Nine Island

by Jane Alison

  Men-of-war, too, are stranded on the crusty sand, their fabulous bodies not single islands but archipelagos: pink crests, blue balloons, long, virulent strands. Also moon jellies and regular jellyfish, too. In some places, they’re all called medusas.

  Okay, why not: Medusa. One of Ovid’s girls whose name has lived on. She’s another one raped! So many raped! Why are so many girls being raped! In this case, a girl whose greatest beauty was her hair (says O), which, like a glittering gold-sequin swimsuit, caught the bad attention of a monster of the deep. A god, again, or so you think, you’re looking at him full of awe, so hard to believe that a god could be there, standing on the sand and studying you, so beautiful, you just can’t believe it! And the world you’ve known until then might have been a bright thing, seashells and sky and water lapping your toes, and who knows what you might find in it: marvels. Then suddenly he smiles and steps toward you, does not care about the film of air you still need around you, pushes his hands right through it and throws you down. All the pounding, the salt, so hard to breathe, your skin ground into sand. Then he goes striding back where he came from, but you—everything around you turns to stone.

  WELL, LOTS OF us have woken with everything wrong. Naked in a swimming pool, barefoot on an icy street. No panties, on a curb somewhere. Or in a grassy field, a field one might have loved that could have been Arcadia once, alone, back scratched, stinging bloody mess between legs.

  “Regrettable sex.” Is that what they call it now?

  Yeah, well. Who told you to ride the shark?

  HAVE DRIVEN TO the Everglades. Am in excursion mode. Over the MacArthur to I-95 and then west to the last road between so-called civilization and ruin. Then on until ruin gives way again to something good, long grass and runnels of water. Best things in the Everglades—aside from waving liquid grass and owls whose heads turn slowly, owls O knew well, owls always watching when things are bound to go wrong, crying warnings when girls in love with their fathers slur toward their fathers’ beds—best things are tree snails whose tiny clean shells look painted, and solution holes.

  Solution hole.

  Where limestone’s been cratered by acid in rain.

  Solution hole.

  An oxymoron?

  Or maybe, instead, an answer?

  Soluere = solve, dissolve.

  When I came home, walked around back and saw P by himself on the dock. He lay on his back on the wood planks, late afternoon light slanting upon him. He’d rested one bare foot on a knee, his skin lit and lovely. He held binoculars and scanned the sky, scoping the deepening blue and tropical clouds. His bare toes clenched once or twice, his foot waggled—a little boy’s delight.

  WHEN ARE YOU coming? asked my mother on the phone. You’re still coming, aren’t you?

  Of course!

  One doesn’t turn eighty every day, she said.

  Exactly why I’m coming. Wouldn’t miss it.

  And what will we do?

  We will have fun.

  Two ladies, she said, on the town.

  Across the way, at Costa Brava, on the corner balcony of the seventeenth floor, that young woman who has people come drum is sitting surrounded by paper. Origami paper, maybe, the colors of parrots, poincianas. She sits with one foot planted on the seat beside her, doing something I can’t make out. She seems to be folding the edge of each sheet of paper, gluing one to another. Creating something that is starting to look large.

  Floors above her, people still run. The tall girl and the boy who times his visits to the gym so he can run beside her, though he, like she, stares ahead through the wall of glass to the western sky.

  Are they running together?

  Are they really either of those words?

  A PERSON, IN FACT, not only can live perfectly well alone but also does not need pleasure.

  Other, maybe, than the sort she might get watching a rainstorm sheet through the sky, or going out on the town with her mother.

  Or swimming.

