This is the Water Read online

  You feel like wet clay in your bathing suit. Your breasts, your rear, are not perfect at all. “Is Cleo excited about the meet tomorrow?” you ask him. You are hot in the water. You wonder how long you can last before having to get out and dive into the cooler pool with the swim team kids. You think Paul says, “She can’t wait,” but you cannot be sure. The children are yelling so loudly. They have started doggy-paddle races now in the kidney shaped pool, and you think to yourself that here is a conglomeration of all the eastern states’ best swimmers and here they are doggy-paddling. Paul invites you and your girls out to dinner. You say yes, and thank you. You say you know the girls would love that. You think how you would love it too. You wonder what you will wear. You hear him say, “But maybe a better idea would be to order a pizza. Everywhere will be crowded.” You are relieved that you can wear anything. You are getting used to the water. You could now stay forever in the whirlpool. Have the pizza in the whirlpool, why not? you think. You hear Paul say he is too hot. He would jump into the pool with the kids, he says, but he is afraid the dose of chlorine in the hotel pool would asphyxiate him. You hear him say he can already feel the chlorine drying out his throat and tearing up his eyes. You look at him and his eyes are red and tears are sliding down and you think that this must be how he looks when he is really upset. You wonder what could make him really upset. You are glad when he gets out first and heads up to his room. You did not want to have to rise from the water first and let him see your body in the suit. You see Dinah and her husband walk into the pool through the door at the same time Paul and Cleo are about to leave. Paul calls to you, “Come to our room in thirty minutes. I’ll order the pizza.” You see Dinah look at her husband and then look at you. You tell Dinah you like her swimsuit before she can make a snide comment about you and Paul. You tell her it’s very Marilyn Monroe. Dinah’s husband smiles at you. He does not even try to have a conversation. He can’t hear anything above the swimmers’ voices, amplified in the small room of the pool. He sits down in a chair next to a rubber plant that is really made out of rubber. You know because one of your girls has already pointed out its almost indestructible leaves to you. Dinah looks down at her suit, or really at her breasts coming out of the suit.

  You head upstairs in the elevator with your girls. You had to tell them twelve times to get out of the pool, before finally throwing the Styrofoam lifesaver that hangs on the wall onto their heads to make them hear you. In the elevator you see how they are dripping pool water on a cheap knock-off of an oriental-design carpet. You let them take long showers when you get to your room. You are thinking that at least you are getting your money’s worth from the hotel in the way of the hot water bill. You think you can hear Paul in the next room clearing his throat.

  When the pizza comes, the girls and Cleo eat in your room and Paul invites you to eat in his room. This is Paul’s black leather coat on the dresser, looking like an extension of Paul himself, the arms of the coat slightly folded, the elbows holding wrinkles in the leather that were created by the constant flexing of his arms, the cuffs looking gently worn and gray compared to the black of the rest of the leather. This is Paul moving clothes off one bed so that you can sit while you talk. This is Paul asking you questions about yourself that you’re not used to answering. You are used to Thomas talking to you about what he thinks is important. You are not used to having to speak for so long in front of a man. This is you thinking that it feels a little like you are emptying your purse out in front of Paul, even though you are not. You are telling Paul about where you grew up and you are telling Paul about your brother, about the good and the bad of your brother, and Paul laughs once in a while, at the parts you mean to be funny, because you try to be funny telling him things you think that you have never even told Thomas about your brother because Thomas never wanted to hear about your brother, even when your brother was alive. When it’s late, and you think you should go, you wish you could pick up what you let fall out of your purse. Is there a way to put back all the things you said, as if they were just your ChapStick and your hairbrush, and zip them inside? When you get up, Paul rises off his bed at the same time. This is Paul saying he wishes you could stay longer, saying he has enjoyed talking with you, saying he is tired of hearing himself lecturing all day at school, and that sometimes he thinks he has lectured for so many years that his voice would continue on talking without him if he could just take himself outside of himself while he was teaching and sit down in a chair in the lecture hall with his students and, like the rest of them, text on his phone. This is you laughing and this is you thinking you should say something about Chris, because Paul and Chris are married and you want Paul to know you are aware of that, and that you talking to Paul was not about you wanting to be with Paul in any other way than just two swim-team parents talking, but already you know the conversation has gone beyond that. You haven’t mentioned the team or your daughters’ swimming once. This is you sitting back down in such a way that you can pull your shirt away from the muffin top of fat on your belly so it doesn’t look as bad. It’s something you only do when you want to look presentable, when you first meet a client whose wedding you may photograph, for example. It’s something you never do at home when you just sit in the chair at the kitchen table across from Thomas, because he’s always reading a magazine and wouldn’t notice anyway. This is you asking how Paul first met Chris.

