to smile, forcing herself to look normal and happy and carefree.

“Hugh, my goodness! What are you doing here? How did you know where to find us?” I said, folding my napkin, laying it neatly beside my plate. He looked thinner, slighter, different somehow.

He bent down and kissed my cheek. His own cheek was sandpapery, and I could tell he'd been sucking on one of his lemon lozenges. “I went into Caw Caw General to call the house and see if you could pick me up in the cart, and someone told me you were here.” He put his hand on Mother's shoulder. “How are you, Nelle?”

“Perfectly fine,” she said, and his eyes moved to examine her hand, the outlandish boxing-glove scarf-bandage.

He greeted Kat and Hepzibah.

“God, if you aren't the most handsome man I've ever seen,” said Kat, and Hugh blushed, a thing you didn't see that much.

I was the one who suggested the two of us leave Max's Café and take a walk. I don't think I could've endured sitting there with him making small talk while Kat, Hepzibah, Benne, and Mother looked on.

We walked toward the center of the island along Slave Road, so named because it wound past the cemetery where the slaves had been buried. We talked with polite restraint, a kind of catch-up talk about what had been going on back home, how things were with Mother. My stomach felt alternately knotted and quivery.

When we came to the graveyard, we stopped automatically and stared at the cedar crosses Hepzibah had erected on each grave. They all faced east, so the dead could rise easier, or so she said. The island had been home to a small community of freed slaves after the Civil War. Eventually they all left or died off, but they'd been a presence here for a long time.

As we looked up at the massive live oak whose branches spread over the graves, I remembered what Dee had said on the phone about Mother's becoming upset here, carrying on about a dead person's finger.

Hugh sat on one of the limbs that had grown tired over the centuries of holding itself up and rested now on the earth. I followed, sitting beside him. We were quiet, Hugh looking at sky and air, at the twigs trembling on the ends of branches, while I studied tiny lime ferns and white, stubby mushrooms pushing through the dirt.

“This tree must be ancient,” Hugh said.

“Eight hundred years old,” I told him. A questionable “fact” everyone on the island loved to quote. “Or at least that's what people say. I guess there's really no way to verify it. Hepzibah says they can't take core samples, because apparently the tree has heart rot.”

He let his eyes drift toward mine. They had that sudden look of psychiatric wisdom, the look he got when he was sure he'd seen through the camouflage of someone's words to an unintended meaning. I tried to read his face. What was he suggesting? That I'd said the poor tree had heart rot when really I was talking about myself?

“What?”
I demanded, aggravated.

“What's going on, Jessie?”

“You know what's going on. I'm trying to deal with this situation with Mother. And I told you I wanted to handle it by myself, so of course here you are—Hugh to the rescue.”

“Look, it's true that I don't think you should be trying to deal with this by yourself, but I didn't come all this way because of that.”

“Why
are
you here, then? You snuck onto the island without even telling me you were coming.”

He didn't respond. We sat for a minute with our shoulders taut and stared at the crosses. Little birds twitched in the moss over our heads.

I heard him sigh. He placed his hand on top of mine. “I didn't mean to start a fight. I came because…because I made reservations for us in Charleston, at the Omni. We'll take the afternoon ferry and check in at the hotel. We can have dinner at Magnolia's. It'll be an evening just for us, and I'll bring you back to the ferry in the morning.”

I didn't look at him. I wanted to feel for him what I felt for Whit. I wanted to conjure it out of the air. I had a sudden panicked moment as I realized I could not get back to the place I'd been before.

“I can't,” I said.

“What do you mean? Of course you can.”

“How could you make all these plans without consulting me?”

“It's called a surprise.”

“I don't want any surprises.”

“What is wrong with you? You've been distant for months, Jessie. Then you come here and don't call, and when I call you, you start a fight. Now this.”

I slid my hand away and felt my heart let go. Like fingers turning loose of the side of a boat. Dropping through layers of water.

I'd never felt more terrified.

“I want some time apart,” I said. I hadn't known I was going to say this, and I looked at him, trying to see by his reaction if I really had.

His head jerked backward sharply. It reminded me of a flag snapping in the wind. I'd shocked him. I'd shocked myself.

He reddened, and I realized it was not shock coursing through him but anger. The most awful, hurt-drenched anger.

“‘Apart'? What the hell are you talking about?” he bellowed. I stood and took a step back from him. I thought he might shake me, and honest to God I almost wanted him to. “Apart from
me?
Is that what you mean? You want a goddamn separation?”

“A separation?” I stood there blinking, my heart gone eerily still. “I don't know. I…I just want to be on my own awhile.”

“That's what a separation
is!
” he shouted.

