I Sailed with Magellan

by Stuart Dybek

  “I should have gone to college and become a doctor or an engineer, but I came to America instead and now look,” he said with the corrosive bitterness of a man employed below his station.

  Davi and his family lived in the basement apartment, behind what sounded like a half dozen locks, as if they were expecting the KGB. At least it felt that way the one time I’d knocked on his door to ask if he could come up and help me get the window unstuck. It was Melody’s theory that Davi pounded the pipes to convince the tenants the cold radiators were on—“the psychosomatic heat of the Loyola Arms” she called it. She called him “Salvador Davi, the surrealist janitor” after he’d opened the door on us one afternoon.

  I wasn’t even aware it had happened until, later, Melody said, “You’re a cool customer.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Cool was hardly the way I felt toward her.

  “The janitor comes in and you don’t miss a beat.”

  “Mr. Davi?”

  “Who else? A paunchy guy with a mustache, standing there with a crowbar. I waited for you to say something. He just stood with his mouth open watching us mating, and finally gave this apologetic little bow and turned and went quietly out the door. You didn’t notice?”

  “You think I would have simply continued?”

  “See, I misread you. You are a romantic after all.”

  Wrapped in a bedspread, listening to the psychosomatic heat that first night in fall, when the wind off the lake smelled of its glacial past, I recalled a grade school day in Indian summer. I was returning to school from lunch, taking a meandering roundabout way and trying to work up the nerve to cut that afternoon and hang out on the railroad tracks with Angel and Stosh, when I saw the alkies were back. They’d been away. Trucks from Manpower would come to the neighborhood every fall and take them off to Michigan to pick apples. Now they were back with bags of apples and money for booze, gathered around a hydrant that trickled along the side street of broken glass where old cars were dumped. Some of them lived there during the summer, sleeping in junked cars the way campers might use a tent. The street dead-ended in the 3 V’s Birdseed Factory, and from the factory’s screened windows came the exotic cries and chatter of parakeets, canaries, mynahs, and Java birds singing out, perhaps in response to the excited twittering of sparrows who were bathing in the sky-reflecting pond that spread from the hydrant. Some of the alkies were bathing, too, mopping water-soaked kerchiefs over their heads. I watched them awhile, then headed for the railroad tracks.

  I wanted to tell her how, when the radiators stopped their metallic knocking, I’d heard another dull pounding—one I hadn’t heard for over a week—and I’d begun to wonder if I’d ever see Melody again. It was the old woman in the flat below, banging with her broom handle the way she did those afternoons when Melody would come over and we’d end up in bed. This time, alone, I sat perfectly still upon the bed. Thump, thump, thump, it continued, as if the woman downstairs was trying to communicate through some code. I decided that if she was healthy enough to stand on a chair and pound the ceiling with a broom, then it wasn’t an SOS. Maybe she was simply a little cracked, like whoever had that voice I could hear traveling up the pipes in my bathroom late at night keening the same nearly unintelligible phrase—“Don’t you wanna, don’t you wanna”—although it could just as well have been someone calling a name—Donna—over and over.

  Night brought out moans like that in the old hotel, sounds I hadn’t noticed at first, growls of insatiable hunger from the guts of the place. Maybe they were ghosts; maybe they were flashbacks left behind. If so, I had my own to contribute: the way Natasha looked that afternoon when we heard the windblown slant of rain beating glass panes and pattering the linoleum in the kitchen. “As if the floor was tile,” she said later. Racing against my ear, her breath became part of the hiss of rain, her hands rose to her breasts, pinching her nipples, making herself cry out again and again. True or not, I wanted to tell her that I knew why the old lady pounded the ceiling. Because she was lonely, and what we’d assumed were raps of disapprobation had actually been applause.

  I would spread the white butcher paper out on the windowsill and pop open a long-neck beer.

  On the street below, a schoolgirl in a white patrol belt stood on the curb at the border of shadow, ringing a bell while games disintegrated around her. Lunch hour was ending.

