“Of course it was. I know that.”
“I just wanted to tell you.”
“You don’t have to tell me. I know.” And then we switched positions and I held her around her submerged hips, the warm water slopping around us and hitting me in my back with every wave, and with each little gentle slap, I thought that the way our bodies were positioned prevented her from feeling a corresponding slap on her belly and chest. I wanted her to know, in other words, that I, at least, knew what love was. I gave her a nice, long kiss, and then I dove into the waves.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but when I emerged, there she was, twenty yards or so away from me, in exactly the same spot I had left her. I motioned for her to wade out a little farther to join me, but she shook her head curtly, and I couldn’t help but notice that the waves were now hitting her directly in the belly and chest, and she winced with every little blow.
I swam back to her and, as if I had never left, put my arms on her submerged hips, and when I looked down through the water at my wavering hands and forearms, I felt subtly ashamed, as if it were my will that were wavering. But I wasn’t about to give up.
“Look, I don’t know why this is important to me, but I’m so proud of you for doing something about Frank, so I guess I just think this is your day to really break through all of the barriers. I mean, I’m breaking a barrier tonight and playing in front of a strange audience with a backing band, right? So head under the water, that’s all. Do you think you could do that, put your head under the water?”
“I don’t have a bathing cap.”
That’s when I knew I had her. If she wasn’t panicking and flailing, and her primary concern was the lack of a bathing cap and what the saltwater might do to her hair, well, the hardest part was over.
“Okay, just stoop with me until the water reaches your chin.” I held her more firmly around the waist and, without terribly much coaxing, got her to stoop along with me until the water reached her chin, but then a wave hit us and her face was splashed with water and she leaped upward and backward like a spooked Appaloosa.
I took a deep breath. “You have to expect the waves. They’re regular, but I mean, sometimes one is bigger than the others.”
“I know. I’m not a moron.”
“Okay, just get used to their rhythm is what I mean. Take it slowly. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Alright, now dip down again with me, slowly, until your chin hits the water, and then when the next wave hits, think of it like this is no different from what it’ll feel like when your head is actually under the water. You know, wet. You’ll just feel wet is all.”
Eventually, after several attempts, I got her to lower her head as far as the underside of her nostrils and then, though I should have known better, for I was the one reminding her of the irregularity of the waves, a bigger-than-usual wave hit and it completely drenched us. She flailed and lost her balance and fell all the way into the water, and before she could recover, another big wave came in, and I could see her clutching helplessly at the water with her mouth open, taking in big gulps of the sea.
We were still in waist-deep water, remember, so it was completely ridiculous; you would have to be a child to drown, I thought. But then as I thought that I felt an awful inner wave of shame and stupidity and reached down to scoop her up by her armpits, but as she came up, spluttering and spitting, she punched me, hard, in the left eye. It was an overhand right, and it came straight out of the sun without any warning at all, like the sun itself had plummeted out the sky and walloped me.
If you’ve ever been punched, really hard, in the inner part of the eye that’s near the bridge of the nose, you know that tears instantaneously spring up in your eyes. It’s some kind of automatic response—yes, vestigial, if you will—and if you’re a man, you feel instantly humiliated because everyone thinks you’re crying because of the pain, but it’s just an autonomic response, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
So I stood there with salty seawater and saltier tears stinging my eyes and feeling, now, a double sense of shame, and I started to yell against the noise of the beach and the waves, “What the fuck do you—” when Alisa grabbed the skin around my left eye and twisted it, hard, in the process digging the knuckle of her forefinger into the eye. I screamed like a woman and sank to my knees back into the water, and I dragged her down with me as if to punish her. I fell into the water with a great slapping sound, and Alisa fell on top of me, and as she fell, she scrambled with her hands and feet to avoid going back underwater once again. And then suddenly I was the one who was flailing with my mouth open, and the water was rushing in, and I thought Alisa was actually trying to drown me. But then she got back to her feet, and she stormed back to shore and grabbed our towel and was gone.
Two: The Truth Rises Up from December (Willa)
1
Alisa had taken everything with her, and all I had on was my wet trunks—not even a pair of sandals to walk through the hotel lobby, not even my room key. I couldn’t bear to think about how, and why, my girlfriend had just punched me in the eye, so instead I obsessed about how my eye would look under the spotlights tonight, and where, with nothing in my hands and nothing on my body, I might wipe the tears and sand and suntan lotion off my face. I used the back of my hand and then I found a napkin dispenser in the Starbucks in the hotel lobby, but riding up in the elevator, somewhat drier but with my orbital bone and eye throbbing and bits of sand grinding between my molars, I started to become enraged.
The door, fortunately, was unlocked, propped open just a crack by one of Alisa’s flip-flops. Alisa was lying, face down, still in her brown and gold bikini, and I was comforted, in some small way, by the fact that she had not yet changed, that she wasn’t, at least, headed right now for the airport. And, too, that she was crying and not laughing; upset and not gloating; defeated and not triumphant. This made me feel, at some level, like we were in the same swamped boat.
I spoke first. “You alright?”
“I guess. It was kind of horrible, actually. It was the sound.”