He walked off into the gray shadows of the tree and stopped, his back to me. His shoulders moved up and down as though he was breathing hard. He was shaking his head as if bewildered. I took a step toward him at the same moment he began to walk away, along the road the way we'd come. He did not look back. He did not say good-bye. He walked with his hands in his pockets.

I watched with the feeling of life draining away, everything leaving, ending. An impulse to chase after him rose up. Part of me wanted to catch him in my arms, say,
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so horribly sorry,
but I didn't move. A strange, Novocained feeling was settling into my limbs.

He grew smaller and smaller, a moth fluttering away. When I could no longer see him, I went and sat back down on the tree.

The numbing weight filled me up. I stared at dimes of light moving on the ground and imagined Hugh at the ferry dock. I pictured him sitting on a bench waiting for the boat. Max was there, pushing his head onto Hugh's knee, trying to comfort him. I wanted Max to be there—someone to go and make things better.

Long ago, when I was nine, Mike and I had come pedaling by the cemetery and found Hepzibah pulling weeds between the graves. I thought of that now. It had been a day in winter, but warm like this day, and the sky had condensed into those brash purples that came so often here.

We'd stopped and laid our bikes on the ground. She looked at us and said, “Did I ever tell you about the two suns?”

Hepzibah was always telling me and Mike one of her folktales from Africa, which we devoured. We shook our heads and plopped down on the ground beside her, ready for another one.

“Over in Africa the Sonjo used to say one day two suns will rise,” she told us. “One sun would come from the east, and one sun would come from the west. And when they met at the top of the sky, that would be the end.”

I looked at Mike, and he looked at me. She didn't usually tell stories like this. I waited for more, for the rest of the tale, but, remarkably, she was finished.

“You mean the end of the
world?
” Mike said.

“I just mean that everything ends eventually. The two suns are always rising somewhere. That's part of life. Something ends, and then something else will begin. You understand?”

She was scaring me a little. I backed out of the cemetery without answering her and rode home as fast as I could. My father died a week later. I didn't go around Hepzibah for a long time. It was almost as if she'd known it was coming, though I realized later that was impossible.

As I sat here now, my body began to shake, trembling like the air after a cannonade. I imagined the ferry pulling up to the dock, Hugh stepping onto it, seagulls circling his head. I saw the boat pull away and the stretch of water become wide. Overhead, the two suns were crashing.

I
turned the golf cart into Kat's driveway the next morning, angling past the
MERMAID XING
sign, feeling unaccountably lighthearted, unclouded, emancipated, something bordering on frivolous. This after twisting around half the night in the sheets in guilt and alarm at what I'd done.

After Hugh had left yesterday, I'd sat beside the slave cemetery for an hour or more, until the paralysis wore off and the paroxysms of terror began.
What have I done?

I'd called him last night, twice. He hadn't answered even though he'd had plenty of time to get back home. I hadn't known why I was calling, or what I would say if he answered. Probably I would have repeated a long litany of
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
What I'd done seemed impossible to me, completely disorienting. Like I'd amputated something—not a mere digit on my hand but my marriage, the symbiosis that had sustained me. My life had been beautifully contained within Hugh's, like one of those Russian nesting dolls, encompassed in wifeness, in a cocoon of domesticity. And I'd demolished it. For what?

I'd sat on the edge of the bed remembering odd bits and pieces of things. The time when Dee was small and Hugh had sung the Humpty Dumpty song to her while balancing an egg on the edge of the table, how he'd let it go, demonstrating Humpty's great fall. She'd loved it so much that he'd killed off the entire carton, then afterward gotten down on the floor and cleaned up the whole mess. I'd thought of the silly game he played every Christmas—I Bet I Can Wear Every Present I Open. I don't mean sport shirts and slippers but fishing rods and steak knives. My part in this was to challenge him by buying one thing a human being seemingly could not wear. Last year it had been a cappuccino machine. Within two minutes he'd strapped it onto himself like a backpack using a couple of bungee cords. “Voilà,” he'd said.

What if there were no more Hugh in my life? No more of these small antics, the moments we'd pieced together to form a history?

But were these habits of love—or love itself?

I forced myself to consider how irritating he could be: the way he dried the insides of his ears with the hem of his undershirt, that maddening puffing sound he made, the toothbrush tapping, the walking around in nothing but socks and oxford shirts buttoned to his neck, the pulling open of drawers and cabinets and never closing them. Worse, the tiresome overanalyzing, the incessant rightness, the entitlement he felt when it came to us—that tendency of his to be the benevolent puppeteer.

People move on, I'd told myself. They create new histories. Still, the panic had kept roiling until I'd fallen asleep.

