To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  A second passed and then a sudden laugh burst up from Judith. “You know who you are? You’re Captain Hook, and that turtle”—she waved vaguely toward the lake—“is your crocodile!” She laughed, then made a series of tick-tocking sounds and laughed again.

  “Laugh all you want,” Willy said with a kind of comic passivity.

  Judith said, “ ’Course, I guess that could make me Mr. Smee.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  “Or Mrs. Smee!” This also struck her as hilarious. Willy stared at her while she fought to contain her laughter. Then, semicomposed, she said, “I ask you, what kind of woman would marry Mr. Smee?” Which set her off again.

  Willy tilted his chin and sniffed exaggeratedly. “That’s all right. You go right ahead and have your sport.”

  She could see that he extended this pose for her entertainment, but then slowly, unexpectedly, her amusement converted to a strange flooding affection. She reached across the table to touch his hand. “You’re funny,” she said, and the warmth that had suddenly spread through her didn’t recede, it lay simmering within her, strange and profound, and when she awakened that night and looked out her window toward his cabin, she felt the kind of exciting, insistent pull she hadn’t felt for years. She put the denim jacket on over her pajamas and walked down. Some nights he had a lantern on at all hours, but it was not on now. At the stoop she stood listening to his fitful snoring, which immediately ceased when she eased open the door latch. He didn’t stir, though. There was moonlight in the room. He lay on his side, turned toward the wall. She took off her jacket and pulled back the heavy bed coverings. “It’s me,” she whispered. “I was cold.” He didn’t speak or turn, but when she curled in against him and wrapped her arm over his bulky body, he reached up and took her hand and held it there against his chest.

  She’d pretended to herself that they could sleep like this, but they couldn’t sleep.

  “Warmer?” he said finally, in a whisper.

  She murmured yes.

  A few still seconds passed. Then, with the barest pressure, she touched his shoulder to turn him over, and she lay back and let him unfasten the pajamas. He didn’t kiss her. She opened her eyes when he didn’t kiss her. In the pale light his gaze upon her seemed rapt. He touched her eyelids closed and ran a finger gently along her neck. The effect was startlingly intense. He peeled back the covers, and when finally his hand grazed her stomach and moved slowly lower, she felt herself rising to meet it. She heard small murmuring sounds. They were coming from her. She began not to think.

  “There,” he said when she was done. “Sound to the deaf, sight to the blind.”

  She just lay there breathing.

  “Almost too easy, wasn’t it?” he said.

  She felt suddenly greedy, or selfish. “What about you?”

  A small raspy laugh. “Judy, sweetie, that was more fun than I’ve had in decades.”

  Judith said she doubted that.

  Again he laughed. “Doubt all you want, but you’d be wrong.”

  He extended his arm; she laid her head on it, curled into his bulk, and fell quickly, deeply asleep. When she awakened, sun was streaming into the room and Willy was already up at the summerhouse tending the fire. She looked about. Willy’s cabin was paneled with the same wide pine planks as hers, and trimmed in the same high-sheen yellow paint, but the similarities stopped there. The furnishings were mismatched, cobwebs spanned nearly every corner, and the dust on the floor was broken by paths linking the front door, the bed, and the chest of drawers topped by a framed mirror. A dozen or so plastic containers of prescribed medications stood in a cluster on top of the chest. Tucked into the edges of the mirror were two photographs.

  Judith rose and walked over to the chest, meaning to look at the pictures, but her eyes were drawn to something behind the pill bottles. A small saucer held a dusty collection of coins, paper clips, rubber bands, and—it jumped like a sudden close-up—the small diamond ring that she had returned to him years before. She lifted it and turned it in her hand and looked at it as she had by the campfire in what seemed another lifetime. She pushed it easily onto her finger and then, a moment or two later, pulled it off again. She shined it on her sleeve—would he notice?—did she hope so?—then set it back into the saucer with the coins and paper clips, but still, even with its new sheen, it was a dispiriting sight.

