To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  Outside, a shrill commotion of seagulls erupted (she imagined someone lobbing remnants of a sandwich), then a general suspension of voices, the solid ka-whump of a wave, and the calls and happy screams resumed again. But the seagulls. In The Birds, weren’t they all seagulls? Rod what’s his name, and chilly Tippi Hedren. Hitchcock’s chilly girls. Chilly Tippi Hedren and chilly Eva Marie Saint and chilly Grace Kelly and chilly Kim Novak, everybody in the darkened theater, man and woman alike, hoping the leading man would melt her down. Rod Taylor. That’s who. After somebody bigger wanted too much money or something. Cary Grant, maybe.

  Her mind moved to the plastic red-roof key tag, which pleased her in some way she couldn’t explain. She sat up and felt for the keys in her purse. She unfolded the receipt that enclosed them—Edie Winks, Unit 17C—and turned over the red plastic tag in her hand, the Red Roof address and telephone number on one side, the company motto on the other: Your Safe Under the Red Roof. Was that a typo? Or did it mean that your storage room was your safe? Postage Prepaid. Mail to Red Roof Storage. The keys themselves were sturdy, and for a few moments she gently sawed the toothed side of one across her bare arm and let her mind go empty. She was in this state when the quick click of a key card at the door gave her a start. She slid the receipt and keys into the gap of the hotel’s spiral-bound directory, then—the door still hadn’t opened—she lay back, closed her eyes, and pretended composure.

  She listened to the solid latch of the door, the tap of heels on the hard floor, then soft footsteps on carpet. This reminded her of a time with Willy Blunt, a time she had waited for him in her basement room, and then it reminded her of nothing else at all. These could be anybody’s footsteps. This occurred to her. Everything turned still then, completely still, except for the rising pulse of her own heart, and finally it was too much for her—she had to open her eyes.

  Malcolm stood looking down at her.

  She was surprised how deflating his presence was. She felt she could smell his smell before she actually smelled it, could hear his voice before she heard it.

  “Do I have the right room?” he said. Relentlessly wry. She had said this to someone. My husband is relentlessly wry.

  “You need a scotch,” she said.

  He made a thin smile. “I do? I didn’t think I drank scotch.”

  She found a single-malt in the minibar, poured it into a tumbler, and, after sampling it herself, handed it to Malcolm, who said, “I not only drink it but drink it neat.”

  He sipped the scotch and while loosening his tie said, “I’m afraid your telephone call effected a certain tumefaction that I feared would become observable and perhaps misconstrued by the exemplary Miss Metcalf.”

  Judith smiled but didn’t laugh. She rearranged herself on the bed and closed her eyes, and when he again started to speak she said, “Don’t talk.”

  She felt the depression of his knee on the mattress. She detected the faint smell of scotch. She did not open her eyes. As he loosened and laid back the folds of the robe, she felt a rising expectancy that seemed almost tidal. Things started quickly and moved easily past the usual restraints. She was not quite herself. She had an unusually good time.

  Afterward, Malcolm said, “Indeed.”

  Judith laughed, and said, “Sound to the deaf, sight to the blind.” Words she’d spoken before to Malcolm, words borrowed from Willy Blunt, not that Malcolm needed to know that. They lay quiet for a few minutes—it seemed to Judith like the reluctant waking from a pleasing dream—then Malcolm leaned from the bed and slipped his phone from his coat pocket. He glanced at Judith. “I’m not calling work,” he said. “I’m calling Sonya.”

  Sonya was the latest nanny (though Malcolm called her their familial assistant), but Sonya didn’t answer the phone. Camille did, and Malcolm’s expression brightened. “Miz Milla,” he said. “It’s your pop figure. What’re you literally doing?” A pause, then: “And what literally is cooking? I think I smell meat loaf. Do I smell meat loaf?”

  It was Wednesday. Sonya was from Hutchinson, Kansas, which in conversation she abbreviated to Hutch. Every Wednesday Sonya made the most delectable meat loaf, a scheduling pattern that Camille had detected before anyone else—she would have no trouble seeing through her father’s present ruse. Into the phone Malcolm was saying, “That’s not true! It’s because of my highly evolved sense of smell. Can I not, for example, smell a Baskin-Robbins from five hectometers?”

