by Ann Claycomb
“Me?”
“You do have an opinion, don’t you?”
“Just because I have an opinion doesn’t mean it’s worth hearing,” I said. “If you really want to work on a piece—”
“But you don’t like it either,” she said. “Why not? Same reason as Bella?”
“Well, no. I’m not surprised about what she said, but it wasn’t what I was thinking of while I was listening. I was thinking that your voice was wrong for the aria.”
“Really?” She didn’t appear to be offended. “How?”
“It’s a beautiful voice,” I said. “You must know that. It’s the kind of voice that makes people stop and listen even though they shouldn’t, like I just did. I just found myself wishing that I could hear you singing something else, something less . . .”
“Depressing?” Kathleen had turned away to stuff her music into her bag and her hair slipped over her shoulder, hiding her face.
This is another gesture I’ve come to recognize since. Kathleen’s hair is part of her defensive array: sometimes shield, sometimes camouflage. A quick shrug of her shoulders or tilt of her head and she will be hidden from me behind a gleaming red curtain.
“Well.” I was upset by her sudden withdrawal. I wanted her to smile at me again. “You have to sing depressing songs. That’s what we’re all doing here, right, learning how to sing about falling in love with the wrong people and dying at the end? But ‘Suicidio!’ is just so bleak. And you don’t have a bleak voice.”
As soon as I said it I knew that was precisely the problem, and I felt better for having expressed it that way. It wasn’t criticism of either Kathleen’s voice or her maturity. But she still didn’t face me. She finished packing up and then she leaned over the piano, gave herself a couple of notes, tucked her hair back, and launched into “Si, mi chiamano Mimi.” I knew she was mocking me, trying to make a point by singing the most cliché, lovely thing she could think of, but I still could have dropped down on the floor right there and listened to her sing until she ran out of repertoire.
Kathleen’s voice is as close to perfect as a voice gets. The sweetness of tone, the clarity, and the flow of sound from her open throat make me think of a fountain in the sun. What’s more, even when she was singing the way she was then, completely carelessly, I heard a longing in her voice that was the longing of one note for the next, of each phrase for the following, perfectly suited phrase. It was longing borne out of the act of singing itself and the sense of it did not leave me until she stopped singing, as abruptly as she had earlier, and turned to face me.
“No suicide for me, then, Harry?”
“No,” I said. “And if you’re going to be a great soprano you have to learn to take compliments.”
She inclined her head a moment, as if she was considering that.
“All right,” she said. “Thank you. But I think you owe me a drink for convincing me of something that the great Isabella Menotti couldn’t convince me of.”
I had a German lesson in twenty minutes. I clearly wasn’t going. “I think Bella owes me a drink,” I pointed out. “But since she’s unlikely to make good, I’ll buy you one. Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere,” Kathleen said. “Wherever you want to take me is fine.”
WHEN KATHLEEN TOLD me her history, or at least as much of it as I’ve ever gotten all at once, we were in bed together, just lying there. The pain was so bad that she couldn’t even talk for a while, just lay there with tears running down her temples into her hair. She shook her head when I asked if there was anything I could do, but then grabbed my wrist when I tried to get out of the bed. So I stayed. When she could talk she told me more than she’d ever told me before, about her mother having killed herself, about the dreams she had about the ocean and how upset she was when she first saw it in real life, about all the weird pains. When she stopped talking I wiped at the drying tracks of tears on her face.
“So Bella never knew what she was talking about,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Kathleen asked.
“When she told you that you couldn’t do justice to ‘Suicidio!’ because you hadn’t experienced enough pain in your life. She was wrong.”
Kath shrugged against my shoulder. “I guess.”
I traced her bruised eyelids with my finger and realized that I believed her completely—I didn’t think for a minute that any of this was “in her head”—and I felt furious at the doctors who had failed her. When she was sixty-three, my grandmother tripped and fell shoveling her driveway. For weeks after that her hip hurt. Her doctor said it was just bruised but she insisted on a bone scan and she turned out to have bone cancer that killed her.