This morning I'd wakened to a soft light folding in through the window, and my apprehension was gone, replaced by this strange buoyancy. I'd lain in bed, realizing I'd been dreaming. The dream had faded, except for one rapturous fragment still spinning at the edge of my awareness. A man and woman traveling beneath the ocean in a path of air bubbles and faint blue streams of light. They were breathing under the water. Holding hands.

The moment I'd opened my eyes, I'd felt their weightlessness in my arms and legs, the mysterious rush of the world below—opaque, free, dangerous, and utterly foreign. I'd wanted to go throw myself into its arms.

Standing at the window in my old bedroom, where the whirly girls used to hang, I'd watched the early-morning light creaming through the dark sky and twisted my wedding rings over my knuckle. I'd held them a little while before dropping them onto an embroidery needle stuck like a horseshoe nail in an old velvet pincushion on the dresser.

Now, pulling up in front of Kat's yellow house, I was a separated woman, and I didn't know if I was possessed by a state of extreme denial or extreme relief.

I parked the cart beside the steps. When Kat swung open the door, Hepzibah and Benne stood behind her in the hallway.

I'd come uninvited, leaving Mother riffling through a pile of recipe books. “I didn't know if you'd be here or at the Mermaid's Tale,” I said to Kat.

“Today I open the shop after lunch,” she said, motioning me inside.

Hepzibah asked what they were all thinking. “How's Hugh this morning?”

“He left yesterday.”

“I told you he did,” said Benne, crossing her arms over her chest.

Benne could be annoyingly smug and sometimes, like now, downright irksome.

Kat ignored her. “What happened? The man just got here yesterday.”

“You know, you really ought to learn when to shut up,” Hepzibah told her. Taking my hand, she led me to the kitchen, into a warm, garlicky smell and the
hum-slosh
of the dishwasher. The room was painted the color of pluff mud—a rich, fermenting brown—and there were mermaid doodads everywhere. “I stopped by to have a cup of coffee. We were just about to pour it,” she said.

She filled four mugs while we sat around the long oak table. An earthenware bowl in the center spilled over with plums, navel oranges, green bell peppers, and gigantic lemons.

“Mother is like a new woman this morning,” I said, wanting to steer the conversation away from Hugh. “I think the lunch did her a world of good. She's talking about going back to the monastery and cooking again. She's at home working on her menus.”

“Well, make sure they hide the meat cleavers,” Kat said.

“Kat!”
cried Hepzibah.

I set down my cup. “You don't think she'd do it again?”

“No, actually I don't,” Kat said. “But tell them to hide the cleavers anyway. You can't be too careful.” She got up and placed a shopping bag beside my chair. “Shem dropped off your art supplies yesterday afternoon.”

I rummaged through the bag, spreading the contents onto the table. There was a one-and-a-half-inch sable wash brush and a number four for small line work, a John Pike palette, and an eighteen-by-twenty-four tablet filled with 140-pound cold-press paper. The size of the paper unnerved me—it was much larger than I'd requested. And the paints were not student grade, as I'd asked for, but artist.
Artist.
I picked up each tube: Yellow Ocher, Indian Red, Cerulean Blue, Rose Madder, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Thalo Green, Ultramarine.

I was only vaguely aware of the others watching me. A spot in my chest had flared up, creating a buzzing sensation like the sparklers Mike and I used to run around waving in the early dark of summer.

When I glanced up, Kat smiled at me. Pieces of her hair fell around her ears. Today it appeared to be ocher red. “So when can I expect to see mermaid paintings in my shop?”

“Art comes when it comes,” I replied.

“Oh. Well.
Excuse
me,” she said. “Let me rephrase that: When do you think your art might be
coming?
”

“As I recall, we had a deal. You were going to talk to Dominic and see what he might know about Mother's reasons for cutting off her finger—remember? And in exchange I was going to paint mermaids. So…did you?”

Kat's eyes drifted away toward the window over the sink, to the filigree of light on the counter. The moment stretched out. I could hear Benne fooling with the lid on the sugar bowl, clinking it up and down. Hepzibah rose from her chair and walked over to the coffeemaker where she poured herself another cup.

“I didn't talk with him, Jessie,” Kat said, turning to me. “It just so happens I agree with Dominic. I don't think it does anybody any good, especially your mother, for us to go picking through whatever her reasons were. It's only going to upset Nelle. And it's pointless anyway. Look, I'm sorry. I know I told you I'd talk to him, but I don't think it's right. I wish you'd take my advice and drop it.”

I felt a surge of anger at her, and yet I was half tempted to do what she'd said. Understanding my mother was exhausting, maybe even impossible.

