Aquamarine (21 page)

“No, I’m much better now. I think the worst is over.”

Jesse looks at her skeptically.

“Really.”

“Stay there a minute,” Jesse says, running a hand through Hallie’s damp hair. Then goes into the bathroom and begins running a tub.

“I’m just a little wobbly,” she says as Jesse lowers her into the warm water, then washes her with a cloth and soap that smells like berries.

“I brought some chamomile,” Jesse says. “I’ll go fix you some. You stay in here a little while. Relax. You want company?”

“Yes. Come back soon.” Jesse thinks this may be the first time she has ever seen Hallie frightened.

When she brings the tea, she sets a cup on the edge of the bath, puts the lid down on the toilet, making it her chair. She pulls her knees up to her chest.

Hallie looks over at the tea as though she is being persecuted with having to drink it.

“It’s herbal,” Jesse says. “Elaine put me on to it.”

“I know about herbal. I knew about herbal before it was cool.
Way
before,” Hallie says. “It’s icky,” she says after a sip, making her mouth into a prune.

“Nope. Good—and good
for
you.”

After quite some while of Hallie looking at her in a peculiar—intent yet distant—way, Jesse asks, “What are you thinking?”

“Oh. This is from so far back. When you were a girl. I stopped by one afternoon on the way home from the parlor, knocked on your mother’s back door, and got no answer. I figured she was downstairs with the washer running and couldn’t hear me. But when I got inside I could hear you squalling. And then I heard a slap, and then dead silence. I came into the living room. I didn’t have to see, but at the same time I did. And then you saw me. You were sitting on the sofa with a little red face and a hardness in your eyes.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, not much of anything really. People hit their kids, I know that. And I’m sure your mother never did it to you but once or twice.”

“I don’t even remember the once,” Jesse says.

“There you go. And who knows, maybe you deserved it. You’ve always had a smart mouth on you. You probably want to hear that I told her if she ever struck you again, I’d stand witness to it on Judgment Day. But this was the fifties. And New Jerusalem, as you know, is not a place where things happen in a big, dramatic way. Not like in
our
city.” By which she means Rome.

“And I didn’t really have to say anything. It was enough—too much almost—that I was even standing there, enough that she saw censure in my eyes. Our friendship foundered for a time after that. It was only after a while that she let me back into her good graces, only after I’d gone through a time of being punished. I’d violated convention, you see. No matter how much I loved you, my proper place was outside, on the other side of that screen door, politely knocking, then waiting until I was allowed in. And except for that one time, I’ve always kept to my place—outside, at arm’s length, at a respectable distance. And all it has gotten me in the end is that I’m alone. And I don’t like it.”

“But alone is how you’ve chosen to live your whole life.”

“Well, not really,” Hallie says.

“You didn’t choose it?”

“I wasn’t quite alone,” she says, dropping as if it were a feather, an anvil. Having gotten confessional, Hallie seems to be on a roll.

“Oh my,” Jesse says, and feels herself starting to blush. “Well, I guess I always knew. I just never knew
who.”
“Oh, don’t go wide-eyed on me. You look like a vulture. It’s not exactly fascinating information anyway. It was only Horace.”

At first Jesse doesn’t get who’s being talked about. Then suddenly she does. “Doc Wemby?!”

“He was a fine man,” Hallie says defensively. “And a great physician.”

“Well, I know that,” Jesse says, backpeddling. “I’m sorry. I’m laughing at myself, for being such a jerk. It’s like I can’t imagine the generation older than me in love. How teenage.”

“No. You just can’t imagine a secret life would be necessary to loving a round, jolly man with a bad toupee and a Say Ahh sampler on his office wall. But really, who’d you think it was going to be, Ricardo Montalban?”

Jesse can’t think of a good comeback, and so just gives over to babbling. “But, I mean, those four kids? I mean five, counting Keith.” And then she slaps her head, catching herself just too late to stop this cartoon gesture. “My sponsor! The poor guy. He probably didn’t give a fig about swimming!