“What sound?”
“You know, of the water in your ears. The difference between the water up to your nostrils and over your nostrils is no big deal, I mean I can hold my breath, I’m not a child, but then when the wave hit me and I fell and the water was over my head, I heard this horrific rushing sound and then at the same time this immense muffled silence, and it felt like I’d been hit by a bomb and was dead all over again. It was awful.”
“Dead all over again?”
“You know, like when it happened to me when I was a little girl. A friend pushed me in to the deep end. I thought I told you. It wasn’t so much that I thought I was drowning, though I guess I thought that, too. It was more like it was what I thought it must be to be dead.”
“I’m sorry. I mean, for taking you out into the water.”
I saw her shoulders shrug from the back and that reminded me, in some small way, of how I had tried to shield her front from the waves, and I stood there, still dripping just a bit on the nice carpet, and expected her, somehow, to reciprocate. To apologize, not for the flailing, which was inadvertent, but for deliberately and with great force and skill punching me in the eye. The eye, and the orbital bone around it, was throbbing, and every throb arrived at about the same interval at which the waves had crashed against my back as I had stood there protecting her, and with every crash, the anger that had faded when I found the door open and Alisa lying helplessly on the bed began to return.
But five or so throbs into this mounting rage, she flipped around on the bed and looked up at me and smiled beautifully and said, “I’m really sorry I hit you.”
“That’s okay.”
“It was instinct. But that’s no excuse.”
“It’s okay.”
“I was still in a panic
mode, but it wasn’t your fault the wave hit me. It was just that when it hit me, I hit back, but since you can’t punch a wave, I guess I just punched you instead.”
I had to laugh at that one—the image of “punching a wave”—but when I laughed my eye hurt more, and then Alisa started laughing too, and I jumped onto the bed with her even though that made my orbital bone hurt so badly I thought I was going to cry for real this time. She kissed me right on the spot where she’d twisted the skin and said, “Listen, first of all, I promise, so don’t worry, okay? I absolutely promise I will go to tomorrow night’s show, but please don’t be mad at me, after what happened today at the beach, plus I’m still so dragged out from the jet lag and the vodka and everything, I just want to sleep in this bed until tomorrow morning. Okay? I mean, you promise?”
“I thought you were the one promising.”
“I am, I mean, I promise I’ll come to your show, I just want you to promise not to be mad that it won’t be tonight’s show, which you’re really nervous about anyway, so you probably wouldn’t even want me there.”
“I’m not mad. I’m really not.”
And I really wasn’t. I put on my best jeans and a crisp blue shirt, picked up my Guild D-40 and my Martin DM, and headed downstairs to the club.
In the hour that it took me to do my sound check with Don and the real drummer, Zach, I started to feel a lot better. We ran through a couple of complete songs so that Zach could pick up the times, and before I even had a chance to think about it, it was nearly 7:00. No one, not even the voluble Don, had said anything about the deep black bruise that stood out so starkly against the white skin of the inner part of my left eye; maybe the low lighting and the orange glow from the camel caravan made it hard to see.
Bowen had known what he was doing, the whole losing-money aspect of it aside, and so had the club’s manager, a cherubic half-Japanese, half-Dutch fellow named Reese “the Knack” Nakamura. What I called my “folk-soul meets Michael Stipe” style of music did all of the genres involved a bit of a disservice, but I had a kind of subdued affinity for murmured lyrics and lilting melodies that seemed to say “island,” or, at least, some lonely islet. My minor-key tunes, the originals, seemed to go over with the crowd of about thirty-five or forty people better than the country and honky-tonk covers, and that was nice. Of course my back was to the drummer the whole time, but Don winked over at me once or twice as we settled into a groove, as if to say, “See, I know what the fuck I’m doing.” Near the end of my set, he was smiling broadly, and I imagined that what he was saying now was, instead, something along the lines of “hey, you’re no fucking Willie or Leon, but maybe you know what you’re doing, too.”
About halfway through “How Many Summers?” my third song in the set, I noticed a young woman seated stage left who looked different, in some way, from everyone else in the room. Since this was a hotel lounge in Honolulu, there were probably no more than a couple of locals in the audience, and everyone else seemed to be out-of-season, cheap package-deal tourists—mostly Asians with a few Germans and Americans.
This young woman, who appeared to be about my age, seemed more avid, for lack of a better term, than all of the other rum-sippers scattered around the stage. She was leaning forward, for one thing, while everyone else was leaning back, surreptitiously checking cell phones, relaxing, or quietly talking. She was petite, with a slightly broader-than-normal forehead, and a very erect posture—when she leaned forward, she did so only at the waist, and kept her shoulders square and her butt firmly in her seat.
She had very round and wide-spaced brown eyes and a rather small nose with an unusually flat bridge that accentuated the wide-eyed look and gave her the aspect, somehow, of an illustration from a fairy-tale book—a Little Red Riding Hood without the hood, perhaps, or a brunette Goldilocks. Her short brown hair was worn in a kind of asymmetrical flip that was cute enough but looked as if she had just come back from the stylist and was trying to make an impression on someone. She must have succeeded, because I forgot the lyrics to “How Many Summers” for a moment—something I never ordinarily do. I certainly didn’t have any actual fans as such, but if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn that this woman had been following me on the last seven stops of my Asian tour—if, in fact, I had been on such a tour.