  Judith walked naked toward the bathroom. Possibly her backside was her better side—she still had the long legs, and her bum (Malcolm’s term, and now hers) was still pert. She sensed a break in Malcolm’s patter and dimly felt his gaze, but it meant nothing now. She drew a bath—the tub was set in white marble and separated from the bedroom by hinged windows she left closed—and added a bubbling agent from a surprisingly heavy glass decanter. By the time she turned the water off, Malcolm had called the bank and was in discussion of somebody’s loan application. “Of course we want the loan, Henry, but we have to have her K-1s,” he said, and Judith quit listening.

  A minute or two later, Malcolm appeared fully dressed in the door and said he had to go, smallish crisis but crisis nonetheless. Judith smiled. He looked happy, dapper, businesslike—blue coat, red tie, gray pants, all just so. He kissed her on the forehead and said, “Loan committee tonight, so I’ll be ten-ish.” He glanced back into the room before returning his eyes to her. “Sorry to leave the love nest.”

  When she heard the door shut, she let her eyes close. Baskin-Robbins, pink and brown, always reminded her of the first time she laid eyes on Willy Blunt, though at the time she didn’t know his name—he was just a roofer whose smooth brown arms flowed from a sleeveless red T-shirt so old it had faded to pink. She had been with her father then, on Cordelia Guest’s farm. A long time ago.

  From the phone by the tub, Judith dialed room service for the applewood smoked salmon and creamed spinach. “And I’m in the tub,” she said, “so I’d appreciate your sending the tray up with a girl.”

  They sent a lanky boy whose heavy black-framed glasses were a terrible mistake. She slid down below the suds and allowed him to set the food where she wanted it, on the marble that edged the tub. When she looked up from signing the slip, she caught him glancing into the water. This made him blush, which Judith found disarming. Behind his glasses, his eyes had the watery diffusion of someone fighting a cold. She nodded toward her purse and asked the boy to hand it to her. It took her a few seconds to find a five-dollar bill. When she extended the money to the boy, he was glancing again. “You know,” she said, “you should be paying me.”

  His face pinkened.

  Again Judith found herself thinking that something had come over her. She felt happy, playful, not sexual—clearly that had been an earlier element, but Malcolm had taken care of that. No, she felt like an escapee. She again closed her eyes.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She listened for the solid clatch of the door closing behind him on his way out. With his big eyes and big bobbing Adam’s apple and big black-framed glasses, the boy didn’t fit her idea of a psychopath, but then, if this were a movie of a certain type, that would have been the very hint that he was—who didn’t suspect, for example, that Norman Bates was more than merely shy? In this type of movie, the boy with the big black-framed glasses would have opened and closed the door without leaving, would at this moment be standing very still within the next room, realizing that he’d just done something all but irreversible and wondering what exactly he meant to do next.

  “Hello?” Judith said experimentally, and heard nothing in return.

  A cheerfully whistled version of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” carried from the boardwalk. And then something else, or so she thought. A subtle rustling sound.

  Judith slipped lower in the tub, held her breath, and again tried to detect a living presence in the other room, someone who, standing there perfectly still and with eyes wide open, might be tryi
ng to guess at her exact location, condition, capabilities—in other words, her emotional whereabouts. Good luck, she thought. Good fucking luck.

  A noise from the other room. A sniffle. A faint truncated sniffle. Was that what it was?

  Judith sat rigid, listening, until she convinced herself she’d heard nothing at all.

  Sometimes she worried that it was the movies that made us view the world this way, movies and the local news. At a party she’d once stood in a small circle of people that included Janet Leigh, who said that since the stabbing scene she’d never again taken a shower behind a transparent curtain. Janet Leigh had seemed used to an attentive audience, and she seemed used to telling this tale. Someone, a small-time producer, a woman, mentioned having heard that Hitchcock gave his leading women a tiny ivory comb for use “on the nether parts,” and Judith had receded from the circle. And yet she couldn’t quite shed the implication of Janet Leigh’s words. How images manufactured by others, perhaps for the sake of artistry, but more usually as a commercial necessity, could manipulate your expectations of the real world.

