To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  After a while, her father gave her a start by speaking. “When pretending to read,” he said, “it’s important to turn a page occasionally.”

  Judith felt her face go hot and without looking up turned a page.

  11

  Over the next few visits, Judith’s storage unit evolved into a mock living space. She spread fabric over the stacked boxes that lined the walls, and she draped the cinder-block walls with it, too, the fabric in a rich red paisley pattern, so it seemed she’d not just recreated her old room but dropped it into a fairy tale, or a dream. She began going through her boxes of books, setting aside her favorites to arrange alphabetically by author in the tiered glass bookcase.

  When she came upon The Portrait of a Lady, she began flipping through its pages, surprised by the number of comments she’d entered in the margins. Early on, next to the paragraph that cited Lord Warburton’s annual income of one hundred thousand pounds, she’d written in pencil, 10 times more than Darcy!!! and she remembered how she couldn’t understand Isabel’s refusal of the fabulous man’s offer of marriage. Elizabeth Bennet had sought a husband, but on her own strict terms, whereas Isabel Archer started with the idea of not wanting any husband at all. At the top of a following page Judith had written, Dad thinks Isabel afraid of being lost in Warburton’s large life…. “folded into the batter.” But wasn’t that what happened with the man she finally did marry, the one who was all taste and treachery? Judith thumbed to the back and found it so. Isabel’s marriage to Osmond had been suffocating. When Osmond remarked to Isabel, “We’re as united, you know, as the candlestick and the snuffer,” Judith had underlined the words and written in the margin, Ha! Send this 1 to mom!

  Judith turned to the beginning of the book, read the first line, then read almost without looking up for the next two hours, and over the following days kept reading until it was done. The plot and structure were familiar to her, but its details came to her fresh, and from a different direction than she remembered. The story of Isabel Archer, the girl who was taken from her dark house in Albany and deposited in a grand English country house, now seemed a kind of social experiment to Judith. Isabel’s aunt and, more especially, her cousin, Ralph, meant themselves to be benefactors. They were interested in her frisky spirit and wanted to see where it would take her. They watched her escape two respectable suitors in Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood, but then Isabel was trapped by her inability to judge the character of Gilbert Osmond, who was both discerning and cruel. For Judith, personal referents presented themselves at every turn. She had escaped Willy Blunt and Patrick Guest, but they were not Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood, just as Malcolm was not quite Gilbert Osmond; just as, even more certainly, Judith was not Isabel Archer. Still, when Isabel had again rebuffed the last late entreaties of Warburton and Goodwood and gone back to the Palazzo Roccanera, Osmond’s house of darkness in Rome, Judith felt as if she’d just attended the funeral of someone strangely close to her.

  That Saturday night, after several postponements, she and Malcolm finally went to dinner at an elegant restaurant in the canyon that seemed to them both the right kind of venue for the beaded black dress. Malcolm, who very often didn’t drink at all, ordered a Glenmorangie neat. After the waiter retired, he said to Judith, “In remembrance of an afternoon spent with the bride in a beachfront room.”

  But Judith, resisting the sportive tone, eyed the entrees just served at an adjoining table and said, “We may need to drink just to distract ourselves from the peewee portions.”

  The beaded dress suited her and had drawn a certain amount of attention from the men in the room as she’d passed, but she hadn’t felt the small ignition of feelings necessary to raise the evening to the level Malcolm clearly intended. Judith knew it was Saturday night—she could see it in the bright eyes of other diners—but it felt to her more like a Monday.

  Malcolm worked hard at his end of the bargain, telling an amusing anecdote about a check-kiting alderman, explaining the significance of the bank’s imminent acquisition of a four-branch bank in northern California, and finally giving his own indignant analysis of how gerrymandering had turned the primaries into the real elections and driven both parties to extremes, or something like that, after which it took Judith a moment to realize he’d stopped talking. Her mind had drifted to poor Isabel Archer. Why, in the end, hadn’t she done something about Osmond? Had she acceded to her situation for no other reason than that she was responsible for it?