  Because there you are in the dark beneath the popcorn ceiling, wearing a silk nightie with straps that can be slipped off the shoulders as if by someone else’s hands, silk that can feel marvelous when drawn slowly across small pink portions of flesh; there you are, ready, having looked forward to this moment of small pleasure after a day of Latin and changing diapers on a cat and feeding an impossible duck and getting no messages, nothing, from no one, not on your screen and not in a bottle, which does, yes, make you drink wine until you start to slur some over the oceanic cork floor in a mirrored box floating high in the sky, the spinning cold sky, and drinking alone is not a good idea, I know, but what the fuck when there’s no one else there, which takes us back to the problem. So there you are, hankering for a small moment of pleasure of the sort you once had with a husband you really did love as well as you could and with a devil you should never have touched but he was hard to refuse, and of course with the one, the one who first split open your stupid young heart and you have never, ever, forgotten him, especially when he sailed back your way thirty years later and said Ahoy!, making you think that just maybe a miracle could happen and you would not remain the single-celled freak you seem to be, the paramecium or euglena you seem to be, something you so much don’t want to be that you contrive fata morganas of rationales for why it’s right to be alone, fata morganas that shimmer positively as you walk and walk alone on the Venetian but then when you are back in the musty old Love Boat, in this mirrored and corked box high in the sky, and have locked the door behind you, those fata morganas do what they do: dissolve into the stratosphere. Anyway. It’s the end of a day, and there you are with the silky straps in the dark, and you shut your eyes and begin to play the fantasies that will help. Fantasies of the men you’ve been gathering to pretend there’s something real here. Lying on the board of that tall stern man as he rows . . . Drifting down to the boys in the speedboat . . . Stealing at night aboard the small red boat and finding the wet-suited man, both surprised and waiting, and it’s dark but with gleams of light coming off the water, and you stand as if fascinated by the glimmers through the gently rocking window, and he comes behind you and very slowly runs his hands all along your curved silken sides and then lifts the back of your nightie . . .

  So there you are, you’ve constructed the scene, you’ve put together a hopeful conflation of men, you’re picturing it all and trying to imagine that your cold dry hands belong to somebody else.

  But then it’s like a spout of water that is just too weak. The mind wanders, tries to focus, but wanders again, the hands lose interest, they fall still, the whole thing dies away. Nothing is stirred, nothing moves, nothing comes of this, nothing.

  WELL, THE TRANSFORMATIONS are logical. Ovid made that very clear. The transformations are fair. You become what you were bound to be; you become what you actually are. Wasn’t it stone you wanted to be? Or glass, chrome? Something like that?

  VIRGIL WAS RIGHT, too. After the floods in the steam room and those lines of apartments, after the blood on the men’s spa wall, there came a final, invisible spasm. We knew what had happened by a notice in the mail room, with its bright hive of tiny brass doors.

  Now that a Contracting Firm has been selected for the Pool Project, the pool and garden deck will be closed as of August 15. Until further notice.

  How long do you think? I asked the Frenchman.

  He laughed. They say two years, which means at least three. And the whole jungle garden will be cut down—he sliced with his hand and laughed—and the koi fish will die. The contractors will say not, but we know how they are. He shook his head. And for this we get to pay nine million dollars. Nine. Which means each of us must now find at least twenty thousand.

  Lino walked by with a grin just then, tipping his blue-banded hat.

  Yes, said the Frenchman once Lino had passed. Nine million dollars, all going to that little man and his friends.

  Well, okay, said N. It’s not the end of the world. Just a stup
id swimming pool.

  But oh, like everyone, a liar, that N who transforms in the water, where for a time she does not have that body and does not feel that pain, pain you can see lance her.

  I swam in the hourglass this evening, the last time for a long while. Just glided through the cool with eyes shut. Bare arms and legs wide, floating, depth belling below.

  I opened my eyes and looked up at the dusky sky: Venus hung bright by the moon. Then looked over to the building. Up on the twenty-second floor, out on N’s balcony, stood P. He was leaning on his elbows, gazing down at the pool, and me.

  I lifted a hand to wave. But he turned quickly away.

  I WONDER. WAS IT ever anything other than two people running side by side, never getting closer?

