by Maria Flook
Also by Maria Flook
Family Night
Sea Room
Reckless Wedding
Copyright © 1994 by Maria Flook
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Bagdasarian Enterprises: Parody based on the song “Come On’ A My House,” words and music by Ross Bagdasarian and William Saroyan, copyright © Monarch Music All rights reserved. Used by permission of Bagdasarian Enterprises. • Bourne Co.: Excerpt from “There’s a Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder,” words and music by Al Jolson, Billy Rose and Dave Dreyer, copyright © 1928 by Bourne Co. and Larry Spier, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. • Sony Music Publishing: Excerpt from “Make the World Go Away,” by Hank Cochran, copyright © 1963 by Tree Publishing Co., Inc. Renewed. (All rights administered by Sony Music Publishing, P.O. Box 1273, Nashville, TN 37202.) All rights reserved. Used by permission of Sony Music Publishing. • Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.: Excerpt from “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, copyright © 1932 by Warner Brothers, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flook, Maria.
Open water / Maria Flook.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-83161-3
I. Title.
PS3556.L58306 1995
813′.54—dc20 94-17114
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
About the Author
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Tony Jackett, captain of the Josephine G., and to M. G. Moore, captain of the Blue Moon, for their technical advice; to Kim Witherspoon, for her wisdom and support; to Daniel Frank, my editor, who has helped me from page one, and whose particular vision schools and entices my own; to John Skoyles for every faith and freedom.
for
Judith Grossman
Chapter One
He came home to Newport with a fractured wrist. He returned to his stepmother’s seaside house and took the same upstairs room with the narrow bed and noisy mattress baffles he had slept in for years. His stepmother had saved him from Social Services when he was orphaned at thirteen and he owed her the visit. He denied it was his final courtesy. Yet, her cancer had advanced. He knew she was sick. Willis had come home to nurse her, but because of his fracture, she assumed it was the other way around.
Willis had received a general discharge from the Navy after a short assignment at the Naval Supply Center in Norfolk. He never shipped out. He worked on a terminal in the bowels of a warehouse, cataloguing dry goods and food supplies for the carriers. He started to do some wagering and some simple pilfering. It wasn’t much, just what he could get into his partner’s Plymouth once or twice during weekend liberty. Mostly it was cases of cigarettes, which he sold to Richmond Vending.
He reclined in his childhood bed. Even small movements jostled his wrist; its torn nerves were chattering beneath the heavy plaster cast. He tried to manage his pain but it was a strange, invisible geography. Its terrain shifted. Pain migrated from its formal nucleus and wormed in all directions, into icy spinal ravines and flash fires of its thermal dimension. His pulse mimicked the trouble spot in the jelly of his retina.
Rennie came into the room. Her long white hair was loose and she had tied the satin strings of her bed jacket in a lopsided bow. She switched on the lamp so that Willis could see what she offered. A pellet in a silver wrapper. A morphine sulfite suppository. Willis sat up and took the foil almond from her hand. He peeled open the foil and pinched the smooth insert; its glycerol coating responded to the heat of his fingertips. He placed the suppository on the night table.
Willis said, “How long have you known me?”
“Forever,” she said.
“I’m serious,” he said. “I’m asking, how many years have I lived here with you?”
She sat down next to him. He was making a speech.
Willis said, “In all those years, have you ever known me to put anything in my ass?”
“This is a legitimate, broad-spectrum painkiller.”
He was holding the crook of his elbow where the edge of his plaster cast ate into his biceps. “Where did you get these things?” he said, matching his thumb against the waxy insert.
“It’s a prescription. With refills. I’ve got a whole inventory left over from surgery. You know, we’re letting nature take its course. They hand out the whole candy store when it’s terminal.”
“Maybe you’ll need these for yourself.”
“I can share.”
“Yeah, well. Don’t be offended if I decline,” he said.
“You’re just acting embarrassed. Pain isn’t so shy, is it?” she told him.
He agreed with that.
Rennie said, “Willis, let me remind you, this is not an oral medication.”
She switched out his lamp. He followed his stepmother’s no-nonsense silhouette around the room as she adjusted the Venetians, slivering the moonlight.
Rennie had arranged her big Fresnel lens on his windowsill. A long hull of beryl-green glass, clear as mint tea. The scrap was from the original lighthouse at Bullock’s Point and Rennie thought the broken shard held luck. The lens was usually displayed against the living room fanlight window, where it refracted normal sunshine and circulated green medallions across the carpet and chairs. She placed it in Willis’s room for his recovery. Even weak moonlight filtered through the lens, shooting tines across the wall. Then she left him alone.
He rested for several moments. In the dark, his arm seemed to quadruple in size. The new plaster cast had hardened into an aching zone, imprisoning pain’s trigger points. The delicate flesh on the inside of his wrist was prickling with fishhook sutures where he couldn’t scratch. The fact that there was an available method to relieve his pain made his pain worse.