  She leaned closer to the pictures wedged into the mirror frame. One was the photograph of fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Willy grinning into the camera with his apple-red cheeks and big ears while his raised hand held a long line of fish. The other was of Judith, in the soft light of earliest evening, standing on the low limb of a tree in her short, frayed shorts, heels together, turned just so, trying to look saucy. But she’d failed, she saw that now. She looked as wholesome as he did, and just as unlikely a candidate for darker fates.

  5

  Was it the next day, or the next, or the day after that—Judith would not remember—that Willy told his secret? She had won it playing one of their games of casino, but he’d said he wasn’t paying up on his bet until she made good on her R-rated kayaking, as he had come to refer to it. As far as Willy was concerned, the Great Thermometer Watch had yielded disappointing results. Twice the thermometer had climbed to seventy-three degrees before falling back, and Willy with broad equanimity said, “Well, that’s okay. I just get to keep my little secret a little longer,” which Judith could only pretend didn’t vex her, so on this particular afternoon, slightly warmer than the preceding two or three, she made a show of checking the thermometer—it said seventy-two—and upon her return said, “Guess what?”

  He looked at her. “What?”

  “Thermometer says seventy-four.”

  A wide smile broke on his face. “Well, then, we better git after it before the temperature falls back half a degree and you welch on your bet.”

  She undressed before getting into the kayak and let Willy stash her clothes in a plastic bag. He strapped on one of the newer life vests and offered one to her, which she declined on the grounds of the weirdness of wearing a bright orange vest and nothing else. “I think the Pooh-bear look can only look good on Pooh bears,” she said, and Willy said, “If that.”

  She did, however, put on her sunglasses and pink John Deere hat.

  Willy, after an appraising look, said, “My, my.”

  “First mosquito bite and the clothes go back on,” Judith said once she’d settled in, but there were no mosquitoes, or other biting insects either. It was pleasant, in fact, once she got used to it, moving through the water without a sound, feeling the sun on her body. She’d had her eyes closed for a time when she opened them and found Willy smiling.

  “What?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just admiring that fine pair of… sunglasses.”

  Judith shook her head. “Welcome to Never Land. Where boys never grow up.” She lay back and again closed her eyes. She didn’t know how it might be with a man in his state, but she knew it didn’t feel wrong to let him look at her. Though she wouldn’t say it out loud for all sorts of reasons, it made her feel benevolent—generous, even.

  They tied up at the dock near the tree house and snacked on crackers and salami. It reminded her of the picnics they’d had, the ones where he’d worn some clothes and she’d worn none, like that Manet painting, the one with the naked woman picnicking near a stream in the woods with the two dandyish men in black jackets, or a little like it, anyway, though Willy was far more attentive than those dandies in the painting, who seemed more interested in their discussion of politics or Plato or whatever it was they were chatting about than in the fact that a naked woman was within arm’s reach. Whereas Willy watched her like there was no tomorrow and had no qualms about commenting on, as he called it one time, “the majestic nature of the scenery.”

  After eating, she stretched out in the mild sunshine of the dock, and she was just beginning to doze when Willy decided to pay up on his own bet. “You haven’t seen m
e for twenty-seven years,” he said, “but it hasn’t been quite that long since I saw you.”

  Her eyes blinked open and she lifted her head. “What do you mean?”