  For instance:

  The Devil inside me the last time. Fucking and fucking, it wouldn’t end, as if the point of fucking were maintaining a state of perpetual need whose satisfaction was its own continuation, pushing into me again and again until I’d gone from near pleasure to pain to numbness to rage, thinking, You are alone, all you want is the ongoing fucking. I pretended to sleep, to be dead, so he’d know I knew his fucking had nothing to do with me, and when he came out of his trance every now and then and said, Are you here? Are you here? Are you with me? I lay in a furious torpor, which didn’t stop him, he kept right on fucking, his sick state of not-having and having at once.

  Or:

  Two people, husband and wife, on a bed. The light from the windows on the north is cool blue; from the south, through the wisteria, green. The parquet floor is laid on concrete, so all the sounds are hard. A new place where no one had yet lived when they carried their boxes up ten years before. Now, wisteria grows up to their fifth-floor wall of glass. A delicate spider dwells in the cold bathroom corner; the wife likes to observe its progress as she bathes. The black cat with long white whiskers and brows and a white spot on the nose is draped on an Ikea chair, glaucousness glazing one eye, for he is getting old, this once prancing boy-cat, fifteen years old. It’s late on a Sunday, because again they have been avoiding this all weekend until now, when it is too late.

  Can’t speak of it any more than has already been spoken for four or five years. Spoken of by her, anyway; he can’t bring himself to speak.

  They have failed again, the two of them. They just can’t love each other right. He weeps dry into his elbow, again; again, she stares at the ceiling. A feeling of hot bones in skin on a bed. Of something in your skin that must burst but can’t: you are trapped inside. Four or five or six years of these Sundays, but who would count such a thing. This is after the years of careful calendars, the five years of animal, vegetable, mineral calendars, which kept track of temperatures, injections, and blood, until this pair was told on the phone that es löhnt sich nicht, was not worth their trying.

  Outside, now, through the wisteria, down past the tram wires, on the gray street, the posters at the tram stop have shifted through their yearly cycle. Always the same poster each May; May is the time for the deodorant ad. Unwiderstehlichen Achselhöhle! Irresistible armpits. October would be the time for the bank poster. And no, she can’t buy mesh bags of seed for the tiny bandit birds now, because it is May. In May you are not allowed to feed the birds. You may go to the drugstore, to DM or Schlecker, and ask bitte for the small mesh bags, but the ladies will shake their heads.

  Nein. It is time for those birds to eat elsewhere.

  FAR OUT IN the bay, a man swims from one boat to another. All you can see is a small splash of arms in the rippling green, near where that hammerhead swam. The distance between boats is maybe two blocks.

  I will watch until he has reached the next boat.

  A boy once tumbled from his father, out of blue sky, and splashed into green sea just like this.

  Feathers, wax, sun.

  Have I mentioned that O had a daughter? Or maybe she was a stepdaughter: it didn’t matter to him. He was teaching her to write stories, just before being exiled from Rome.

  And when he was ordered to live and die alone on the Black Sea, she’s one of the few he sent letters.

  My dear darling girl.

  I FORGOT TO mention what’s in N and P’s apartment that surprised me: among polished fossils and vases of plumes and ferns were candies. Chocolates, truffles, drops wrapped in scarlet or green or golden foil, as well as the brass molds to make them: stars and crescents, eggs and hearts, snowflakes, butterflies, fleur-de-lis.

  What is this? I asked N.

  It’s P, she said. Haven’t I said? His business. Making candy.

  Making candy but not in Miami. Canada, in fact: he flies there each week.

  Why? I asked him, in the garage. Why are you in Miami?

  He shrugged, smiled weakly, and said, Oh, for N. I thought it might help.

  BOUGHT A WEEK’S worth of diapers, pills, litter, and cat food, gave N instructions, held Buster for a time on my lap, his paws slowly pedaling, then took a cab to the airport, and flew.

  Rental car from BWI down 97 to 50 past Annapolis to Woods Landing. When I parked, my mother was dressed up and ready to go.

  Let’s go to the Severn Inn, she said. You know the Severn?

