To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  Her nose was running in the cold. She said to Patrick, “Where’s Petey and your little dog?”

  Patrick’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at anything. He said, “That dog died.” Then: “Petey’s with some church people. They’re pretty nice.”

  Judith didn’t know what to say next. Nobody did.

  Deena said, “Well, we have to go now.”

  Judith looked at her.

  Deena said, “My two uncles are waiting for us up at the restaurant.”

  Judith was nodding now, and Deena said, “We just wanted to say hello.”

  “Okay,” said Patrick Guest, and both he and his mother seemed to recede without taking actual steps.

  The girls walked deliberately to the street, but a few houses away, before in fact they could be sure they were out of view, they began to run, and laughter began to spill out of them, spontaneous, inexplicable, up-from-the-belly laughter that bordered on hysterical, and when it began to abate, they rekindled it by repeating some line or other from their visit (“I’ve never been to Woolcott before” was the most dependable, but “We were just in the neighborhood” and “That dog died” also now seemed hilarious).

  At the Country Kitchen, they ate tall stacks of buttermilk pancakes, greedily, silently, and then they settled into drinking watery hot chocolate and reading This Side of Paradise (Judith tore her copy in two so Deena could read the first half while she read the second). But once, when Judith glanced over her book, Deena was looking back at her.

  She said, “What happened to them, do you think?”

  Judith said she didn’t know. “It’s like they’ve been living without natural light,” she said, and fell silent. Really, she couldn’t bear thinking about it.

  A little before 1 P.M., the uncles arrived in a broad mood. “So how was it?” Deena asked, and one uncle said, “Well, when we got there, this old boy Fritz says, ‘Okay, fellas, I have one word for you and the word is… exotics.’ ” When this uncle grinned, Judith saw for the first time the friendly gap between his front teeth. “He showed us emus and ostriches,” the other uncle said, “and he’s talking a mile a minute about high protein and low maintenance, and when he was about out of gas he turned around and he was beaming like a new daddy and he says, ‘You know what I really like about these birds? They are completely flightless.’ ” The uncles were having a good time. “We could’ve got us little cards that said Eleson Brothers, Purveyors of Flightless Bird Meat,” at which even Judith had to laugh.

  That night, back at home, Judith and her father cooked up a supper of scrambled eggs, sausage, and spinach as a way of putting to use the seven-grain bread he’d baked that day while she was away. Judith uncapped a jar of orange marmalade and said, “Deena and I saw Patrick Guest today in Woolcott.”

  Her father seemed to hesitate a half-second before he slid eggs from the tilted skillet. “Did I know you were going to Woolcott?”

  “No, I said I was going with Deena’s uncles to a place near Fenton, and it turns out Fenton is near Woolcott.” She took a quick bite and plunged ahead. “Anyhow, he looked awful. Like an actual zombie.” She watched her father. “And so did Mrs. Guest.”

  Her father took in Judith’s gaze and said, “Ah.”

  “She asked about you,” Judith said.

  Her father’s eyes broke from Judith’s. He chewed several mixed bites of spinach and egg without speaking. Then he said, “I suspect you’re jumping to conclusions, Judith.”

  “So why don’t you straighten me out?”

  He pointedly kept eating. So did she. Because it isn’t your business. She could hear the words as if he’d spoken them. Silence filled the room. He reached for a piece of toasted bread. His method was to puddle the marmalade on his dish, then slide a small amount on the edge of each bite of toast. He said that something seemed off with the bread—he wondered if the yeast had expired. He forked another sausage link from the serving dish. But eventually his expression softened, he sighed audibly, and he said, “Look, sweetheart, Delia Guest and I met a few times for coffee here in town. Her life has not been easy—her father died when she was six or seven, and then she was thirty-seven years old, widowed twice, and losing her farm. She saw me, correctly, as a safe commodity. Our friendship was based on circumstance and proximity. I was her stranger on a train. Then she moved away and that was that.”

  “And that was that.”

