The Glass Ocean

by Lori Baker

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  Copyright © Lori Baker, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Portions of Part One first appeared, in different form, in Common Knowledge, Volume 16, Issue 1, Winter 2010 (Duke University Press).

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Baker, Lori, date.

  The glass ocean / Lori Baker.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-61799-1

  1. Manwoman relationships—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A43148G53 2013

  813’.54—dc23 2013007696

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Peter

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I.

  VOYAGE OF THE NARCISSUS

  II.

  THE BIRDCAGE

  III.

  THE GLASS OCEAN

  IV.

  ON A WINTER NIGHT A TRAVELER

  Acknowledgments

  I.

  VOYAGE OF THE NARCISSUS

  I write in retrospect, from the vantage of a distant shore.

  • • •

  Carlotta Dell’oro is my name; I am eighteen years old; mother I have none; father either. My hair is long, red, bright as a flame; I stand six foot two in my stocking feet; or would, except I am very seldom in my stocking feet, having planted my boot firmly on the backside of the new world—up to the hilt in it, in its mud and its muck and its offal—a commitment of a sort; my hair, like a flame, has lit the new and savage shores, the hills, the craggy, wooded paths of this new world, coming now, briefly, to rest, in this bright, hard, hot, blue place. Here I rest; here I write.

  • • •

  Outside, beyond the screen, is a jeweled line where sea meets sky; a single tree trunk, bowed, elliptical, smooth as a rib, its shaggy top pendant with the brown, rough-skinned nuts of this land; there is a rustle of anoles; high-pitched alarm of cicadas winding up, then down, then away, into deceiving silence. Before me, on the table, are spread my father’s things, what was left of him, his diaries, his drawings, his letters. Of my mother I have nothing—just his drawings of her (many of these), a single roguish photograph, and memories—poor uncertain objects, from which to try to reconstruct a world.

  Spiders stir in the high, bright corners above me as I write, knitting their webs; the fan ticks rhythmically, tock-tock-tock-tock; it does not stir the air; this is a hot place; innocent, relentless in its innocence; without shadows; remorseless in its brightness; begging to be filled in. From the other room, the room where I am not, comes the sharp, sudden creaking and croaking of springs, a screen door snapping, sharply, open and shut.

  Carlotta? It’s time to go. Carlotta.

  Her step is soft, compared to mine; her hair still dark, supple, repelling reflection, like a raven’s wing. She has packed our bags, bought our tickets.

  Carlotta.

  We are about to step off the edge of the earth together, she and I. It takes great faith, to do a thing like that, with anybody. Let alone with an orphan like me.

  • • •

  First steps are hardest. When we step outside, onto wooden sidewalks that loft us up, in our long skirts, an inch or two above the muck of the new world, the men will call out to me: Hey, Red! Walk my way!

  Ginger hair being no impediment here, in the new world. In this savage place.

  • • •

  Wait—I’m not ready.

  Then hurry up, she says, hurry up, she’s impatient, with her little valise buckled up tight, lengthwise, crosswise, she’s ready to go; while I’m the picture of laxity, everything loose, scattered, unpacked, unorganized, unready; falling apart, oh, all falling apart, from the hairpins on down, with the past spread out before me on this desk, the future a willful flinging into the abyss. There is such complexity in this thing, of orphaning, and being orphaned; of leaving, and being left behind.

  I am one, you see, who has slipped through; fallen down, unnoticed, through a gap in the fabric of things; settled softly, in a quiet, nearly forgotten place.

  • • •

  Hurry up, Carlotta. Or we’ll miss the boat.

  Well. This is true.

