Snap, p.24
Snap, page 24
The university’s indoor swimming pool is just ten minutes away across Milbrook Avenue. Ruby used to swim there as a child and remembers the slime on the walls of the locker room, the tile floor slick with algae and mold. So he is not nostalgic. He is happy to see that the old pool is gone, replaced by a modern complex. Of course he has to lie his way inside. He’s an alum, he says, and if that’s not enough, his brother’s a student. His brother’s in the locker room now, he lies, waiting for a game of squash.
Ruby’s got his swimsuit on under his cut-offs, his mother’s ancient flowered bathing cap stuffed in a pocket. In the locker room he bites off the daisies.
For an hour he follows his familiar, comfortable routine. Ten crawl, five breast stroke, five back stroke, ten crawl. Then a brief respite, blinking chlorine from his eyes, before repeating the laps. In the interval he treads, surprised to find his body unchanged, after all, still in working order. Its very clumsiness is reassuring. He never has mastered the butterfly, and his breast stroke is awkward owing to one stiff knee, but his back stroke is straight; he charts its course by following the beams on the ceiling. His crawl is formless but his kick is firm and strong. Every so often, he brushes up against the dense braid of the lane divider, but never once does he bash into an oncoming swimmer. His testicles shrink as usual, and the exertion makes him thirsty as hell, but he’s too disciplined to climb out for a drink until he’s finished his laps. Also, he’s horny, which is to say that every nerve in his body is alert to the suck and pull of the enveloping water. It’s as if he’s entirely naked. Or, more exactly, as if he’s shed even his skin and is floating in a substance that mingles with his own. Extra Sensual Perception, Dale Lewis jokes.
Ruby actually feels passion.
He climbs out of the pool, throws his towel across his shoulders, pulls the bathing cap off and makes his way through the maze of men’s lockers. His legs are like springs, bouncing him all the way home. He is thinking of linguini, of the clams in their parsley-flecked oil. Changing clothes at his mother’s, he spies the box with the glass globe he bought at the gallery. He’ll give it to Linell, he thinks. Why not? At least she’ll know what it’s for.
He is finished with the birdcage when Linell gets home. Even the spray paint has dried. Together they move the pieces of the wicker set into the dining room, and Ruby stands on a ladder to fasten the green monstrosity in place. It is the most hideous object he has ever made. Beneath it they slurp their linguini.
“This is delicious,” Ruby says, and he tells her about the new swimming pool. He even tells her, embarrassed, about his mother’s bathing cap. He’d left the rubber daisy petals scattered on the locker room bench. He must have left his loafers there as well. He can’t find them. He sits cross-legged on the floor. Linell watches him from her place on the loveseat. Her chin glistens with oil and Parmesan, and a soaked clam falls from Ruby’s fork to his knee. He lifts it and sucks it into his mouth. Linell once worked for an archaeologist, sexing clams dug out of a dry riverbed. You can tell the sex of a clam, she explains to Ruby, by counting the “teeth” along the straight, hinged portion of its shell.
Night falls. When it’s dark, the new chandelier throws a bony apparition on the ceiling. Its very spin is deranged, like a dancing skeleton’s agitated pirouettes. Needing to escape it they go upstairs.
Somewhere in the world, something terrible is happening to somebody and Ruby is powerless to know of its particulars. It might be happening right now in the house next door, or six thousand miles away. It might be a tidal wave, an avalanche, a fire, a sniper, a spider, a murder, a snake. It might be terror or poison. The victim needs help, which Ruby can’t give. He can offer only horror and condolence. He cannot offer love. For the moment, he doesn’t want to think about love. He thinks only about breathing, the way a swimmer tries to regulate his breath. One foot is off the mattress. His fingers explore, a bit eautiously, this new territory whose scenery frightens him. So many hills and valleys. So damp. So moist. What hides in its shadows? Something tickles his neck, and something else scratches gently at the bare underside of his knee. However, he still needs to get somewhere. He needs to make his way through and around. At the end he is startled by the pleasure itself, as if pleasure is what he’s been wary of, all along.
Something is going to happen. No. It already has. They are finished. He even moans into the soft, damp flesh of her arm. Blinking, he reaches toward the night table and takes hold of the gift. This time the glass ball has a reddish tinge. From what? Their two bodies? But not even Linell can determine its function. “Maybe it has no function,” she says. “Maybe it’s one of those things.”
5
TUL OCEAN is flat, eerily calm, lead-colored. From this distance it appears unnaturally viscous, as if, were she to try to swim in it, it might pull her under and hold her in place. Like a fish in a paperweight, fly on fly paper, a moth in the bottom of a drinking glass.
