Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

by Sarah Monette

  She sighs, running one palm over her velvet-short hair. It would’ve been nice if the artist fucked as pretty as he talks.

  197. Figurehead. Wood. 34” x 17”. American, ca. 1830-35. Figure of a woman in a hat. Ship unknown.

  I found a museum today. Not a surprise, really, but I’d given up on there being anything interesting to do in this town. The only bookstore for twenty miles was a rare and used dealer along the “picturesque” main street specializing in the most abstruse and technical aspects of naval history. I’d spent hours on the beach, staring at the water and the gulls. The water was dark; the gulls were blindingly white. And malicious, I thought. They would have appreciated me more if I’d been dead, and I saw that truth in their little, bright eyes.

  But this afternoon I turned up a side street, and there was the sign: MARITIME MUSEUM. I’d taken it for a warehouse. It was open, and I needed something to do for at least one of the three hours remaining before I could legitimately go back to the apartment Dale had rented and begin to wait for him. I pushed open the door, and pushed hard, for like all the doors in this town it was balky and swollen with the breath of the sea.

  I’d been in more than my share of maritime museums, as Dale had a passion for them. This one seemed indistinguishable from the multitude: bleak and dusty and full of ship models and scrimshaw and all the sad mortal paraphernalia of a long-gone way of life. I stood for a long time before a case of glass pyramids, once set in the decks of ships to allow light into the cramped spaces below. I wondered how long you would have to stay down there before you forgot that you could not reach up your hand and touch the sun.

  The museum’s collection was large, but not terribly interesting. “Thorough” would be the polite word. There was nothing there I hadn’t seen better examples of elsewhere, and I was unhappily conscious that the museum was not occupying enough of the long brazen afternoon. I walked more and more slowly, carefully reading each word of each printed placard, and still I was calculating: how long to finish at the museum, how long to walk back to the apartment, how long to take a shower. How long I’d waited for Dale the previous night and all the nights before.

  And then I turned a corner, stepped through a narrow doorway, and found myself in a long hall, its stretch of narrow windows admitting dusty sunlight and a view of the sea; a hall bare except for the double row of figureheads, mounted like the caryatids of some great invisible temple.

  I started down the hall, reading the placard beside each figurehead and studying awkward proportions, stiff shoulders, clumsily carved faces. The collection was composed entire of women: naked, half-dressed, clothed in Sunday best; blonde and brunette and redheaded; empty-handed and holding books and holding navigational instruments. And all of them staring, their eyes seeming to seek for something lost and irreplaceable, something that they would never find in this half-neglected room.

  There was a feeling of incompleteness about them. They had never been meant to be seen on their own, nor from this unnatural angle. Their makers had intended them to be part of a greater whole, had intended them to lean forward fiercely, joyfully, into the crash and billow of the sea. By rights they were the eyes, the spirits, of ships far vaster than themselves. This room was not where they belonged; this room was not their home.

  The dust motes floating in the shafts of sunlight, the long shallow gouges in the floor boards, the cracking, yellowing plaster of the walls—I had never been in a room so sad. The figureheads seemed like mourners, standing at the edges of a grave which was the aisle I walked down. For a moment, I felt truly buried alive, in my marriage, in this town, in this dreary, dusty hall.

  But even as my heart pounded against my ribs, my breath coming short from imagined suffocation, I looked into the face of a figurehead whose long wooden hair was entwined with strands of wooden pearls, and saw that I was not the one buried in this room. Nor was I the one for whom they grieved, the one for whom they watched. They were waiting for something that could not enter the museum to find them.

  After I worked my way up one side and down the other, I returned to stand in front of one woman, the pale green of sea-foam, her prim Victorian maiden’s face framing the wide-open eyes of an ecstatic visionary. I was staring into her eyes, trying to put a name to what I saw there, when I was startled nearly out of my wits by a man’s voice asking, “Do you like the figureheads, miss?”

  After the silence of the figureheads, the man’s harsh voice seemed as brutal as the roar of a noreaster. I turned around. The door at the far end of the hall, marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, was open, and a tall, gaunt old man stood with his hand on the knob. His hair was iron-gray, clipped short, and he wore jeans and a cable-knit sweater.