  • • •

  It’s not that I’m angry. They couldn’t help themselves, my parents; nor could anyone else have helped them—they were, like all of us, each in our own way, doomed right from the start, just by being who they were: she, with her vague blue eyes, her pink, sulky pout, her distractedness—that peculiar air she always had, of being somewhere other than where she really was, or of wanting to be, until at last she was nowhere at all; he, with his pale white stalk of a neck, his nervous stutter, his pad and pencils, his ill-fitting suit, hunching over his lamp; hardly more than children themselves, when I came into the world; and unmoored, the both of them, terribly unmoored; all at sea; and so it was inevitable; and where blame cannot be placed, nor can anger be. They did not belong together, it is true, though he would chase her to the ends of the earth, and has done, and is doing—or so I believe—

  • • •

  Carlotta, it’s time—

  • • •

  No blame to be placed for their serial disappearances, first she, then he; she, as I am about to be, off over the edge of the earth; he—willfully—off over the edge of a boat into the cold—the slithering—the grey blue—the unblinking—the sea—

  • • •

  Don’t dwell on it, don’t dwell, that’s what they say. But I dwell nonetheless, casting my shadow onto this new and bright, unsullied and heretofore shadowless world.

  • • •

  Scraping of bootheel. Slamming of door. She’s given up on me for now. Out of patience. Crossing my line of vision, out there beneath the palms. Calmly regarding the horizon, that sharp, seamless glitter of blue. Balancing, for a moment, from my perspective, the sea on her back; then stooping to touch—to touch—

  I don’t know what. A coconut. A cockleshell. The sand.

  • • •

  Let her go. It will pass, this feeling, as of sinking into cold black and wet, the bubbles rising swiftly around me, silver and white, and the buzzing—

  • • •

  There. All right again now. It’s only for a moment that I’ll be alone.

  • • •

  That’s how it was when he went, into the cold North Sea. A sea far darker, and colder, than the one outside this window.

  Tell Clotilde, he said.

  Unwitting last words. Or not? She’d been gone a long time already, when he finally went, too.

  It’s hard to know what he meant by it. This is ambiguous.

  Down then. Into the murky unknown.

  We were in the smallboat together, he and I, and Harry Owen; just before dawn we’d sought our purchase on that slithering sea, with the cliffs still shadowed in the dista
nce—Black Cap, Mad Molly, Devil’s Brow, their faces indistinct—Whitby itself somnolent, the whitewashed houses with their red-tiled roofs clinging like barnacles to their cranny in the cliff, limpets in the crevasse, holding tightly, tightly, such memories. Shadows aplenty there, in the old world. And all asleep among them. Outside the protective embrace of the breakwater, which in all weathers flashed its lights, one red, one green, our smallboat bucked and turned on the waves, while, from the harbor, fishing boats essayed, with their accompanying chorus of gulls, all in ignorance of us, our business none of theirs on that playfully cavorting sea: sea like a cat, batting us languidly with a tireless, disinterested paw. My father had the diving suit on, the entire ridiculous getup, the lead-soled shoes, the horizontal steel tank mounted on his back. Going down he was, to gather specimens for his glass ocean. These to be sketched, remade in glass.

  It was Harry Owen’s job, up top in the boat, to work the pump. He it was who would play out the length of hose, press the air down beneath; an esoteric job for an esoteric man. My job was simpler: I helped my father adjust the helmet.

  Tell Clotilde, he said, before taking the mouthpiece between his teeth. Then I battened the seals, and he sank, with a last, businesslike nod, into the wine-dark sea.

  What was I to tell her? How was I to tell her? He didn’t say, I didn’t ask.

  No matter. No matter. My mind was elsewhere mostly. I inherited that from her.

  I may have been irritated with him, just for a moment.

  Then he was over the side. I saw the silver crown of the helmet descend into the greeny-black void. All gone then. Not even a ripple remained to mark the place. The ocean unzipped and swallowed him up. The air hose played out vertically. Stopped. Harry Owen said, He’s struck bottom. The hose played out some more. Harry Owen said, He’s walking.

  How deep? said I. But Harry didn’t answer. He was too busy tending to the pump. As was only right. Suck and hiss of air, mischievous lip-lop of waves, cat’s paw softly batting. And then the sun rose, sparking light in the black bituminous shale of the cliffs, awakening from their nests the fulmars and kittiwakes, which began to wheel with haunting cries above us.

  Harry Owen said, He’s off the tether.