“People are always right about their own bodies,” I said, and Kathleen made a choked sound that might have been laughter.
“I wish I wasn’t.”
THIS MORNING, SITTING in the sunshine on the first day of what was supposed to be our perfect vacation, Kathleen practically choked on a swallow of coffee. I could hear the strain in her voice the way I used to be able to feel that a cello string was about to go. She is a very good liar about specifics—about whether she took a pain pill or drank an extra shot or actually did the goddamn dishes—but terrible at concealing the actual truth about anything. I knew last night that she was just saying she’d clean up to give me permission not to do it myself. That’s why I let it go, because she was trying to take care of me and it felt lovely. And I knew now that she was keeping something from me.
She wasn’t talking to anyone down on the beach. There was no one there. She could well have been talking to herself. But she was angry and she flinched away from the touch of the sea.
“So are you ready to hear my plans for the week?” I asked.
She looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup and I watched her find her balance again, saw the spark of humor come into her eyes.
“Oh God,” she said. “Is it color-coded? Or . . . wait, is there a schedule?”
“You say that like it’s a dirty word.”
“Umm, yes. Because it is. Hello, vacation? No schedules allowed.”
“But it’s a schedule of fun things we’re going to do—or can do.”
“Do you hear yourself? Schedule and fun all in the same sentence.” She shook her head. “You’re not well, Harry. You need help.”
“I’ll go get it,” I said. “You’ll see.”
I took my empty bowl and cup into the kitchen and pulled the schedule out of my backpack. In my defense, it wasn’t an actual schedule, just a list of all the activities on the resort we might like and the times when they were offered.
“Come on,” I said, sliding the door open again, “there’s a wine tasting class in the main restaurant every afternoon at four.”
She grinned. “Wine tasting? Every day? Sign us up!”
“And there’s golf and croquet and mini-golf. I know you love mini-golf, or how about horseback riding—”
I stopped to gauge her reaction to my litany and caught her in the one gesture she made that broke my heart. She lifted her chin, sniffed, and jerked her shoulders back, all in one motion. It was Kathleen bracing herself to get on with it, no matter how much she hurt. Now she was doing it while staring at the sea and I realized suddenly what could be wrong, what it could be that she wasn’t telling me.
Don’t let her have lost the sea, I thought, not even sure what I meant. Please, not that.
Poor woman. Poor girl. When we speak of her among ourselves we call her by the name we used for all of the lovers who have come before her in this tale. It means “seeker of one who is lost,” for that is what she is, this Harriet. Harry. As they all were, six men and another woman before her, though they did not know it.
And yet the love between these two—Harry and Kathleen—is woven in a pattern we have not seen before, we who have watched the fabric of each love come together and then unravel, strand by strand. It is shaped in part by strength and truth, by the revelations that Kathleen has offe
red and Harry has accepted. The open heart of the one in pain sings in a voice like sunlight splintering on the water, and the open heart of the one who would die to ease that pain sings like the walls of an ancient sea cave. It is the sound of rock in her voice that interests us particularly.
What will she do when she hears what we tell Kathleen? For that is the other new and subtle cast of the pattern. Always before, the lost ones came to us alone, seeking the answers and the escape that we offer. Carrying the new secret back to their lovers, they played at oysters—encasing their terrible choice in layers of tears and silences until it grew into a pearl that choked them.
But Kathleen does not know. And when she comes to us, finally, as she must, woven tightly to a woman as steady as a rock, will Harry not come too?
If she does come, there will be no secret to tear these two apart, but the choice will be all the more terrible, shared by two.
The seeker of the one who is lost will know her beloved for a stranger, unknowable.
And she will know herself for what she is.
KATHLEEN
Aria for Soprano
I wake up late on the morning we leave and feel the double deprivation of the sea I’ve been dreaming about and the sea outside the French doors that won’t leave me in peace. I turn my back on it, swing my legs off the bed and go straight to the bathroom to brush my teeth. As soon as I put the brush in my mouth, though, I choke and have to take it back out again.
