My mouth puckered with distaste. I hated eel, and up until that point I thought Del had too. Her appetite had remained good until then, her tastes never including the stereotypical cravings of most pregnant women. Until now that was.
“Honey?” I called. No response. I moved through the living room and caught sight of her standing in the veranda, her back to me. There was a languidness to her posture, as if she’d fallen asleep standing up. “Del,” I said, moving closer. She turned her head a little, showing me a slight angle of her face.
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“What are you doing?”
“Looking outside. What’s it look like I’m doing?” The acidic edge to her voice caught me off guard. Emotional swing, I figured, and tried a different tack.
“I got a call today from Edward and Towe.”
“Who?”
“The firm I applied to a few weeks back, remember?”
“Oh yeah.”
I waited, hoping she would turn fully to look at the smile on my face, but she returned her gaze to the sea instead.
“Yeah. I got an interview in the morning.”
“That’s great,” she said, but her tone said otherwise. It was as if I’d told her the mail was here or that my mother was coming to visit next week.
“I think it could be the one,” I said, still trying to engage her, but she didn’t respond. She picked up a glass of water from the windowsill and took a drink before setting it down.
“I’m really tired,” she murmured after a drawn silence. She moved toward the stairs, turning her shoulders so that she wouldn’t brush against me, and left me standing in the doorway alone with my good news that had deflated like a pricked balloon. Some quiet music clicked on a moment later upstairs.
I hovered there for nearly a minute before stepping into the porch to stand where she had. The skies were overcast and low, threatening a cool, fall rain. The ocean was a frenzied wash of whitecaps and breakers that tossed foam high into the air wherever it touched an outcropping of rock. A feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time began to invade me. The last time I’d encountered it was the first year of college when I’d seen my steady girlfriend of the moment out with one of our teacher’s aides at a restaurant after she’d told me she was heading to her parents’ house upstate for the weekend.
My hand trembled slightly as I reached out to pick up Del’s glass from the sill. A weakness flooded my muscles like poison as thoughts that I would’ve scoffed at hours ago whirl-winded through my mind. Absentmindedly I brought her cup to my mouth and took a drink.
I gagged, spitting onto the wood floor.
The glass was full of saltwater.
Abhorred, I brought the tumbler up and looked at it, holding it to the gray light. Particles and brown bits I didn’t want to identify swirled within it. I stared in the direction of our room and listened to the music pour down from where my wife had gone.
~
I didn’t get the job.
The interview had gone as wrong as one could. I couldn’t blame it on anything or anyone but myself. I had stuttered. I had gotten one of the partner’s names wrong, twice. Near the end, when I knew the job would never be mine, I answered in single words. It couldn’t be helped. I hadn’t slept the night before, there was no way I could after having drank from Del’s glass and realized what its contents were. I had tried to bring it up to her that evening, but each time I did I would catch the vacant look on her face, as if she were miles away, experiencing something or someone intimately, completely in a world of her own.
When I came home there was a note on the table. I approached it with the kind of dread a bomb squad member feels when reaching for a ticking briefcase. Del’s script was the same looping scribbles I had always known, but even through the ink left on the page I could feel her distance.
Went to an appointment today for an ultrasound at Megan’s clinic. Was going to do some shopping. Be home later.
She hadn’t even signed it.
We had decided to doctor at the clinic where her high-school friend Megan worked as a nurse when we first found out Del was pregnant, and I had missed the initial checkup nearly a month ago due to another failed interview. Del had assured me then that we would do the first ultrasound together and decide if we wanted to know the baby’s sex. Now she had gone ahead and scheduled the appointment without me.
I sat down at the table after finding a dusty bottle of tequila in the lower set of cupboards and a shot glass with the Route One road sign emblazoned on the side. The bottle was nearly full, neither of us had touched it since learning of the pregnancy. But now, at the table in my mother and father’s house, in the mid-day light, after having lost my chance at the first promising job in years, I drank.
I poured shot after shot, losing count after four. When the bottle was half empty, I took it with me out to the enclosed porch and sat staring at the sea. If asked in that moment I would have told anyone that I would have preferred the blank and barren reaches of some Oklahoma prairie to the undulating waves. Even the buckling thunderheads and swirling masses of air that signaled a tornado would have been welcome to the indifferent crash of the sea.
“You’re so fucking pathetic,” I said, slurring the last word. I didn’t know who I was speaking to, the sea or myself. “Everyone thinks you’re so majestic and wild, but I know the truth. I know you. I know you.” I took another shot of the liquor and sat back in the chair. “You’re all washed up.” It was a beat before the laughter broke from me like the bray of some wild animal. I didn’t like the sound of it, alone on the porch, but I laughed anyway. I laughed until tears clouded my vision and I had to hold myself to keep from falling to the floor. Slowly I came back to an upright position and the giggles trailed off. I must’ve fallen asleep sometime shortly after that because the next thing I knew, Del was shaking me awake.
“Jason, what the hell are you doing?” she said, stepping back as I arranged myself in the chair. My head shadowed the beat of my heart, throbbing in pulses colored a reddish black. There were coils of rusted wire in my neck and the vision in my left eye kept blurring.
“I…I think I fell asleep,” I said stupidly.
“I can see that. It looks more like you passed out.”
“Yeah.”
“What the hell’s wrong with you, Jason?”
The anger was there in a second, rising like a cobra. “Me?” I asked, standing from the chair while trying not to lurch forward. “You’re asking me what’s wrong?”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“I want to ask you the same question, Del. Is there something you want to tell me?”
“Like what?”
“Like why you’ve been so distant lately. Why you ignore me half the time when I’m in the same room with you. Why you’ve quit talking to me.” I paused. “Is there someone else?” The words were out there, floating between us, absorbing the air in the room until it was only the contact of our eyes that held us in any semblance of place and time.
“What are you talking about?” she said in a low voice.
“The way you’ve been acting over the past weeks, I want to know, is there someone else?” With my fears now released like the lancing of some wound, all the anger flowed out of me as well. “I just want to know, honey. Was I not paying enough attention to you? Did I do something?”