To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  “Sleek,” Lucy said. “New?”

  “It’s Milla’s,” Judith lied with some smoothness. The alcohol helped in this regard. “She left it in my car, and I wanted to remember to take it into the house tonight, so I put it in my purse.” She stopped then, wondering what unforeseeable ambush she might have just begun leading herself into, but Lucy, possibly because of her own martini, did not seem remotely suspicious.

  “That says something about Milla right there,” Lucy said. “How many kids would go public with a Debussy ringtone?”

  “It’s probably keyed to her piano teacher,” Judith said, and dropped the phone back into her bag. It was ridiculous, really, a phone for Edie Winks, but there it was. From the beginning, the bank had wanted a telephone number, and every time she deposited cash, this requirement came up as some kind of tickler on the computer screen. So once she had her new bank MasterCard, Judith went to the Nextel store, selected the cheapest plan and most stylish phone, then dumped it into her purse, where until now it had lain forgotten. She would have to figure out how to get it into freaking vibrate mode.

  After the plates were cleared, Judith slid one of the pimiento-stuffed olives from its glass toothpick. A question poised within her for days calmly passed her lips: “Remember when you hired that private eye?”

  Lucy said she did. “Though I think I referred to him as a private dick.”

  Judith ignored the ribald drift. “You thought he was good, though, right?”

  Lucy nodded. “Also pricey.” She grinned and gave Judith the mischievous look of a co-conspirator. “And why do you ask?”

  “There’s an old girlfriend in Nebraska I’ve lost track of.”

  Lucy kept grinning. “What’s his name?”

  “Whose?”

  “The old girlfriend you’ve lost track of.”

  “You’re horrible,” Judith said. “I’m sure you’ve been told this before.”

  “But am I not right?”

  Judith smiled and shrugged. “Half right. I was going to check two names, actually. A girl named Deena Schmidt and a boy named Patrick Guest.” Judith was a little surprised at herself. Until she spoke Patrick Guest’s name, she’d presumed she was going to tell the truth.

  “Patrick Guest?” Lucy said. “Have we discussed a Patrick Guest?”

  Judith didn’t mind Lucy Meynke chasing after Patrick Guest. “He was just this sweet competent hopeful boy in Nebraska whose father had died in a horse accident and whose stepfather died in a farming accident and whose mother then lost the family farm.”

  Lucy said, “This is going to be hard to sell as a comedy.”

  “When I last saw Patrick Guest, he and his mother were living in a tiny dark house in a row of tiny dark houses. I just always wondered if he’d made an escape.”

  The women both leaned back in silence while the waitress took their plates. Then Lucy said, “And the girl?”

  After Judith left Rufus Sage for college, she and Deena had written for a while, but Deena had been critical of both Judith’s friendship with Malcolm and her abandonment of Willy, and the correspondence had dwindled and died. Judith had considered asking Deena to be a maid of honor at the wedding, but it didn’t feel quite right to have the maid of honor disapproving of her marriage, and if she wasn’t going to invite her as an honored guest, she knew she shouldn’t invite her at all. When, nearly a year later, she wrote a letter describing her new life in California, it came back with the words Please return to sender written on the front in what Judith recognized as Deena’s own hand. It had stung (Judith had wadded the letter and thrown it away), but now she wondered if she hadn’t deserved it, if not inviting Deena to her wedding hadn’t made the gesture of the returned letter seem to Deena like the least she could do.

  “She was my best friend in high school,” Judith said to Lucy, “and then over time we just lost touch.”

  “And you always wondered whether she bested you in love and marriage?”

  Judith gave a mild laugh and signaled for the check. “Something like that.”

  Lucy volunteered that she’d found a couple of old high school friends through Switchboard.com. “Didn’t cost a dime.”

  “Tried that,” Judith said. “And some others, too. Including a search engine you pay for.” It had been a nightmare. They’d wanted his birth date, which she wasn’t absolutely sure of, and where he lived, which she didn’t know.