We are leaving today. We are going back to Boston. I am not staying here and I am not coming home. I am not swimming this morning. There’s no time for a swim, no time to risk going out too far and being unable or unwilling to come back in. I lean over the sink and recite these certainties, then try again to brush my teeth.
This is the first sign that I’m in trouble. Next comes the panicky need for the water, any water, but ideally the sea itself. I start to feel this way on the drive back across the causeway and I remind myself that I’ve come back from this stage too, and it should be easier now that the sea is trying to mess with my mind. Outside the shuttle window, the water slips past, the early-morning mist still hovering over it. A heron stands on one leg and dips his head for a fish, splashing drops as he surfaces, empty-beaked. I can recall the feeling of those drops, that water, on my skin, but already it is fading. The car drives on, to the end of the causeway, and then we are on the highway, speeding up, leaving the sea behind.
At the airport, Harry apologizes for being so quiet and I feel only a dull, guilty gratitude that she hasn’t pressed me this week. She’s tired, worn out from drinking more than she’s used to drinking, from a late night in the hot tub last night, and from packing this morning. She leaves me at the gate to go find a cup of coffee. I sit bolt upright in a chair at the end of a row. It’s a straight shot from the gate back to the security check-in, then there’s an escalator and only a short walk from the bottom of it to the exit doors. If I get up now and go, just bolt out of the airport and hail a cab, I can ask to go to the nearest beach. This is Florida, after all, aren’t there beaches everywhere?
A ghostly version of me is already running, unraveling my path to this chair. She is white-faced, gasping as she flies past people and they turn in alarm, wondering what the emergency is. I close my eyes to watch her go. I take deep breaths and press down into the seat with my spine so I can feel how fully I am sitting here, how thoroughly I am not moving, not running, not escaping. I am staying put, dammit, and getting on the plane.
But if I get on the plane I will lose my chance and I can’t lose my chance, not when the sea is still so close . . .
“Hey,” Harry says. “I got you some tea.” She holds out a paper cup that will be so hot, in my hand, against my thigh, that I will not be able to hold it. I will spill it everywhere, scald myself, or worse, scald Harry.
“Kath?” Harry says. “You okay? Do you want me to put it down next to you?”
I nod. I feel her gaze on my face as she sits down, sets the cup beside me, takes a sip of her coffee. I clench my hands even tighter. Don’t start, I think. Don’t start.
She doesn’t start.
“I know this is hard for you,” she says softly, “having to leave. I don’t understand exactly, but—I just—I know it’s hard so I’m trying to leave you alone, okay?”
I nod again.
“We’ll come back, okay? We’ll get a house right on the beach, what do you think?”
Come home.
I am on my feet, fumbling in my carry-on bag for my wallet. Harry stands up too.
“I want to go get some stuff for the plane.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No!” Too quickly. She flinches.
“I’ll be right back,” I say. “Save my tea.”
IT HAS TO stop now. It can’t go any further, to the point where I believe that I can stay submerged indefinitely, that I can breathe underwater. If it goes further, it ends in the emergency room and a confusion of searing white light and metal until eventually, inevitably, they knock me out. I’ll fall into a sleep like sludge then, thick and clammy and hard to shake.
In the ladies’ room I let cold water run over my wrists and hands. I tell myself that it’s seawater, just seawater without the salt.
“You too, hmm?”
I turn to the woman beside me at the counter.
“I’m terrified of flying too,” she says. “I’ve heard that works.”
She makes a gesture at my hands. “Water on your pulse points. Supposed to calm you down, isn’t it?”
She’s maybe sixty, small and brown and wiry. She’s wearing Florida clothes: turquoise hooded sweatshirt and little matching tennis skirt, sparkly T-shirt and cork-heeled shoes. I bet she’s not afraid of anything, not really.