To imagine anything moving of its own volition under that sea is nearly impossible. Of course, things do; she can see them on the beach where they’ve been thrown up. Blowfish, jellyfish, horseshoe crabs with speckled backs, masses of kelp, halves of clams. The clams always come up in halves, and the crab shells are empty, their insides picked out by the birds. The kelp is red, brown and stuck all over with glistening bits of shell.
I have no imagination, Ida thinks. If a vulture dropping were a Rorschach print, I’d look at it and see a vulture dropping. The picked crab shells make me hungry, and all of this sand is just grit. When I look at the ocean, all I can see is a lot of water.
There’s a porpoise out there, too. A dead one, on the beach, its stomach turned to muck. Like tar. Ida can smell it all the way from the top of the lighthouse, where she had hoped to escape it. She tries to recall if she has ever smelled anything so bad before in her life. She hasn’t. Not even the bottom of the river near Audrey’s house, after the tide has gone out and left a stink like the stink of a garbage dump soaked in a hot rain. No. There are degrees of rottenness, and the porpoise is rotten, rotten, rotten.
In its way, the stink is refreshing.
Everything is. All this scumminess offers its own salvation, the way a rotted pier is more picturesque than a new one. Ida is wearing the windshield rag, an old T-shirt of Big Stan’s. For years he’s used it to wipe the grime off the windshield wipers and to clean the slush from the soles of his boots in winter. After a muddy rain, he polishes the hubcaps with it. When the windshield fogs up, he uses the shirt to wipe off the condensation. The shirt is gray, threadbare, tattered and has holes as if it was meant to, in a pattern of melting circles. Against her skin, Ida thinks, the holes feel like the droplets left drying after a bath: small, vaporous sequins of water.
There. She is using her imagination, after all. A shirt like a map of evaporating ponds.
I’m hungry, she thinks. I am light as a sea oat.
Ida began the day as a masthead, on a wrecked ship displayed on a stretch of white beach just south of the previous night’s campground. Big Stan “needed” some pictures of terns, he said, and he set out to find some. In the meantime, Nina had Ida climb up on the boat, position herself on its shattered, jutting bow, arch her back proudly, and above all make herself comfortable. She was to extend her arms, lift her head high and maintain the proper balance while Nina took pictures. But after a minute Nina decided on a change of costume. She ran to the truck for the windshield rag, which Ida put on in the leeward shadow of the broken mast. A lizard appeared between two weathered planks, flashed its lizard smile at her nakedness and vanished with a rasp of wizened feet.
“Mastheads are sad,” Nina advised. “And lonely.’
“And hopeful,” said Big Stan, who passed by at that moment.
“And heroic,” added Nina, who reached up to straighten a tatter of Ida’s rags. Ida wondered if her nipples would show in the picture. She didn’t mind one way or another. The sunlight was full on the soles of her feet and spun bracelets of gold round her ankles below the unhemmed cuffs of her jeans. A masthead is sad, hopeful, heroic and lonely, she said to herself, as Nina positioned her head under the folds of black felt behind the camera.
“Okay,” said Nina. “You’re upside-down, you know.”
Ida looked at Nina questioningly.
“You’re upside-down, when I look at you through this thing.”
A moment later Nina’s head popped out again.
“The feeling’s all wrong,” she said. “Forget it.” She withdrew the film holder from the camera and dropped it, unex-posed, back into her bag. Ida jumped down from the splintery boat just as Big Stan, ambling past again, dropped his lens down a steep escarpment of shells. The lens rolled, skidded and bounced finally onto a moist grave of sand at the tide line.
“Goddamn it, Nina,” Big Stan grumbled. He blew the sand grains from the lens, fogged it with his breath and cleaned it with the hem of Nina’s Indian skirt. Nina was smoking a cigarette. Her eyes were closed, but when a wave came up and lapped her toes, she opened them to watch and shook her salt-and-pepper hair. Big Stan wasn’t wearing a shirt. A faint sunburn glowed on his amazing paleness. He could be carved from a monolith of alabaster, Ida thought. He was always cool as stone and luminous as ice. What a body. The sunlight, overcome, vanished in his bright orange hair.
“Anyway, Ida, thanks a lot for trying,” yawned Nina. “Too bad it wasn’t worth your ambrosial sweat.”
