To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  Her father, sitting forward, two hands on the wheel, was quiet.

  Judith said, “You’ve done that before, haven’t you?”

  Her father seemed to nod.

  “And you like it?”

  “I don’t know if I like it. But I am interested by it.”

  An idea formed in Judith’s mind: that this would be how her father would die.

  She said, “Please don’t do that again.”

  Her father again seemed to nod.

  “No, I mean it.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  Twenty minutes later, lying under her tight-stitched quilt in her basement bed, Judith would wish she’d extracted an actual, ironclad promise from her father regarding this kind of driving, but they hadn’t spoken again for the duration of the ride home, and they hadn’t spoken at the house, other than to say parting goodnights as they moved off toward their rooms.

  Judith’s premonition of the style of her father’s death would turn out to be false. Her father would die of a massive heart attack that occurred in the bathroom of his grandparents’ home. “Evidently while straining at stools,” a paramedic told Judith, a fact that she kept a long time from her mother, and one that she herself would have preferred not to know. A man who ate prunes every day. Better, much better, she thought, that he’d missed a curve on a dark country road, at night, in the midst of the mysteries that occupied him.

  On the first Saturday of September, Judith packed her bags for the plane ride east. From the door of her room, she turned to look at her bird’s-eye maple furniture, perfectly restored, and she went back to tug smooth a ripple from the quilt that seemed now to have been purchased a long time ago.

  She was to fly out of Rapid City, a two-hour drive north on Highway 385, and Judith’s emotions stretched thinner with every mile that passed. She and her father chatted for a while and then fell silent. At one point she sensed he was about to speak, but he didn’t. He put on La Traviata. The Bonneville swept past the turnoff for Mount Rushmore, Violetta wondered whether Alfredo might steal her heart, and then her father said, “The other day, when you asked what I thought we’re here for and I didn’t answer…”

  She turned in her seat. “The kind of thing no one sober tries publicly to answer.”

  A slight smile formed on his lips. “Yes, that kind of thing.”

  She waited.

  He switched off the opera. “I was going to make a list. Most of them… I couldn’t bear even to see them on paper. But there is one I am going to tell you.” He drew a full breath and expelled it. “I am sure one of the things we’re here for is to make certain that those whom we love fall asleep each night assured of that love.”

  There was quiet in the car. His eyes were fixed on the road before them. “I love you, Judith,” he said. “You must know that—it would kill me if you didn’t know that. I love you utterly.” And then—what impulse to brutal honesty carried him further?—he said, “And if I could do what I think you’ve come here this summer to ask me to do, I would, Judith. I would, but…”

  Judith, like her father, had been staring forward, but she now turned suddenly toward the side window. She thought she might cry. The fences and farms slid by, and she thought she might cry because her father had just given the name of love to his feelings about her, and she might cry because of her futile reflexive desire to tamper with this fact, to expand it to include someone he couldn’t include. She willed herself away from saying, You love me, but not Mom?

  An increase in highway billboards signaled their approach to Rapid City. After a minute or so, her father said, “One other thing. Remember when you asked if you’d ever be like Elizabeth Bennet?”

  Judith said she did.

  “Well, I just want to say that in all the important respects, you already are.”

  Her father’s soft baritone seemed to crack just a little, or did Judith just imagine it? It didn’t matter. She so suddenly began to cry that it humiliated her, as if it were a bodily leak. She told herself to stop, and finally did, and turned back to her father to say, “I’m glad you think so.” She made a smile. “Except Elizabeth Bennet wasn’t so weepy, was she?”

  He said, “We’ve all done our share of weeping, including Miss Bennet, I’m sure.”

  At the airport, her father helped her check her bags, then they waited in silence for her flight to be called. When finally it was, neither of them moved for a second or two. She rose only after he did, and took a few steps toward the boarding ramp, but when she reached the line she stood aside and looked back.

  He stood where he’d been, stiff and still, as if the slightest movement might cause breakage.