  “Yes.” He let his eyes fall evenly on Judith. “That was that.”

  So although he had, as she thought of it, thrown her a couple of table scraps, he’d ended where he’d started, with the position that none of this was really any of her business. Which meant that in regard to Delia Guest, if that hadn’t been that, if there had been some kind of strange romance (strange because any romance between her father and someone other than her mother would be strange), well, then, that wasn’t Judith’s concern. But it was her concern. She couldn’t help it, it just was.

  She found she couldn’t swallow the food she’d just chewed.

  “Are you all right, sweetheart?” her father said.

  She drank some water, nodded, and drank some more water.

  Her father sat back in his chair. Probably he had some sense of her disturbance and gloom and saw the usefulness of distraction. In any case, he said, “You know, Delia Guest was born in that farmhouse we visited. Her actual Christian name is Cordelia, after Lear’s good daughter.” His voice was soft now, and thoughtful. “That’s something, isn’t it? A man and wife in a Nebraska farmhouse in 1933 giving their baby girl the name of Lear’s good daughter.”

  Judith thought this sounded like too much credit. “Maybe they just got Cordelia from some let’s-name-the-baby book,” she said.

  He ignored this. “Delia’s father didn’t live long enough to rage on the heath.” A small smile. “He died as abruptly as her husbands did—a hunting accident, though he hadn’t been hunting. He’d just been a man in a brown hat on the upper contours of a field. She was six or seven—that’s how early her bad luck began. What she remembers is how she was mad at him as he’d gotten ready to go off into the fields that morning and when he’d said his left cheek needed a mouse kiss and she was the only mouse he had, she’d snubbed him fiercely—she actually remembers setting her chin, crossing her arms, and turning her back—and then of course she’d changed her mind and run out, but by then he was gone.”

  “Oh,” Judith said in a fallen voice, and when she heard how schoolgirlish she sounded, it brought her quickly back. She stiffened her voice and said, “Well, that’s just a prime example of…” but quit because she wasn’t sure what exactly it might be a prime example of.

  That night, when she lay in bed thinking about herself and Patrick Guest and her father and Delia Guest and Delia Guest’s father, it all wound up in a muddling confusion, and she finally gave up, and the thought she was left with, the thought she would remember, was this: What if, in the end, we are all just flightless birds?

  7

  In the days after discovering—or not discovering—Malcolm’s infidelity, Judith found herself taking stock. In the past, she had occasionally speculated that a mistress for Malcolm might be more a good thing than a bad one—that it might allow her to sleep when she felt sleepy, might allow the less frequent occasions for sex to feel less dutiful, might even allow her to receive with secret pleasure the expensive little offerings of a penitent spouse—but she now realized that these idle thoughts needed considerable refinement. The existence of the mistress needed to be so abstract as to be credibly deniable, for one thing, and for another—or was this just a variation of the same idea?—the other woman needed to be someone of whom Judith had no image whatever (Francine Metcalf’s white Rubenesque body poised in a casually sensual attitude on a hotel bed had turned out to be a difficult picture to dispel).

  During other rough patches in her life—when her awkwardness with motherhood troubled her, or when Malcolm went through a period of distraction—Judith had always bu
rrowed into her work, but that couldn’t hold her now. Her mind wandered in the editing room, she lost her decisiveness, and many of her cuts were made just to end her exasperation. More than once Lucy Meynke had fallen overtly silent over her choices. Twice Mick Hooper had to push back other sessions—looping the actors, sound spotting, mixing, coloring, titling—because Judith had missed her deadline.

  Outside of work, Judith began doing things she had never imagined she might do. She checked Malcolm’s shirts for Francine Metcalf’s scent (having determined, by means of a casual drop-in at the bank, that it was jasmine-based), and she went through the American Express statement for unusual charges for food or lodging (even while knowing perfectly well that Malcolm would certainly have used cash). But in the end these searches and inquiries told her nothing.

