To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  She had gone to one of those little assembly rooms in one of the dorms for a poetry reading, the kind of thing she hardly ever went to, but her Hawaiian roommate was going and so there she was, waiting for the poet to arrive. When someone peeled her roommate away, Judith drifted to the refreshment table and was considering the cider and wine when a man materialized beside her, an older, slightly plump, but dapper man in a sport coat and tie, presenting himself as Rene Gassault and asking if she was Judith Toomey. Rene Gassault explained that he was a friend of her father’s from the University of Chicago. Had her father ever told her about their nickel-limit poker games? And how was her father? And how was she fitting in here? Fitting in, those were his words, and she would never forget them: How are you fitting in? Half a minute later, someone called Rene Gassault away and Judith never laid eyes on him again. But his sudden appearance and the strange ballast of knowledge he seemed to carry disturbed her. In the midst of the poetry reading, Judith abruptly remembered the conversation she’d overheard from the basement door at home in Rufus Sage, her father talking excitedly to someone named Rene, whom Judith had presumed to be a woman, but now… Her thoughts were brought up by sudden clapping: the poem had ended. Before another could begin, she stood and made for the door. The poet made some remark; Judith didn’t hear it but understood that it was about her departure, because members of the audience simultaneously laughed and turned their eyes toward her. A few days later at an interdorm mixer, she ran into a young woman who worked in Admissions. Judith guided the conversation to the woman’s job—did she like it, were the people nice, was it stressful, that sort of thing. Then she asked what beyond the normal package of SATs, grades, and extracurricular stuff might get someone admitted. The woman shrugged. There were the athletes, of course. Then, after enumerating minorities and what she called “the bred-bys”—the children of famous people and big donors—she mentioned children of friends of important people. Judith asked if the woman knew Rene Gassault. Of course she did, the woman said, or knew of him. He was the vice provost, a very big wheel. The woman finished her glass of wine and was subtly scanning the room for conversations of greater interest when Judith asked if she had ever heard of the term swim in regard to applications. The woman laughed. Sure, she said. Swims were the poor saps on the waiting list. Why they were called swims, she couldn’t say, but maybe—she laughed again—it was because they were swimming for their lives. Then the woman, waving at someone across the room, excused herself. On Judith’s way out, a hand reached out for her arm. It was a dorm friend, asking if she was okay. Yes, Judith said, she just needed some air, and she felt a little all-overish. All-overish. A term she had heard in Nebraska and never imagined using herself. The dorm friend seemed befuddled, but Judith didn’t stop. She kept going, out of the stifling room and into the night. She felt suddenly different, diminished, and she was as sure as sure could be that if people knew how she’d been admitted, it would change everything, plant uncertainties everywhere. She’d seen the very thing with black and Hispanic students after they’d fumbled a few questions from a professor. Why were they here? How had they gotten in? She never mentioned Rene Gassault to her father, never passed on his greetings and good wishes. She never told anyone about Rene Gassault’s help, not her mother, not Malcolm, no one at all, until now, to Willy, who listened to the story and gave it a dismissive shrug.

  “So what?” he said. “You graduated, didn’t you? And you got okay grades, right?”

  She nodded. In fact she’d done very well.

  “So all it really tells us is how bad your dad wanted you out of my clutches.”

  “It was you, I guess, but it wasn’t just you.” She gave herself a second to try to get this right. “It was who he thought I wanted to be.” The sun had moved. Its slanting light gave the water a soft glow and made it look welcoming and warm, though she knew it wasn’t. She heard herself telling Willy about the story her father had told her, the one about her climbing the chest of drawers and waving the argyle socks around, and of how he himself had gone to Rufus Sage as a kind of tactical retreat, and then she told him about the night her father turned onto a dirt road, switched off the headlights, and drove her faster and faster through the black night. She stopped talking then. It seemed enough.

  “He thought this was too small a box for you,” Willy said finally in a soft voice, and something in Judith went out to him.

