To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  Judith pulled out her cell phone, dialed home, and spoke briefly with Sonya of Hutchinson, Kansas, who delivered her standard line—“It’s all good here”—before intercomming Camille in her room. “Pick up, Camille!” Judith heard her yell. “It’s your mom!”

  During the summer, Camille worked mornings as a receptionist in a restaurant owned by the family of one of her friends, and she’d volunteered at the public library, helping with the summer reading program, but that was tapering off. Judith had the feeling she was now spending most afternoons with friends by the pool or in front of the TV.

  “Yes?” Camille said instead of hello.

  Judith said, “I’m cutting and it’s going slow, sweetie, so I’ll be a little late.”

  Camille said nothing. In the background, Judith heard a faint papery crinkle.

  “I rented a storage place for the bird’s-eye maple today.”

  Still nothing from Camille except more rustling. It was annoying to Judith, which she supposed was the intent. She said, “The storage place was creepy. I think the Coen brothers are the absentee owners.”

  Camille sighed audibly and turned the page of whatever she was reading.

  Judith said, “Did your father tell you we’ve decided to send you to the Citadel next year?”

  This at least provoked Camille to speech. She said, “That’s hilarious, Mom.”

  Judith waited a second or two. “Want to tell me what’s wrong, sweetie?”

  “Other than being stuck alone in a house under the supervision of a religious zealot and both your parents calling to say they won’t show?”

  “Dad called, too?”

  No response from Camille other than the papery sound.

  “What’re you doing besides talking to me?” Judith said, trying to keep her voice in the coaxing mode.

  “Reading.”

  “Reading what, princess?”

  “Spin. The new one with, as Sonya put it, the slut on the cover. And don’t call me princess.”

  It was Judith’s turn for silence.

  Camille said, “You know what Sonya asked me to do tonight? Have popcorn with her and watch one of her eight-year-old videos of The 700 Club.” She paused to let this sink in. “If you guys aren’t ever going to be here, couldn’t you at least get a baby-sitter who isn’t an Anabaptist or whatever she is?”

  Judith wasn’t going to be drawn into this general line of discussion. This was America, and Sonya was free to worship whatever false gods she pleased. Besides, there was something in Judith that made her yearn for belief pure and simple, not that the Pat Robertson stuff was that. She said, “What time did your father say he’d be home?”

  “Didn’t. He just said later.” A pause. “He tried to jolly me, but I wouldn’t be jollied.”

  “No, I’ll bet not,” Judith said. Odd, though: Malcolm liked to wrap up loan committee no later than ten. After that, he thought the decision-making got sloppy.

  Camille broke the silence by saying, “That Miss Metcalf woman called, wanting to know where Dad was. I told her the bank.” More background page-turning. “That was before Dad called to say he’d be late.”

  To Judith’s ear, the tone here seemed a creepy mix of calculation and aloofness, and it made her suddenly tired. She said, “You’re fifteen, Milla. When you’re fifteen, you’re supposed to believe in the good intentions of the world.”

  A phrase, she realized after speaking it, of her own father’s.

  Camille said, “On one of Sonya’s Anabaptist shows I heard a man say that when teenagers are home alone, a moral vacuum develops. I think it’s when I’m in that moral vacuum that it’s hard to believe in… what you just said I ought to believe in.”

  “The good intentions of the world.”

  “Yeah. That.”

  Judith exhaled heavily. “Bye, sweetie. I’ll kiss the sleeping you when I come in.”

  “That’s fabulous, Mom,” Camille said. “It’ll mean the world to me.”

  Judith resisted the bait. “That’s okay. It’ll mean something to me. I’ll find a nose or ear to kiss.”

  She waited, and then, for the first time in the entire conversation, she heard a smaller, more endearing voice, the voice of a girl more ten than fifteen. “Promise?” Camille said.

  Judith’s voice softened, too. “Sure,” she said. “Sure I do.”

  After Judith hung up the phone, she stared off toward a new commercial building that rose above the studio. Some of its windows were still lighted, but none of the rooms seemed occupied. She took a deep breath. Camille was fifteen—the same age Judith had been when she met Willy Blunt with his brown arms and pink shirt. She should go home, she should go straight home and sit up with her daughter in her ridiculous new canopy bed and watch an old movie with her, something black-and-white, simple and substantial—On the Waterfront, maybe, or High Noon, or maybe even Pandora’s Box, the erotic one with Louise Brooks following her wayward impulses down the tortuous path that would finally lead to Jack the Ripper. That would give Camille something to fill that moral vacuum she was worried about.

