To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  When Judith spread the quilt over the bird’s-eye maple bed, it was so beautiful that as she stepped back to look at it composed with the blond furniture and the deep reds and blues of the Persian rug, she began secretly to hope that this was what her own honeymoon cottage might someday look like—a notion she revisited throughout the summer, even though she knew the idea was embarrassingly conventional.

  3

  In Toluca Lake, the furniture still stood at the edge of the pool. It had been there a week now, and every day Judith vowed to make the time to do something about it, but the season was off to an ominous start—already they were reshooting scenes, shortening the time between the shoot and air dates—and she had worked long days right through the weekend. The bedsheets covering the furniture were now littered with fading bougainvillea bracts. Before Malcolm left for work this morning, he slid a note under Judith’s cup next to the coffeemaker: Re the bird’s-eye maple, shall I call in the army? His joke term for the Salvation Army.

  Judith had a schedule. She would sleep until Malcolm’s 5:50 departure for the gym or tennis club, the two sites of his daily prebanking workout, then she would put on her robe and, before Camille and the nanny were up, poach an egg, section a pink grapefruit, toast a thick slice of artisan bread, and drink Peet’s coffee from a delft blue china cup set on a delft blue china saucer. This was her ritual, one that positioned the day for good effects. But now there was this note, and Judith’s response was resentful.

  The Salvation Army?

  This was where Malcolm thought the furniture should go? Why did he loathe the stuff so much? She’d once asked him that very question, and when he’d looked at her with calm eyes and said, “Why do you love it so much?” she’d had the sudden alarming notion that his reason for hating it and hers for liking it might be one and the same. That he knew nothing of the furniture beyond its general family history wouldn’t necessarily keep him from sensing that its importance to her went beyond that to something more specific.

  Judith flipped over the slip of paper and wrote, No need, I’ll make arrangements, and hurried off to the studio.

  For the past three years, she had been working on a critically respected television drama about an earnest yet winsome college girl with a social conscience and lots of problems with her great-looking boyfriends and roommates (Judith never knew which was more stunning, their god-and-goddess looks or their disinterest in the most basic acting technique). She loved the job, especially when she was tucked away in the editing room, but it wasn’t as if she didn’t have to look over her shoulder. She was answerable not only to the director of the episode at hand, but also to Mick Hooper, the wiry, semimanic, and omnipresent associate producer who ran the post department, and Leo Pottle, the show’s producer, with whom she’d previously worked. Pottle in fact had been the one to bring her on, and Judith in turn had brought on Lucy Meynke.

  The morning’s work proceeded efficiently, and a noon-hour sound-spotting session with the sound supervisor went so quickly that, with Lucy on the Avid burning a DVD for the director of the last episode and both Mick Hooper and Leo Pottle off the lot, Judith saw her chance to investigate the storage yard she had telephoned a few days before. It was a clear day, with actual massed clouds, unusual for Los Angeles in July, and as Judith wheeled out of the studio parking lot, she felt at once released. No joy like the truant’s joy. Willy Blunt had said that.

  On La Cienega, she turned up the CD in the changer. It was Warren Zevon, a personal favorite. “Most of all I’m sorry if I made you blue,” he sang, with Judith in accompaniment. “But I’m betting the gorilla will, too.” She kept singing along until, at a stoplight, a nearby driver—a man in a suit—seemed to be wondering if she were deranged, so she fell quiet until the light changed and the man was safely beyond her. Then she began to sing again, though not as freely as before, and finally she gave it up and listened to NPR for the duration of the ride.

  Red Roof Mini-Storage, it turned out, was a two-acre compound of pink cinder-block buildings that plenty of sun, salt air, and neglect had given a blasted look. The iron frontage fence was blotched with rust, Bermuda grass grew from cracks in the asphalt, and the red of the metal roofs had dulled to something faintly orange. But Judith was paying for storage, not curb appeal, and besides, places like this held a kind of noir charm for her. Red Roof Mini-Storage, she thought, was the kind of place you’d be happy to find if you were driving around with a body stuffed in your trunk.