  This in itself was not alarming. The tank on my father’s back allowed for that, for several precious minutes at least.

  Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Twenty-five.

  Seven minutes the apparatus allowed. But by no means twenty-five.

  There was a silence then, but for the playfulness of the cat, batting at the gunwales.

  Harry Owen said, He’s gone.

  What else could he say? Reluctantly, we hoisted in the tether.

  Harry slowly rowed back, while I remained holding tight to aft, staring out to sea. There was no splash or scar to mark the place where I became an orphan. No matter how I looked I could not find it; nor would I ever, in the days to come.

  • • •

  The days to come.

  Ironical positioning, that.

  • • •

  For it seemed to me then that there were no days to come. Seconds, minutes, hours; passing time, keeping it, counting it; what were these to me? I was done with all that. Time was stopped, and I with it. Though I was aware, in my dim way, of tumult around me, of running feet, of voices raised, and banners, too, upon stern, upright masts; of shrill police constables and of fishermen who set out upon the water to troll for the body of my father who, it was presumed, had slipped his tether, gotten lost down there in the dark, and drowned.

  The diving suit weighed more than he did. Much was made of that, after the fact.

  His body, though, was never found. Of course it wasn’t. He was too subtle for that, far too subtle, he was a subtle man, a tactful man, oh father mine. And gone.

  • • •

  Suddenly there’s a scratching at my window screen. Look—it’s she, outside. She’s holding something up, something she found out there beneath that stark, polished rib of palm, something she wants me to see. Two halves of something, bone white, brilliant, unmatching. Disarticulate. Occluded by glare.

  • • •

  She doesn’t want me to tell it, that’s the problem.

  • • •

  Too late. Too late. I am launched now, in one sense, at least.

  I’d like to be able to say: they met at sea. There is a gracefulness in that, an ease of telling. An economy. They met at sea, they were at sea, they parted by sea, exeunt. But no. It was never that simple. The problem is they should not have met at all, at sea or anywhere else, neither on the street nor in a room, in a field, on a beach, he and she, Leo and Clotilde, two opposing elements that should have repelled, resisted; that did repel, resist, for a time; that still resist me, at any rate. The two of them, unmeant; of emphatically disparate stuff. Until brought together. A collision, I the result. And then once again: the molecules fly apart, will not hold.

  • • •

  She was a beauty then, though. That’s what Harry Owen said of her. She was irresistible, your mother. Irresistible. Who knows what fantasies took root and blossomed in that charming little Eden, the pale and tender hollow of your mother’s heat-bared shoulder. That’s what he said. He rhapsodized all right.

  From which it may be seen that he was a little bit in love with her, too. As were they all.

  • • •

  But I’m getting ahead of myself now. Best reserve her entrance for later. She deserves a good one; such drama.

  • • •

  My father, of course, is a wholly different matter. Unprepossessing. I imagine him as he was then, a young man, very young—young as I am now—a little older, perhaps—eighteen, nineteen; dressed very properly in a dark suit, yellow waistcoat with small silver buttons, white shirt with a stiffly starched collar. These clothes are of fine quality, evidently expensive, purchased on the eve of his long journey from the north; but he is uncomfortable in them; unaccustomed; see how he pulls at the collar, fiddles with the cuffs, nervously pulling, nervously fiddling, with his pale, small, delicate hands. Small. Yes. He is a small man, my father. Neat and small. A pale man, dark haired, with bright, dark eyes the most expressive feature in a face otherwise unrevealing. Fiddling with his cuffs and collar in a hot, dark room. Pressed close, he is.

  I can easily imagine it, the closeness. And the smell: very sour. For it is a very hot day, the hottest of that very hot summer of 1841. Outside the small, dark room wherein my father is contained (wherein I have contained him), close pressed, in his very proper suit, the roads are a steaming clamor of dust and dung, the garbage tips expelling everywhere across the city their noxious gases, cinders carrying thick and hot on a dry, southwest wind. He’s lucky to be indoors actually, on a day like this. Despite the fug.