  “I guess,” she said. But then, so he would understand it hadn’t all turned out as hoped, Judith began to fill in the details of her own recent circumstances: telling the boy at the mini-storage her name was Edie Winks, losing the key, going to the hotel room, seeing the woman who was her husband’s assistant and a man who might or might not have been her husband, the headaches, the conversion of a storage room to a retreat resembling her basement bedroom in Rufus Sage. “Whew,” she said when she was done. “I had no idea how strange all of that might sound.”

  After a time Willy said, “Well, it’s all a kind of puzzle, isn’t it? You start out with your own little set of pieces you’re trying to fit together, then you get married and it’s a lot more pieces, way more than double in my opinion, and next thing you have kids and all of a sudden there are too many pieces for the table, and more showing up every day.” He gave a small dry laugh. “I suppose the Buddhists and them would say you just got to appreciate the ever-changing thinginess of the puzzle.”

  “They might,” Judith said. But she didn’t really like the idea of its all seeming unsolvable. It was why she liked editing, because sometimes in the cutting room things did fit together, and with enough good fits you had a whole that did whatever it was meant to do—affect, unsettle, entertain, inspire even. She told Willy this, and thought she’d done a perfectly good job of presenting it, but when she was done, he looked at her and said, “So you work in a dark room all day?”

  She laughed. She’d never thought of it that way. “Not completely dark. But, yeah, pretty dark.”

  The shade had inched its way along the dock and now overtook her. For a minute or two, the sudden coolness felt good, but then quite suddenly it didn’t. It felt cold. She glanced at her wrist and remembered she’d handed her watch over to Willy. But it didn’t matter what time it was; it was cold and getting colder. She stood to pull on her pants.

  “Well, now, that’s a disappointment,” Willy said in a mild voice. But he stretched and looked about. “Time we headed back, though.”

  Judith said she was hungry.

  “Well, there you are,” Willy said. “And I’ve developed a thirst.”

  At the encampment, Willy poured her a small amount of scotch and a larger portion for himself, then began to count briquettes into the one-gallon can, open at the top and punched with triangular holes near the bottom, that he used to ignite them. When the little chimney began to smoke, he headed off toward the kitchen cabin and came back with a bag containing a can of tomato sauce, a box of cracker crumbs, an onion, some bell peppers, two eggs, and a package of ground venison. They worked together. Judith halved and hollowed the peppers. Willy diced the onion, then roughly measured the other ingredients into an old metal mixing bowl. He cracked the eggs into the mix, turned back the sleeves of his flannel shirt, and used his bare hands to knead the gooey mass, slick extrusions of meat sliding out between his knuckles, working the mixture toward something more or less uniform and smooth. After a minute or two of this he stopped abruptly and cocked his head. The gesture alarmed her—it reminded her of how once he’d stopped to listen to the distant high-pitched whine that would turn out to be Joe L. Minnert’s chain saw.

  “What?” she said.

  “Oh,” Willy said, as if caught at something. “I was just trying to think when the last time was my hands might’ve been clean.”

  Judith, relieved, gave this a small laugh. “You’re a funny man,” she said, and Willy, clearly pleased with himself, said, “I am, aren’t I?” Then: “Just for the record, I washed up before I started. Used hot water from t
he shower tank. Kind of hot, anyhow. Fact, if you want to use it, now’s a good time, while the water’s still warmish.”

  Judith had finished her scotch and was in good spirits. “What? You don’t think I’m looking my best?”

  “Truth is, I think you’re looking just a tad better than your best.” He smiled. “ ’Course, my eyesight’s not good and you’re some distance away.”