  “Yes,” I said, groping after my composure. “They . . . they are very beautiful.”

  “Aye,” he said, coming toward me, and I had to repress the stupid impulse to back away, “they are. There’s nothing like them made any more.” When he reached me, he extended his hand. “Ezekiel Pitt.”

  I shook hands with him, although I didn’t want to. It was like shaking hands with a tangle of hawsers, even down to the faint sensation of grime left on my palm and fingers when he let go. I refrained with an effort from wiping my hand on my jeans. “Magda Fenton.”

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Fenton,” Ezekiel Pitt said politely, and I did not correct him. “I do most of the collecting for the museum, and I must admit the ladies have always been my favorite.” His smile was unpleasant, the teeth prominent and yellow and wolf-like. His smell was musty and sweaty at once, and I gave in and backed up a step.

  “Why do none of them have names?” I had noticed that on the placards; figurehead after figurehead was ship unknown.

  “They’re all from shipwrecks, these ladies,” Ezekiel Pitt said. “Their names are beneath the sea, like their ships. I suppose you might call them widows.”

  “Yes, you might,” I said, although it seemed to me, looking at their wide, blind eyes, that it would be fairer to call them lost spirits, sundered from their proud bodies, their unbounded blue world, their joyous wooden lives.

  Ezekiel Pitt was crowding me again, and I did not like him. I moved toward the door, to finish my tour of this dismal museum and return to my dismal life. He stayed where he was; out of the corner of my eye, I saw him touch the green woman’s face, caressing it like a lover. At the door, I stopped. I had one question more. “Why are they all women?”

  He glanced up from the green woman and gave me a horrible, unbelievable, leering wink. “I only like the ladies, miss,” he said.

  I could stand him and his sad prisoners no longer; I fled.

  179. Figurehead. Wood. 32” x 17”. American, ca. 1840. Figure of a woman crowned with flowers. Ship unknown.

  Byron Pitt stole the selkie’s skin on an August afternoon when the sky was dull with heat, the sun as fake as an arcade token and not a cloud near to cover its shame.

  Byron knows the old stories either far too well or not nearly well enough. He ran with her skin that first day, ran like an ungainly jackrabbit, and nothing—nothing within the limited compass of what she is allowed—will make him tell her what he did with it. She cannot hurt him, much as she would like to; she cannot leave him. She could refuse to have sex with him, but it would do her no good. Byron is willfully stupid about a lot of things, but not even he is foolish enough to believe she would stay with him one split-second past the moment she got her hands on her skin again. And although selkies can lie, it is not natural to them: she admits the truth of her own appetites. Even Byron is better than no one at all.

  But he isn’t enough. He could never be enough, even if she loved him as the stories say some selkies came to love their captors. And she doesn’t even like him, although much to her own irritation, she finds him too pathetic to hate. She’s all he’s ever had, he tells her over and over again, and it’s all too easy to believe.

  She doesn’t care about charity. She wants her damn skin back. Her life. Her home.

&nbs
p; In the six months she’s been trapped on land, she’s trashed Byron’s apartment twice, searching. Her skin isn’t there. She’s explored this dreary town as thoroughly as she ever explored the sunken ships that were her childhood playground. She knows everywhere Byron goes, and she’s searched all those places, too. All of them except for one.

  She knows her skin is in the Maritime Museum, the same way she knows, not quite in her head and not quite in her gut, where her sisters are, out in the cold Atlantic. It may not be true, this knowing, but it’s real. These days, it’s the most real thing about her.

  But she can’t go into the museum. The museum is Ezekiel Pitt’s territory, and her fear of him is too deep for reason.

  Ezekiel is Byron’s uncle or cousin or something like that. He knows what she is, knew the moment he laid eyes on her, without Byron saying a word, and he doesn’t care. He’s not impressed, not appalled; he looks at her as if she’s just another curio in the museum, and not even an interesting one. But the way he looks at Byron . . . Ezekiel Pitt may not care about selkies, but he understands Byron perfectly. He knows what it is to keep something that doesn’t belong to you. Knows and gloats, and she knows it was Ezekiel who put the idea of catching a selkie into Byron’s stupid head.