  A voice from a loudspeaker again called her flight, and after two or three more seconds, Judith stepped into the line of departing passengers.

  5

  When Judith and Malcolm had first come to Los Angeles, she’d contacted all the studios in search of an entry-level job, without luck (one human resources woman said, “You don’t want to work in food services, do you?”), but one night during a loan committee meeting, Malcolm listened as Miss Metcalf described an application from a man who worked in movies, which, it turned out, was part of the problem with his file: over the past five years, his income had bounced from peak to valley, suffering from, as Miss Metcalf put it, financial mood swings.

  “What does he do in movies?” Malcolm asked.

  “Finds locations required for certain scenes. A string of three-story commercial buildings built before 1927 was one example he gave me. Another was a cemetery with vertical monuments and no perimeter fencing.”

  Malcolm, like the others in the committee room, stared at Miss Metcalf.

  “And he makes money doing this?” one of them said.

  “Quite a lot, actually, when he’s working,” she said, and without checking his file, she ticked off the names of three directors for whom he’d recently worked.

  Malcolm wondered who these people were and what it meant that he hadn’t heard of them, but one of the other committee members asked something specific about the subject property, and the discussion switched directions. Afterward he called the man.

  “You’ve been approved for the loan on your rental property,” Malcolm said, “but that’s not the reason I’m calling.” He explained that his wife was looking for an entry-level position in a production company. The man gave a quick laugh and said, “Who isn’t?”

  “Yes, of course,” Malcolm said, and thanked him all the same.

  But the man said, “Your wife isn’t an English-major type, by any chance?” and Malcolm said indeed she was.

  “Organized?”

  “Would be an understatement,” Malcolm said.

  The man laughed again. “I had me one of those,” he said. “She’s now the ex.” Then: “Okay, no promises, but let me have your number and I’ll check something out.”

  Two weeks later he called back. The position was as a personal assistant to an actor-director whose name even Malcolm recognized. During the interview, the actor-director sat squirming in his chair while three of his employees peppered Judith with questions. After a few minutes of this, the actor-director rose and said, “She’s fine,” and left the room. Once the door was closed behind him, one of the three interviewers turned to Judith and said, “This is of course probationary.”

  When, later, Judith was asked to describe what the actor-director was like, she answered, “Distracted eighty-five percent of the time, pissed off at somebody ten percent, and friendly the rest.”

  “How friendly?” someone sometimes inquired.

  “Never overly.” Some of the hotshots felt entitled, but her hotshot wasn’t one of them, which made her respect him all the more. Still, this answer seemed to disappoint people and force them to ask what she actually did.

  “Correspondence over his signature,” she said. “Speeches, articles, prefaces to books.” The work was neither boring nor gratifying, but its proximity to the production of movies le
d to the deep-in-the-bone conviction that she wanted to edit, wanted to break a scene into its tiniest parts and stretch and shape them in ways so subtle that the viewer could never quite identify the source of their effect. When she worked up the courage to mention her desire to edit, the actor-director seemed pleased. He called it “a good fit.” Editing was hard to break into, he said, but if she’d wait until he directed his next picture, he’d get her a position. The next picture was a metaphysical baseball movie, and Judith’s minimal editorial participation in it slipped her into the editors’ union and out of her actor-director’s immediate sphere of influence. It took three years of documented experience before she could become an assistant. The first scene she edited by herself was an alternative ending to a movie about a dog named Hooch. In Judith’s scene, Hooch didn’t die. In the released movie, he did. Still, her scene turned out competently enough (“Quiet and deft,” the director told her, “and every bit as good as the let’s-leave-them-weeping thing, which is the thing we’ll of course use”). Judith’s career had found traction and fitfully ascended to a level of dependable employment. She did TV from roughly July to April, midbudget movies during hiatus. It was through one of these movies that she’d caught the attention of Leo Pottle, who had hired her for several television shows, including the one on which she now worked.