  “I went out there. That’s my little secret. I went out there after you sent the ring back.” He smiled and nodded and stared off across the lake. “I didn’t know what else to do. So I got on a bus. A lot of buses, in fact. When I finally got there, I stayed in some little motel in Redwood City. I’d put a gun and a scope in my suitcase. I saw that everybody out there was carrying a backpack, so I bought one of those and put my scope and stuff in there, and took a bus to Palo Alto. I felt like a freak, to tell you the truth—I walked down that main drag there and felt everybody looking at me, my boots, my belt buckle, my hat—and that just kind of pissed me off, I don’t know why, but it was like everyone there thought they were so hoity-toity. I had one of your letters and I went to the address on it, this big tall concrete-and-glass building with lots of kids coming and going, not just girls but boys, too. I didn’t go in. I found a bench where I could sit and watch the entrance, but people kept looking at me, so I went and found a thrift shop and came back the next day wearing tennis shoes and an old Stanford sweatshirt that covered my belt, and carrying the backpack and a couple of books. I couldn’t tell you what they were, but I just sat there pretending to read them and watching the comings and goings. I sat there all day and didn’t see you, and then, you know, it was getting toward dusk and I saw three kids walking across a big lawn, and just the way the one in the middle walked, I knew it was you. There was a boy on one side, a tall boy with hair down to his shoulders and a tennis racket in his hand and a leather backpack slung over his shoulder, and on the other side was a pretty girl, Oriental-looking. You were talking a little bit to her, but most of your attention was on the boy, the skinny, prissy-looking one with the hair right out of a Breck commercial, and you were all in a world of your own, talking and laughing and walking right toward me, getting close enough that I could hear your actual laugh and your actual voice, and honest to God, all of a sudden I didn’t know what to do. What I did was to pretend I was reading, and then, when you were just passing by, I looked up over my book, straight at you. And at almost the same time, you and the boy flicked about a half-glance right past me and kept on walking. I watched you. I thought it might dawn on you what you’d just seen, but you kept walking and talking and laughing, and then all three of you went into the building and the doors closed and that was it. There I was. I don’t know, it was like I’d been shot in the head and couldn’t think but couldn’t die. I walked like a zombie all the way back to Redwood City and left the tennis shoes and sweatshirt and all that stuff in that shitty little motel room and went down to the Greyhound station. It took me three days to get home, and while I was staring out the bus window up in the mountains by Elko or Reno or one of those, I just kept trying to understand how quick you were able to fit into things there in that college town, and how I never could, not in a million years. I am a land animal. That was what I figured out. Only you were amphibious. You had more choices. You could’ve lived there or you could’ve lived here, but seeing you there with that Oriental girl and that boy with the Breck hair, I knew it wasn’t likely you’d want to come back to live in Rufus Sage.” He’d been staring across the lake as he talked, but now he turned to Judith with a wintry smile. “Not that I gave up hoping.”

  She didn’t remember the day he’d just described. There were probably a dozen just like it, she and Crystal and Malcolm walking together toward the dorms. “I didn’t see you, Willy. Believe me, if I’d seen you…”

  He inhaled, exhaled, looked off. “Yeah, well.” Then: “That boy. I suppose he was the one…”

  He was. Probably he was. But she said, “I don’t know—maybe, but really, it might’ve been anybody. The girl sounds like my roommate, Crystal, from Hawaii.”

  He nodded and looked away.

  He’d had a gun. She couldn’t get past that part, how some line of thinking would’ve taken him to laying a gun onto the folded clothes in his suitcase. She said, “Why would you bring a gun?”

  But he shrugged as if this were normal, or perhaps merely incidental. “Well, you know, you get to feeling like I was feeling, you can start having some funny ideas.”

  “What kind of funny ideas?”

  He rubbed his neck. “Okay, well, one that I had—and I know it will sound a little strange, maybe—but I was thinking I’d figure out what room was yours and then when nobody was there, I might plink the window.”

  “Plink the window? Why would you plink the window?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure. To make you wonder, I guess.”

  To make her wonder what, she wanted to ask, but then she supposed that might’ve been the very point of the exercise. Just to make her look at the hole in the glass and in guessing how it got there force her mind off in every direction, including one that led to Willy.

  The shadows had gained on her. “I’m getting cold,” she said, and he said, “You can cover up, then. But I’m playing for those stakes again. Those are stakes worth playing for.”

  After she’d put on her clothes and was adjusting the collar of her sweater, she said, “Marrying Deena. If you had to do it all over again…”

  He didn’t answer right away, but then he said, “I would, yeah. Those boys—honest to God, those boys got me through a lot of bad patches. And Deena, you couldn’t say Deena didn’t do her best.”

