The Mermaid Chair (25 page)

I heard Hugh's footsteps pacing the hallway, back and forth. When they stopped, I could tell he was just outside the door. I looked around to see if I'd locked it, though I was sure Hugh would never come in without knocking. The latch, an old-fashioned hook and eye, was unfastened. I waited. Held my breath.
Ping, ping, ping.
Finally he moved away.

What had caused him to tread up and down the hallway like that?

When I came out of the bathroom, I wore Mother's blue bathrobe, my hair wet, combed back and slicked down like enamel. It was when the cool air hit my face that I remembered. I'd propped my canvases across the bed, the dresser, and the floor in Mike's room, ostensibly for storage, but I would go in there at times and stare at my work. It was like standing in a gallery inside myself, gazing at the deep, dark marvels. My thirteen diving women, their wild, sensual bodies grandly nude.

I thought of Hugh in there studying them, examining the cast-off pieces of their lives that I'd painted floating to the surface. The kitchen spatulas, the apple peels, the wedding rings, the geese…oh, God, the kissing geese.
Our
kissing geese.

Frozen in place outside the bathroom door, I realized that even the colored-pencil sketch I'd made back in February was in there, the one I'd hidden for weeks behind the lighthouse picture over the mantel. He would see my enraptured couple clinging to each other's bodies, encircled by the woman's exceedingly long hair. Sometimes when I'd looked at the picture, all I could see was her hair, and I'd remembered Dee teasing me, calling my attic studio Rapunzel's tower, wanting to know when I was going to let my hair down.

Hugh had always grimaced at that, even defended me to her, sometimes snappishly. “Your mother isn't locked in a tower, Dee,” he said. “Now, stop it.” Maybe he'd thought it was a reflection on him, or maybe somewhere inside he'd known it was true and was afraid of it. None of us ever mentioned the rest of the tale—how Rapunzel did finally let down her hair for the prince and escaped.

Hugh Sullivan was the most astute man on earth. I began to feel a dilating pressure in my chest. I walked to Mike's room and paused in the doorway. Inside, it was dim, lit by one small table lamp with a low-wattage bulb.

Hugh was staring at my underwater couple—
Lovers in the Blue Sea,
I called them, after Chagall's
Lovers in the Red Sky.
His back was to me. His hands were in his pockets. He turned around, parting this night from all other nights, letting his eyes, bruised and disbelieving, come slowly to my face, and I could feel the air around us blaze up with the terrible thing that was about to happen.

“Who is he?” he asked.

Whit

H
e sat in the music-listening room on a ladder-back chair, staring at the television set, which was perched on a table conspicuously covered with an old altar cloth. It was the top of the seventh of a Braves doubleheader on TBS. Tom Glavine had just struck out. Whit took his pencil and traced a small
K
on the scorecard he'd drawn in the back of his journal.

There was something about watching baseball that took him completely out of himself. It worked on him better than meditation. He could never meditate more than two minutes without chasing one thought after another or becoming so self-conscious it defeated the whole purpose, but he could sit in front of a game with absolute absorption. He lost himself in the tension of the play, the strategy, the intricacies of scoring—all the diagrams, symbols, and numbers. He would never have been able to explain to Father Sebastian or any of the others why it was a refuge for him; he just knew he felt exempt sitting here. From the monastery. From himself.

Before vespers the abbot had announced Nelle's latest “tragedy,” as he now delicately referred to her amputations, asking the monks to pray for her, their beloved cook and friend. Whit had stood in choir staring stoically ahead, aware of Dominic turning to look at him. He'd thought then how he'd spent all afternoon waiting for Jessie in the rookery to no avail, only to come back and find Dominic pacing the porch of the cottage. He'd been the one to give Whit the news, even the part about Jessie's husband coming from Atlanta to be with her. He'd delivered that portion with scrupulous concern.

Whit had not had the presence of mind to ask Dominic until later how he'd come to know all this, when he discovered that Hepzibah Postell, the Gullah woman, had come to the monastery and explained everything to Dominic. Why would Hepzibah come to Dominic, of all people?

All through vespers Whit had yearned to come here and turn on the doubleheader and disappear into the game. He'd burst out of his choir stall like a racehorse so he could get the game on before the other monks came herding in for community time.

They inevitably spent it watching the evening news. It mostly boiled down to watching Tom Brokaw announcing Reagan's latest social cutbacks. The last time he'd come in here, they had been watching a segment on how to “dress for success”—something about designer suits by Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein—and the monks had sat there with such rapt attention he'd wanted to stand up and shout,
But you're wearing
robes! The point of their robes was the exact opposite of dressing for success. Surely they saw that. He'd gotten up and left. On weekends Brother Fabian would put one of the monastery's scratchy old 33
¹
/
₃
rpm records on the stereo, usually Wagner's
The Ring of the Nibelung.
He would turn the volume so loud the air would tremble with the bass.