  Yep, I said, as it’s where we always go.

  She was dying to be out among people, young people, any people, men. When we got to the restaurant I helped her clump with her candy-bright cane across the deck to a table looking over the river to the Naval Academy, and the sun hung low and red, and we agreed it was grand to be out on the water on a warm summer eve, two single ladies on the town. When the wine came we toasted her birthday and talked about some birthdays past, and after a while I told her the rationales and ramifications of my decision to retire from love.

  Well, well, she said. You know, darling, this might be how it is with our line of women. There’s nothing my mother liked more than being alone in her house in Adelaide, tending her garden, making pavlova. And there’s nothing I like more than being alone in my house, with the deck and tulip trees and paper. That might just be how our line is: contented, solitary women.

  I nodded, and we gazed at the melting sun, the water tin-bright, not the green-blue of paradise, and I didn’t have the heart to mention the difference between my mother and her mother, and me.

  But oh well, it did feel grand to be out with her as in old days, and sitting with her cane hooked behind the chair she looked like herself. She glanced around gaily in her chartreuse top with her imbalanced seawater eyes, and she smiled widely at a pair of cadets and waved to a little girl in a puff of pink dress trotting up and down the deck, and even though we hadn’t eaten, her wineglass was already empty. The waitress appeared and said, Another? and that mother of mine is always so fast that before I could say anything she nodded passionately and said, I should think so. Do you know I’m eighty today?

  Well, happy birthday! sang the waitress, and the small girl by the rail spun to see.

  The new glass came, was gulped down at once, too little of her crab cake was eaten and almost none of her green tomatoes, and I thought dammit, she takes lots of pills, but okay, it’s her birthday, let her be jolly. Then as we were leaving, after I’d helped her clump down the ramp and across the asphalt to the car, as I was propping open the door with one hand and holding her elbow with the other, she began, slowly, to fall.

  I have seen and seen this moment. It is slower every time.

  She was clutching my wrist with one hand, her purse with the other, and one foot had veered into the passenger well, but the horizon must have tilted or her thin leg suddenly failed, because then her fingers were digging into my skin, she was falling slowly back, she had suddenly turned so heavy I could not hold her, I could not hold her, and she tilted backward and slid out of my hands and fell, her head hard on the asphalt.

  Mom, I said, Mom!

  She murmured something, and I was on my knees trying to lift her shoulders, her head, her hair slick with blood.

  Help!
We need help.

  Then as people ran and called, as she lay on the ground and I pressed my scarf to her head to stop the blood, but it would not stop because of the Plavix, and I said, Mom, Mom, Mom, she began to make a noise. A deep grunting, something that could come from a bear or the ground. She muttered and grunted, her arms and legs stiffened like branches, and when she opened her eyes and stared at me, there was nothing I knew in that face.

  In the ambulance they wouldn’t let me in the back with her so I sat in the front, clasped her purse, and tried to follow the roads we took so I could find our way home. Route 50 to 97 to 695 and into Baltimore but then what? At the hospital—which hospital? Shock-Trauma something—they raced to wheel her in one door and shouted for me to go in another and find her inside. Find her inside. Find her inside. I ran through sliding doors, down halls, through more sliding doors, up steps, down more halls. When I found her she was in a sheeted place with people moaning on either side, blanket to her shoulders, face pointing above, pointing because her eyes and cheeks had suddenly sunk and she was nothing but nose.

  I took her cold hand. She opened an eye and held my hand tight.

  Something happened, she muttered.

  Yes. But you’ll be fine.

  Mm, she said, and shut the eye.

  I rubbed her knuckles. After a moment she squinted.

  Am thinking, she said, of alphabet. Got to hyena.

  (Her animal game.)

  Hyena, I said. Okay: iguana.

  A pale smile appeared. Iguana. Was that . . . in Ecuador? Did we live there?

  Yes, we did. Your turn.

  She shut her eyes, then said, What?