  He tells you he first met her in Greece on a trip he took right before he started college. They were both just eighteen years old. You listen to how beautifully he describes how they met at an archaeological site in front of a figure captured in ash during the eruption of a well-known volcano. You can hear your girls and Cleo in your room next door laughing at a show on the television. Outside it’s getting dark, and you notice that Paul has not gotten up to turn on the light. He looks gray in the fading light and you imagine he could very well be the man frozen in volcanic ash come back to life.

  You gasp so quietly, almost to yourself, when he leans over you to take a picture from his wallet, which is behind you on the bed. You think you should stand up now and leave. Your gasp frightened you. You had no idea how it would feel to have him so close to you. You wonder if there’s something the matter with you. If all of a sudden you’ve developed the disorder Thomas read about in the article where you’re hypersensitive to everything. Or maybe there’s nothing wrong with you, and this is the most normal your body has felt in a long time. Normal because you want to be close to someone and you want them to touch you. You feel warmth coming off Paul as if he were pavement on a hot day. You wonder, for a moment, if it’s the room. But then you realize the heat is coming from you as much as it’s coming from him. You look at his wallet pictures instead of leaving. Chris with long hair blowing in a breeze. Cleo as a baby being held up in the sky by Chris as white, puffy clouds float by. Chris from behind as she’s looking at a cathedral. Of course, you think, he would take a picture of her from behind. What man wouldn’t? Paul is smiling as he shows you the pictures. You accept the wine he has brought out of his bag. You drink from a hotel cup that still tastes like the plastic it was wrapped in. You do not expect the phone call from home. It’s Thomas wanting a recap of the day. You do not tell him you are in Paul’s room. You do not tell him you are looking at a picture of Chris’s great rear taken by Paul, and that you feel as if you are seeing Chris’s great rear through Paul’s very own eyes. You tell him you’re in the middle of dinner. You tell him you’ll call him later. “Wait,” he says. “Make sure the girls do some of their studying while they’re there,” he says. You can hear him running the water from the kitchen tap as he talks. You hear him swallow. You are amazed that you know the sound of his swallow, its timbre and tone. You would know it anywhere, the way a mother knows the sound of her own child’s cry. “Talk to you later,” you say.

  Paul tells you more things that night than you have ever told Thomas, or anyone else. They are things from long ago, the embarrassing things that Thomas would not
have listened to you talk about, because to him they would sound trivial. You tell Paul these things and he laughs. His laughter makes you even funnier. You really are quite funny, you think to yourself. You feel as if you have turned that darned purse upside down, you have turned it inside out, you have shaken it and let all the lint float down onto the hotel linen. You let him touch your cheek, you turn your face as if you would kiss his hand, your lips on the flesh of his palm. The TV next door gets louder, the show is a comedy. Now, in addition to the children’s laughter, you can hear the canned laughter of a popular show. “Is this how you handle all those students who come to you with questions about their prose?” you ask, your words spoken into his hand. He laughs. He keeps his hand on your cheek. He is looking at your face.

  “I have confessions of my own,” he says.

  “That sounds ominous,” you say, jokingly. The canned laughter gets louder.