Tonight, when the monks had arrived to find that Whit had commandeered the TV set and filled it with the announcers' play-by-play, they'd complained to Father Sebastian, who had sovereign jurisdiction over the room. Sebastian had scrutinized Whit before telling the men to stop whining, it wouldn't kill them to miss the news once in a blue moon. They had all left and gone back to their rooms to wait for compline, except for Dominic and Sebastian.

He wanted to be angry at them, to use this as just more justification for leaving, but the sight of the monks shuffling off in various degrees of huff was no different, really, from his own arrogant refusal to be in here when they watched Brokaw or listened to Siegfried and Brünnhilde.

It reminded him suddenly of the whole point of existing here with these curmudgeonly old men—that somewhere on the face of the earth, there needed to be people bound together with irrevocable stamina, figuring out a way to live with one another. He'd come here with such idiotic notions, expecting a slight variation on utopia—everybody loving everybody else, returning good for evil, turning the other cheek left and right. Monks, it'd turned out, were no more perfect than any other group of people. He'd gradually realized with a kind of wonder that they'd been picked for a hidden but noble experiment—to see if people might actually be able to live in genuine relatedness, to see if perhaps God had made a mistake by creating the human species.

He seemed to think constantly these days about what it meant to be at the monastery, to be part of it—the whole outrageous thing. He thought equally about Jessie, what it meant to love her, to be part of her.
That
was outrageous, too. What he'd not thought about was her husband. A real person, a man who'd rushed here to be with his wife at a moment of crisis. What was his name? He forced himself to remember.
Hugh.
Yes, Hugh. It repeated in his mind with the drone of the stadium noise, with Skip Caray and the baseball trivia question.

Hugh was the ruptured place in Whit's conscience, one that had—in a self-protective act—gotten walled off. Even now, after two walks and the bases loaded, when he should have been completely immersed in the game, Whit could not stop thinking of the man. He could see how Hugh, the very reality of him, had been inside all along, quietly turning to an abscess. The poisonous mess starting to leak.

After the third out, everyone in the stadium stood for the seventh-inning stretch, and he stood up and put his journal down on the chair. He thought of the day he'd told Jessie he loved her. They'd been in the rookery, lying on the blanket.

We'll be damned and saved
both, he'd told her. And already it was happening.

He closed his eyes and tried to listen to the song the fans on TV were singing. He'd thought he could blot everything out, calm the anxiety that had begun on the porch with Dominic, but all he wanted now was to bolt and go to her. He felt consumed with the need to pull her into his arms. To claim her again.
Jessie,
he thought. He could barely stand still.

Across the room Dominic sat in an old lounge chair with his hat in his lap. After Whit had confessed to Dominic all those weeks ago that he'd fallen in love, they hadn't spoken of it again. Of course the old monk had to know it was Jessie. Why else would he have pulled Whit aside like that and given him this extra bit of information about her husband's being on the island, staying in Nelle's house with her?

He wanted to concentrate his distress on how upset Jessie must be over her mother, and yet he stood before the television and could not keep himself from imagining her with Hugh. In the kitchen with a glass of wine, the solacing embrace, telling small jokes to break the agony—the myriad ways Hugh might comfort her. He felt frightened by the lifetime of small, secret rituals they must've shared at moments like this, the magnitude of such things.

The man is her husband,
he told himself.
For the love of God, he's her
husband.

Hugh

H
is wife stood in her mother's island home in South Carolina and calmly told him the name of her lover. “His name is Brother Thomas,” she said.

For a moment Hugh stared at the drops of bathwater sliding along her neck toward the opening of her robe. Her hair was wet and plastered back from her face. He watched how she took a sharp breath with her mouth open and let her gaze drop.

They were in the doorway of her brother's old room, and he reached out and placed his hands on the doorjamb. He watched her without any pain at all, stood protected and benumbed in the last seconds of a dying illusion, the truth flying toward him with the speed of an arrow, but not yet there. It allowed him to see her one last time before the tip gashed into him and everything changed. What he thought standing there was how beautiful she looked with the bathwater still netted on her skin, running in drops between her breasts.
How beautiful.

His name is Brother Thomas.

She had said it with complete candor and matter-of-factness as if she were telling him the name of her dentist.

Then it slammed into him—more pain than he'd known in his life. It rocked him backward on his heels, as if there had been a blast of wind. He went on holding the sides of the door, wondering if he might be having an attack of angina. The power of the feeling was crushing.

He stepped back, engulfed suddenly with fury. He wanted to smash his fist into the wall. Instead he waited for her to raise her eyes to his face again. “Brother Thomas,” he said with lacerating calm. “Is that what you call him when you're fucking him?”