  “Hello, Mrs. Judith.”

  The voice gave her a start. She turned to say hello to Sergio Rocha, the studio’s Mr. Fix-It, who was at the moment carrying in each hand small metal boxes that suggested electrical matters. He was already past Judith when she had a thought. “Sergio?”

  He turned.

  “You don’t have a truck, do you?”

  Sergio had heavy facial lines and a stiff mustache grayer than his dark, combed-back hair. He gave a nod that suggested formality. “It is with the mechanic, but I will have it next week,” he said, and within minutes Judith had arranged the transport of the bird’s-eye maple furniture to its new home at Red Roof Mini-Storage the following weekend. Sergio nodded and disappeared around the corner.

  Farther down the breezeway a door opened and someone she didn’t know left the building whistling “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

  Judith’s mind drifted to the hotel room overlooking the beach, and suddenly, without logical prompt, she remembered.

  The keys. She’d forgotten the Red Roof keys.

  In her movie, there would be a close-up of the black spiral-bound notebook that contained the hotel directory.

  Judith checked her purse to be sure, but found only the key card for the room. A telephone call to the hotel was unproductive. The maids hadn’t been into the room, she was told, because the room hadn’t been vacated. “But it has,” Judith said. “My husband and I were there, and now we’re not.”

  The man said, “Yes, but the room is still yours. No one checked out.”

  How this changed things, Judith wasn’t sure. “But couldn’t you still just check the room for me?”

  The desk clerk excused himself to confer with someone, then returned to say, “I’ve talked with our manager and she has sent someone up to look now, Mrs. Whitman. Shall I call you back or would you like to hold?”

  Judith said she’d hold, and waited a surprisingly short time before the man came back on the line to say, “We found nothing tonight, Mrs. Whitman, but we’ll look more thoroughly in the morning. Shall I call on this line?”

  Why not look more thoroughly tonight, you freaking slackers? Judith thought, but what she said was, “Yes, this number is best.”

  She went back to the cutting room and took her place in front of the monitor, but her thoughts kept sliding toward the lost keys, and finally she gave in to it. She had the key card—she would check for herself.

  Twenty minutes later, she pulled up to Shutters and asked the attendant to keep the car close by. The moment she stepped into the lobby, it seemed a different hotel from the one she’d visited earlier in the day. The lazy afternoon feel had given way to a more expectant temperament. The restaurant emitted a rich hum of easy conversation and sportive laughter, the clink of silver and the ring of crystal. There was a lot of skin and skimpy fashion on show here, and Judith guessed that among these men you could find a surpris
ingly high per capita rate of silk socks and Berluti loafers. Women flicked only passing glances at Judith, who tonight had nothing to offer in terms of fashion, but a man at the bar swiveled to let her know his attention was full frontal.

  It was while waiting for the elevator that Judith began to feel a little funny about being here. True, the room was still hers. She’d taken it this afternoon. But this afternoon seemed like two days ago.

  A muted ding, the elevator door slid open, and Judith stepped aside as a man and woman passed her. In the elevator the residual smell of the woman’s perfume, some too-tangy shade of citrus, seemed not just to hang in the air but displace it. It was dizzying—Judith could see in the elevator’s mirrored walls a long line of ever-dwindling images of her own oddly stricken face—and when the door quietly opened onto her floor, she stood for a time in the corridor, taking in fresh air before heading to the room. She didn’t feel herself. As she moved toward the room, she felt she was lifting and setting her feet carefully, as if on black ice.

  At Room 314, Judith inserted her key card into the door, saw the tiny green light flash, and had started to open the door when, within the room, a change of smell and light and ownership told her to stop. To stop and yet to look. In the next three or four seconds, her eyes skittered from one image to another. A stilled red X against a black background on the TV screen. A naked woman wearing earphones and sitting on the bed in a meditative position, her composed face tilted slightly down, eyes closed, breasts floppy and so smoothly white that in the dimness of the room they almost shone. A pair of gray trousers folded over the high-backed chair. The silhouetted upper body of a man brushing his teeth behind the frosted windows separating the bedroom and bathroom. The man’s voice—watery, distorted, as if he were talking through toothpaste—said, “Francine?” Was that what he said? The woman on the bed raised her head and began to lift off her earphones.