  “No, I mean real confessions. Ever since that news piece about the serial murderer killing all those women in Denver, I’ve been on edge. I have to tell someone about what happened to me once—well, really, what happened to someone I met.”

  “Tell me,” you say.

  “All right,” he says.

  This is Paul’s story. This is him telling the story in the room with the lights still off and only the light from the parking lamps outside coming into the room. This is him interrupting his story, just for a moment, to find another bottle of wine in his bag, and opening it and pouring it for the both of you into your plastic cups. This is him saying, “This is a story I’ve been trying to write, because I thought it would lessen my guilt.” This is him giving you the facts. This is you thinking this is a joke, or this is him trying out a story on you that he hasn’t finished yet because he wants to know if it will hold your interest.

  “It happened a long time ago, just after Chris and I came back from Greece. We were so young. We were taking it slow. She wanted to separate for a while. She suggested we date other people, to see if we were sure about dating seriously.” He doesn’t look at you when he says this, sitting next to you on the bed. He is looking at nothing or he is looking down at the wine in his cup. He is wearing a white tee shirt. You look at his chest, seeing his heart beating slightly beneath the cotton. His voice sounds quiet. It is a voice you think he uses when he wants to capture the attention of his students. You think he is probably the kind of teacher who never has to reprimand his students to get their attention. All he has to do is whisper, and they lean in closer to him to hear everything he has to say. You do lean in closer. You can feel the breath from his words blowing across the hairs in your ear, and the sensation sends shivers down your spine. You learn that he knew a woman named Bobby Chantal. You try to picture her. She looks just like Chris in your head, blond and perfect. You try another picture of her, because she couldn’t possibly look like Chris. There couldn’t be two perfect Chrises. You picture Bobby Chantal with dark brown hair and a curvy body. Paul is quiet. “Go on, I’m listening,” you say. He nods. “This is difficult for me,” he says. He takes a deep breath and continues. You would like to take notes. You would like to reach over him and pick up the hotel stationery and the hotel pen loaded with the barest minimum of ink and begin to write what he’s about to tell you because you have the feeling that you’ll want to replay his words in your head later, when you are apart from him, and you don’t trust yourself to remember them well. Today you have already forgotten to remind your youngest to pack an extra pair of goggles for the swim meet, and at the last meet her one pair broke right before her event, and she had to borrow her friend’s that were too big, and when she came up from finishing her race you could see the water sitting in the eye cups, the wavy line of it going halfway up her eyes.

  “ . . . I said yes, and then we went for a drive,” you hear Paul say, and then you could kick yourself, because you realize you have already forgotten a part of the story he is telling. What he said yes to you can’t quite remember. Yes, now you remember, Bobby wanted to go for a drive. He had just met her that day, not far from his college campus. It was a cool summer’s day. Fall was in the air, but it hadn’t yet started to change the colors of the leaves. She met him after he had just gotten out of his creative writing class, while they were both standing on a long line at a coffee shop. The cool temperature made everyone want an afternoon coffee. He had joked with Bobby Chantal, saying by the time they were served they could have had a coffee sitting down at the nearby restaurant. “That’s a good idea. I’d like to sit down for a while,” she had said, and she got off the line and started walking toward the restaurant. “Do you mind if I join you?” he asked. They had a coffee at an Italian restaurant where the odors from the kitchen were so strong that even their coffee smelled like garlic and basil. She was easy to talk to. She was older than he was, but still young, and very attractive. She told him about growing up in a small house on Cape Cod, and how she used to bandage her little dolls so that they looked like mummies. She didn’t call her dollhouse a dollhouse, she called it a doll hospital, and then when she was older she went off to nursing school. He pointed out how beautiful the sunset was going to be. He could see pink clouds rolling in. She suggested going on a drive. He recommended they go up the highway a bit, and then to a lake where there was a place to sit and talk. As they drove, she told him the stretch of highway they were on was the stretch that was famous for making Vietnam vets have violent flashbacks, its rolling green hills reminiscent of Nam. What was stranger, she said, was that many vets came from far away just to travel the stretch, to see what memories it could stir up, as if stirring them up could somehow vanish them. Paul found this fascinating. “I might use that in a story someday,” he told Bobby. She held out the flat of her hand to him. “Don’t forget to give me a percentage of the royalty check,” she said. A little ways up the highway there was a rest stop and a lookout. “I bet there’s a good view up there of those mountains that look like Nam,” she said. “Let’s stop here instead of going all the way to the lake.”