  Children, herded by billowing nuns, jostled into lines.

  The pigeon-launching church bells tolled one o’clock, if a single ring can be considered a toll. Its reverberation filled my apartment.

  That was lunch at the Loyola Arms Hotel—on one or another of those days when nothing happened really but lunch—and yet I don’t remember ever feeling more free, or more alone, than when I’d watch the children marching into school, surrendering the street back to the pigeons and shadow until it was empty and quiet again, and I sat propped in the window, draining the foam, with the length of an entire afternoon still before me.

  We Didn’t

  We did it in front of the mirror

  And in the light. We did it in darkness,

  In water, and in the high grass.

  -Yehuda Amichai, “We Did It”

  We didn’t in the light; we didn’t in darkness. We didn’t in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn’t in your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you’d slept in as a child, or in the backseat of my father’s rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa he delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent’s meat market. We didn’t in your mother’s Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs.

  At the dead end of our lovers’ lane—a side street of abandoned factories—where I perfected the pinch that springs open a bra; behind the lilac bushes in Marquette Park, where you first touched me through my jeans and your nipples, swollen against transparent cotton, seemed the shade of lilacs; in the balcony of the now defunct Clark Theater, where I wiped popcorn salt from my palms and slid them up your thighs and you whispered, “I feel like Doris Day is watching us,” we didn’t.

  How adept we were at fumbling, how perfectly mistimed our timing, how utterly we confused energy with ecstasy.

  Remember that night becalmed by heat, and the two of us, fused by sweat, trembling as if a wind from outer space that only we could feel was gusting across Oak Street Beach? Entwined in your faded Navajo blanket, we lay soul-kissing until you wept with wanting.

  We’d been kissing all day—all summer—kisses tasting of different shades of lip gloss and too many Cokes. The lake had turned hot pink, rose rapture, pearl amethyst with dusk, then washed in night black with a ruff of silver foam. Beyond a momentary horizon, silent bolts of heat lightning throbbed, perhaps setting barns on fire somewhere in Indiana. The beach that had been so crowded was deserted as if there was a curfew. Only the bodies of lovers remained, visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield, a few of them moaning, waiting for the gulls to pick them clean.

  On my fingers your slick scent mixed with the coconut musk of the suntan lotion we’d repeatedly smeared over each other’s bodies. When your bikini top fell away, my hands caught your breasts, memorizing their delicate weight, my palms cupped as if bringing water to parched lips.

  Along the Gold Coast, high-rises began to glow, window added to window, against the dark. In every lighted bedroom, couples home from work were stripping off their business suits, falling to the bed, and doing it. They did it before mirrors and pressed against the glass in streaming shower stalls; they did it against walls and on the furniture in ways that required previously unimagined gymnastics, which they invented on the spot. They did it in honor of man and woman, in honor of beast, in honor of God. They did it because they’d been released, because they were home free, alive, and private, because they couldn’t wait any longer, couldn’t wait for the appointed hour
, for the right time or temperature, couldn’t wait for the future, for Messiahs, for peace on earth and justice for all. They did it because of the Bomb, because of pollution, because of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, because extinction might be just a blink away. They did it because it was Friday night. It was Friday night and somewhere delirious music was playing—flutter-tongued flutes, muted trumpets meowing like cats in heat, feverish plucking and twanging, tom-toms, congas, and gongs all pounding the same pulsebeat.