  Malcolm said, “I believe I’ll have another scotch.”

  Judith had barely touched her manhattan, a drink she’d always loved but which tonight seemed too sweet. She remembered suddenly the night in the empty bank. “ ‘Your business is our business,’ ” she said. “Who came up with that?”

  “Consultant. What’s your verdict?”

  She shrugged. “Guess it’s better than ‘Your business is none of our damn business,’ which is what I might’ve suggested.”

  Malcolm murmured good-naturedly and said it was possible her temperament was not well suited to public relations. Then, after the first sip from his fresh drink, he said, “Something strange happened to Miss Metcalf.”

  Judith waited.

  “She found a lock in her desk.”

  He said this casually and without studying her reaction. In fact, he seemed to be throwing it off as a kind of joke. He let his gaze drift to the steaming dinner plates passing by in the hands of two waiters.

  “I don’t get it,” Judith said.

  He turned back to her. “Nobody does. That’s why it’s strange. Usually if there’s a transference, it’s out. But this was in. Yet useless—a lock somebody had cut through and nobody has the keys to.”

  But Miss Metcalf does have the keys, Judith thought, to a lock that could no longer secure anything, which wasn’t useless at all, if your taste ran toward metaphors.

  “Maybe it was some kind of swap,” she said. “Something in and something out.”

  Malcolm shook his head. “Nothing’s missing. Miss Metcalf is sure of it. She thinks somebody put it there when she wasn’t looking.”

  “As a kind of… what? Joke?”

  He shrugged. “Very probably.”

  A second passed. “Why not check the security cameras?”

  “We did, but she doesn’t know when the lock was put there, and the video only goes back seventy-two hours before it tapes over itself.”

  Judith sipped her manhattan. “Did you tell her I’d been sitting at her desk?”

  Malcolm looked puzzled, then shook his head. “I’d honestly forgotten, not that it matters. And practical joking doesn’t seem your style, does it? Besides, that was ages ago. She found the lock yesterday.”

  He’d finished his drink—when had he managed that?—and something about his body language suggested that he might order another. Where were their dinners, anyway?

  “What are you going to do?” she said.

  “Nothing to do. Well, that’s not quite right. Ed and I brought in several old broken locks, and when she was gone on break, we tucked them into various corners of her desk.”

  “And?”

  “She was not unamused.”

  “And jokes all around about you and Ed in Miss Metcalf’s drawers?”

  He laughed. “Sadly, no. It’s the new day and age. No hands-in-Miss-So-and-so’s-drawers jokes. Thank God, of course.”

  He did order a third drink, and when finally their dinners were served, Malcolm regarded his plate and told the waiter he should be forewarned, he might require seconds. The waiter gave a bland smile and receded.

  They tried to eat slowly, but still, it didn’t take long. When their plates had been cleared and they were waiting for coffee, Malcolm leaned forward and extended his hand across the table. Judith took it. “Just for the record,” he said in a low tone, “you’re still the fetchingest creature I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I love you madly.”

  She was glad he left it at that. Alcohol could make him harebrained.
Once before, in a similarly expansive mood, he’d mentioned the sun, moon, and stars, which in her opinion was dangerously close to the twelfth of Never. “I love you, too,” she said, and, hearing how pro forma it sounded, wondered if she was falling out of love with him. Or even already had. She hoped not, but she didn’t need her mother to tell her that hope wasn’t much of a stopper against the seepage of love. Judith had once formulated her own aphorism for a successful marriage—it was one, she believed, where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts—but after a moment or two of smug satisfaction, she had to ask who could be trusted to do the math. Who would protect against rampant number-fudging? Because who wouldn’t compute that their one plus one equaled three? Or at least two point one?

  Later that night, at home, when Malcolm moved to make love with her, Judith merely acceded. At some point in his ministrations (at what point exactly, she couldn’t say; to be truthful, her mind had been elsewhere), Malcolm abruptly rolled away and sat at the edge of the bed.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said. Peevishness was not his style, but he was peevish now. “I guess your boredom was infectious.”