  She fears him because she does not understand him and because whenever she sees him, she smells death in captivity, smells the truth, that Byron is never going to let her go. Ezekiel Pitt makes her want to submit, to let Byron take her self the way he took her skin, and that scares her most of all.

  191. Figurehead. Wood. 45” x 15”. American, ca. 1840. Figure of a woman using a telescope. Ship unknown.

  That night, lying beside Dale’s indifference, I dreamed of the figureheads. They were free from their mountings, standing at the windows of their prison, staring out at the clamoring surf. The moonlight showed the tears on their faces, showed their small pleading wooden hands pressed against the indifferent glass. And then, in my dream, like a gull I flew out from the museum, out over the dark and terrible sea. I flew for miles and miles without becoming tired or afraid, marveling in the beauty of the water and the night.

  Then I dove beneath the waves. I seemed still to be flying, effortlessly, down through the water, and I knew I was a seal, as much at home in this element as gulls were in the air. I reached the sea floor and there danced in and out of the gaping, barnacle-encrusted hulls of sunken ships. These were the ships of the figureheads, their lives and their deaths, all here interred in the sand beneath the black weight of the water.

  188. Figurehead. Wood. 37” x 22”. American, 1865? Figure of a woman holding a broken chain. Ship unknown.

  The selkie spends a lot of time on the beach. It drives Byron up the wall; he seems to be afraid that someone will figure out what she is and take her away from him. “Well, I can hope,” the selkie said, and Byron winced and shut up.

  She met the artist on the beach, let him think he was seducing her. She’s learned a lot, these last few months, about the lies men tell themselves.

  She pushes the cuffs of her sweat pants up and walks as far into the tide as she can in this stupid body that will drown if she lets it, or die of cold. She doesn’t swim; without her skin, it’s just a mockery.

  She stands for a long time, until her feet start to go numb, and it’s not until she turns back toward the land that she realizes she’s not alone. There’s a woman standing at the high tide line.

  The selkie startles, splashing. The woman doesn’t even seem to notice, and as the selkie wades back to dry land, she realizes that the woman is crying. The selkie skirts wide around her, light-headed with relief when she makes it to the public parking lot without attracting the woman’s attention. She glances back, and the woman is still standing there. Staring out to sea, crying slow silent tears, as if the oceans of her body are trying to find their way home.

  176. Figurehead. Wood. 39” x 19”. American, ca. 1820. Figure of a Native American woman. Ship unknown.

  I woke up hard, my breath caught in my throat, rolled over and looked at the clock. It was almost six a.m. I couldn’t stand the stifling closeness of the bedroom any longer; I got up, dragged on yesterday’s clothes, and escaped into the open. Dale always slept like the dead, and he wouldn’t care even if he woke. I took the same path I’d taken for days, threading my way through the stiff, sullen town to the beach. I stood there, just above the undulation of seaweed that marked the high tide line, staring at the jeweled golden mystery of the sunrise, my mind, still half-dreaming, full of the memory of the figureheads, imprisoned in a hall as stifling as that bedroom, held away from the place where they belonged. The green woman’s childlike face returned to me, her rapturous eyes.

  Somewhere beneath those waves was her home. The rich strangeness, the terrible sadness of the dream returned to me, and I realized that I was crying, hot silent tears sliding down my cheeks; I licked one off my upper lip, but could not distinguish its taste from the salt miasma of the sea. I stared at the water until my eyes felt as sea-blasted and blind as the figureheads’, and then I began to walk, aimlessly, blindly, my mind in the air with the gulls, in the deep water with the seals, in the dusty prison with the waiting women.

  190. Figurehead. Wood. 30” x 18”. American, ca. 1870-1890. Figure of a mermaid. Ship unknown.

  The selkie answers the phone: “Moonwoman Coffeehouse.”