He waited. A wolf spider edged across the maple headboard and darted inside his plaster cuff, a recurring apparition. He knocked his cast against the bedpost to chase it out. He pushed down his briefs and inserted the medication, sinking the morphine pellet through the taut, resistant sphincter. Within minutes, he felt his hips liquefy, his spine warmed and ascended in fluid notches until the drug reached his gnawing wrist and Willis slept.
For the first week, pain vanished, returned, vanished
again with every application. He peeled the foil from another crayon bullet and tamped it into his rectum. It freed Willis from his wall of thoughts. When the drug had less effect, he doubled the dosage. There were side effects. After two weeks, his pelvis felt hollow as a coal chute and he had lost his center of gravity. He tried to wean himself from the morphine. The pain returned. Without the rectal suppositories, Willis never slept. He got out of bed in the middle of the night and searched for Rennie’s vial of Seconal in the mirrored cabinet above the sink. Glossy capsules spilled across the porcelain like little slivers of pimento.
The rainy March weather revived the fleas; the humidity moistened egg casings and the insects emerged, dotting the curtain hems. Rennie had to call exterminators in. The men powdered the floors, but the fleas held on. Every night Rennie came into Willis’s room to count his bites. She wanted to know if they were the same welts or new ones. She examined his legs and circled each individual swelling with a ballpoint pen. She rolled the tip of the pen over the back of his knee, tugging the skin. The tiny indented circle made a pleasing sensation until she lifted the pen and started again somewhere else. She moved up his legs, marking his buttocks and the small of his back. He turned over and she inked the sharp knob of his collarbone and spotted the ladder of his ribs where the insect bites flared. He listened to her count them out, drawing nineteen dime-size rings the first night, twenty-four the next. In a week’s time, the painful histamine domes were subsiding. To make sure, Rennie took a pair of Willis’s white crew socks from his drawer and pulled them up high on her ankles. She walked room to room in Willis’s socks. She returned to his bedside and stood back, in the center of the oak floor. She told Willis, “See anything?” She showed him one foot and then the other. Willis tried to look for the vermin but it didn’t show up. He couldn’t keep his eyes focused on her tiny figure any longer. The morphine had lifted into his line of vision like a furry blindfold, a cashmere turtleneck tugged up to his hairline.
Holly Temple watched Rennie hopscotch in Willis’s crew socks. Rennie’s silhouette bounced across the lace panels from one window to the next. Holly couldn’t figure it out. She decided that her windows faced someone’s sickroom. A nurse was dancing before her charge, perhaps indulging her patient’s final request for the evening.
Holly had just moved into one side of an oceanfront duplex. The duplex was really a single-story cottage halved by some extra Sheetrock and carpentry. The house next door was a weather-beaten two-story with a third-floor garret, part Greek Revival and part Victorian. The turn-of-the-century house had seven-foot-high windows dressed with lace curtains; tattered antique cloth hung in loose tails. Large velvet sofas, their furred backs against the windows, looked bleached by many seasons. Big wavy privet and boxwood, wild and unmanicured, cinched the ground floor. Its airy front porch looked over the water, same as Holly’s, but it had more height, and Holly suspected it had the better view.
She had not yet unpacked her things. She still felt anesthetized from having been forced to start over. The duplex looked west, over First Beach. The water was smooth until it hit the shore, where it churned and spread out like sugar lace. Holly stepped up to the window and let her breath cloud the pane. She moved back and watched the mist crawl off the glass. She rubbed the window with the cuff of her Angora sweater, leaving a few blue hairs sticking to the glass.
Her divorce had just come through.
Holly was pleased to have the divorce. She wasn’t happy about the charge of arson.
One week after her husband, Jensen, had left her, Holly went over to his new apartment. He invited her inside, then he decided he didn’t want to talk. He went to his job and left her standing in his tidy new living room. The telephone started ringing. Holly saw the red light bloom on his answering machine and she waited to hear the caller. It was Sarojini, her husband’s new Hindu love connection. Sarojini, again. Her husband had met his Eastern item when she was buying up three Carvel franchises in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. Jensen took the exotic visitor around for site inspections. Holly remembered that she herself had left several embarrassing messages for Jensen on the machine. She had begged him to reconsider. She had even held the telephone receiver to the Panasonic while it played an old seventies classic, “You Are the Magnet, I Am Steel.”
Holly jerked the answering machine loose from the telephone jack in the middle of Sarojini’s lilting message. She walked outside her husband’s apartment and shoved the answering machine into the trunk of her Toyota. She picked up an empty coffee can from the backseat. She looked for new russet coils of dog shit, but the smouldering coals in a neighbor’s backyard grill caught her eye. She scooped them up and went upstairs to the strange apartment. She deposited the red nuggets, fiery eggs of charcoal dead center on the quilted surface of her husband’s double bed. For half a day she watched the bed smoldering. She called her husband at his Carvel Ice Cream franchise.