  Judith was dressed as she normally dressed for work: lightweight cotton and flax in beiges and blacks, sandals without hose, and just enough jewelry—a double-chain gold necklace that looped over her chest—to indicate legitimate economic standing. As she got out of her car, a seagull screamed. She hadn’t seen the gull, and it wasn’t an actual scream, she knew that—it was just the shrill call of a common shorebird—but it had entered her ear as a human scream would. She waited for the sound to come again, and when it did, in a series of staccato bursts, it sounded like mimicry of raucous laughter.

  Inside the Red Roof office, a slim, slouchy boy with combed-back black hair watched her approach the counter and waited for her to explain herself. She wanted storage space for some old furniture, she said. She wasn’t exactly sure for how long or of what size, but it shouldn’t be too small.

  The boy looked at her and nodded. His eyes were deeply brown, nothing like Willy Blunt’s pale blue, and yet their peering-in-from-a-distance quality reminded her of Willy Blunt. The boy was faintly handsome—every boy who reminded Judith of Willy was faintly handsome (or maybe it was even more gymnastic than that; maybe any boy Judith could think of as handsome had first to remind her in some slight way of Willy Blunt).

  The boy lifted a hinged section of the counter and led her outside to a faded red golf cart to show her what was available. The cart was shabby, but its quietness pleased Judith, and the little cooling breeze that slipped into her clothes caught her off-guard, hinted at some past childhood sensation—coasting barefooted on a bicycle, maybe.

  The boy wore khaki slacks and shoes of an intricate weave of soft leather, without socks. His bare ankles were brown and smooth, like a Pakistani’s, Judith thought (though she knew no Pakistanis). She extended her legs, relaxed into a position just slightly more recumbent, and gazed at the sights. Most of the doors were locked and closed, but in one building, a man in a sweat-darkened T-shirt was packing neon-colored teddy bears into plastic bags; in another, a group of boys wearing huge earphones stood amid a tangle of wires playing electrified guitars and keyboards only they could hear; and, further along, an obese woman was silkscreening dancing bears on aprons. If any of these people were happy, it would come as a surprise to Judith.

  She said to her driver, “Did you hear about the woman who killed her husband and stashed him in a mini-storage in San Bernardino?”

  The boy kept his eyes straight ahead and said no, he hadn’t.

  Judith said, “She had him there three years.” The boy said nothing, but she could tell he was paying attention. “She got caught when she forgot to pay the rent.”

  The boy gave a muffled snort, then stopped and pointed up to storage compartment 142C, which he described as a twelve-by-twelve-by-twelve overhead.

  The story about the stored husband was true, or at least Judith presumed it was true. She’d heard it this past winter when she, Malcolm, and Camille had spent a skiing weekend in Big Bear. They’d gone up on a Friday, and the next morning they were driving to Snow Summit when the story was reported on NPR’s local news. Malcolm laughed and said, “If that’s not made for a made-for-TV movie, I couldn’t say what is.”

  Judith, in holiday spirits, said, “Really? It sounds like Merchant and Ivory to me.” (The truth was, she thought the Coen brothers could probably do something with it.)

  Camille sat in the back seat. She’d been silent for perhaps five minutes when she said, “Do only stupid people kill people?”

  Immediately Malcolm said, “That’s rig
ht, Miss Pie. Only really stupid people kill people. Smart people talk, and if they can no longer talk, they walk away.”

  It was a perfectly good answer, Judith had seen this at once. In Camille’s worldview, nothing was worse than being stupid, unless it was wearing clothes purchased at Ross Dress for Less. Malcolm understood this and had tried to fit a sturdy moral into Camille’s Tinker Toy value system. Who knew what Judith, alone and upon reflection, would have said? Of those who kill and get caught, a higher than normal percentage are stupid? Or (as, to her surprise, she really believed), Only stupid people get caught killing other people?

  The faded red cart was heading up an alley toward the office. They’d looked at five different storage units, several too small and one, the one she kept thinking about, too big. When they’d gone back to look at that unit—17C—she’d noticed an electrical outlet, and the boy said it was a small, something-amp circuit. Twelve, maybe. Now, to make conversation, Judith said, “So what do you do if you break into a delinquent unit and find yourself faced with a cadaver?”