“Hugh,” she said. It came out broken and splintered. It sounded pleading in a way that enraged him even more.

He could tell she had shocked herself with the admission; her eyes seemed dazed and frantic. Stumbling toward him, reaching out to grab his arm, she looked like a scalded animal trying to understand what had happened to it.

When her hand found his arm, he wrenched it out of her grasp.

“Get away,” he said through his teeth.

He watched her back out of the room, her lips moving with no words coming out and her eyes wide. He slammed the door and locked it. She stood outside.

“Hugh, open the door. Please, Hugh.”

There was scarcely any light in the room, and he'd stared at the back of the door, at the shadows running across it like pieces of wire and black vines. He wanted to wound her with his silence. Later, though, it occurred to him that he may have wanted to protect her, too, from the pulverizing things he could have said.

She went on calling him for an unbearable amount of time. When she finally left, tears shot up behind his eyes. He sat on one of the twin beds, trying to choke down the urge to cry. He wouldn't have Jessie hearing him cry. He needed to get hold of himself. The force of his anger had started to frighten him. He had an overwhelming need to go to the monastery and find the man. He wanted to take him by the throat and pin him to the wall of the church.

He stayed in the dark little room like that for hours. In the beginning he was gripped by repeated convulsions of anguish, by an actual trembling in his limbs. After that subsided, he was able to think.

When he'd asked Jessie the question—
Who is he?
—he hadn't really believed there was anyone else. Not really.

The possibility that there could be another man had come to him in a flash of intuition as he'd looked at her paintings. He'd been shocked by them, by their highly charged eroticism, by the depth of the plunge the woman in them was taking. It had been like looking at a death—Jessie's death. Her previous life, all the old adaptations and roles, were breaking away and rising to the surface while the woman kept going deeper and deeper. He'd stood there confused, puzzled by what she might be plunging toward. And then he'd seen the sketch of the two lovers embracing at the bottom of the ocean. The flash had come instantly. It had struck him to the heart.

The couple at the bottom of the ocean. That place where you have gone as far as you can go. When he'd first seen the image and the crazy idea had seized him, he'd stood there for several minutes, then thought,
No.
It was preposterous to think Jessie capable of that.
Preposterous.
He'd always trusted her. Without question.

But it explained so much. Her uncommunicative behavior almost from the moment she'd gotten to Egret Island. The strange abruptness of her wanting time apart from him, her inability to articulate any real reason for it. She'd been aloof even before departing Atlanta, depressed about Dee's leaving for college, questioning herself, her life.

And so he'd asked the question. It had just come out.
Who is he?

It occurred to him that Jessie had answered him truthfully, not only because she wanted to end her deceit but because she wanted to force something to happen. Realizing this, he felt a vibration of panic in his chest.
Could it be this was not a casual affair? Did she actually love this man?
He spread his hand across his chest and pressed hard against the sick, betrayed feeling.

He began to feel emptied out. A deep-boned sadness. On and off during the night, he lay down and tried to sleep, but it was useless to try, and each time he would get up again and pace beside Jessie's paintings, which sat on the floor leaning against the opposite twin bed.

Through the small window, he could see the sky lightening slightly, black turning to gray, that smoked look that comes before dawn, and for the hundredth time he looked at his watch. There was no way off the island until the first ferry run at nine, but he knew that the moment it was light enough, he would leave the house.

When he stepped into the hallway, it was not yet six. He carried his suitcase to the living room and set it down, then wandered back to Jessie's room.

Her door was closed, and he simply opened it and walked in. She was sleeping the way he'd seen her sleep for twenty years, on her right side with her hair spread behind her on the pillow and her hand tucked under her cheek. The windowpanes were silver. Daylight had just begun to seep in. He stood there and watched her, studying the gray in her hair, the saliva gathered in the corners of her open mouth, the soft grating breath that was almost but not quite a snore, and all these things had made him want to lie down beside her.

Her wedding rings were gone from her finger. He found them on a velvet pincushion on top of the dresser, circled around a straight pin. He touched them with his finger, thinking of the geese in her painting, how she'd jettisoned them to the surface.

He twisted his gold band off his finger and placed it on top of the diamond engagement ring and platinum band he'd given her so long ago.

 

Nine days later, back home in Atlanta, he still felt the same hopelessness that had come over him that night.

For the last twenty minutes, the patient seated in his office had been talking about the death of her eighteen-year-old dachshund, Abercrombie, alternately recounting stories of his life and crying. He'd let her go on and on about the dog because today it was just easier, and he suspected she wasn't crying for the dog anyway but for her brother who'd died three months earlier after years of estrangement and for whom she'd cried not a tear.