  “Gilbert J. Smith,” Lucy said, scrolling down the contact numbers on her telephone, “is the private investigator’s name.”

  As she read off the number, Judith jotted it down.

  When they returned to the studio and walked chatting through the reception area, there was the usual collection of three or four people waiting in the armchairs, browsing through magazines or staring at their laptop computers.

  “Judy, sweetie!” one of them said, and Judith turned.

  It was her mother.

  “Mom. Jesus. What are you doing here?”

  Her mother stood and wrapped her arms around Judith, who wasn’t sure what to do. Finally her mother broke her clasp and stepped back to give Judith a motherly appraisal. “You look a little pale,” she said. “Have you been having enough sex?”

  An actual guffaw burst from Lucy Meynke, and Judith had no choice but to join in the laughter.

  “There,” her mother said. “You look better with a little color in your cheeks.”

  As for her mother, she looked happy. “I’m off to Mexico,” she said. “San Miguel de Allende.” She sounded vaguely triumphant, though over what, Judith couldn’t guess.

  “San Miguel,” Judith repeated.

  “But first I’m here,” her mother said. “It’s a layover. We have seven hours.”

  “God, Mom.” She lowered her voice. “I’m working here. On stuff that had to be done three days ago.”

  Her mother’s smile didn’t give an inch.

  “Judith, sweetie, when was the last time you saw me? Shortly after your father’s funeral, that’s when, and the next time may be mine.” She tilted her head ever so slightly. “We need to commune.”

  Lucy Meynke cleared her throat and said she could handle the changes they were on, no problem. And if need be, she could explain to Hooper and Pottle, also no problem.

  “Who is this marvelous woman?” Judith’s mother said.

  Judith felt herself carried along in a current she knew she ought to resist. “Are you sure?” she said to Lucy.

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “There, then, it’s settled,” Judith’s mother said. “But first things first. Take me someplace yummy. I could eat a horse.”

  They went to Tom Bergin’s, where her mother ordered vegetarian lasagna and Chianti, and Judith, sensing danger and in need of bracing, ordered a manhattan. When the waitress brought the Chianti, Judith’s mother nodded at the glass and said, “When that’s down to the quarter mark, bring me another.”

  Judith’s mother, it turned out, had been seeing a new therapist, a woman who among other notions believed in the liberating effect of brutal truths. Suppressed heartfelt ideas and opinions, the theory went, could only convert to internal toxins. The unfortunate effect of this therapy was that Judith’s mother no longer kept much of anything to herself. When for example Judith brought up the subject of that awful vacation in Florida with the Irwins, her mother said a number of unsettling things.

  She said, “That night at Lefevre’s we were all drinking Cuba libres, and while Dale Irwin and I were dancing, your father and Vanessa Irwin had sex in one of the toilet stalls of the men’s room.”

  And: “It wasn’t just that he was unfaithful—that had happened before. And it wasn’t just that he did it more or less in front of me—that had happened before, too, although I’d always pretended it hadn’t. No, what distinguished this occasion was that he did it with the wife of a man who sat on his tenure committee.” She laughed. “Lust might be forgivable. Stupidity is something else.”

  “He told
me he wasn’t getting tenure,” Judith said, on her father’s behalf, though it was true he’d never said why.

  “Did he also tell you he was offered three jobs, none as good as he’d had but two better than the one he took?”

  Judith shook her head.

  Judith’s mother snapped a stretching piece of mozzarella with her fork and said, “Two years later, when you were living with your father in Nebraska, Dale Irwin knocked on my door late one afternoon out of the blue. It was springtime—I remember lilacs. He’d been drinking and had this funny grin. I let him in.” She chewed thoughtfully. “Sex that afternoon with Dale Irwin is still on my top ten list.”

  Judith looked around; there were no other customers in the room except a couple of men drinking beer at a far table. She said, “If this is your idea of communing, I just don’t think I’m up to it.”