  Again the sniffling sound, or something like it.

  Oh for God’s sake, she thought, and rose from the tub. She wrapped herself in a towel, took the heavy glass decanter in hand, and crept into the other room. There was no one there, of course. The sheer curtains billowed and shushed. She checked the narrow balcony beyond the doors. There was nothing, no one. Though a slight surprise did occur. When a peripheral movement drew Judith’s attention, she found herself staring into her own startled expression. The woman in the mirror, wrapped in a towel, decanter in hand, seemed like someone interesting, and for two or three seconds she stood perfectly still, not even breathing, trying to get a lasting look at this woman, whoever she was, before she again disappeared.

  Judith put on the hotel robe and took her tray of food to the white wicker table on the balcony. The sounds of the ocean and children at play, dimmed somewhat within the room, here were full-throated. When her spinach bowl was finished, she sopped up the last of the cream sauce with French bread. She felt as if she’d been dropped into the hypervivid world of commercial advertisement, where all the senses seem dilated, all tastes and sensations emboldened. She wished she’d ordered coffee, and was thinking of ordering it, along with a scoop of strawberry ice cream sprinkled with slivered almonds, when her cell phone rang.

  It was Lucy Meynke, talking in a lowered voice. “The Pothole’s on site and wondering why you’re not,” she said. The Pothole being Lucy’s joke name for Leo Pottle. “He seems actually kind of pissed off.”

  Judith glanced at her watch. Pottle knew she was a go-to cutter, no job too hard, no hours too long, and good value besides—but still, what was she thinking? She had had no idea it was this late. She hurried into her clothes, grabbed her purse, and gave the room one quick look before closing the door. Several hours would pass before she would realize that she’d left behind the keys to Unit 17C of Red Roof Mini-Storage.

  4

  Judith’s father found the classified ad for a washing machine one night while reading the Rufus Sage Record in his red floral armchair. “Seventy-five dollars,” he read aloud to Judith, “like new,” and two days later they were driving west on Highway 20 toward the farmstead where the washer was for sale. Judith gazed out at the farms, green with alfalfa, yellow with wheat, and said, “It’s pretty flat, isn’t it?”

  Her father smiled and said, “That’s what they said to Columbus.”

  Judith didn’t think much of the attempted humor, but still, he was in a good mood, which was the only time to bring up serious subjects. “But don’t you miss Vermont?” she said.

  “I do,” he said. “Sometimes keenly.”

  Just like that, what had been sunny in his face was now somber.

  Judith made her voice small. “Do you miss us?”

  “Mmm. I miss you especially.”

  “And Mom?”

  He stared straight ahead for a time before letting his face soften slightly and turning to her. “Yes. I miss your mother, too.”

  Not exactly a posted Notice of Intention to Reconcile, Judith thought, but it was better than nothing. She said, “So what’s your favorite single memory of Mom?”

  A silence developed, and Judith was wondering if he’d heard the question or was just ignoring it when he said, “Once, soon after we met, we were in the Reynolds Club”—he smiled—“where every Wednesday was Shake Day, all milkshakes thirty cents, and your mother set aside her straw and said, ‘Sometimes I think of a cover of a book as a door to another world… but other times I think of it as an escape hatch from this one.’ And then she blinked and said, ‘I guess it’s the same thing.’ ” He gave Judith a mild glance. “I always thought it possible that I fell in love with her within the space of that blink.”

  Judith took the story and held it tight as a child might hold a found smooth stone.

  Then her father, glancing ahead, said, “We’re looking for a green mailbox marked Guest.”

  When they sighted it, they turned up a straight dirt lane that pointed past two or three neglected outbuildings toward a dirty white farmhouse. Beyond it a red barn loomed, with an extension ladder propped against its eaves. The southern half of its roof was stripped to bare rafters and partly sheeted with new plywood.