  I stripped your bikini bottom down the skinny rails of your legs, and you tugged my swimsuit past my tan. Swimsuits at our ankles, we kicked like swimmers to free our legs, almost expecting a tide to wash over us the way the tide rushes in on Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity—a love scene so famous that although neither of us had seen the movie, our bodies assumed the exact position of movie stars on the sand and you whispered to me softly, “I’m afraid of getting pregnant,” and I whispered back, “Don’t worry, I have protection,” then, still kissing you, felt for my discarded cutoffs and the wallet in which for the last several months I had carried a Trojan as if it was a talisman. Still kissing, I tore its flattened, dried-out wrapper, and it sprang through my fingers like a spring from a clock and dropped to the sand between our legs. My hands were shaking. In a panic, I groped for it, found it, tried to dust it off, tried as Burt Lancaster never had to, to slip it on without breaking the mood, felt the grains of sand inside it, a throb of lightning, and the Great Lake behind us became, for all practical purposes, the Pacific, and your skin tasted of salt and to the insistent question that my hips were asking your body answered yes, your thighs opened like wings from my waist as we surfaced panting from a kiss that left you pleading Oh, Christ yes, a yes gasped sharply as a cry of pain so that for a moment I thought that we were already doing it and that somehow I had missed the instant when I entered you, entered you in the bloodless way in which a young man discards his own virginity, entered you as if passing through a gateway into the rest of my life, into a life as I wanted it to be lived yes but Oh then I realized that we were still floundering unconnected in the slick between us and there was sand in the Trojan as we slammed together still feeling for that perfect fit, still in the Here groping for an Eternity that was only a fine adjustment away, just a millimeter to the left or a fraction of an inch farther south though with all the adjusting the sandy Trojan was slipping off and then it was gone but yes you kept repeating although your head was shaking no-not-quite-almost and our hearts were going like mad and you said, Yes. Yes wait … Stop!

  “What?” I asked, still futilely thrusting as if I hadn’t quite heard you.

  “Oh. God!” You gasped, pushing yourself up. “What’s coming?”

  “Gin, what’s the matter?” I asked, confused, and then the beam of a spotlight swept over us and I glanced into its blinding eye.

  All around us lights were coming, speeding across the sand. Blinking blindness away, I rolled from your body to my knees, feeling utterly defenseless in the way that only nakedness can leave one feeling. Headlights bounded toward us, spotlights crisscrossing, blue dome lights revolving as squad cars converged. I could see other lovers, caught in the beams, fleeing bare-assed through the litter of garbage that daytime hordes had left behind and that night had deceptively concealed. You were crying, clutching the Navajo blanket to your breasts with one hand and clawing for your bikini with the other, and I was trying to calm your terror with reassuring phrases such as “Holy shit! I don’t fucking believe this!”

  Swerving and fishtailing in the sand, police calls pouring from their radios, the squad cars were on us, and then they were by us while we struggled to pull on our clothes.

  They braked at the water’s edge, and cops slammed out, brandishing huge flashlights, their beams deflecting over the dark water. Beyond the darting of those beams, the far-off throbs of lightning seemed faint by comparison.

  “Over there, goddamn it!” one of them hollered, and two cops sloshed out into the shallow water without even pausing to kick off their shoes, huffing aloud for breath, their leather cartridge belts creaking against their bellies.

  “Grab the sonofabitch! It ain’t gonna bite!” one of them yelled, then they came sloshing back to shore with a body slung between them.

  It was a woman—young, naked, her body limp and bluish beneath the play of flashlight beams. They set her on the sand just past the ring of drying, washed-up alewives. Her face was almost totally concealed by her hair. Her hair was brown and tangled in a way that even wind or sleep can’t tangle hair, tangled as if it had absorbed the ripples of water—thick strands, slimy looking like dead seaweed.

  “She’s been in there awhile, that’s for sure,” a cop with a beer belly said to a younger, crew-cut cop, who had knelt beside the body and removed his hat as if he might be considering the kiss of life.

  The crew-cut officer brushed the hair away from her face, and the flashlight beams settled there. Her eyes were closed. A bruise or a birthmark stained the side of one eye. Her features appeared swollen, her lower lip protruding as if she was pouting.

  An ambulance siren echoed across the sand, its revolving red light rapidly approaching.

  “Might as well take their sweet-ass time,” the beer-bellied cop said.