“Sorry,” said Ida. It was the first word Ida had uttered all morning. She has grown very careful with words. If she speaks one a day, maybe then it will be heeded. Yesterday she’d said, “Orange, please,” her cautious way of saying she was tired of milkshakes for dinner. Nina bought an orange snowcone, instead, along with a small tub of popcorn. Tonight Ida might say, “Salted, please.” She doesn’t trust herself not to say please. She has come to feel an impassioned apathy, as if thrilled by the notion that nothing can ever truly affect her. Not even climbing the lighthouse had worn her out. At the top of the stairs, the landing opened into a room, round, with windows dotting the circumference. One windowpane had fallen to the floor and shattered, and Ida stuck her head out for a look. She was higher than she’d expected, and she could see the very shape of the horizon as it circled the endless stretch of ocean. Birds wheeled over the water. Big Stan and Nina were specks beside a larger speck, which Ida still smelled. “Two hundred and twenty-two,” she was saying. “Two hundred and twenty-three. Two hundred and twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Three hundred and twenty-seven.”
Ida paused, perplexed, embarrassed to find herself still counting steps even though she was already at the top. Blood hammered in her ears with a bang-bang-bang.
But then she felt the breeze through the holes in her shirt and sighed. When she opened her eyes, Nina was there beside her with an armload of stuff, panting. The masthead pose had been just practice, Nina said, but now they really had to get down to business. She dropped her bundle on the dusty lighthouse floor and began sorting through it like a rag picker hunting in a junkyard.
“We’ll have to take that old shirt off,” Nina blurted out. “I have this off-white thing, this cream. It’s sort of satin.” She lifted up masses of creamy satin yellowed with age. There was enough for a bridal train, which was exactly what it was, Nina confessed. She’d bought the train at a bankruptcy auction. Ida traced the outline of a stain with her finger.
“If Scarlett O’Hara made a dress out of curtains, we can make a dress out of this!” Nina exclaimed. She helped Ida out of the tattered shirt and wrapped her up in the satin, fastening it tightly in back with two diaper pins.
“It has to be tight to stay up,” Nina said. “Is it tight?”
Ida nodded yes.
“Is it too tight to breathe comfortably?” asked Nina hopefully.
Yes, Ida nodded. She wondered if she’d get to keep her underwear on. Nina was removing Ida’s jeans. She let them drop to the floor amid the other items and rummaged around until she found a turban. The turban was creamy satin as well, adorned with a brooch in the shape of a rose with petals of tarnished filigree. Nina scooped Ida’s hair out of sight and tugged the turban down over her ears.
“There,” she said. “Well, maybe some gloves. I don’t know. What do you think? About gloves, I mean.”
Ida stepped into the pile of laces and satins and began sorting through them with her naked toes. She saw no gloves but found a slipper of gold lamé. Just one, flat soled and strapless, soft as a ballet shoe.
Nina said, “You can put on that slipper, instead. That would be nice. That’s the absolute, perfect thing. You have to look a little lost, like you’ve been wandering for centuries. If I could brush a little powder on your cheeks …
Nina dug in her net bag and pulled out a cracked compact. Inside was a brush and the barest, finest residue of powder. Nina studied the empty insides of the compact before swabbing it furiously with the brush and then poking its bristles into one of Ida’s cheeks and then the other. Ida sneezed.
“It’s not white enough,” Nina complained. “God bless you. I suppose we could just use talc.” But Nina couldn’t find her talc and so settled on her canister of pills and tablets. From this she fished an aspirin and crushed it with her thumb against the windowsill. She swept the residue onto the palm of one hand, and with the cosmetic brush applied the medicine to Ida’s cheeks and forehead.
“I’d like some on your lips, too,” Nina said. “And on your eyes. On the lids, I mean.”
Nina yawned. Ida sneezed and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, which stung from the analgesic. Pain’s the pinch you give yourself to see if you’re awake, she reminded herself as she slipped her foot into the gold lamé slipper. It was a perfect fit, like Cinderella’s, with a graceful, pointed toe and seamless instep. Ida wiggled her toes, arched her foot, flexed and relaxed. But Nina was skeptical. “I thought maybe we should put it on the wrong foot,” she instructed Ida. “You have to look wayward. Depraved. You know.”
Ida thought she did know. After all, she was still counting steps. Five hundred and one, five hundred and six, five hundred and ninety-two. It was very much like counting sheep, she thought, except she wasn’t getting tired. Instead she felt vexed, and light, as if each imagined step were just a step away from floating. Zero gravity at last. So that she wasn’t really frightened of jumping out the window, once Nina made the suggestion. She looked out at the sea and on to a sea of waving grasses. Nothing ever stopped moving out there. The grasses, the clouds, the water — nothing was still, everything shifted and changed. Even the rocks seemed to bob up and down in the waves. Now the breakwater vanished, and now it popped into view again. Fish jumped in silver arcs along the horizon, and a freighter traveled slowly toward the edge. Then to the south a sail flashed in the sun where no sail had been just a moment before. Ida wanted to be part of it all, and Nina would provide her with the opportunity.