  The boy said, “Besides ask for a raise?”

  Judith laughed, which in no way affected the boy’s expression. “Yeah,” she said. “Besides that.”

  The boy let a second or two pass, then said, “Dead bodies never came up during orientation.”

  Judith laughed again and turned to look at the boy in profile. “That’s funny.”

  The boy gave a bland nod that made Judith realize he hadn’t been going for humor and wondered why she might think he had. It was true she was feeling a little odd.

  When they returned to the office, Judith surprised herself by saying she would take the twelve-by-twenty walk-in, the big one, bigger than she really needed. When faced with the price, she said, “Yikes,” in a voice meant to be playful.

  The boy took it for actual resistance. “There’s a five percent discount for six months’ advance rent,” he said. “Ten percent if you pay cash.”

  He pushed the registration form in front of her. Judith hadn’t given her name when she’d come in, hadn’t given the boy her card. She was carrying cash. She didn’t need to write a check. A name came to her, and Judith watched with a kind of surprised amusement as the blue ink flowed from the pen in her hand.

  The boy spun the card around, scanned it, and looked up.

  “Edie Winks?”

  “That’s right,” said Judith, aware that her whole body had stiffened. (This, she thought later, is why lie detectors work on your typical citizen.) “I mean, technically it’s Edith,” she said, recovering a little, “but I always go by Edie.”

  The boy nodded, but kept looking at the signature.

  Judith heard herself say, “We’ve traced the family back to the isle of St. Kilda.” An island Camille had wanted to visit, where the people once lived on puffins.

  Judith thought she saw the boy flick a glance at her left hand.

  “It’s my husband’s name, actually. My maiden name is Winterbottom.” She’d known a Winterbottom once, but really, where was all this coming from? “You can imagine the fun my school chums had with that.”

  Here the boy’s eyes rose from the registration form and took on a long-distance glaze—maybe it was school chums; who under the age of sixty said school chums?—and just like that the boy was gone, off to that place where bored teenage boys go, a place, Judith guessed, chock-full of cars with loud engines and girls with big breasts.

  Judith opened her purse and started counting out money. The boy opened a receipt book and began copying the name from the application. He said that the first time the circuit breaker threw, there was a fifty-dollar charge; the second time, seventy-five. “So don’t try any microwaves or anything.”

  “How about a lamp?” Judith said, and the boy said, “Two sixty-watt bulbs, max.” He looked at her blandly. “If you need more juice, you’ll need to go to a different unit.”

  Both were then silent until Judith pointed to one of a set of five different padlocks mounted on a wall behind the boy. “And I’ll get that big Master lock,” she said, pointing.

  The boy pulled a fresh box from beneath the counter. He slid out the lock and displayed it to Judith, who nodded and pushed another twenty-dollar bill into her cash pile.

  Two keys were attached to a thin spring ring, along with a promotional red plastic tag in the shape of a roof. The boy said, “Some customers like us to keep a key in case they lose theirs.”

  Judith had no intention of leaving the key to her storage unit in the hands of this boy, or anyone else, for that matter. “It’s okay,” she said, taking the ring with both keys. “I don’t lose things.”

  The boy, letting his eyes fall on Judith, blinked so slowly that Judith imagined it in film slowed to thirty frames, so subtly stretched that the viewer could hardly notice. Certainly in her movie that’s how she would shoot it, to acknowledge the unconscious traps we set for the opposite sex. But that was her own editorial tinkering, because the boy merely said, “No worries, then,” and began counting out her change.

  After taking a last look at her storage unit and securing the door with her new lock, Judith walked to the parking lot, turned on the engine, and let the air conditioning pour into the car. From the moment she’d gotten on that golf cart, something had come over her, an expansion of possibility, something odd and enlivening. Vivifying. Malcolm had said that to her once. You are strangely vivifying. Judith flipped open her cell phone, thinking to call him, but she didn’t. She dialed 411 and heard herself ask for William C. Blunt, possibly in Nebraska. After the barest moment, the operator said in a flat voice, “I have that number in North Platte. May I connect you?”