  “Listen to you,” her mother said. “You sound just like your father.”

  Her mother looked good, Judith had to admit, with none of the coarsening and sagging you usually saw in women her age, or at least not much of it. Sun—she kept out of the sun. Well preserved, Malcolm had called her once, and it was true. But it had seemed true of Judith’s father, too. He’d seemed so solid, boulderlike, maybe not impervious to erosion but close to it, and yet. She said, “One of the Rufus Sage policemen told me the heart attack occurred while he was sitting on the toilet.”

  Across the table, her mother took this in.

  “Probably while straining at stools, the deputy said.”

  Her mother’s expression didn’t change. It went through Judith’s mind that the philosophy of brutal truths might advocate such an advanced state of tolerance that even mild surprise was discouraged. Finally her mother said, “The only shame of that is its lack of dignity, which would’ve meant something to your father. More than it should have, in my opinion, which by the way he rarely asked for.”

  After the funeral they’d retreated to a restaurant in Rufus Sage called Herman the German’s. Her mother had been more subdued then. She had ordered a salad that came so drenched with dressing she couldn’t eat it, but she hadn’t said a word. Judith, for unknown reasons, had ordered the buffalo burger. They had eaten alone. Judith had all but forbidden Malcolm from coming. He had just taken over a new bank—it was only his third week on the job—and Camille was in second grade, when she might as easily come home from school humiliated as happy. Those were the reasons given. “Stay and tend the home fires,” Judith had said, but Malcolm had been torn. She was his wife, after all, and Howard Toomey was his wife’s dead father. Once, while talking about arrangements on the telephone with her mother, Judith had mentioned the standoff.

  “Put him on,” her mother said, and after handing the phone over, Judith heard the timbre of her mother’s voice and saw Malcolm break into a grin. “Well, that’s one way of putting it, Kathleen. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “What’s one way of putting it?” Judith asked when the conversation was over.

  Malcolm made his wry smile. “Your mother said your father couldn’t stand the sight of me when he was alive and probably wouldn’t want me around when he was dead either.”

  “That’s not true!” Judith said, though they both knew it was, more or less.

  Judith recalled the episode for her mother now, and said, “It’s possible you like your new therapist because she gives you permission to be as brash as you always wished you could be.”

  “And the problem with that would be?”

  They ate and drank silently for a few seconds, then Judith’s mother said, “In case you’re interested, I talked Malcolm out of coming to the funeral because I knew you didn’t want him to come.”

  “And why was that?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Maybe I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Her mother nodded and chewed. “What I remember is how during the service you kept brushing your hair back over one ear and glancing over your shoulder to see if someone had stepped in late.”

  Judith felt a tightening in her chest and waited for her mother to say whatever she would say next, which might be anything, but in fact was, “You thought Willy Blunt would show up, didn’t you?”

  Good God, Judith thought. Never in her entire life had she mentioned Willy Blunt’s name to her mother. Judith looked at her for a long moment, then reached for her water glass and let a rounded ice cube slide into her mouth. Her father. He must’ve told her. Judith shrugged, made a strange-feeling smile, and came more or less clean. “It didn’t seem impossible he might come to that funeral.”

  Her mother took this in. “And when he didn’t,” she said, “were you relieved or disappointed?”

  “Relieved,” Judith said.

  Her mother produced a good-natured laugh. “I should give you the name of my therapist.”

  Her eyes drifted from Judith toward a cluster of commemorative cardboard shamrocks on the wall, but she wasn’t really looking at them. “It was February, wasn’t it? What I remember is all those pickups and big American cars. They all carried the grime of winter. So did the roads and the walks and the windows. But the people, I have to admit, the people were nice. All those students and former students coming up and telling nice little anecdotes.” She turned back to Judith. “I know you think I’m silly with my homilies, but there is an Italian proverb I thought of that day. It is the first shower that wets.” She changed her voice from the reciting mode. “Your father was my first shower, I’ll admit it. And this boy Willy Blunt, whom I never met and who your father thought was simple yet actually dangerous, and whose photograph I have never seen, was yours.”

