Back Seat with Fish

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Back Seat with Fish Page 2

by Henry Hughes

“A jerk at one end of the line waiting for a jerk on the other end?” I tried to joke.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I know it’s your hobby.”

  “Well, I wasn’t just sitting there. I walked around the lake casting spinners.”

  “And?” she arched her eyebrows in another question.

  “I saw loons and eagles. The snow on the mountains—you know Detroit Lake—it’s beautiful. And I did a lot of thinking.”

  “About me?” she interrupted.

  “Sure. Of course. Hey, why don’t I take you fishing up there on Sunday.”

  “I thought we were going shopping for wedding clothes. Don’t you want to get some new pants?”

  It was clear that Haley and I were different. She was squeamish around waders, fish, and cats, and she showed no interest in angling. We listened to some music, and then she said she had to go. When I returned from walking her to her car, Dash was on the kitchen counter eating the rest of her fish.

  “Not fishy enough,” Richard said and chuckled when I told him about Haley. It was true that every one of my serious girlfriends liked fishing. Rain lummed down on the leaky roof of the studio, and Richard set out a few pails to catch the drips. “What about Morgan?” he asked. Morgan, one of the life-drawing models, had just broken up with her boyfriend. I liked her. “But be careful,” Richard added. “She’s got a lotta drama in her life.”

  Morgan worked at a supermarket and took psychology classes at Chemeketa Community College. She wanted to be a counselor. Fleshy and wide-hipped with large breasts and wild brown hair that sometimes smelled of cooking oil and cigarettes, Morgan liked to eat, drink, smoke, cook, and play with her three cats. She rented a house with another guy and girl and said they once got drunk and had a threesome. “How do I apply?” I smiled. And when I told her that I liked to fish she said, “Let’s go.”

  Avoiding her family over Thanksgiving break—“I’m not going near that mad house,” she hissed—we fished and frolicked, starting on a drizzly afternoon catching stocked rainbows from Foster Reservoir and cooking them at Morgan’s house. Her place smelled a little sour with dirty dishes glued to the counters and a mountain of old mail spilling off the kitchen table. The cats eyed me warily then slunk into the dark bedroom. Morgan wiped out a pan and dropped in a stick of butter, telling me to chop some garlic. She put up brown rice, handed me a beer, and we cooked, drank, laughed, and ate fried trout down through the crispy fins and tails, moving to her bedroom for desert.

  We woke slowly with cats and coffee and then drove an hour west out of the foggy Willamette Valley over hilly pastures and rusty logging towns through a dense corridor of Douglas fir that opened to the sunny Pacific Ocean. At Depoe Bay we boarded a party boat, motored a couple miles off shore, and bounced tail-twisting jigs for rockfish and lingcod, the blue satin swells buttoned with small dark birds and the thrilling geyser of a gray whale. Morgan had been fishing with her father—“When he wasn’t a goddamn drunk”—and she knew how to use a spinning rod and how to grab the four-pound black rockfish she swung over the rail onto the deck. “Nice job,” I cheered. Morgan dropped the bleeding fish into the white pail, wiped her hands on her jeans, and touched my face. “Mmm, fishy,” she sung softly, pulling me into a kiss.

  We spent the night at a cheap inn over the water. Her round body moved slow and steady and wanted me everywhere. After, we lay back, smoking a couple of her cigarettes and drinking cheap bourbon from plastic cups as we watched South Park on TV. The next morning came even later, but by early afternoon we were below a campground on the Siletz River, casting bobbers and jigs for steelhead. Morgan was into it at first, targeting the green bubbly pools and dark ledges, but she soon grew tired and wanted to smoke a bowl to kill her hangover. I didn’t like getting high and wading swift water, but I sat with her on a rock and we talked. Morgan asked about my mother. “My mother?” I smiled, hesitated, then told her how she once helped me release a shark I’d caught, and how she praised me when I carried home a few flounder for dinner. But my mother died when I was thirteen.

  “I’m sorry,” Morgan said.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said and shrugged. Morgan asked about my time in Japan and China, and I told her a few more stories.

