by Lydia Millet
“The jury’s still out on it. OK? Keep you posted. I was right in the middle of a hot breakfast, though. Do you mind if I get back to it?”
More static. He had hurt her feelings.
“Not that I don’t want to talk. Just a rush here—hectic. Wreckage, repairs. Aftermath. Hurricane. You wouldn’t believe the scene.”
He gazed out over the tranquil dining room, where lilies stood in tall vases on the white tabletops. Hans waved out the window to the boys in the pool, and Gretel, her long, languid legs crossed, was peeling an orange and licking the juice off the tips of her elegantly tapered fingers.
“OK. But keep me informed, OK Hal? Tell me everything that happens.”
“I always do. We’ve always told each other everything, haven’t we?” He was feeling a pinch of malice. Speaking with a dangerous transparency. He told her goodbye, hung up and downed the tepid dregs of his coffee.
• • • • •
There was no reason, he found himself deciding, not to enjoy himself while he waited for the armed forces. The day was still young, he had hours to kill before the night came on, and Hans and Gretel had invited him to go scuba diving.
Fortunately the children of the corn were too young to qualify for the scuba course and had resigned themselves to playing ping-pong.
“For the whole boat trip? They’re going to play ping-pong for five straight hours?” he asked Hans, when he saw the boys hitting the ball back and forth at the table beside the pool. They were steadfast and tightly wound, their lips compressed, eyes darting only a fraction to the left or right with a predatory glint as they followed the bouncing ball.
“At least,” said Hans.
“One time they played for two days, stopping only to sleep,” said Gretel. “Of course it was a weekend.”
They said goodbye to the boys, who ignored them studiously. Then a resort employee led them down to the dive shop, a kind of bunker with wet sand and footprints crisscrossing the rough concrete floor. There were wetsuits hanging on a rack and fins and masks arrayed in wooden cubbies along the wall; the ceiling was low and the walls were painted a deep, gloomy blue inside, maybe to simulate the ocean. The divemaster shook their hands and welcomed them.
Before they went out they had to sit through a safety lecture. Hal tried to listen attentively but was distracted by the presence of half-naked Gretel in her bikini, smelling delicately of coconut oil, and also by the belated arrival of the young bohemian couple hailing presumably from lower Manhattan.
The bohemian couple appeared skeptical of the lecture by the divemaster, bored and skeptical despite the fact that they had never been diving before and, if their breakfast exchange of the previous day was any indication, were also hypochondriacs. When the lecture ended and the divemaster began to choose gear for each of them, asking shoe sizes and moving along the row of cubbyholes searching, the bohemians raised an objection.
“This says we don’t have the right to sue if we suffer injuries on the dive, up to and including death,” said the man.
“Yes,” said the divemaster politely. “It is a required legal waiver. I am very sorry but it is not possible to go out on the resort dive if you do not sign it.”
“I don’t know about this,” said the woman, shaking her head. “I don’t do waivers, normally.”
“It says you can’t go if you’ve ever had a lung collapse,” said the man.
“I’ve never had a lung collapse,” said the woman. “Have you had a lung collapse?”
“Not that I know of.”
“It’s something you would probably notice,” said Hal.
The bohemian man ignored him.
“I had bronchitis one time in college,” said the woman. “Is that a risk factor?”
“Or smoking. It says here you can’t be a smoker.”
“I did have that one clove cigarette at Dinty’s. At that New Year’s thing?”
“It was clove? Clove cigarettes are the equivalent of seven regular cigarettes.”
The rest of the group stood waiting for them to sign or not sign the waivers, gear slung over their shoulders, fins hanging by the heels off two crooked fingers.
Hal felt impatient. He was irked by the bohemians. Previously he had been irked by the Germans, now it was the bohemians who irked him. Although the Germans had become his allies. What if the bohemians fell into line also? Would the bohemians also befriend him?
No. A bohemian was not a German. Socially speaking a German turned outward, like a sunflower toward the sun; a bohemian turned inward like a rotting pumpkin.