  Judith had heard of women fighting for their mates, using their charms and wiles to reel the wayward hubby back, but she was in no shape for it. The thought of Malcolm having casual sex with someone else was bad enough, but worse yet was the possibility that it wasn’t casual at all. The thought of Malcolm routinely sharing intimate and important conversations with Francine Metcalf caused her to feel logy, dull, almost benumbed. The life she’d thought of as handsome and heavy-timbered now seem to tremble under her every step. She began having headaches, and the bad ones really were bad—she would have to see a doctor about them. They started with a black dot in her right eye, a growing dot set against a jagged edge of light, after which it began to bear into all the brain’s tenderest spots, until nausea unfolded and overtook her and nothing seemed more attractive than a cool dark place to lie down in.

  Even without the headaches, she found herself craving stillness. She stopped reading Variety and the L.A. Times, she stopped turning on music in the car, she turned off her cell phone. One night after work, she took a meandering route home, then parked across the street, sat in the car, and stared at her house long enough to imagine that it might be someone else’s.

  When Malcolm remarked one morning that Judith was looking tired, she said, “That would be because I am tired. I can’t sleep. The show we’re on isn’t done and they’ve already brought in the next one to cut.” She was aware that he’d heard this kind of complaint before, but then, although it wasn’t true, she added another. “You’ve begun snoring,” she said.

  “Pardon?” Malcolm looked bewildered.

  “You snore,” she said.

  “I snore?”

  She nodded. “Unless someone else was in bed with me last night.” She could hardly believe it—she was lifting her chin in mock thought. “But no, it was just you.”

  Her surprise at saying this caused her to laugh at a strange high pitch, and though he gave a small reflexive laugh, he was clearly hurt. When, later, on her way to work, she replayed the scene, she wished she could give it a hard edit. Why had she said what she said? What in the world was she doing? Malcolm was civilized, Malcolm was goodhearted, Malcolm provided. She reached for her cell phone, cupped it in the call position. Possibly, too—she lowered the phone—Malcolm fornicated five times a week with Francine Metcalf.

  At a stoplight, through the closed windows of her Audi, Judith heard the pounding bass beat of rap music. It came from a tricked-out red Honda beside her. The music was so loud the car seemed to pulsate, but in the passenger’s seat a pretty Hispanic girl, her face rigid with makeup, sat motionless, looking at nothing with blank eyes. Beyond her, the driver, a huge man with a goatee and slicked-back hair, sat in much the same ceramic attitude. Judith supposed that two blocks back they might’ve been laughing like maniacs, but she doubted it.

  What she didn’t doubt was that there was more going on within these two than she could ever guess, and probably more than they could guess either—that under our skin run whole streams of feelings and inclinations so slithery they are only rarely and uncertainly grasped.

  There had been fog this morning in L.A., and on her way out to the car Judith had stopped between the house and the garage to look at the intricate dewy web of the large, brown, hairy-legged spider that waited at the edge in such perfect stillness that it seemed to Judith like indifference (a hypothesis she disproved by gently touching the web; the spider scampered toward her finger with alarming speed). She recalled the several times she’d encouraged Malcolm to take Francine Metcalf to dinner before one of the evening bank meetings, and she remembered how airily she’d told Malcolm, when declining to accompany him to some bankers’ convention in New Orleans or Kona—the timing was always horrible in terms of her own work, and really, however good the nanny might be, they were both uncomfortable being away at the same time—that at least he could rehash the meetings with Francine at the end of the day, and what was up with offering those particular temptations? What kind of traps do we set without even knowing we’re setting them, and, more to the point, what appetites crave the meal such traps might provide? She had no idea. No earthly idea.

  The moment the light changed, the throbbing red Honda shot ahead. Judith eased forward, used her blinker, and moved into a slower lane. If Malcolm and Francine Metcalf were in fact an item, it might at least in part be due to her own orchestration. That was the possibility at hand. But why? To slash what picture, disturb what calm pond? Gain what leverage, give her what rights?