  “Wow. It’s always fish, water, and women with you. That’s weird.”

  “I never thought of it that way.” I laughed.

  “Do you drop women because you’re afraid they are going to leave you or die or something?”

  “I don’t drop women. Things just change and we move on.”

  “You move on.”

  “I’m not possessive,” I said, trying to explain myself. I’d heard these things before from girlfriends.

  “You like the chase. You like to catch fish and eat them. And then let them go!” she laughed. “Then move on downriver, right?”

  I didn’t like the way this was going. “And what about you? You seem pretty free,” I asked.

  “Yeah. I’m free of charge,” she answered with a smirk. Morgan had known a lot of lovers, men and women, but rather than letting go and moving on, her stories ended in cut lines, overturned boats, and drownings. “Shit,” she said. “The last guy borrowed a ton of money from me, totaled his fucking car, spent two months in a hospital—of course, I was like there almost every day—then he gets out and moves in with his ex-wife.” I listened. She told me about her alcoholic father, enabling mother, sister’s dreams of becoming an actress, and a brother who was doing okay. “He likes to fish,” she pulled her wool hat down over her ears. “You’d dig him. Fishing keeps him sane.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “Maybe we can all fish together.”

  “I’m cold,” she said with a shiver, and we walked back to the car. I started the old Buick and cranked the heater. As we pulled off our waders and jackets, Morgan grinned: “Look at that big back seat. But what’s that stupid fish doing in there?” My brother’s gift of the plaster striped bass was lying on the floor. I jammed it in the trunk, breaking off part of its tail. The car stereo no longer worked, but in ten minutes Morgan and I were naked on the blanketed vinyl, spinning our own music as a rivery, fishy steam filled the air and fogged the windows.

  “Fish and Sex,” I wrote on my notepad. Recovering after the long holiday, I sat at my desk and jotted down notes for an essay. I had always enjoyed literature where fishing became a metaphor for some great salvation or revelation earned through patient and mindful practice. There was the possibility of emotional healing in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” or the victory of respect and love for a fellow creature that fills Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish.” Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It offered the beautiful story of fly fishing as way into nature and human understanding that ultimately expresses itself as spiritual grace. But at that moment I was angling more primitive currents.

  Junior high boys joked about their “trouser trout” and a salty old Long Island fisherman once advised me, “Head before tail, boy,” as he set another snapper on the cutting board, chuckling and winking at his double entendre, completely lost on me at fourteen. I would soon learn, however, that there was something inherently fishy about the sexual encounter.

  In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the war-weary women exclaim that they could suffer the loss of men but not the eels—“Surely you’d spare the eels?” With this in mind, Plutarch tells the mournful story of Isis searching for the remains of her slain Osiris. When she learns that his penis has been thrown in the Nile and eaten by eels, she makes those long and slippery fish sacred. In “L’anguilla,” The Eel, Italian poet Eugenio Montale praises that “torch, lash, arrow of Love upon earth” that points “back to paradises of fertility.” Shakespeare abounds with fishy vulgarisms, including Iago’s implication that some ladies may “change the cod’s head for the salmon’s tail,” that is, give up men for women, and Cleopatra likens seducing Antony to angling for “Tawny-finned fishes.”

  Collected in a stained file from years
of reading were Yu Xuanji’s ninth-century Chinese love poem to her man gone fishing, John Donne’s “The Bait,” Edmund Waller’s “Ladies Angling,” and Lorca’s “brunette of Granada … who will not bite.” I pushed through a sprawl of books to Herman Melville’s Typee, lingering over chapter twenty-eight and the eroticized descriptions of the young American sailor, Tommo, and his island beauty, Fayaway, eating raw fish. With a reluctance known to many unversed lovers, Tommo admits something “disagreeable” about his first taste of raw fish, and I recalled teenage jokes about fishy smells and confessions from Vagina Monologues. But Tommo opens the fish, exposing the smooth, slippery pink walls, and finds them “remarkably tender,” telling us that “after a few trials I positively began to relish them… .”