“Why don’t the rest of you go ahead and get into your wetsuits,” said the divemaster, and smiled affably.
When they came out of the restrooms the bohemians were also wetsuited. All of them stuffed their clothes and shoes into cubbies and walked barefoot down the beach toward the dock, the bohemians broadcasting a sense of glum foreboding. Or perhaps it was terror. Hal hypothesized that one bohemian had blackmailed the other into the scuba diving excursion, possibly with threats of poisoning via Red Dye Number Three.
Hans and the divemaster walked at the head of the pack discussing reef fish and Hal listened to Gretel tell him about swimming with stingrays in the Grand Cayman, how she had gently stroked their soft pectoral wings. He nodded without saying much, smiling in what he hoped was a beatific fashion and meanwhile wondering if, in the black wetsuit, he in any way resembled Batman. Was his torso, for example, slightly triangular? Just slightly, he didn’t mean any big bodybuilder-type-deal. Did it descend just a bit from broad shoulders to a narrow waist, creating an impression of virility?
Squinting down at himself he noticed the wetsuit was in fact a very dark green. He was disappointed. In the shade of the dive shop he had thought it was black. Gretel’s was black, as was Hans’s. They gave the Germans the black wetsuits; him they gave the dark-green, the color of spinach slime. He suspected he most resembled the animated character Gumby, which as a child Casey had watched on TV with barely suppressed delight.
“Out at the caye,” the divemaster was telling Hans, “where we will stop between dives for a late lunch and snorkeling, you will see lemon sharks. Some people feed them, although it is technically forbidden. Small sharks. Pretty. They swim around at your feet.”
In the boat Gretel sat beside him and asked him about Stern.
“This is the man who is the boss of your wife?” she asked.
“The boss of my wife. Yes.”
“And he is a seller of real estate, you said before. Like a small Donald Trump.”
“Better hair, though.”
“That is very funny.”
“I notice you’re laughing hard.”
“But you must be very close to him, yes? To come all the way here looking. He is a friend of the family, maybe.”
He considered telling the truth but dismissed this as rash. And in fact Stern was a friend of his family, both his wife and his daughter, though not him personally.
“It’s difficult,” he said, but nodded.
She reached over and squeezed his wrist in sympathy. So easily misled.
•
He would not have come scuba diving if Gretel had not lured him with her kindness and beauty, he thought resentfully as he sat on the edge of the boat, his tank hanging heavily off his back, waiting to roll over backward into the ocean. He did not want to roll over backward into the ocean. Who was he? He was a middle-aged IRS employee, a father and a cuckold. He was an idiot.
He had let Hans and Gretel go before him so they would not witness his tomfoolery. He anticipated some kind of choking, spasming incident. But it was time. He had to follow Hans and Gretel, for they were his dive buddies. If he waited too long he might lose them. The pressure was on. This was it. The divemaster was staring at him expectantly. The neurotic bohemians were also watching. Their scrutiny was a grudging challenge.
He had hoped the neurotic bohemians would go before him, but they had found reasons to fiddle with valves and masks
almost endlessly. Now there was no more excuse for delay. He could not see the expressions of the neurotic bohemians through their masks, but he imagined they were white-faced and trembling.
Middle-aged employee, or tax man? It was all in the wording. He was the tax man, by God.
He felt off slowly, even limply. He grappled. Then he was in. Sinking. For a second he panicked. Then: breathe only with the mouth. It was OK. He was doing it.
He heard his breath, the slow in-and-out like Darth Vader. There were white bubbles around him as he sank, a screen across everything, and then they cleared and it was light blue and placid. He looked down: beneath the black fins on his feet were rocks and yellow-and gray-striped small fish. He raised his head again and saw Gretel ahead of him, moving toward a wall of coral. She was lithe and graceful with her fins moving back and forth; her long hair floated behind her and caught the light, a stream of warmth in the cold water. It rippled.