“Just jump when I tell you,” Nina advised, and rushed down to set up her camera. It was an awkward setup, the tripod in the sand, and Nina was slow. Ida was getting impatient. She wanted to jump, and she wanted to jump at this instant. She fully intended to fly. It all seemed so possible. She was a featherweight; she would twirl, list, spin and float. The bridal train would open like a parachute and carry her along. But Nina shouted that she wanted a bird in the background, swooping at the instant that Ida jumped. Ida sighed. Nina wanted a seagull, but seagulls rarely swooped, exactly. They darted, glided, hovered and dived. Nina might be waiting forever. Also, she changed her mind when she’d finished with the camera and looked up to see Ida waiting at the window.
“Earrings,” Nina shouted, and disappeared once again for the back of the pickup. She returned with two prisms on tooled clasps, climbed the steps and closed the prisms on Ida’s ear-lobes.
“These prisms are Lucite,” Nina said critically, “but they look like glass if you wait for the right kind of light.”
Which is what they did next. Ida got good and ready in the meantime, with her ass on the sill and her legs dangling out and the satin bunched up around her eager thighs. Far below on the beach, Nina muttered on about placement and angle. When she got the angle right, she forgot to lock the camera, so it slid out of place when she slid in the film. Then she had to adjust the bellows, and then when a seagull finally dove in the background, Nina was yawning, so they waited some more. Ida felt thirsty and licked her lips. Aspirin. She was three stories up. She thought of all of her falling practice and of her fine, studied technique. Twenty deep breaths, twenty sharp, or was it the other way around? Not that it mattered, anymore. She was hungry and light; she would float to the beach in her wrapper of satin, blinking sunlight like the fringes on a blade of dune grass.
“Stop breathing,” Nina cried, having draped her black cloth behind the viewer of the camera. “Oh, God. I just can’t get the earrings. You’re too high up. No, wait, there’s a seagull. Wait. Don’t move. Don’t move. Oh, shit. Where’s Big Stan? I can’t concentrate. Let go of the sill now, honey. Okay? Jump!” Nina yelled.
And Ida did.
Something saved her, though, in that first split second. The turban. It was slipping off her head, and just as she let go Ida flung herself backward, arching her back, so as not to lose it. Her legs kicked up and the slipper flew off. Nina snapped the picture just as the slipper shot into the sky. Later on, it would show up in the developed photograph, clear and distinct and gold as a comet. Which was funny, because they never found that slipper on the beach. It simply disappeared.
But Ida fell backward into the lighthouse, onto the cushion of broken glass.
Which is how she remembers what she remembers.
She is lying on her back upon shards of window. The lighthouse is old, so its windows are thin and brittle. Broken, the pane is all cutting edge. As a child, Ida loved to put her weight on a frozen puddle, to test its solidity. First she’d poke the ice with just the toe of her boot, and then with the whole of her foot. The ice never cracked all at once, but with slow, creaking whispers, like a city of miniature voices. It’s that sound she hears now as she lies on the floor, a glassy, brittle chorus that reminds her of something else. Life before Ruby, the day of her fall down the terrible, wonderful steps. Ida had forgotten all about that day. That was Ruby’s doing. Once he came along, there was never a need to look back. But now she remembers. In the basement an orange light played along the lengths of some wine glass stems, snapped at both ends. Three stems rolled past along the gritty surface of the basement floor, clink-clinking across the cement. A giant water bug vanished into a corner, and water gurgled overhead in a new copper pipe. Then Mitch ran over with his wooden crate of bottles and knelt down, exclaiming. Ida hadn’t known it was Mitch at first. She saw a giant kneeling shape that was the shape of kindness, that wrapped its arms around her body and carried her upstairs. Mitch kept a corkscrew in one of his pockets, and its sharp, exposed spiral stuck into her hip. Ida remembers the sun room, too, with its rows and rows of windows. Through them, she saw a gridwork of green pastureland, and above that, a gridwork of sky. There was a long paved road that curved out of sight, and some parked cars polished like gems. In Ida’s dizzy vision the estate seemed endless, as if the whole world were dotted with grazing ponies. She remembers too the sweet scent of fermenting oranges, a recollection that confuses her until she recalls the shot glass of Grand Marnier, delivered by a distracted Martha. Then Mitch had sat down and plumped his giant elbows on the table before her, and made a steeple with his meaty fingers. Ida remembers the steeple, and the triangle of face she saw peering at her through its negative spaces. It was Mitch’s face, and it was saying things she hoped she wasn’t hearing.