  The shower was primitive but efficient. A stout overhead platform supported a black metal drum of water, canvas walls enclosed three sides, and a floor had been built of redwood slats spaced to drain. A corner shelf held new bottles of Prell shampoo and conditioner. Prell. When had she last used Prell? And Dove soap? There were hooks for hanging clothes, which she did quickly, and then she stepped through the open side. She pulled the metal chain hanging from the overhead valve and the water sprinkled through. She’d taken a deep breath but hadn’t needed to. The water was surprisingly warm. It fell without much force, so washing and rinsing her hair took some time, but she didn’t mind. It felt mildly exhilarating to have warm water running over her as she looked out at the lake in the last paling light. Beyond the profane—who said that, and what did it mean? Free. Freed. Amo, amas, amat. Amamus, amatis, amant. What in the world was she thinking? How far away could an inch of scotch take you?

  She returned to the summerhouse wearing fresh clothes and a towel turbaned on her head and found Willy rolling dough on a board. “Use all the water?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’d know.”

  “I liked it. Looking out at the lake like that.”

  He was using an empty soup can to cut circles from the dough. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve built some fancy showers for people, but that one right there is hard to beat.”

  They ate the bell peppers stuffed with venison and for dessert they spread butter and chokecherry jelly over hot biscuits.

  “God,” she said when it was over.

  “See him, did you?” he said, and drew a small laugh from Judith.

  After they’d washed the tin dishes and wiped the Dutch ovens, her hair was still damp, so they went up to her cabin and played casino in front of the fire. She hadn’t played the game since that summer with Willy, but after a couple of hands she said it was all coming back to her.

  “You’re just talking rules of the game, right?” he said, arranging his handful of cards.

  “What else might be coming back to me?”

  He shrugged. “Just getting it straight is all.”

  It wasn’t all coming back to her—there had been too much distance and decay for that—but it had been the voice and eyes and smile that had always supplied the potency of Willy’s appeal, and whatever else had changed in him, the voice and eyes and smile had not.

  While shuffling the cards between games, he said, “You know why you came here, Judith?”

  She’d been entering their point totals on a pad of paper. “Very possibly to give you some instruction in casino. I’m ahead by thirteen.”

  He nodded mildly and kept shuffling cards. She felt her hair—almost dry—and stood close to the fire to brush it, tilting her head first one way, then the other, so it could hang straight. She felt rosy warm, as if clothes could ease off on their own. He sized and squared the deck of cards, sipped from his cup, and watched her.

  “So I guess you do,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Think you know why I came.”

  He issued a small husky laugh. “I do, yeah.”

  “So?”

  “Oh, you came because you wondered.”

  She waited for the sentence to go further, but it didn’t. “Wondered what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said amiably. “Just wondered.”

  She decided two could play this game. “How about you? You told me I had to come and come fast. What about that?”

  “Same thing.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I wondered, too.” He smiled. “Only I probably wondered more.”

  She finished with her hair and he took up the cards. He dealt the next hand and while sorting it said, “So when do you have to go back?”

  He could not have helped noticing her bag still filled with clothes on top of the empty dresser. “Not sure,” she said. This was true; she wasn’t. She tried to put some fun in her voice. “How long can you put me up?”

  “Oh, a little while yet.” He smiled. “Though this wouldn’t be the place to winter over. One of these days the hot water will give out.”

  He looked at her and waited. The fire shifted. Then Judith heard herself speak words she couldn’t remember ever before speaking. She said, “Let’s just wait and see what happens.”

  This seemed to surprise Willy, too. “Okay,” he said. “That’s fine.” Then: “Only thing is, you’ll need to give me a two-day notice. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find you waiting on the steps with your bag and ready to go.”

  “Okay.” What she was actually committing to was three more days, which she knew should bother her, but it didn’t. “Okay.”

  After he left, she laid her clothes in the top drawer of the dresser and pushed her empty bag under the bed. She slept well that night, and the following morning she awakened to the sound of something she hadn’t heard since she’d come: Willy whistling. That old song, the one they couldn’t identify that summer.

  He stopped and turned when she approached. “Well, there you are. I was afraid you might miss breakfast altogether.” He was in good spirits, and his physical attitude had loosened, too. He didn’t look less unwell. He just looked more at ease, something that as the day slipped by Judith came to associate with the deal struck the night before. The certainty of a forty-eight-hour notice.