  The moment Judith’s father parked in the shade of a cottonwood, a squat, bristly brown dog came skulking out from beneath the wooden porch of the house. What looked like an old aluminum saltshaker hung from its rope collar, and as Judith’s father stepped warily from the car, the dog charged to within three feet of him and stood there barking furiously until Judith’s father, in a peacemaking gesture, held out the back of his hand for sniffing—not an easy thing for him to do, Judith knew, given his general aversion to the entire canine family. The dog quieted for a moment, then abruptly lunged forward in a renewed flash of snarl and teeth. Her father found himself pinned against the door, yelling what sounded to Judith like, “Gwan! Gwan now!”

  The bristly dog merely receded a step or two and gave up barking for a low throaty growl.

  Judith leaned over, rolled down her father’s window, and said, “I think he’s scared.”

  Without moving, her father said, “I think he’s psychotic.” Then, in a low, deliberate monotone, he said, “In the glove compartment there is a gun.”

  “A gun?” Judith said. Her father had never in his entire Vermont life carried a gun.

  “Wrapped in a cloth,” her father said. His whole body was still and his eyes were fixed on the dog. “Under the manuals.”

  Judith said, “I’m not getting out a gun so you can shoot a dog so we can buy a used washing machine.”

  “Judith,” he said, tight-voiced, and with his eyes still trained on the dog he reached an open palm into the car. She found a flashlight in the glove compartment and gave him that instead. “Conk him with that if you have to.”

  Her father had just said, “Judith, get me the gun now,” when a two-note, high-low whistle carried from the house and the bristly dog at once relaxed and sat and looked over its shoulder. A woman now stood in the door of the mud porch. She wore Levi’s and a plaid shirt, tails out. Her hands were evidently wet, because she pushed the hair away from her eyes with the back of her hand before she said, “Did Roscoe bark?”

  Judith’s father recovered himself. “Quite a lot,” he said. “Excessively, even.”

  The woman laughed. “You here about the washing machine?”

  Judith’s father nodded. He was now watching the woman almost as intently as moments before he’d been watching the dog. From the front seat of the car, Judith felt like she was watching the kind of play where the meeting of two strangers was clearly significant. She popped out of the car and said, “My father wanted to shoot your psychotic dog.”

  This seemed only to amuse the woman. She’d written something on a slip of paper, and bent now to unscrew the little metal saltshaker dangling from the dog’s collar, an a
ctivity that provided a view of the white cleavage and lacy black bra within her loosened cotton shirt that Judith did not believe unintentional. After the woman put the paper into the saltshaker, she screwed the lid back on and, finally standing back up, said in a robotic voice, “Git Jim.”

  The dog shot off past the barn and out of sight.

  “Who’s Jim?” Judith said, but the woman seemed not to hear. “It’s hot out here,” she said. “Would you like some iced tea?”

  “No, thanks,” Judith said, but her father said, “Iced tea sounds good to me.” He shifted the flashlight to his left hand and extended his right. “I’m Howard Toomey.”

  The woman said her name was Delia Guest. Strands of premature gray streaked her hair, but there was no getting around the fact that men might find her attractive. Judith guessed she’d been a creamy high school beauty, prom queen probably, or at least part of her court. Not that she was an old maid or anything now. What she’d lost in youthful smoothness, she appeared to have picked up in know-how.

  When her father released the woman’s hand, he said, “And this is my daughter, Judith.”

  Delia Guest gave Judith a quick smile before returning her gaze to her father. She nodded down at the flashlight in his hand. “Were you going to shoot Roscoe with a flashlight?”

  There was something undeniably frisky in her voice; Judith heard it loud and clear. She said, “He was going to conk your psychotic dog with it.”

  Again the passing smile at Judith before returning to her father. “Well, you can put it away now, unless there’s someone else you intend to conk.”

  Her father set the flashlight on the front seat of the car and the woman disappeared into the house. Judith leaned on the front right fender and said, “This is a prime example of a place that gives me the creeps,” and when her father didn’t say anything but took a few steps this way and that, regarding the abandoned roofing project on the barn and then directing his gaze here and there as if this were a property he was thinking about investing in, she said, “If we have to buy a used washer from a place like this, I’d rather keep going to the laundromat.”