  He slipped into his silk robe and left the room, which was not quite like putting on street clothes and leaving the house—a more credible threat, in Judith’s opinion, what with Francine Metcalf either on call or not. Still, Judith knew Malcolm’s sequestering himself elsewhere in the house while she lay waiting for him to come back to bed would drive her crazy. Probably he knew this, too, and this probability cost him sympathy. She began thinking of the stillness of her storage room, the unencumbering feelings and strange ideas that incubated within it. She wished suddenly she could get in her car and drive there, but the Red Roof had a policy. You could visit your belongings only between 7 A.M. and 9 P.M., which, in Judith’s opinion, was not always time enough. She had never again seen the sloe-eyed youth who had shown her around on her first visit, but there was one unkempt attendant, the one she privately called the Merry Man, who just before closing time drove through with a boom box playing a muddy recording of the Moody Blues’ “Go Now.” (Once, in passing, he gave Judith a grin gaping with missing teeth and called, “You don’t have to go home, lady, but you can’t stay here!”)

  Judith rose, put on her robe, and found Malcolm downstairs, standing at the kitchen sink. The smell of barbecued chicken hung in the air. He’d bought it at Albertsons, and she wondered why they never barbecued chicken themselves anymore, along with asparagus and onions, the way they used to do in school, soon after they met.

  “Kitchen open?” she said.

  Malcolm turned. “It is. But I’m afraid we’ve just served the last of the wings.”

  She came close and stood beside him. The tiny crackleware saucer she normally kept on the windowsill lay now on the kitchen counter. Her rings were in it, which wasn’t itself a surprise—she often left them there overnight—but what she couldn’t remember was whether she’d worn them that day. She thought back to her hands at dinner, but could as easily see them without rings as with. She turned to Malcolm, who was intently staring out the window.

  “Was I wearing my rings at dinner?”

  He started slightly, as if brought back from intricate thoughts. “What?”

  She repeated herself.

  “What a strange question. Of course you were. I held your hand over dinner, don’t you remember? I would definitely have noticed.”

  He was looking away again. From this—his words and his protective tone—she knew she hadn’t worn them. She wished she had. She would have to pay more attention.

  Down the canyon, most of the houses were dark, and beyond them, in the farthest distance, long lines of freeway traffic stretched through the valley’s darkened contours.

  He said, “It’s funny, watching all the red lights going willy-nilly one way and all the white lights going willy-nilly the other.” She didn’t speak, and after a while he said, “I remember reading somewhere that the first thing you should do when you’re uneasy about something important—the pattern of your life, the direction you’re going, a problem you’re trying to fight your way out of—the first thing you should do is just stop. Really stop. Become the rock in the stream.” A small smile. “Either those people out there haven’t heard this advice or they’re feeling just dandy about themselves.”

  Judith didn’t speak. Stopping and taking stock seemed like perfectly good advice—she was more or less doing this on a daily basis herself—but what worries or regrets had brought Malcolm’s mind to the solution of stillness? Or could it just be the temporary abasement of failed sex? She took Malcolm’s hand. “I’m sorry about—”

  But he cut her off in a decisive tone. “Don’t be sorry about anything, Judith. You are the one person in the world who hasn’t a single important thing to be sorry about.”

  Judith knew this wasn’t true and considered saying so, but he would only disagree, and where would that lead them? To him arguing for the purity of her life and her arguing against it?

  She moved toward the door. “Coming?” she said.

  “I’ll be right up,” he said. “We’re out of wings”—and though in the dimness she couldn’t see the thin smile form on his lips, she knew that it had—“but we’re not out of drumsticks.”

  She said, “We can try again upstairs.”

  “Can and shall,” he said, “but not tonight, if you don’t mind.”