  Judith closed the door.

  Her heart was beating wildly.

  From within the room, the indistinct sounds of the woman’s voice calling someone’s name.

  Malcolm? Had the woman just called Malcolm?

  Judith stared at the room number, 314, and then at her unmarked key card. It must be the right room. Her card wouldn’t open any other room.

  Again, muffled voices within the room. The woman calling, “What?”

  Judith nearly ran to the elevator. Inside, in the mirrors within mirrors, she saw a diminishing line of ashen Judith impersonators. The citrus smell still hovered. Her hands were trembling, so she held one with the other, which merely seemed to redirect their current to internal circuits. From the elevator she hurried through the lobby to the street and her car. She jolted into traffic, a horn honked, and Judith, glancing in her rearview mirror, saw the attendant stepping into the street to get a better look at her erratic progress.

  What had she just seen and heard? She had the reflexive need to rewind the scene, slow it, watch it again and again, frame by frame. It was certainly Miss Metcalf. That was the one given. The man was the variable. He wore trousers like Malcolm’s. In silhouette he looked a little like Malcolm. His voice through toothpaste might’ve been Malcolm’s. And the way the gray pants were hung over the chair—waist on the seat side, legs over the back—that was Malcolm, too.

  When Malcolm came in, shortly before midnight, Judith was sitting knees-up in bed pretending to read The New Yorker. “Home at last,” she said in a neutral voice, and peered at him over her reading glasses.

  He smiled, used the walk-in closet for changing into his pajamas, then crossed to the bathroom to brush and floss: his usual routine. Judith waited until he was brushing to say, “Bad meeting?”

  “What?”

  His voice through toothpaste could’ve been anyone’s voice. Judith said, “I asked if it was a bad loan committee meeting.”

  Malcolm rinsed, spat, and came out dabbing his mouth with a hand towel. “Meeting was canceled. Neil, Dan, and Ivy were all sick with one thing or another, so we postponed until tomorrow night. I stayed late because I was behind and it was my chance to catch up.” He gave a subtle wag of his eyebrows. “You might recall that I was detained this afternoon.”

  Judith offered a polite laugh, waited, and said, “So you’ll be late tomorrow night?”

  He shrugged. “Not too late. Why?”

  “I was thinking of Milla. She was peevish about neither of us being home tonight.”

  Malcolm nodded and said, well then, he’d just cut the meeting short tomorrow night.

  In bed, he put on his glasses and shook out the front pages of the Wall Street Journal, and when he began to read with what seemed like his customary casual interest, Judith asked the question she’d told herself not to ask.

  “Did Miss Metcalf stay and help?”

  “No. She had a dinner date.” Prompt in delivery, decisive in tone. Then, more reflectively, “With someone she may well be interested in.”

  Judith considered this. “And he in her?”

  Malcolm’s eyes stayed fixed somewhere in the middle of the newsprint. “I’m not sure.” Then: “Perhaps.”

  Judith turned a page. So, after a few seconds, did Malcolm.

  She said, “Where were they going?”

  Malcolm turned. “Who?”

  “Miss Metcalf and the someone she may well be interested in.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Someplace in Santa Monica.” He touched a finger to his tongue and turned a page. “I told her if they went to One Pico, she could have our room key in her pocket in case he got lucky.”

  A faint unpleasant shock moved through Judith. What Malcolm was saying could explain Miss Metcalf’s presence in Room 314, but even if true (and she couldn’t help doubting this), it merely shifted her attention from a greater offense to a lesser one: an easy familiarity with Miss Metcalf’s personal life that Judith had never before imagined. “And she responded how?”

  Malcolm turned toward her with his wry little smile. “She blushed… and took the key.”

  Judith nodded. She heard herself say, “Ah.”

  And who knew? This might be true, might very well be true. The man Francine Metcalf was interested in might wear gray pants like Malcolm and look in silhouette like Malcolm and sound with his mouth full of toothpaste like Malcolm. That was the problem with marrying someone as facile and circumspect as Malcolm. Without much effort, he could have you believing this had all been some kind of R-rated Lucy-and-Ricky-style muddlement. And yet.

  Malcolm was regarding her. “Did I commit a faux pas in giving her the room key?”