  This morning he was pressing corned beef into oiled dessert molds.

  “Know what song you were just whistling?” she said.

  He nodded. He’d finished three molds and went on to the fourth. “Found it out one night in a bar a few years after you’d vamoosed.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “Only not in a bar and I don’t remember when.”

  Though she did, actually. She was whistling it one day in the kitchen and Malcolm not only told her its name but sang a few lines, not that she could remember them now. There aren’t any magic adjectives to tell you all you are…. She couldn’t remember what came after that. “So what are you making?” she said.

  “Hash and eggs. The boys and I always liked it. Deena would take one look and start jabbering about cholesterol.” He smiled. “Her working for a health professional had its ups and downs.”

  He broke eggs into each hash-lined mold and began setting them into the Dutch oven.

  “Looks yummy,” she said.

  He nodded. “Only bad thing is you got to wait fifteen minutes to enjoy them.”

  Judith sipped her coffee and drew in a deep breath. Except for some birds chattering, there was only the low hollow sound of air moving through the trees. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s as if all of a sudden my ears have been cleaned out or something. I just hear everything really well. I breathe better, too.” She smiled at him. “You might want to advertise Camp Blue Moon just for its decongestive properties.”

  “What about the fine dining and scintillating conversation?” Willy said.

  “That, too, of course.”

  Willy’s appetite was somewhat improved this morning: he ate one hash-and-egg bowl and part of a second. As they were cleaning up, he said in an offhand way, “I was thinking we might want to play that Pay Day game again. Maybe gin up the stakes a bit.”

  In the negotiations that followed, it was determined that Judith would again play for a secret from Willy, but not, Judith said, just any workaday secret; it needed to be something notable. And if he won, she would have “to go boating in less than her skivvies” (his condition), but not until (her condition) the temperature hit seventy-five.

  Willy said seventy-five was kind of high. Seventy-two, he s
aid, was plenty warm for skivvy-free boating.

  They settled on seventy-four.

  “What if it doesn’t hit seventy-four at all?” Willy said, and Judith said that was the chance he’d have to take.

  They played an extended six-month game of Pay Day, with lots of lead changes and casual cajoling, especially over her acquisition of “The Artificial Insemination Supply Warehouse,” but in the end Willy narrowly won, which led to what Judith began to refer to as the Great Thermometer Watch. That afternoon, while Willy sat in a chair positioned nearby, the temperature pushed up to seventy-three, and when it fell back to seventy-two, he said, “You know, in most circles, you’d round seventy-three right up to seventy-four.”

  Judith said those were not the circles she traveled in, and she was now preparing to go out in the PowerYak fully clothed.

  “Wouldn’t have made the damned bet if I’d known you were going to split hairs,” Willy said, affecting a sulk as he strapped on one of the old life vests.

  Not far into the water, over in a marshy inlet, a doe raised its head to stare at them for a moment, then went lazily back to browsing.

  “Scared her shitless, didn’t we?” Willy said.

  A few seconds passed, and Judith said she was glad the deer wasn’t afraid of them. “Never did understand shooting them.”

  “Oh, I did a bunch of that, and then I just kind of gave it up. One of the things was the way a mule deer will take off when it’s spooked, then when it gets a couple hundred yards away, it’ll feel safe and stop and look back. That’s when the big scopes and high-powered rifles get into the act. At some point it just didn’t seem fair anymore.”

  They moved on through the water. “I went out hunting once with a guy using a bow and arrow, which I thought would be a little more sporting, only it wasn’t like the bows you see in Robin Hood, it was one of these compound bows with cables and pulleys and stuff. Still, I thought it would be okay, but not till I’m out there does the guy say that what we’re trying to do is get the front end of the deer from forty or fifty yards. I was surprised, killing a deer with an arrow at that distance, but no, he says, you don’t kill it outright, you wait for it to bleed to death. Follow the trail of blood until it stops. I thought, Now god damn, there’s a way to spend the day.”