“Just one thing,” she said.
“And what’s that?”
“Guess what I’m doing? I’m burning the bed.”
“Holly, I’m real busy. I’m taking a delivery. I don’t need this—”
“You better get your ass off ice and drive right over here. It’s smoking.”
He didn’t believe her.
“It’s starting to smell funny. I bet I’m not supposed to breathe these fumes,” she told him.
If he had believed her, she might have doused the bedding, but she waited. She dialed her mother’s number in New Jersey where her mother had moved with her new husband. The telephone kept ringing. Holly wanted someone to acknowledge her gravest moment: she was moving from a stale, familiar loneliness into a fresh state of loneliness; its virgin landscape was electrifying. It didn’t require a witness, after all. Holly sat on the edge of the mattress and watched the sheet’s floral pattern curl in ashy petals, then the ticking charred and the fumes increased. She fanned the blaze to hurry it along. She started to cough and opened the window.
The fire department arrived in time to shove the mattress onto the fire escape, where it burst into flames, fully involved. In minutes the bed was consumed, the batting disappeared leaving only the meticulously knotted springs. Holly stared at the grid of wire and imagined their love-making sifting through, like sand and soul.
Before the police took her down to the station to record her explanation, Holly picked up some familiar kitchen utensils Jensen had lifted from her. She recognized the salt and pepper shakers, two halves of a ceramic house which when shoved together made a complete cottage, the chimney perforated with tiny holes to deliver the spices. She shoved the shakers into her purse.
At the station house, even the matron wouldn’t take her side of it; she told Holly that “female hysteria,” “PMS,” or “whatever she wanted to call it,” wasn’t an excuse for arson. The senior officer explained the severity of her actions. Because Holly had set fire to a furnished apartment in an occupied dwelling, Holly could be charged with arson in the first degree. Holly set the blaze but did not leave the scene; this might have meaning in court.
“What meaning?” Holly said.
“That detail could go either way,” the officer told her.
The officer wanted to know about her husband’s insurance. “Jewish Lightning. Italian Lightning. In East Providence it’s Lisbon Lightning. The what-have-you. It’s an insurance scam.”
“I’ve heard of that, but we don’t pay insurance,” Holly told him. “They don’t sell insurance for people like Jensen and me—”
“Sure they do. It’s common to have insurance for personal property. You don’t have to be a homeowner. People can insure their possessions.”
“I’m saying,” Holly said, “they don’t insure everything. Do they?” She rolled her gaze over the abrupt shelf of her breast and down the tight valley of her lap; she crossed her legs and rotated her white ankle. Her small foot, in its braided leather pump, was an irresistible attraction and the officers waited for her to drop
her foot and cross her ankles again. The matron filled in the lines, telling the sergeant, “She gets married. Her husband turns out to be a textbook case. She goes berserk.”
“Textbook?” He had to run it through his mind. There were a million different textbook cases. “Give me the example.”
“Gash hound,” the matron said.
The violence of those two words surprised Holly. Then she wasn’t surprised. “That’s right,” Holly spoke directly. “What insurance policy do they have for that?”
She wasn’t getting a lot of sympathy. They arranged the answering machine and the salt-shaker house on the table and tagged them. This was too much for Holly. She started crying.
After a short course of psychiatric evaluation ordered by the Superior Court for the County of Newport, Holly’s charge was reduced to “malicious burning.” She would face trial before a judge. Her court date would run almost concurrent with her divorce proceedings.
The Newport Daily News ran a story about her: SPURNED WIFE IGNITES THE NEST.
She still had six more months of probation. Her probation terms involved biweekly sessions with her probation officer, Dr. Kline, a psychiatric social worker. All winter, Holly had been out of work, collecting unemployment. If it weren’t for her courthouse visits, her life would have had no external structure. Holly’s regular job was during the tourist season, when she worked changeover Saturdays at Neptune’s Hide-A-Way, where she cleaned summer cottages. The tiny beach cottages were named after perennial flowers: Hollyhock, Cosmos, Zinnia, Larkspur, a string of two-room efficiencies, eleven all in all, where Holly had worked summers her whole adult life. Five months a year, she took charge of the eleven units, cleaning and setting up for the new clients each weekend. Between changeovers, she went into the cottages to add soap and towels or to ration out complimentary packets of sugar and nondairy creamer. She found surprises. A jar of pee in the freezer. Somebody’s pregnancy test abandoned. She found a set of glossy-red car doors. It was difficult to make up the beds with car doors in them. Doors often appeared in the rooms when people stripped down their four-wheel-drive vehicles before riding the back shore.