  Judith thought of the picture of Willy hidden in her wallet, thought of bringing it out, showing it to her. She was at the fulcrum, sitting still, wondering in which direction she might lean, but just like that, the moment was gone.

  At the far table, one of the beer-drinking men laughed and said, “You’re kidding, right? That bum’s hitting about a buck something with men on base.”

  “Ready?” her mother said.

  Outside, in the parking lot, the sun had angled lower and the heat was beginning to recede. Judith’s mother said, “We still have five hours. Take me someplace interesting.”

  Judith wheeled her Audi onto Fairfax and mentioned the usual places. The Farmers Market. Olvera Street. Little Tokyo. Third Street Promenade.

  “I said someplace interesting, sweetie.”

  Judith drove vaguely on, and her mother looked out the window and talked. “You know, I used to think the only widows who stayed widows were the ones who didn’t like sex in the first place, but what I’ve found out is there’s plenty of high jinks available to widows. Probably more than to those who sign up for a second tour of duty.”

  Judith hoped her mother was finished with this particular topic, but she wasn’t. She said, “Latin men especially seem to value the seasoned woman from north of the border.”

  Judith said, “Mom, nobody talks like that here.”

  “Maybe you should move.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Judith said. “If you promise not to make one more remark that in any way alludes to your sex life, I’ll take you somewhere I’ve never taken anyone else.”

  Her mother turned from the window. “Where?”

  Judith wasn’t sure what to say. She said, “A secret place.”

  “Your secret place?” Her eyes were just short of predatory.

  Judith said yes, she guessed it was.

  “Okay, then,” her mother said, settling back. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Judith tilted the Red Roof clipboard away from her mother when she signed in as Edie Winks.

  As they drove down a dirty alley between rows of unvaried cinder-block buildings, her mother said, “I’ll never forget this.”

  Judith chuckled. She remembered the line. Long ago, when her mother was in a good mood, she sometimes used it on her father when they were in the midst of some lackluster outing
.

  Judith unlocked the door to 17C and rolled it up. She turned on the floor lamp with the paisley shade. Dim light shone on the bed, the quilt, the commode, all of it. Her mother laughed. “It’s a diorama,” she said. “Get a pink princess phone for the bedstand and it’s a teenage girl’s room, middle America, late twentieth century.”

  The words stung. It was a little conventional, she’d always been a little conventional; was that a crime? Was it any worse than a mother in gauzy tops and rainbow-hemmed bell-bottoms?

  Her mother had stepped into the room now, was looking at the books arranged in the tiered glass cases, running her finger over the stitching on the Young Man’s Fancy quilt. “So you come here and lie down and…”

  “Read. And think. And rest.”

  After a few seconds of silence, her mother said, “Judy, sweetie, I think you’re trying to run away from home but don’t know how to do it.”

  Judith said she would certainly know how to do it if she wanted to do it, which she didn’t.

  Her mother listened to this and changed approach. “You said you come here to think. What do you think about?”

  “Nothing in particular. Mostly I read. Sometimes I nap.”

  Judith’s mother kept looking around, studying things, taking them in. It made Judith nervous. It put her in mind of the canny detectives in those crime comedies—Columbo, Barnaby Jones, that fussy crime writer Angela Lansbury played. The lady novelist, I’m sure she’d not be missed—what was that from? And why might she care? She’d drunk too much. She wondered if she was just beginning to get a headache.

  Her mother said, “Howard told me about this furniture, how it had been handed down, how the two of you whipped it into shape, how you went all over the countryside until you found just the right quilt for it.” Her eyes turned from the furnishings to Judith. “So what brings it here?”

  Judith explained as best she could.