“All right.”

“You mean you'll drop it?” she asked.

“No, I mean, it's all right—I won't ask you to help me.” I said it with resignation, with the anger bleeding out of me. Kat believed she was doing what was best, and I was never going to convince her otherwise.

She cocked her head and gave me a rueful smile, pretending to be contrite. “But you'll still paint the mermaids for me. Won't you?”

I sighed. “Oh, for God's sake, yes, I'll paint the mermaids.” I wanted to be aggravated with her—I'd tried to sound that way—but when I looked down at the paints and brushes she'd gotten for me, I couldn't.

The phone rang, and Kat wandered off to answer it. Hepzibah stood at the sink rinsing out the coffeepot. The room filled with the sound of running water, and I had a momentary flash of my dream from the night before. I wondered what Whit was doing now—this very minute. I pictured him in his cottage, hunched over a desk covered with books, the cowl of his robe cradled between his shoulder blades. I saw him in the johnboat cutting through the creeks, saw that remarkable shade his eyes had turned in the sunlight—the color of denim.

It was adolescent to be thinking about him this way. But I was unable sometimes to think of anything else. I would imagine our bodies pressed together, me lifting out of myself into something timeless and large, where I could do anything, feel everything, where there would be no empty spaces inside to fill.

“Are you going to tell us why Hugh left?” asked Kat, slumped against the counter. I hadn't even heard her come back into the room.

“He hadn't really planned on staying,” I answered.

“Not even one night?” She looked at my left hand. “Yesterday you were wearing your wedding rings. Today you're not.”

Benne stared at my hand from across the table, then at my face. It was that same look she'd given me in the Mermaid's Tale when she'd informed me that I was in love with one of the monks. The realization that she'd also informed her mother of this fact left me with an irrational need to confess everything.

As Hepzibah wandered over and stood next to Kat, it occurred to me that this was probably the reason I'd come here in the first place. Because I desperately needed confidantes. Because underneath I felt terrified. Because the weight of what I was carrying around was at least ten times heavier than I was, and I had come to the end of my ability to hold it. I wanted suddenly to kneel down in front of Kat and Hepzibah, lay my head in their respective laps, and feel their hands rest on my shoulders.

“Something awful has happened,” I said, directing my attention to the bowl, then the tabletop. “Hugh and I have—I think we've separated.” Shifting my eyes a little, I saw the hem of Hepzibah's dress, Kat's pointy shoes, a trellis of shadows falling from the window. The faucet was dripping over in the sink. Coffee smells drifted around like ground fog. I went on. “I've fallen in love with…with someone else.”

I didn't look up. I wondered if their expressions had flattened out with shock. I hadn't felt ridiculous saying it to them, as I'd imagined I would. I
did
feel shame, but, I told myself, at least I was a woman having a real experience, unwilling to pretend about it, ready to take myself, my feelings, seriously.

Kat said, “Benne told us.”

It was generally true that Benne was never wrong, but it astonished me how easily they'd accepted her word on this.

“She told us this ‘someone else' is one of the monks,” Kat added.

“Yes,” I said. “Brother Thomas.”

“He's the newest one, isn't he?” Hepzibah asked.

I nodded. “His real name is Whit O'Conner.”

“Did you tell Hugh?” Kat wanted to know.

“No, I…I couldn't.”

“Good,” said Kat, and she let out a breath. “Sometimes being honest is really just being stupid.”

My hands, I noticed, rested in front of me as if I were praying, my fingers laced so tightly they were actually hurting. The tips of them were pulpy and red.

Kat sat on one side of me, while Hepzibah plopped down on the other and draped her brown hand over both of mine.

“When I think of Hugh, I feel terrible,” I said. “But I can't get over the feeling that Whit is someone I'm supposed to be with. We went out in his boat a few days ago, to a place out in the rookery, and talked. He had a wife, who died.” I stopped. “I'm not making sense.”

“First of all, you don't
have
sense when you fall in love,” said Kat. “And no one here's judging you. Not in this house anyway. Lord knows you won't see
me
throwing stones. I've been exactly where you are.”

I looked at her and blinked. The arches of her eyebrows had traveled up on her forehead, and her mouth had taken on a bitter amusement. “Now, the man wasn't a monk. God—bless her heart—spared me that bit of humor. He was a harbor pilot in Charleston who used to come over here to fish and buy cast nets. God, I loved that man—despite the inconvenient fact I was married to Henry Bowers. I was just about your age, too, just old enough for the bottom to start falling out of things, you know? You look around and think, So this is
it?
I'd been married twenty years.
Twenty.
Which is about when the marriage glue gets so old it starts to harden and crack.”