The woman pulled the last tissue from the box beside her and held out the empty carton to him like a child needing her glass refilled. He got up from his leather armchair and pulled more tissues from the louvered cabinet beneath the bookshelf, then sat down again, forcing his mind off Jessie and onto his patient's dissociated feelings.

It had been like this since he'd returned, this painful inability to concentrate. One moment he would be listening to his patient and the next he was back at that moment—Jessie announcing the name Brother Thomas.

“I don't know what else I could've done,” his patient said, sitting on the sofa with her legs tucked under her. “Abercrombie's arthritis was getting so bad he couldn't walk, and he was on so many steroids already. I mean, really, what else could I have done?”

“I'm sure you did the right thing by putting him down,” Hugh told her, which prompted her to begin crying again.

He watched her bent head bobbing up and down in her hands, and castigated himself for sitting in the room with her and not being present, for hearing everything she said and not listening to any of it.

His mind wandered, and he was standing once more before the picture Jessie had made with colored pencils. The man was a monk. This was not as shocking as the thought of Jessie, his Jessie, having an affair, but it was still stunning to him. She had wanted him to know; otherwise she would've simply answered by saying “Thomas.” He couldn't imagine why she'd added “Brother” unless there was an unconscious message in it somewhere. What? Did she want him to know how much this man would have to give up to be with her?

Since returning, he'd felt his life continually imploding, the emptiness welling up like the immense reaches of space. Two nights ago he'd dreamed he was an astronaut making a space walk, tethered to the space shuttle by a cord that had suddenly snapped. He had simply drifted off into an abyss of darkness, watching his craft grow smaller and smaller until it was a speck of white in the silence.

His hatred for the man Jessie had been with would come over him with torrential suddenness. He would picture the two of them—how the man would touch her in places that had belonged only to him, breathing into her hair. How many times had they done it? Where? He had wakened once in a drenching sweat, wondering if they were having sex right then, at that very moment.

It had been humbling to discover his capacity for violence and revenge. He'd acknowledged this, like all good analysts, in a theoretical way while studying Jung's concept of the personal and collective shadow, but he knew it now as a living reality. He had stopped envisioning himself going to the monastery and taking the man by the throat, but he did not deny there were moments he wanted the monk to choke and bleed.

He would never act on it, of course, but even the wanting to, the needing to, expelled cherished notions he'd held about himself. He was not special. He was not entitled. His goodness, his enlightenment, did not set him apart. He was like all the rest, carrying around the same huge quantities of darkness.

The knowledge of this had driven him down into his own humanity. Once in a while, when he was capable of seeing himself as more than the pain he felt, he'd hoped his suffering was not being squandered, that somewhere inside it was making him pliant and tender.

The woman across the room from him, he realized, was explaining the details of her dog's death.

“He was in such pain—just to pick him up made him yelp—so the vet came to the car to give him the shot. Abercrombie was lying on the backseat, and when he saw Dr. Yarborough, do you know what he did?”

Hugh shook his head.

“He looked up at him and wagged his tail. Can you
believe
that?”

Yes, Hugh thought. He could believe that.

When Jessie had called him that Sunday and asked him to come, he'd gone just like the damn stupid dog—wagging his tail. He'd thought he was going to a reconciliation. He'd thought whatever had come over her had run its course.

It had been easy to see how much she'd changed. She'd looked tired and frazzled from the ordeal with Nelle, but underneath he'd sensed aliveness. There was an unmistakable independence taking hold, a self-containment that hadn't been there before. He'd seen how her paintings had changed, too, exploding out of their little boxes, becoming bold excerpts of the mystifying process she was in.

In the past so much of her had been invisible to him. Looking at her in the hospital waiting room, after being apart from her for so long, he'd been able to see her again.

How often did we do that, he wondered—look at someone and fail to see what's really there? Why had it been so hard to look at his wife and understand his need for her, the way his life was held in the accumulation of moments they'd shared?

He looked at the woman in front of him and tried for a second to see her. She was telling him now about the pet cemetery.

He touched the odd little bracelet on his wrist.

The last time Dee had phoned had been his birthday. “When is Mom coming home?” she'd asked.

He'd paused. Too long.

“Something's wrong, isn't it? She's been there forever.”

“I won't lie to you, honey. We're having a few problems,” he'd told his daughter. “But nothing that serious, okay? Every marriage has them. We'll work it out.”

Five days later the bracelet had arrived. She'd made it herself.

He didn't know what to tell Dee now. He didn't know what to tell himself.

He looked at the clock in the office, just over the woman's head. He dreaded the end of the day. At night Jessie's paintings haunted him, waking him up. He would sit on the side of the bed remembering how the colors had grown fiercer the farther the woman went.