  I considered the “Nurse Duckett” chapter in Catch-22 when Yossarian claims, “My fish dream is a sex dream,” disappointing the truly disturbed Army psychiatrist who tells him to find a “good hobby … Like fishing.” And there was the trolling scene off the Oregon coast in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where the topless Candy battles a salmon with the rod between her legs. Freud and Jung identify fish as phallic, but Richard Bunse draws women as salmon-curved mermaids, Yeats catches a “little silver trout” that becomes “a glimmering girl,” Sandra Alcosser offers a beautiful woman as “A Fish to Feed All Hunger,” and Roseann Lloyd spreads it right out there with “Song of the Fisherman’s Lover”:

  Dip me from the water.

  Bite the gash. Say fish.

  Say woman.

  Fish were phallic, yonic, beautiful, seductive, messy, delicious, full of sex, and all over my desk. I took a break and called Morgan, who sounded stoned and said my angle on fish and women was funny. We hung up, and I made myself a tuna salad sandwich.

  Humans are pumped with salt water, but we can’t live very long under the sea. Morgan and I dated off and on for a year, her drinking and smoking turning more and more reckless. We’d meet after work and she’d already smell of booze, her eyes red and tired. Lines deepened in her face and she coughed constantly. Reverend Bob said we should try to do healthy things together. I’d get Morgan out on a walk and she’d march right to a bar.

  I didn’t hear from her for a month, then she lost her job and called to ask if she could move in with me for a while. “That won’t work,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Too fishy?” Richard scratched his shaggy white beard when I talked about Morgan. Women and fish could be a hard match. There’s Magritte’s somber, washed-up attempt at a fish and woman fusion in “Collective Invention,” Dalí’s cold elongation of a languid lady and a sail-finned mackerel in “Forgotten Horizon,” and the surreal concentration of Picasso’s “Seated Woman with Fish,” where the lady’s hat, breasts, and interlocked fingers all swim absurdly around her serious terrestrial gaze. I took more comfort in Ray Troll’s zany illustration, “Embrace Your Inner Fish,” and Richard’s simple renderings of happy women and their finny friends.

  That night in life drawing I was happy to sit next to Chloë, a professor at the university, about my age, with whom I shared a committee. Chloë had straight coppery brown hair that swayed around her tan freckled shoulders. Her bright hazel eyes were flecked with green. She had just joined the drawing group and said she found it relaxing after a long day of teaching. “Me, too,” I said, and we worked charcoal into thighs, backs, necks, and breasts. I had real trouble with faces and hands, and Chloë, a much better artist, helped me. At break we talked about books—she loved reading—and I even risked telling her about my essay connecting fish and human sexuality. “Fascinating,” she said, describing a late night Japanese restaurant in Seattle that serves sushi on a reclining nude woman covered in plastic wrap. I made notes above the wonky figure on my sketch pad.

  At the university honors-committee meeting that week I looked at and listened closely to Chloë. Her slender figure bloomed into a full bosom, and I loved her soft British accent and the way she deftly turned over a problem and solved it. After the meeting we had a cup of coffee and talked about her life growing up in England, and of course, I angled for fish. She remembered catching pollock as a little girl on a seaside holiday. “The sea is everywhere,” she reminded me, describing fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, kippers, fried white bait, and smoked eels. “Really, eels?” My eyes widened.

  Chloë described other fishy dishes like baked gray mullet with oranges and skate in black butter—“the capers and vinegar darken the butter, and you pour it right over the sautéed skate wings.” Her favorite dish was kedgeree, marrying lightly smoked haddock and hard-boiled eggs with an Indian dance of coriander, red peppers, and curry folded into basmati rice. “My mother loved to make it,” she said with a smile. “She’d cook up a huge batch that would last for days.” Chloë talked about her family. Her mother had died young from alcoholism. “Such a waste,” she said. When we stood up to leave I gave her a hug.

  Later that week Chloë came by my office in the English department and gave me a tin of Fortnum & Mason’s trout pâté.

  “Thank you. But really, what’s this for?”

  “Just having someone to talk to. You were kind to ask all those questions and listen to me go on about home. I don’t have much family here. And it’s been hard to make friends with taking care of my kids and the job and all.”