Off to the right at a slight distance was Hans, at greater depth. He had announced on the boat that he had two goals: sea cucumbers and moray eels.
Hal did not share his goals.
The fins felt good, powerful. He propelled himself forward, hastening to get close to Gretel. It was nice down here, lovely. It was a cathedral of light and softness. Down here you probably couldn’t even tell the difference between a black wetsuit and a dark-green one.
The dive would last about a half-hour, they had told him. He would stay close by her. She would point at things.
As they held steady side by side about fifteen feet beneath the surface he found himself entranced, not only by her but by the corals and the fishes. Beneath them and around them—he had to be careful not to brush up against the coral, hit a sharp urchin or a stinging anemone—there were formations like brains and antlers, sponges and intestinal tubes and lace and leaves of lettuce. Among them the fish swam, some hunkering low and inside, others flittering lightly along edges. Gretel touched his shoulder and they looked down together at a speckled, dun-colored fish on the bottom half covered in sand, bloated and with spikes on it. Some kind of blowfish or puffer, he guessed. They ate them in Japan. Flat, tall fish that were a deep purple-blue with a line of bright yellow moved past him in stately elegance.
He thought how Casey would love all this. He would describe it to her when he got home. She had seen photographs, had watched Jacques Cousteau and the like, but she would never know how it felt to be here, the buoyancy. How everything seemed to move slower, with a silence that changed the world. Time, even. He felt a quick wrench of longing, worry and regret—what he always felt, when he recalled her and was not in her company. The guilt for not being there, actually, among other impulses … not that she wanted him there. He was only a father.
When they were small you were everything to them, then they grew up and you dwindled into next to nothing … she liked underwater scenes, had drawn them often when she was a little girl. He remembered her pictures in felt-tip pen: mermaids hovering beside straggly green seaweeds, mermaids with dots for breasts and large scales along their tails and yellow hair. She had believed that underwater was a kingdom where she would be welcome—where she could move like a fish, move like fluid itself.
She would have seen Gretel back then, when she was six years old, and thought she was beholding a mermaid.
Hans was also still in view, though just barely. He was always diving, scouting, always searching for something. Hans was not content to float and look, unlike Hal and Gretel.
Hal was watching a fish nibble at the coral, listening to the sound of many of them eating, like the pop-pop-pop of milk in rice cereal, all over in the background, when she suddenly grabbed him by the upper arm and turned him. They were surrounded by silver, or at least there was nothing but silver in front of them. It was a vast school, thousands. Small, moving in silver flickers, hundreds of them switching angles in the same pulse of motion, instantly. He was astonished by it, how hundreds or thousands moved in a flash, as one body. It seemed impossible.
Then he was startled, almost breathed through his nose feeling Gretel’s hand move over the arm of his wetsuit with something akin to tenderness—was there intent in the touch? He could almost believe it. But it was through the wetsuit. Most likely she had just forgotten to let go. Both of them gazed at the flanks of the fish—the gleaming, moving-as-one legions. He thought they could never be like this, people. Never. Was she thinking it too? With her hand on his arm. It was the two of them, suspended, the rest of the world far above and in the dryness of air—nothing like this below, these silver thousands.
Finally the school thinned and dispersed, left them gazing out into a fading blue abyss. At some point her hand was gone from his arm, which he also regretted. He felt cold despite the wetsuit.
It was not their place, after all. They were here only by the grace of machines.
He had forgotten to check his tank and lost track of his oxygen, but luckily she was on top of it. She showed him her gauge and made a thumbs-up signal, which he thought at first meant everything was OK. In fact it was the signal to return to the surface, which he recalled a second later from their safety lesson. She was already rising slowly, and he watched her for a while before he went up too.
•
On the island where they went to eat lunch there were too many tourists crowded onto a slight, barren finger of sand. Many small boats were anchored, wave-slapped and bobbing, on the windward side, while on the lee side all he could see was a field of snorkels sticking out of the shallow water, black and day-glo yellow and fluorescent pink. Seagulls had splattered white onto the rocks and benches all around; there were bathrooms and some low shelters over picnic tables. On one end of the island were a few tall, thin palms, scraping and flapping their dried fronds in the breeze.