  “No,” Judith said, almost to herself, then put some spine in her voice. “I think it was considerate of you. It’s probably why she’s so willing to move with you from one bank to another.”

  “That,” Malcolm said, “and the raises she receives with each new position.”

  The possible ambiguity of these words wasn’t lost on Judith, but Malcolm was a banker, he believed in risk-yield ratios, and what could risking discovery through idle wordplay yield him? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Still, she said, “Do I get a raise with each new position?”

  An appreciative chuckle from Malcolm. “That would be expensive,” he said.

  A few seconds passed in silence. Then Judith said, “Does Miss Metcalf’s new beau have a name?”

  Malcolm lowered his newspaper and looked off, as if searching for something hidden in the palm tree outside the window. “Milton,” he said. “I think it’s Milton. I don’t know his last name.”

  Through a closed door, Milton could sound a lot like Malcolm. “He’s Jewish?” Judith said.

  Malcolm gave her a blank look. “What? Is Milton always Jewish?”

  They were looking into one another’s eyes.

  “Maybe not,” Judith said.

  The smallest smile, a smile so small it might not be a smile, seemed to form on Malcolm’s lips. “It wouldn’t be the question to ask, would it? ‘This new fellow in your life, Miss Metcalf—would he be Jewish?�
�� ”

  “No, I suppose not,” Judith said, and meant to stop there but couldn’t. “Though when you think about it, that question wouldn’t go much further than asking her whether she’d like a room in which to fornicate.”

  Malcolm looked actually abashed. “So I did commit a faux pas.”

  “Maybe,” Judith said. “I’ll know better in the morning, when I’m less tired.”

  She leaned over and switched off her light. Malcolm on his side did the same. But she lay in the darkness, awake, as Malcolm fell into the slower, heavier breathing of sleep. She wished he would snore so she could elbow him awake, tell him to turn over, go to another room, whatever people told snoring spouses to do. But of course Malcolm didn’t snore. He would never snore. He was too discreet a man for snoring.

  Judith thought peevish thoughts like this for a while, and then more reasonably sour thoughts, and then she remembered her promise to kiss the sleeping Camille. The girl’s room was not quite dark; a slender illuminated moon hanging from the far wall cast a faint light. When Camille was twelve or so and showed a passing interest in the planets and constellations, Malcolm brought home several astronomy-based gifts. Of them, the one that remained was this craggy wall-hung moon, which, with a remote control, could be clicked through four phases from full to crescent. When she was expecting her mother to look in on her, as she was tonight, Camille would leave the crescent moon lighted, and Judith, after kissing Camille’s ear so lightly it wouldn’t awaken her, would turn the light off. Tonight, having done that (Camille didn’t stir), Judith walked from room to room, looking into some, entering others, sitting occasionally near a window to stare down the canyon past the darkened houses to the shimmering lights of the freeway.

  She had distrusted Malcolm once before, and with surprising results. It was in Palo Alto, soon after they’d fallen into the habit of seeing each other nightly, but the Wednesdays had become problematical. Prior to meeting Judith, Malcolm had had a standing Wednesday afternoon tennis date with a girl named Izzy Tisdale, a fact that bothered Judith not at all until she began to notice a gradual lengthening in the tennis matches. Every Wednesday night Malcolm would arrive a little later at Judith’s dorm, and with each added minute, Judith’s thoughts darkened. She said nothing, even when Malcolm, in conversation with a former fraternity brother, agreed that Izzy was “a leggy number,” but finally—this was the sixth or seventh Wednesday, and Malcolm was more than an hour late—Judith bicycled to the courts in a sleepy neighborhood south of campus. As she approached, she heard a volley of hooting laughter, and, dismounting, she crept to a better vantage point. Leggy Izzy Tisdale was nowhere to be seen, but there was Malcolm, hitting ball after ball to a small Hispanic boy dressed in old shorts and new white shoes. His black hair was thick and shaggy; he looked to be eight or nine. Two even smaller boys were racing around fetching stray balls and running them over to Malcolm so he could keep steadily hitting balls to the first boy, all the while giving him gentle repetitive instruction. “Up and through,” he droned, “up and through, step straight forward, then up and through.” Suddenly he stopped and his voice rose: “There! Did you feel that? Did you feel that? Didn’t it feel just perfect?” and the small beaming boy was nodding, and then, when Malcolm said, “Ready position,” the boy began again dancing lightly at the baseline in his new white shoes.