  They stopped the car at the rest stop parking lot and hiked up a short path to the lookout; as they walked, he held her hand. At the top they sat on a picnic table. She told him to close his eyes and imagine he was in Nam, even though he’d never been there. At first it was difficult. A woodpecker was pecking a beech tree nearby, as rhythmically as if he were pounding nails, but then somehow the noise faded, and when he opened his eyes again, he really was in Nam. He could almost make out helicopters flying over the ridgeline, and huts with straw roofs, and thin threads of smoke rose from the ground that he could imagine were from cook fires. “Unbelievable,” he said to Bobby. They stayed sitting on the picnic table until dark, and then he kissed her. She drew him down on her as she lay flat on the table as if it were a bed. And well, Paul says, one thing led to another. Afterward, she excused herself and said she was going to use the rest stop bathroom. “I don’t think she ever made it through the door,” Paul says. While he waited, he could see the black outlines of the mountains, and he imagined again that he was a soldier in Nam, only now it was night and the enemy was all around. At first when he heard a scream he figured that he had let himself imagine for too long that he really was in Nam and that what he had heard was just an owl screeching in a nearby tree and not a human screaming for his or her life. When Bobby didn’t come back, and the owl never called again, he went down the path toward the restroom to check on her. When he found her she was facedown, the white of her hospital dress easy to see in the light coming from the entrance to the restroom and making it look as if her dress were glowing. He called her name, but there was no answer. He turned her over by her shoulder, and the front of her white hospital dress was anything but white now. It was stained with blood and dirt, and even her face and her forehead were covered in a mixture of blood and clods of dirt and bits of grass. He felt for a pulse, but there was none. There was no point in even calling an ambulance. He could see, as he held her, that her neck had been slit. He looked in
the parking lot, but there were no other cars aside from his. He ran around the back of the restroom and along the edge of the woods, but no one was there either.

  While standing at the edge of the woods, and looking into the darkness, he realized that if he called the police, he would become a prime suspect. They would check for signs of rape. They would want to know how he knew her. How was it that he had just met her that evening and then she was killed? “It was not like I could help them with the case,” Paul says. “I hadn’t seen or heard anybody. I figured the best thing, the least complicated thing, was for me to get out of there, so I left. I took off. I left her there all covered in blood.” Paul puts his hands over his face in the dark hotel room. You feel like maybe you missed something. Wasn’t it just a second ago that the both of you were laughing about a silly college anecdote you were telling him about the time you ate brownies and didn’t know they were laced with pot, and you had never even smoked pot, and you were so hungry and ate so many that it was as if you were tripping and the EMTs had to come and calm you down and then everyone on campus the next day knew what had happened. Wasn’t it just a second ago you were feeling overwhelmed by his body leaning over yours? Weren’t you just thinking about him touching you?

  And now he is talking about unimaginable things, horrible things, blood and rape and a throat being slit. It feels as though you are being sucked down into that evil abyss you always seem to fall into whenever you think about your brother and his suicide. You are standing now. You are heading out the door. You feel a strong urge to check on your daughters, no, to be with them, to hold them. How reassuring it will be to have them in your arms and smell the shampoo in their hair and the faint smell of chlorine that lingers no matter how many times they shower after swimming. When Paul stands and grabs your arm as you are going, you almost let out a scream, but he lets go, so you stop. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’ve never told anyone before. I should have guessed your first reaction would be to run away.”