  We had joined the circle of police surrounding the drowned woman almost without realizing that we had. You were back in your bikini, robed in the Navajo blanket, and I had slipped on my cutoffs, my underwear dangling out of a back pocket.

  Their flashlight beams explored her body, causing its whiteness to gleam. Her breasts were floppy; her nipples looked shriveled. Her belly appeared inflated by gallons of water. For a moment, a beam focused on her mound of pubic hair, which was overlapped by the swell of her belly, and then moved almost shyly away down her legs, and the cops all glanced at us—at you, especially—above their lights, and you hugged your blanket closer as if they might confiscate it as evidence or to use as a shroud.

  When the ambulance pulled up, one of the black attendants immediately put a stethoscope to the drowned woman’s swollen belly and announced, “Drowned the baby, too.”

  Without saying anything, we turned from the group, as unconsciously as we’d joined them, and walked off across the sand, stopping only long enough at the spot where we had lain together like lovers, in order to stuff the rest of our gear into a beach bag, to gather our shoes, and for me to find my wallet and kick sand over the forlorn, deflated Trojan that you pretended not to notice. I was grateful for that.

  Behind us, the police were snapping photos, flashbulbs throbbing like lightning flashes, and the lightning itself, still distant but moving in closer, rumbling audibly now, driving a lake wind before it so that gusts of sand tingled against the metal sides of the ambulance.

  Squinting, we walked toward the lighted windows of the Gold Coast, while the shadows of gapers attracted by the whirling emergency lights hurried past us toward the shore.

  “What happened? What’s going on?” they asked without waiting for an answer, and we didn’t offer one, just continued walking silently in the dark.

  It was only later that we talked about it, and once we began talking about the drowned woman it seemed we couldn’t stop.

  “She was pregnant,” you said. “I mean, I don’t want to sound morbid, but I can’t help thinking how the whole time we were, we almost—you know—there was this poor, dead woman and her unborn child washing in and out behind us.”

  “It’s not like we could have done anything for her even if we had known she was there.”

  “But what if we had found her? What if after we had—you know,” you said, your eyes glancing away from mine and your voice tailing into a whisper, “what if after we did it, we went for a night swim and found her in the water?”

  “But, Gin, we didn’t” I tried to reason, though it was no more a matter of reason than anything else between us had ever been.

  It began to seem as if each time we went som
ewhere to make out—on the back porch of your half-deaf, whiskery Italian grandmother, who sat in the front of the apartment cackling at I Love Lucy reruns; or in your girlfriend Tina’s basement rec room when her parents were away on bowling league nights and Tina was upstairs with her current crush, Brad; or way off in the burbs, at the Giant Twin Drive-In during the weekend they called Elvis Fest—the drowned woman was with us.

  We would kiss, your mouth would open, and when your tongue flicked repeatedly after mine, I would unbutton the first button of your blouse, revealing the beauty spot at the base of your throat, which matched a smaller spot I loved above a corner of your lips, and then the second button, which opened on a delicate gold cross—which I had always tried to regard as merely a fashion statement—dangling above the cleft of your breasts. The third button exposed the lacy swell of your bra, and I would slide my hand over the patterned mesh, feeling for the firmness of your nipple rising to my fingertip, but you would pull slightly away, and behind your rapid breath your kiss would grow distant, and I would kiss harder, trying to lure you back from wherever you had gone, and finally, holding you as if only consoling a friend, I’d ask, “What are you thinking?” although of course I knew.

  “I don’t want to think about her but I can’t help it. I mean, it seems like some kind of weird omen or something, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know,” I said. “It was just a coincidence.”

  “Maybe if she’d been farther away down the beach, but she was so close to us. A good wave could have washed her up right beside us.”

  “Great, then we could have had a menage a trois.”

  “Gross! I don’t believe you just said that! Just because you said it in French doesn’t make it less disgusting.”