  Chloë lived in the States for a decade, but there were problems. She and her London husband were getting a divorce, and she had just moved to the university town with her two boys, aged five and seven.

  I felt closer to Chloë with every shared conversation. And when we hugged there was that unmistakable charge of an electric eel. The mind-body connection was there. Everything was there. When Reverend Bob saw us walking together in the park, he smiled, “You let me know if you need my services.” I nodded, and Chloë blushed. “Let your hook always be cast,” Ovid tells us in The Art of Love. “In a pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.”

  Chloë and her sons stopped by my apartment one afternoon and were immediately smitten with the neighbor’s cat, Dash, stroking his dark back and rubbing his white chin. Using an ultralight spinning rod and a rubber frog bass lure with the hooks removed, I sent Dash bounding and clawing madly down the hall and over the couch and table. The back door was open, and when Dash, frog in fangs, saw his chance, he dashed. I stepped out after the cat, adjusted the drag, and let him run across the empty parking lot—the boys squealing in delight. I was able to turn Dash and gain a couple yards, but his next run was too powerful and he broke free, slipping under the fence with the rubber frog. Everyone laughed.

  “It’s getting warmer now. Maybe I could take these boys for some real fishing?” I asked. And they cheered.

  On a sunny June day after the school term ended, we packed gear and lunches, and the older boy, Zach, tried to help me lift the plaster striped bass from the trunk, but he dropped it into a dozen chalky pieces. Zach burst into tears. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, hugging him. “It’s nothing. It’s not real. We’ll get some real bass today.”

  I drove to a little known pond out in the country. When the boys groaned over the quarter mile walk through the pasture I told them we were “fish walking,” and they giggled, suddenly flopping on the ground like mudskippers. As we stepped over the grassy berm to the water, a family of glossy brown muskrats swam for the bank and disappeared into a burrow. The boys had no experience fishing, and I rigged up spinning rods with bobbers and small hooks, showing them how to bait with a worm and make a cast. The lesson proved challenging, but I took my time, remembering my father’s patience. When Gethin, the youngest, launched his bobber a few feet from the bank it instantly disappeared. He felt the tug and resistance, yelled for his mother to look, and reeled in a hand-sized sunfish with a bright orange breast. There were many tangles, snags, complaints, snack breaks, and a few more satisfying sunfish until the boys had enough and walked down through the flower-studded meadow, picking up spent shotgun shells. Chloë and
I sat close and watched them.

  “Is that safe?” She grew concerned.

  “Sure, the shells are empty. I used to collect them when I was a kid.”

  “You Americans and your guns,” she frowned.

  But we were, indeed, safe in this secluded meadow beside this little pond. “Make another cast and set the rod down on that stick. We’ll have a beer,” I urged.

  “I think I might’ve caught something already.”

  “What?” I jumped up. She put her hand around my leg and laughed.

  “Oh no, I’m supposed to say that. Women think I’m fish crazy. Too many fishing metaphors. Weird, right?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s how you think.”

  The teeming waters of a summer pond, the lessons, frustrations, casts, hopes, and a hooked sunfish flopping on the grassy bank raise a child’s delight and a man and woman’s growing interest in each other. How wonderfully simple. If fishing brings us closer to the earth’s essentials, can it also help us transcend that realm? Is angling an art that can actually lead to enlightenment, salvation, grace, and even love, as promised by some writers?

  Chloë and I leaned back on the warm grass. “This is marvelous,” she said, and I bent over to kiss her. Her lips returned the soft, warm gesture with something more, and we looked at each other and smiled. “This is a nice fishdate,” she said.

  Redwing blackbirds called from the cattails, a dragonfly alighted on the tip of my finger, then Chloë’s rod bounced off the stick and slid toward the water. “Fish!” I yelled. She chased the rod down the bank, picked it up, and reeled. A big bass thrashed and swam. “Fantastic,” she cried. The boys saw the splashing and came running. The foggy green water burned gold as the bass flashed clear before us.

  “I can really feel it,” Chloë said and smiled back at me, reeling in her fish.

  “Me, too,” I said, even before I did.

  Casting Off

 

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