  Over the next four or five blocks, as the Audi lurched along with the other traffic, Judith found herself formulating the notion that whether it was Los Angeles or Kyoto or Constantinople, the love between a man and a woman (and probably between a man and a man or a woman and a woman, too—why should they be excused?) had at the controls something thuggish. And this was not the last sobering thought she had before turning into the studio parking lot. The last was that, at least in regard to the state of marriage and the means by which its weaknesses might be described, she was becoming more and more like her mother.

  When she walked into the cutting room, Judith was surprised to find Lucy sitting in the straight-backed chair Judith thought of as her own. On the monitor in front of her was the image of the Ben character about to shoot a basketball at night on a semilighted court, a frame Judith had never before seen.

  “What’s this?” Judith asked.

  “New scene,” Lucy said. “Pottle and Hooper ordered it because they hate the episode as is.” She was rising from the chair so Judith could take her place. “They called me last night,” she said. “They tried to call you on your cell but couldn’t get through. I tried, too. Cell and landline.”

  “My cell was dead. As for the home phone, think Milla in full networking mode.” Judith eased into the seat, strangely warm, and said, “Okay, what’ve you got so far?”

  It was a long day, and a long week. They worked harder and fell further behind. Once—this had never happened before—she exchanged petty objections with Lucy Meynke. Friday night Judith, who should have worked late, instead left the studio early to buy fresh tomatoes, onions, and eggplant for ratatouille, then, having prepared it, sat at the table waiting for Malcolm. Camille and Sonya ate without expression or comment. Judith poured herself a third glass of wine and began to eat by herself, masking her irritation with careful unhurried bites, and why was she so irritated anyhow? Thirty minutes late—now thirty-five—wasn’t that flagrant, was it? The work was whittling away at her, that was part of it, but it was also true that she kept noticing strangers doing overtly indiscreet things: sitting close to one another in parked cars in broad daylight, or, as happened this afternoon in a far corner of the Vons’ parking lot, a middle-aged man leaning into a car to give the woman behind the wheel a lingering kiss before slipping into his own car, parked nearby. Judith had begun walking toward the market’s front doors, but as the couple drove off in different directions, the woman passed close enough that the radiance in her face couldn’t be mistaken. Judith tried to watch these little episodes with the distanced interest of a moviegoer and to restrict her thoughts along the bland lines of Such is the human condition, but all that notwithstanding, the
moment Malcolm presented himself tonight in the dining room, she rose from the table and began cleaning up. He made apologies—they’d had a security malfunction at one of the branches just as he was leaving—but she didn’t respond, nor did she offer to heat the ratatouille on his plate. She put her wedding ring in the tiny crackleware saucer she kept on the windowsill for that purpose and began rinsing dishes. Camille and Sonya helped just long enough to say they had, then slid off to their rooms at opposite ends of the house.

  “The pugilists retire to their corners,” Malcolm observed after they’d departed, a remark Judith pretended not to hear. Malcolm didn’t seem to mind. He rose and took the day’s mail to the table to sort through while he ate.

  A few days ago, Judith, Lucy, and another editor had run into Tom Bergin’s for a salad, and two tables beyond them, a man eating with his wife pulled out a book to read while his wife looked here and there with a chipper expression, as if this was exactly what she’d hoped for, to come out in public with a man who would rather read a book than talk to her. Lucy said, “If I had me a gun, I’d lend it to that woman.” Judith laughed, and the other editor asked on whom the woman should use it, herself or the hubby. “First shoot the husband,” Lucy said, “then assess your position.”

  Malcolm said, “Have you seen this Visa bill?”

  Judith hadn’t, but nearly had. Malcolm always handled the bills, but tonight, while heating water for pasta, she’d considered steaming open the Visa statement to check for incriminating charges. “No,” she said. “Why? Should I look at it?”

  “Sitting down, is my suggestion.” Then he remarked favorably on the cold ratatouille. “Is that rosemary in there?”

  “Basil.” Her voice was sullen. She wondered what, culinarily, was the equivalent of tone deafness.