  After her interlude with Malcolm at the beachfront hotel in Santa Monica, Judith returned to the studio just as Pottle was leaving it. He walked slowly across the parking lot, a large, slope-shouldered man whose body was so limp it suggested a shortage of bones. Judith lowered her window and threw him a friendly grin. He grimaced, sighed, and looked at the sky, a combination Judith took as a signal to stop. In a dour voice he said, “If this episode were a ship, the words would be glub glub glub.” Judith thought of Pottle’s comic shtick as Eeyore-with-brains. She obliged him now with a laugh and said she thought the actual words would be glug glug glug, and laughed again. Pottle kept his long face, gave Judith a deliberate chest-level glance, then, raising his eyes to hers, said, “For you, with the excellent flotation devices, it might be funny.”

  Judith laughed, not much of a laugh, but enough to let him know she wouldn’t be going to the Labor Relations Board over the remark.

  “And did you hear the studio has cut our ad budget?”

  She hadn’t heard, and probably wouldn’t have worried if she had. The accepted wisdom was that the show was less about ratings than about bringing respectability to the network, something to counterbalance the teen garbage that was its bread and butter. For a while, the show had had it both ways—a nice smattering of Emmys and Golden Globes and solid ratings—but then they’d been moved to Sunday night, and last year, in the third season, the writers had struggled for story lines, and based on the last couple of scripts Judith had read, things hadn’t improved much this year, not that she would say so. Of the cut in the advertising budget she said, “That’s not so good, is it?”

  “Not so good?” Leo Pottle said. “If being air-dropped into the burning wasteland without food or water is not so good, then all right, it’s not so good.”

  Judith shrugged and grinned, then wished she hadn’t. It wasn’t the response he wanted, or even one that was appropriate—it was her job, too, after all. Leo Pottle gave her one last morose look and slouched off toward his car, in search, Judith supposed, of fresh sources of gloom.

  In the darkened cutting room, Lucy Meynke sat before a Panasonic monitor showing a stilled shot of a single hand breaking a single egg over a stainless steel sink.

  “You missed the Pothole,” she said as Judith slid in beside her.

  “Not quite. We spoke long enough for him to refer to the show as a sinking ship and to my smallish boobs as excellent flotation devices.”

  Lucy made a short, snorting laugh. “It was weird—he seemed even more than usually grim today, as if the problems he’s been expecting all year have finally become real.” A pause. “You’d have thought it would make him happy.”

  This did not seem wrong to Judith, especially the part about Leo Pottle’s grimness. There had been something stauncher about Pottle’s apprehension today, and what should she be reading into that?

  “What about Hooper? Has he been snooping around?”

  “Only every thirty seconds or so, but he’s fine. Just Hooper being Hooper.” Then: “So where ya been?”

  As Judith told her about the episode at the hotel in Santa Monica, Lucy’s eyes grew bright. “Assignation at Shutters!” she said. “Saucy courtesan! Little tramp! I am completely green.”

  Judith couldn’t help but laugh. “It was so different, you know? I kept having the crazy feeling that I was someone other than Malcolm’s wife and he was somebody else’s hubby.”

  “My God!” Lucy said. “You know what you did, don’t you? You used your husband to cheat on your husband!”

  This seemed to Judith clever but not necessarily true.

  “It’s kind of a breakthrough marital move, really,” Lucy was saying. “Guilt-free cheating.”

  Judith said, “It’s possible you’re overreaching here, Lucy.”

  The editing room was small, dim, the walls hung with buttoned sound baffling. Its one window was covered with bamboo and then velvet, so nearly all the room’s light came from the monitor in the center of a wall-to-wall work counter. The wine red scarf Judith’s mother had worn when photographed behind Judith’s father on the motorcycle the day they were married was loosely tied over the knob of the closed door. To Judith, there was something about editing rooms that caused the kind of intimacy that quickly bred alliances and animosities. In Lucy’s case, it was alliance. They both liked books, and they loved movies, and when it came to the editing, they fed each other’s energies, very often saw eye to eye, and when they didn’t, Lucy could be deferential without truckling. Lucy had never married, loved traveling, and had found that assisting television editors meant interesting company, a living wage, and a little money left over for travel to the more far-flung but less expensive tourist destinations. Most recently she’d been to Macedonia, where she’d stayed at a small mountain inn and formed a brief affiliation with a widowed tobacco farmer, whom, with affection, she now referred to as her doddering Slav.