  On her way back to her room, Judith looked in on Camille. The room was dark. She drew close to the high bed and looked at her daughter curled under the sheet, the duvet pushed aside. Of the memories of Camille’s toddlerhood that Judith could recall with undiluted fondness, the one that stood out was lying in bed with her at the end of the day, Camille’s head tucked into the crook of Judith’s outstretched arm and Judith feeling the girl’s restive, contrarian spirit finally give way to sleep, her intense little body easing into something softer, looser, dearer. For a moment Judith considered crawling into the canopied bed, sliding her arm under Camille’s head, letting her settle again into her motherly embrace, but the thought didn’t hold. Very probably Camille wouldn’t turn, nestling, to Judith. Very probably she would awaken, alarmed, then indignant, and loudly so. So Judith instead felt the edge of the step stool and knelt on its top step to lean close enough to kiss Camille’s earlobe, which, she knew, had everything—the plumpness, the softness, the smoothness—that lips might expect from a baby.

  But upon the kiss Camille stirred. “Theo?”

  Is that what she said? Theo?

  “What?” Judith whispered, but Camille was asleep again, slipping back into her dreams.

  A few days later, Judith and Lucy Meynke went out for a quick meal after working through the lunch hour. Every day Judith came in a little earlier so that she could squeeze in a bit more reading and relaxation at the Red Roof after work, but no matter how early she came in, Lucy had arrived before her. Judith appreciated it—Lucy was making some nice cuts, solving some tricky problems—but Lucy’s fuller assistance tampered with the editing room’s balance of influences. Judith’s comments and cuts were sometimes now met with silences that she sensed were judgmental. “What would you do?” Judith asked once, more accusatorily than she intended, and Lucy matter-of-factly said this and this and this, demonstrating each step and leaving the sequence both more fluid and clearer than Judith’s cuts had, which only deepened Judith’s diffidence. Only when she and Lucy were outside the editing room did their friendship revert to its former ease.

  Today Judith ordered a Caesar salad, and then, as the waitress turned to go, she added a martini. “Sapphire, stirred, two olives.”

  Lucy broke a piece of bread. “Something up with you and Malcolm?”

  Judith blinked with surprise. “This being the question because I order a real drink?”

  “Normally you don’t. Not at three in the afternoon, anyhow.”

  “Malcolm’s fine,” Judith said. “I’m fine.”

&
nbsp; “Except for the hellacious headaches,” Lucy said.

  “Yeah, well,” Judith said, and was glad to see the martini arrive in a chilled clear hand-blown glass, its yawning lip edged in cobalt blue, a swank look that pleased Judith, and evidently Lucy, too, because she said to the waitress, “Okay, I better have one of those myself.”

  After Judith took her first burning-soothing sip, Lucy said, “How about Milla? All well in the City of Milla?”

  Judith considered telling her about the Theo moment but decided to keep her concerns more general. “I could make the argument that she’s the perfect teenager—decent social graces, good grades, college-bound friends, blah blah blah—but the truth is, I have no idea. Every now and then I recognize her as my daughter, but most of the time she feels like a casual acquaintance. She’s still forming, and most of the forming these days occurs away from home.” She remembered what her own father had said to her the night Willy Blunt first telephoned: that he hoped Judith had collected the tools to defend herself. “What’s hard is butting out, letting them do it themselves.”

  Lucy said, “Camille’s spunky. She’s got backbone. I’d bet the house on her.”

  Lucy had expressed a similar sentiment more than once, not that Judith minded hearing it again, but it didn’t keep her from saying, “Though what you have to bet is not a house but a condo,” and Lucy let a laugh burst out. “God, Judith,” she said, “you’re not supposed to fact-check a fucking compliment.”

  They ate and drank and talked about almost everything, except work. At one point, Judith became aware of two things: the dim sound of someone’s cell phone and Lucy’s bemused stare.

  “What?” Judith said.

  “Your purse is ringing.”

  Of course. It was short repetitions of the opening notes of “Clair de Lune.” Which became much louder as Judith pulled a slim silver phone from the bottom of her purse. On the readout it said Unavailable, but while Judith considered whether to answer the phone or not, it fell suddenly quiet.