  • • •

  It is arbitrary of me, perhaps. I could have chosen differently. But I’ve decided that this unpleasant day is the day on which I will begin. On which they will. He and she. In late August. All the parks burned brown, the leaves on the trees like galvanized metal, uncompromising sky the color of steel. Water in the Long Pond stippled. Crackling. Conducive to chemical reaction.

  • • •

  My father is in Bury Place. I have contained him upstairs, in the peculiar pink-and-blue confection of a building, so unexpected among all the red brick and whitewash of Bloomsbury, where are located my grandfather’s lodgings.

  • • •

  Is this precise enough?

  • • •

  No. I can be more specific yet. The pink building is at the corner of Bury Place and Great Russell Street, just around the corner from Montagu House. On the street level there is a shop, very dark, that bears the placard: A. PETROOK, ANTIQUITIES; COINS; CARPETS; OLD COINS; PAPER MONEY BOUGHT AND SOLD. Small, intriguing objects are contained within this shop, displayed in its windows. A head of Isis, for example. Another of Aphrodite. Greek vases and other odds and ends of pottery. An iron Celtic figure of a horse and rider. A red terra-
cotta hand and arm, very roughly made, probably broken off an early Roman figurine. Something Mayan.

  Arthur Petrook is there as well, at the back, one among his objects, like them rough, with an unfinished quality, as if poorly cast, by old-fashioned methods. A short man, squat, dark, balding, foreign looking (not unlike my father in this), apparently untouched by the heat (in this very unlike my father indeed), surrounded by old, piled newspapers, dusty bound squares of carpet, a jumble of packing crates and boxes from which straw stuffing protrudes. He sits at—or rather, it seems, crouches over—a desk, though, of course, this isn’t true, he doesn’t crouch, not really, more it’s that he’s leaning over something, leaning avidly over an object that lies before him, on the desk. It’s a page from what must be (have been) a very old book, lettered in Latin, brilliantly colored in the margins in gold and crimson and deep blue, borders illuminated with strange, deformed figures, some human, some not, cavorting, coupling, consuming themselves and each other and the text in an infinite, uncheering roundelay that, from the look of it, Arthur Petrook finds infinitely cheering.

  • • •

  There are only two ways he could have obtained a single plate from a manuscript this old. He cut it out of the book himself, I bet. No stranger Arthur Petrook to this and other profitable mutilations.

  • • •

  How can I say such things? What do I know about it? It’s not like he’s got the knife in his hand right now.

  It’s something else, that sharp glint, something else altogether.

  • • •

  Anyway, that’s no business of mine. Look away, look away.

  • • •

  And find, in the corner, behind a narrow door surrounded by stacks of crates, the stairway leading up to my grandfather’s lodgings.

  Like the shop itself, this stairway, dim and airless, is choked with objects—papers, books, boxes, terra-cotta heads, grimy textiles—that almost completely occlude the passage up. It is very like a burrow, dug with tooth and claw by some eager, gnawing mammal. At the top is a landing piled with carpet samples, and a door with a card upon it that reads: PROF. F. GIRARD. Behind the door: a dim, low-ceilinged room, antechamber to the warren, carpets rolled and leaning against the wall, large packing crates, some with the lids pried off, from which protrude rocks and bones partially wrapped in old newspapers. In one corner hangs the skeleton, strung together with wires, of some kind of ape, orang-utan, perhaps, how should I know, this is not my area of specialty; in another corner, a stuffed vulture, the feathers grown patchy with mange—El Galliñazo this is, wattled, beloved companion of my mother’s childhood. The collection continues into the adjoining corridor; here are shelves crowded with seashells and birds’ eggs and butterflies of great beauty, side by side with glass jars containing dark things pickled in brine, all kinds of things: fish, insects, tree tumors, parasitical worms; here again a box in which somebody has mounted, perfectly, an exquisite set of colorful dried beetles with enormous mandibles, like something from a dream; there, anemones and hydras in fluid, indifferently prepared, poorly preserved, hardly worth keeping, but kept nonetheless. Stinking, in the heat.