“Doc Wemby,” she says again a few moments later, still tapering off in her amazement as she gets Hallie out of the tub and blots her dry with a big towel, then puts Sarah Vaughan low on the stereo, and brings Hallie out onto her little patio. The rain has stopped as suddenly as it started; everything is dripping and smelling of reawakening.

The next night event starts so late it barely comes in under the wire of dawn. Jesse has been sleeping restlessly, first through hard cracks of thunder, photoflash lightning bursts, and then a short while of pelting rain. It doesn’t even feel as though she’s been sleeping, except that she wakes to the sound of distant splashing that wasn’t there before. Sometimes neighborhood dogs get in. One time she found a small alligator in the shallow end. It pays to take a look.

She pulls on shorts and a shirt, picks up a bread knife from the kitchen counter, and pads barefoot through the breezeway. When she gets to the pool door, she stops and looks out between the open jalousie louvers. There are boys, one, two ... four of them. It takes a while for her to see through the shadows that one of them is Anthony.

The others she doesn’t recognize. Anthony’s friends are always strangers to her, and never seem to be around long enough to become familiar. From the goofy way they’re talking to each other, the laughter that comes too easily from jokes too dumb, she guesses they are stoned. They’ve turned on the underwater lights and have shed their clothes and are variously diving and falling into the water, then barreling up to the surface, breaking through shouting, shaking the water from their whipping fans of long hair, spraying it from their mouths, their pale skin blue, as they emerge into the moonlight, washed clear by the storm.

Soon they grow tired and fall onto the gym mats at the far end of the pool. Only Anthony remains standing; he’s on the lip of the pool for so long and in such a state of perfect suspension, he looks like a failed statue, too frail to be made of stone. And then in one fluid move, he is in the air, out over the water, then onto it and taking the length of the pool with a machinery of strokes, getting rid of the water standing in his way.

Jesse knows he knows she’s watching. And that he’s showing her, not what he can do, but what he won’t.

These stormy nights leave behind a sky the blue of Hawaiian shirts, prom dresses, the inside of Woolworth jewelry boxes. Jesse cruises into town, picking up some coffee at the doughnut shop, then heads up A
I
A to a short stretch of tourist-free beach she uses as a thinking spot. There are
PRIVATE-KEEP OFF
signs, but she has never run into anyone enforcing them.

She cuts a fast right off the highway onto the sand and stops just shy of the breakers. She snaps an old Stones tape into Sharon’s Walkman, pushes the tiny speakers into her ears, and gets out and boosts herself up onto the hood. She needs to retreat for a while, from the present.

Usually, if she looks at the ocean long enough, then closes her eyes, the color will come up. The part she can’t control is where the scene will open. Sometimes it’s the dead white, and she is down in the showers, Marty’s breath on her, hot; the night air cool, clinging to the tiles. And the dogs, something about their yelping exciting her, making her think of search parties, translating this into fear of discovery. Discovery of what, though?

This time the frame that comes up is an earlier one, the color is still aquamarine, the pool bottom as she streaks over it. When she turns her head to the side to breathe, she can see she has only a quarter of the pool length left to go. She can also see that Marty is ever so slightly behind her. And then Jesse can feel herself, just the slightest bit, slowing down her stroke, spreading her fingers in the water to let the blue-green flow between them, relinquishing purchase. All of this so that her hand, when it slaps the tile at the end, will do so the smallest increment of measurable time after Marty’s. Taking the biggest moment of her life and blowing it off. For love. Making a spectacular gesture Marty would never know about, and if she did, would probably feel more contempt for than appreciation. The definition of folly.

Jesse can’t be sure about this, of course. She can’t tell if she is really remembering this, if this is the way it actually happened. Or if it is simply a device of self-torture, pulling the drape off the unthinkable thought.

She stares out at the sun, which has just lifted itself off the horizon, tastes the salt on her thumb as she drags it across her lower lip. Inside her earphones, she’s backed by “Tumbling Dice.” “My my my,” Mick Jagger slides into her ears, “I’m the lone crapshooter.”

She is sitting on the rust-pocked hood of a way too old car as she looks out on a dying sea. She’s pushing forty, with a failing business, two Visas maxed to the gills, a truly stupid marriage behind her, two kids already cruising into their own disappointed adulthoods. What can this pitiful bubble of history mean to her now that it has been paved over by so much real life?