Of course, the next morning, I didn’t mention the young woman to Alisa, who in any event was very focused on going shopping on Kalakaua Avenue; she’d had enough of the beach, and I’d had enough of her having enough of the beach. I, on the other hand, was just getting started.
I went to breakfast in a restaurant near the hotel, in a fine mood thanks to my performance, and then I wandered the streets for a while, feeling almost euphoric.
When I got back to the beach, I laid on the turquoise towel thinking about not much at all for the first time in a long time, drowsing, and listening to some Emmylou Harris on my earbuds. I awakened from my drowse every time I rolled onto my side so that the earbuds, and the tiny grains of sand they’d picked up over the course of the morning, pressed into my ear canal.
After the third or fourth awakening, the music was getting a bit too soporific for my taste, so I turned off my MP3 but remained prone on my towel and raised my head slightly to have a look around me.
Standing so close to me that she cast a shadow over me, and facing partially away from me, was the young woman from the nightclub, shaking some stray droplets from her too-new asymmetrical haircut. She was wearing the same pure white bikini I had “seen” in my dream and in my vision in Alisa’s laundry room.
Then she turned her head slightly in my direction, and I realized that this young woman who had been listening so avidly to my music in the nightclub was Wilhelmina.
Willa.
I said the name to myself a couple of times, and suddenly remembered that, for a time, she had had the nickname Nilla, either because she liked to eat Nilla Wafers or because she was sweet and simple and bland, or maybe just because it rhymed.
Though she was standing so close to me she cast a shadow over my legs, she clearly thought I was still snoozing and was waiting patiently and politely for me to awaken. That gave me a chance to observe her, with my left hand in a downward-tilted salute above my left brow to keep the powerful sun out and, I suppose, to keep anyone from seeing my black eye. She had a compact but full-figured body; she couldn’t have been any taller than about five foot four, but she had an unusually erect posture, very much as I’d remembered from childhood, with a slightly up-tilted chin and those big, resolute, unblinking eyes, as if she were bravely bracing for an impending impact. It accorded exactly with my earliest memory of her, when we were both four or so, and she had announced to me that she was mad at me about some nonsense or other, and, with a “humph,” had stalked off with her arms crossed tightly and her head held comically high, whereupon she walked straight into an elm tree, bounced off of it, and fell backward onto her bum. I’d laughed, of course, but she’d picked herself up from the ground and, with the same up-tilted chin and erect posture, walked back to her home and her mommy.
She turned slightly further in my direction as if surreptitiously checking to see if I’d awakened, and I realized, though I had seen this as well in the club, that she was indeed a brunette now, though her hair had been much lighter—almost blonde—in her Nilla days. Her nails and toenails had a nice, light coral-colored polish, and I reminded myself that, while the eyes and the posture were unmistakably that of the little girl I’d once known, she was as much an adult now as I was.
I could see that she still wasn’t quite sure if I was awake because I was still lying there, my eyes mostly closed against the sun, and I wondered if it was best if it stayed that way, because once she knew for certain I was awake, we would have to talk, and that conversation would inevitably turn to the very thing I didn’t quite know how to talk about.
I couldn’t talk about it because I
didn’t understand clearly then, and couldn’t recall clearly now, why Willa’s mother Isabelle—Mrs. Dunleavy, as I had known her—had blamed only me and not Willa, since both of us had been charged with watching Willa’s baby sister. And I thought that this odd, though clearly not coincidental, meeting would be, as no doubt Willa intended it to be, a good chance to clear the air—not to blame Willa, nor even to ask her to share the blame with me, but merely to understand why it had not been shared to begin with.
Or perhaps it had. Perhaps Mrs. Dunleavy had spoken to Willa much as she had done to me, except that the mother had no intention of self-exiling her family to Buenos Aires or anywhere else. And maybe Willa was feeling much of the same guilt that I felt, and maybe I could help to relieve her of some of it. It was worth taking the chance of being the first to bring up this subject that she had traveled all the way to Hawaii to discuss in order to remind her that we had only been kids.
So I said, softly, but loud enough for her to hear, “Nilla,” but Willa didn’t turn around. I tried again more loudly, and still she did not acknowledge me, maybe because of the clamor of the waves and the other bathers, or maybe because she had seawater in her ears.
Or more likely because she had utterly forgotten that long-ago nickname.
So this time I said, loudly enough for anyone in her vicinity to hear, “Willa Dunleavy?” And she turned around and looked at me, still holding my down-tilted salute, and gave me a slow, shy smile that showed no teeth. She wore pale pink lip gloss on her thin and soft-looking lips.
Then she said, simply, “Hi.”
“I recognized you right away.”
“I did, too. I mean at the club last night.”
“Well, I more recognized you here on the beach, I wasn’t completely sure at the club, because it was so out of context for me. How are you, Willa, it’s been quite a while!”
Everything Solid has a Shadow Page 11