  He could be describing her own marriage, it seemed to Judith, or at least an aspect of it. There had been that one long stretch when Milla had loved her picture books and sock monkey and tea parties, and her face had so often beamed with happiness that it seemed the child’s natural state, and Judith had been able to insulate herself from annoyance or discomfort simply by calling up the image of the small girl’s radiance. And Malcolm—who could say Malcolm hadn’t done his best? He, after all, had been asked into marriage by a woman who may or may not have loved him. Who had the complaint there?

  As they were riding quietly across the lake, Willy laughed and said, “You know, one day we had a terrible hailstorm, and when I came home I saw the windblown hail had broken a window, and there was Deena in the living room, shoveling the hail back out the window with a flat shovel. She was working like a demon, so I got in to help, and then she just stops and breaks into the funniest grin. ‘What?’ I say and she says, ‘Well, I’ll bet this is a different kind of fun than Judith’s having out there in California.’ I don’t know, we both found it funny, thinking of you while shoveling hail out of the living room window.”

  Judith said she was glad she could provide them comic relief. She hadn’t stopped thinking of her marriage with Malcolm; she supposed that was why she’d asked Willy about his marriage to Deena in the first place. One seemed born of calculation, the other of revenge, and yet they had both taken on a life of their own. She said, “Malcolm and his assistant… It wasn’t like I even knew anything for sure, but it didn’t matter. Every time I really looked at him, he just looked strange to me. Like a replicant in one of those science fiction movies.”

  He seemed to be waiting for her to say more, but what she’d said felt not only incomplete but disloyal, a kind of useless pandering to her audience, so she didn’t say anything more. After a few seconds Willy said, “You know, for a while there we kept horses for the boys, and we had a mare that had broken down. Couldn’t ride it, except maybe to walk it around the corral. You could feed it and brush it and water it was all. Sometimes I’ve thought that’s what most marriages get to. A horse you still care a little bit about but cannot any longer ride.”

  It was a sad metaphor, Judith thought, one her mother would like, and to put further thoughts of Malcolm out of her mind she began talking about her. Her proverbs and grim marital aphorisms. And now her unrestrained truth-telling, filling Judith in on her sex life. “She’s in Mexico now. I’ve been where she is, a beautiful colonial city called San Miguel de Alle
nde. That’s where people think I am right now, nursing her through some mysterious illness.” The kayak moved through the water. “I never told my mother about you until a few weeks ago. She popped in on me on her way to Mexico. I showed her your picture, that one of you with your shirt off, holding a bottle of beer. She looked at it and said it made her feel sorry for Malcolm.”

  Willy made a snorting kind of laugh. “I would’ve thought she might feel sorry for the one who didn’t get the girl.”

  “Well, it ought to tell us something about ourselves that I thought she ought to feel a little sorry for me.” Some seconds passed and she said, “The problem is, after the thing or not-thing between Malcolm and his assistant, my everyday life began to feel fatuous and… flimsy. First at work and then everywhere I went, I’d be thinking things like, Too much is too much, or Enough is enough.” She went on in this vein for a while longer, then she sighed and smiled at Willy. “I began having these terrible migraines and just wanted to sleep all the time.”

  They were perhaps a hundred yards from shore when Willy said, “You know, I wouldn’t beat myself up too much, Judith. If we were honest about it, our lives are all fiascoes. There really isn’t anything of importance except maybe who gets handed your heart and what they do with it. And just so you don’t spend a lot of time fretting over it, even that may be pretty meager.” A few seconds passed. “We’re just small, Judy. All of us, even though we do stuff every day of the week to distract ourselves from the fact, it’s still true. We’re just little and small and maybe if we have some backbone we do a few things worth doing and then we’re gone.”

  He cut the power and let the kayak glide toward the dock.

  Willy was dying, Judith understood, but at what rate was hard to guess. She’d seen the array of pill bottles on his chest of drawers and presumed they were designed to suppress pain, or at least palliate it, but who knew? She didn’t ask and Willy didn’t tell. One day in the boathouse, in the midst of a game of Othello, he suddenly laid his chips down and said he was just going up to his cabin to rest a bit. He stood heavily and stared at the door for a moment before he stepped toward it.