“My husband loves to travel,” she says, “wants to treat me by taking me on trips. And now my grandchildren are scattered all over the place. I’ve done hypnosis, behavioral therapy, good old-fashioned Kentucky therapy—you name it, I’ve tried it.”
“Kentucky therapy?”
She turns off the water at her sink, pulls down some paper towels, and pats at her hands. “Bourbon, honey,” she whispers. “Never worked, but I had fun trying.”
I laugh. “I like champagne.”
“Well, hey, if it works . . .”
I shake my head.
“Listen, I’ll tell you the truth,” the woman says. She slings her purse over her shoulder, turns back to the mirror to fluff her hair. “Only thing that’s ever worked for me for sure? Plain old Dramamine. Take two when I get on the plane and wake me up when I get there.”
She pats my arm as she leaves. I look down at my hands in the sink and turn off the water suddenly, decisively. It’s not helping and it’s stupid to pretend that it is. I can feel the difference between seawater and tap water, for God’s sake, and it’s not tap water I want.
I meet my own eyes in the mirror and flick water at my reflected self.
“Soprano,” I hiss. “Stop it. Stop it now. Drama Queen!”
Two more women come in, look at me strangely before they duck into the stalls. I am blurry now, as if hidden behind a waterfall or a curtain of rain. I splash more water off my hands at the mirror—if I’m going to go crazy, might as well go for broke. Come home, Drama Queen, Drama Queen, Drama Queen, Dramamine, Dramamine.
I’ve never taken Dramamine before; can’t remember what it’s for exactly. Isn’t it for motion sickness? Water runs down the mirror in rivulets, water that I can shake off without a care because it doesn’t help, goddammit, it’s not even real water, not really real, not straight from the sea. Then I remember and remembering makes me laugh because Dramamine is perfect, Dramamine is exactly what I need, Dramamine is for when you’re seasick and isn’t that what I am?
My blouse is splotched with water and I shiver in the newsstand as I hunt for the medicine aisle. When I find it, I pick up a box of Dramamine and start to open it right there. But of course I have to pay for it fir
st and I can’t take pills dry. I grab a bottle of water, then a box of candy. I’m hysterical now over the idea of Dramamine and how hilarious it is that it’s a pill for seasickness, which is what I have, more truly and deeply than anyone I’ve ever met. But just in case Harry doesn’t get it, in case she doesn’t see the irony here, I’m getting her a box of sea salt caramels. Get it? You eat salt that’s been stripped from the sea and I’ll take these pills to strip the sea from my head. And we’ll both be fine.
A book. I should get a book to read on the plane. I’m going to sleep on the plane, and when I wake up we’ll be in Boston and I won’t be seasick anymore, but Harry won’t ask questions about what’s taken me so long if I come back with something to read. I can’t make sense of a single book on the rack, though, so I grab a magazine instead. As soon as the clerk has rung me up, I fish the Dramamine out of the bag and read the dosage: one to two tablets every four to six hours. I gulp three down with water.
They are boarding our plane. Harry stands outside the line trying to pretend she’s not nervous. She is holding my tea in one hand.
“Are you all right?” she asks when I reach her. Then, with a narrower look, “Where did you go, the other end of the terminal? You’re breathing like you’ve been running.”
“I’m sorry.” I sound like I’m talking from far away, but then I don’t have to say more because it’s our turn to board, sidle into our seats, and stuff our bags beneath us.
“So what did you get?”
The package of pills is in the bottom of the bag and I don’t want her to see it. I fumble for the box of caramels, get the ribbon tangled in the handles as I tug it out.
“Here.”
“Silly,” she says, but she is pleased. “Thank you. But don’t think you can hide the rest of your loot—” She reaches for the bag and I try to jerk it away. The magazine slides out onto the floor.
“Aha,” Harry says. “Just as I thought. Trashy airplane reading.” She picks it up. “Town and Country, Kathleen? Really? Let’s see, we’ve got a cover article about the next generation of philanthropists, another about the ten most gorgeous, unspoiled vacation spots in the world. We can plan our next trip.”