The neurotic bohemians found the last empty picnic table in the shade, unwrapped the packed lunches the divemaster handed them from a plastic cooler, then talked in low voices about how there was nothing in them they could stand to eat. The woman was a vegetarian, the man was lactose-intolerant.
Hal sat at the other end of the table with Hans and Gretel. He was ravenous. He wanted to order the neurotic bohemians to hand over their portions; he wanted to tower over them and scoop up their sandwiches into his gaping maw. Instead he quietly ate his own ham-and-cheese and listened to Hans enthuse to the divemaster about a sea cucumber.
Apparently, when alarmed, they could extrude their intestines.
Gretel was impatient to see lemon sharks so after a minute Hal got up from the table, left the neurotic bohemians and Hans and the divemaster and followed her with the final crust of his sandwich in hand as she walked along the lapping edge of the water. You could walk from one end of the island to the other in five minutes and soon they found the sharks, circling again and again in less than a foot of water. They were small, just a couple of feet long, and being fed by tourists, who tossed in fragments from their own bagged lunches.
Gretel shook her head, worried.
“It is not natural,” she said.
Germans hated it when things were not natural. Hal remembered this from college philosophy. Heidegger or something.
“Sharks have strong stomachs,” he improvised, straining to recall any actual facts. Natural history was not a strong suit, despite his years of watching Nature with Casey. “Great whites have been found with oil barrels in their digestive tracts. Rusty engines. I doubt a few Fig Newtons are going to hurt them.”
“But these are not great whites,” said Gretel, and squatted down on her haunches to see them more closely. “Look! They are like little babies.”
A few paces away the divemaster was already gesturing at them: it was time to head back to the boat. Gretel left the so-called baby sharks reluctantly.
On the windward beach again, lagging behind the rest of the group, Hal looked out beyond the boats and saw a small skiff cruise by, a thin, bearded man standing in the front of the boat leaning into the wind with raised binocula
rs, one bent leg braced against the prow like a sea captain in books of yore. Hal tried to recall where in the hotel he’d run into him. Then the bohemian woman screeched. She was barefoot and had stepped on a bottle cap.
“You could get lockjaw,” said the bohemian man.
• • • • •
Back at the hotel the Germans pressed him into service for dinner also, as though he could not be trusted to be left on his own. Their two boys left the table in a rush once they had bolted their kiddie menus, running outside to continue the ping-pong tournament.
“We must get organized for tomorrow,” said Hans. “We have the map. I have made many copies. We have many copies also of the photograph of Mr. Stern. The hotel is having them laminated.”
“Nothing left for me to do then, really,” said Hal. “Is there.”
He had a cavalier attitude; he was drinking a margarita, which Gretel had encouraged him to order. She drank one also and her bright-blue eyes were shining.
“Does Mr. Stern have any medical conditions?” asked Hans.
“Not that I know of,” said Hal.
“You should find out the blood type, in case he is located and is injured and requires a transfusion. Also a medical history.”
“Huh,” said Hal, nodding vaguely. “My wife would probably know.” He had ordered the snapper, which was overcooked and too fishy. He decided to leave it mostly uneaten. The margarita tasted far better.
“Also, does his insurance cover helicopter evacuation,” Hans was saying.
Hal was already at the bottom of his glass, and at the far end of the dining room a band was setting up. He was thinking how pleasant it was to be drunk, that he had been missing out all these years in not being drunk far, far more often.
Couples gathered at the edge of a dance floor. There was a drum flourish, bah-da bum. A woman singer in an evening gown said something husky and incomprehensible into a microphone.
Lights sparkled. Yellow and golden in the dining room, now a ballroom. Beyond the large windows, the pool, the chairs, the deep-black sky, the ocean. A room full of people and golden lights, and outside the whole dark world.