She has never been able to tell anyone that this nonsense still tumbles around inside her. She worries it indicates an essential foolishness, and that maybe this is where Anthony comes by his. She would like to save him from this legacy, but her dreams of salvation are too unfocused. She can’t see what shore she could bring him to. Still, she’d like to be able to toss the rope within his reach and feel the tug of his grabbing on.

She should pry herself away from here, light out for the territory, wherever that might be. Sometimes, particularly on windless days like this one, she thinks she might truly die with longing for something to get her out of here, something to at least point her in some direction. Instead she sits here on the hood of her car, or lies on the sofa late at night, watching TV for clues. The modern dramas bleed, as the night wears on, into dated ones with cigarette holders and veiled hats, but all of them are about lives lived breathlessly, on heights with a steep dropoff. She has a brief acquaintance with this geography herself, but getting worked up about it does no good at all. Just leaves her sitting here all turned around, looking forward to the past.

Sandgate

December 1990 Brisbane

J
ESSE HAS BEEN SITTING
in a room in the Travelodge for two days, passing up the Koala Sanctuary and the Devonshire Tea Cruise recommended by the front desk clerk, who couldn’t know she is a traveler of a different sort, a tourist in her own past.

She hasn’t told anyone about coming down here. Smoke in their eyes, a light dusting of deceit, so they won’t be able to see her for the little while she needs to disappear.

All she has is an address, in a beach town up the coast a bit. Sandgate. A resort town of another era. This from the Olympic alum newsletter. (“Marty Finch asks her old pals, one and all, to write.”)

What she has done for these two days is sleep and gather up her momentum and watch TV, sifting through Lucy reruns and numbingly educational programs on wildlife and ancient civilizations and the nervous system. Finally she finds Marty’s show, “Q & A,” which appears to be a deadly earnest interview-format half hour.

“How did you see yourself and Parallelogram breaking away from what you call the ‘grounding’ of earlier dance movements?” Marty leans in, posing an intent question to an extremely thin, middle-aged man in a black turtleneck coiled in the chair opposite her.

She looks—not the same, of course not. Not at all, really. She’s so much older, in the middle of her adulthood instead of where Jesse left her, at its beginning. But the differences between Marty’s then self and this one—her mouth and eyes now set within fine lines, the tan which has lost its freshness—are irrelevant in the face of the sameness of everything significant. Jesse knows, just from what she can see on this snowy motel TV screen, that Marty is, in everything essential, the same.

Jesse throws the shift into overdrive and feels the engine of the rented Fourunner kick in as she passes a cluster of poky cars and delivery vans. Idly, she wonders if there’s a speed limit in Australia. She pulls over onto the gravel shoulder and checks the road atlas spread out on the passenger seat, anchored by a chocolate doughnut. She picks up a smaller, pencil-drawn map the guy at the gas station a few miles back made for her. She sees she has missed the turnoff and has to double-back two mile markers. From there, though, it’s a breeze, and in a few minutes she is near the sea, can smell it before she sees it, can see the high-flying water birds—sea eagles and kingfishers—swooping down, soaring up again. And then she is coming up on the house described by the gas station guy. It’s the last in a small line of old holiday houses, across the road from the beach, set up on stilts covered with latticework to let the breeze through, a Colonial conceit in gentle decline, battered by hard winds of other, less clement days, its wooden veranda sagging a bit, its boards holding the last of an aging coat of peach paint.

It’s still quite early, the ocean is still half-asleep, the palest of blue-greens pushing softly up onto the fine white sand. Maybe Marty won’t be here. Maybe she’ll be out of town, or already off to work. But of course she’ll be here, Jesse knows it. The Fates are usually up for a little drama; they won’t be able to resist conspiring to make this moment happen.

She gets out of the car and leans back against a front fender to gather up her expectations. But she finds she has none, actually can’t imagine anything will happen today to rub out the past and pencil in something startling and revelatory. This is just something she has to do, an improvised ritual of ablution.