  “Hi, Russet, it’s me. Byron.” Byron always has to name both of them when he calls her, as if he has to guard against the possibility that their identities might slip. She feels sorry for him, for the crippled understanding that thinks identity has anything to do with something as arbitrary as a name. Russet isn’t her name anyway, but it’ll do.

  “Hello, Byron,” she says warily.

  “Look,” Byron said, his voice a little too high, a little too fast, “I’ve been thinking. I think we should get married.”

  She wants to laugh at him, but she can’t find the breath. Because marriage means Byron isn’t getting tired of this horrible fake relationship, isn’t coming to his senses. No, quite the opposite: Byron wants to make it official.

  She hears herself say, “Well, we can’t talk about it now, Jesus, Byron!” And watches her hand, small and broad and brown, hang up the phone. And then she starts to shake.

  She looks up, and Shelly is staring at her. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just Byron, y’know?”

  Shelly says, “I wish you’d just go ahead and dump his ass,” and the selkie gives her half a smile and a shrug and gets back to work.

  She clears tables and scrubs counters all morning, remembering to smile at the regulars, remembering receipts and correct change and to keep out of Shelly’s way as she works. She has the afternoon off. She doesn’t have another meeting with the artist until next week. Byron won’t be home ’til six. She walks to the museum after eating a lunch she doesn’t taste, and then stands in front of the door for nearly five minutes, trying to stop shaking. Ezekiel Pitt isn’t interested in her. The worst he’ll do is tell Byron, and she isn’t afraid of Byron. Byron’s power over her is only a matter of her skin and the old stupid rules about possessing it. Nothing here can hurt her, so why can’t she move?

  Because she’s afraid. She’s afraid of Ezekiel Pitt; she’s afraid of the museum where he dens. Her fear is brutal, terrible, so vast she can’t even run from it. She stands, wooden and helpless, on the sidewalk until a voice says, “Are you all right?” and breaks her stasis.

  It’s the woman from the beach, the pale, mousy woman who was watching the sunrise and crying, and this time the selkie is close enough that even a stupid human nose can catch her scent. “Oh!” the selkie says involuntarily. “You’re . . . ” The woman the artist is cheating on with me. The woman I smell on him, although he claims you’re hundreds of miles away.

  “Magda Fenton,” the woman says. “And you’re Dale’s new model. Russet, isn’t it?”

  The selkie nods.

  And then a thought seems to strike the
woman; she tilts her head to one side, like a bird, and says, “How did you know who I was? Dale showed me his sketches, but he hasn’t drawn me in years.”

  “I smelled you.” And then her heart stutters in her chest, because of all the things she shouldn’t have said . . .

  “You smelled me?”

  “On him. I’m so sorry.”

  “He’s sleeping with you.” She doesn’t sound surprised, or even angry. Only tired. “That explains a great deal.”

  “I really am sorry,” the selkie says; she feels sick. Because she can’t claim she didn’t know the artist was cheating on his wife. She can’t even claim she didn’t know it mattered. Not when that’s why she was sleeping with the artist herself. Because it’s the only thing she can do that hurts Byron at all.

  “Dale’s decisions aren’t your fault,” the woman says, almost kindly. “But . . . you smelled me? How? I don’t wear perfume, and I haven’t . . . ”

  The selkie knows she should lie. But she doesn’t. She’s hurt this woman already, and the woman has not tried to hurt her in return. She has behaved like a sister, not a hunter.

  The selkie turns her hands palms up, spreading the fingers. And she says, “I’m a selkie.” It’s the first time she’s ever spoken the words.

  The woman becomes very still for a moment, staring into the selkie’s eyes as if she could find truth in them. Then, slowly, she bends her head to look at the selkie’s hands, the webs between her fingers, the rough skin of her palms. And then she looks up again, her pale eyes like rock, and says, “Where is your skin?”

  The selkie blinks hard against the salt burn of tears. “In there,” she says, nodding toward the museum. “Byron hid it in there.”

  201. Figurehead. Wood. 35” x 20”. American, ca. 1850-1860. Figure of a woman, her hands crossed at her breast. Ship unknown.