  Judith said she could.

  A woman answered on the second ring.

  “I’m from the Rufus Sage Chamber of Commerce,” Judith said, “and we’re contacting past residents regarding next year’s Fur Trade Days. Is Mr. Blunt in?”

  “He’ll be back in a bit,” the woman said. “Did you say Rufus Sage?”

  “Right, Rufus Sage. Did Mr. Blunt ever live in Rufus Sage?”

  “Not that he mentioned, but…” The woman caught herself up. “Who is this again?”

  “Did he ever go by the name of Willy?”

  “His name’s William,” the woman said. “We call him Bill. Now who are you again?”

  “Edie Winks.”

  “And what’s your number?”

  Judith idiotically said, “Thank you,” and hung up, feeling terrifically slimy. She speed-dialed Malcolm, who answered with a calm “Hello.”

  “It’s me,” she said. “Feeling lonely. What’re you doing?”

  “Miss Metcalf and I are touring tilt-ups in the industrial cityscape.”

  Tilt-ups, Judith knew from past conversations with Malcolm, were warehouses and office complexes whose sides were composed of poured concrete and then tilted up into place, or something like that. As for Miss Francine Metcalf, Judith had met her many times. She was the bank’s chief loan officer, a position she’d held in every bank Malcolm had run. She evidently did good work—Malcolm often referred to her as “the exemplary Miss Metcalf”—and Judith had thought that if she were the jealous type she could imagine Miss Metcalf as attractive, but Judith wasn’t, so when she thought of this woman, she thought only of the loud geometric designs Miss Metcalf favored in clothes and the coarse, mouse-colored hair that seemed always to have the mashed look of the just-awakened. “How important is this field trip you’re on?” Judith asked.

  “Not terribly. Why?”

  “Lucy’s doing dailies and Hooper and Pottle are putting out other fires, so I wouldn’t exactly be missed for the next two hours.” Judith glanced at her watch, and in a slightly friskier voice, one not quite her own, she said, “I could meet you at One Pico at three, and I could have a room key.” One Pico was a tony restaurant attached to a beachfront hotel called Shutters, to which they’d been given a good-sized gift certificate by the bank board at Christmas.

  Judith expecte
d Malcolm to regretfully decline—he wasn’t the type either to ditch work or to expend a luxury-room chit for an impulsive hour or two—but he surprised her.

  “It’s possible you’re a telepath,” he said with perfect equanimity. “That’s a property I’ve been dying to see.”

  Judith didn’t speak for a few seconds, during which a blooming excitement allowed her to cast herself as Edie Winks on the phone with a wry, handsome man of means, a man not her own husband but someone else’s. “Let’s make it two forty-five,” she said, “and forget the restaurant. Just come up to the room.”

  Half an hour later, Judith was wearing a white hotel robe, lying on a four-poster bed in a breezy third-floor room overlooking a wide white-sand beach, wondering how this had all come about. She wasn’t sure and she didn’t care. She’d slipped outside of her life, that was all she needed to know. A door had swung open and she had stepped through. She’d thought of lying naked on the bed when Malcolm walked in, but a few minutes of waiting without clothes on had made her feel too self-aware (her thighs felt suddenly heavy, and when she glanced at her stretch marks, they seemed like white scars), so she put on the plush terrycloth robe hanging in the bathroom. She opened the balcony doors, tied back the drapes, and left the sheers to flutter. She checked the hotel’s spiral-bound informational notebook to determine her emergency exit route, flipped through an in-room magazine—Islands—then lay back and closed her eyes. The hum and calls of the beach crowd floated lazily through the open balcony doors. She thought she heard a girl say, “I just saw Patrick Swayze,” and a boy seemed to say, “Whose Uzi is this?” In the outside corridor, a cart rolled past the door. Two women spoke in Spanish and laughed. Later she would wonder how she had lazed so freely when she should have been at work, but at the moment it all felt slightly and pleasantly foreign.