  “The thing is,” Lucy said, “to me and most of the girls in the chorus, Malcolm looks like a yummy grown-up boy toy, and yet to you…” She threw up a hand and smiled. “This is just one of about three dozen reasons why connubiality scares the shit out of more than a few of us.”

  Judith, who usually enjoyed Lucy’s riffs on general themes and other people, found she wasn’t enjoying this particular riff quite so much. That Malcolm could seem interesting only when regarded as somebody else’s husband didn’t seem to her like good news. She made a laugh and said, “Let’s not overdo it. I had some fun with the hubby, sweetie, and that’s all.”

  She was ready for the next thing, and turned her attention to the monitor. “So what’s up with this shot?”

  Lucy forwarded from the one-handed egg break to a following shot showing the finishing touches of what was supposed to be the same egg break, but this one was two-handed.

  Lucy, watching Judith’s face, exploded into gleeful laughter. “There’s some cinematic magic for you,” she said, but Judith barely heard. Already she was scanning the interceding frames for ways to patch things up.

  There were times when Judith wondered if this explained her inclination to edit—how in film, unlike real life, you could always go back, and by deleting this and adding that, you could change the tone, change the outcome, change even the consequences. If such an act could be performed in real life—she had often thought this—how many crimes of passion might go undone, how many marriages might be saved?

  By 5:30 Judith had worked her way past the two-handed egg break, and at 6:45 Lucy left for a first-time dinner with someone she would refer to only as John Doe (Lucy called all male companions John Doe until they became serious, which they almost never did). An hour
later, Judith was mired in a scene between the show’s two male leads. She leaned close to the monitor, trying tiny, frame-by-frame cuts, sitting back, sipping Earl Grey tea, undiscouraged by the small failures, talking in a low, gingery voice, just as if Lucy were still there.

  “Whatever happened from this angle is over,” she said. “Too much indicating from that jasper… I don’t want to be in this angle… Whoops… God, that’s a nice reading… Nope, I like him better when he’s throatier.”

  A pleasant, immersive satisfaction resulted from this process, and when Judith next held her watch close enough to the monitor to read, she was surprised that it was nearly 9 P.M. She checked what she had after nearly five hours of editing: a little more than seven minutes of finished tape. She was surprised it had gone that well—four would have been a fairly normal yield.

  She pushed back from the monitor and went outside. She’d gone into the cutting room when it was light; now it was fully dark, and she brushed across the feeling of emerging alone from a Saturday afternoon double feature, something she’d done often as a child. Usually the studio hummed with activity; now it was quiet. She leaned on a breezeway rail and, listening to the hum of traffic beyond the studio, caught the pleasant, faintly diesely smell she associated with buses. She felt good. Stretching felt good. Inhaling felt good. She wished Lucy were here—they could run down to Tom Bergin’s, order a filet, drink a manhattan. Judith had never smoked, but moments like this suggested to her why a person might. A little slice out of time, you and your tar, nicotine, and floating thoughts. The operator placing that funny phone call to North Platte, the woman saying, “His name’s William, we call him Bill, now who are you?” Judith had to laugh. And then one thing leading to another, the SOS to Malcolm, that breezy hotel room at the beach. And what was Malcolm up to now? Speaking at his loan committee meeting, or listening, or pretending to listen while thinking… of what? And Camille. What was Camille doing right now? She was home, Judith knew that much, but your daughter being home was a consolation of yesteryear. With the Internet, Camille might as well be leaning against a lamppost in New Orleans or São Paulo.