“I can’t see life as a series of man-made structures. It’s fluid.”
“No. Rigid and mechanical. Once I thought different, but that was a long time ago. Some of us,” she said, “can build like Carmelita. But the rest are like the hermit crabs you see along the shore. They live in one borrowed shell after another.”
“And where do you live?”
She turned her eyes toward the cliff. “That’s my house up there,” she said somberly.
“You built it?”
“John and I together.”
“Why? Why there, I mean?”
The question slid off her like oil. “Why anywhere, for that matter? The water’s cold out here. Colder than the surf. Are you going in?”
“I’m too comfortable.”
“I think I’ll try it for a little while.”
She pulled the black rubber swim fins over her feet and strapped the face glass around her head. It covered her nose and eyes.
“You look terrible in that get-up,” Mark said.
“I know, but I don’t care. There’s no one to see.”
“How about me?”
“You don’t have to look.”
“I won’t.”
But he watched her as she slid over the side of the boat into the water. She surface-dived, her fins flicking like a shark’s tail. To Mark it seemed a reverse step in evolution, the return of the amphibians to the sea.
When she came back to the surface, he said, “Cold?”
“Paralyzing.”
“What do you see?”
“Nothing much, so far.”
She submerged again and came up a minute later on the other side of the boat with a sprig of kelp caught in the strap of her bathing suit.
She stayed in the water for a long time, not swimming on the surface, but continually diving under and coming up for air, as if she was searching for something she had lost.
When she finally climbed back into the boat her lips were blue and her skin rough with cold.
“Did you find it?” he asked.
She pulled off the face glass and rubbed her eyes before she answered: “I wasn’t looking for anything.”
Briny tears dropped down her face leaving trails of salt.
“What would I be looking for?” she said. “Anyway, the sea’s too murky today. I couldn’t see anything.”
“Here, you’d better put on my sweater.”
“I’ll get it wet.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She put his old grey sweater around her shoulders. The color made her look sallow and emphasized the pallor of her full mouth. She didn’t seem to care much about her appearance, and it irked Mark a little that she didn’t put on some lipstick or comb her hair or indicate, in any of a hundred female ways, that he was a man. The evening before she had been almost coquettish in her eagerness to please. He wondered what had caused the change.
In the west a single cloud rode the sky.
“I hope the storm comes our way,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “We’ve had three dry years in a row now. We couldn’t afford to waste any water irrigating, so we kept some of the plants alive by siphoning out the bathwater and the rinse water from the washing Carmelita did. But it was never enough. Only a few things survived. The geraniums — they never give up — and the weeds, of course.”
She hesitated, pulling the sweater closer around her. “You asked me a while ago why we wanted to build the house here. There were many reasons, but I think the chief one was the trees. They aren’t all wild trees, you know. Many of them were planted there years and years ago by the man who owned the land. It’s funny, he had that valuable stretch of coastline, yet he lived all by himself in a shed. The shed is still there. Whenever I look at it I think of the old man living there watching his trees grow, and hoping, as we kept hoping, for a storm to pass this way.”
The cloud divided, cut in two by a wind they couldn’t feel.
“It’s incongruous, isn’t it? To have things die for lack of water when the sea is right beside us.”
He said, so abruptly that her eyes widened in surprise, “Where do you come from?”
“A place you never heard of. It’s just a small town in Nebraska.”
“Has it got a name?”
“Of course.”
“Why not name it then? You don’t have to be cagey. Nobody’s going to Nebraska to check up on your past.”
“It’s very difficult to acquire a past,” she said blandly, “in Broken Bow, Nebraska.”
“Broken Bow, Nebraska.”
“Population, three thousand. On the Burlington line about two hundred miles from Thedford. The home of...”
“I get it.”
“... the home of Beeman’s Sandwich Bags. I’m thirty-six. I was married eleven years, four months, and three days ago. Before that I taught school in Omaha, which is also in Nebraska, on the Missouri River, population a quarter of a million. The principal industries...”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Satisfied?”
“Partly.”
“You wouldn’t like any more straight answers to straight questions?”
“I might. It’s a long way out here from Broken Bow, population three thousand, the home of Beeman’s Sandwich Bags. What happened along the road?”
She sat in silence for a minute, rubbing the flecks of salt off her forearm.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” Mark said in apology. “Maybe that’s how it sounded, but I was actually trying to be funny.”
“We’d better start back now.”
“All right.”
“As for what happened along the road, I can’t tell you. I don’t like revisiting places. I’m not a romantic.”
“You’re revisiting now.”
“Only because I have to.”
It was strange to Mark that she repudiated the one word that he thought described her. She was a romantic. The rhythm of her voice echoed with lost music, vanished loves and an obbligato of death.
He pulled in the sea anchor and flung it on the bottom of the boat.
He said, “Just what kind of a spot are you in?”
“Trouble, you mean? None. None at all.”
“Then what are you covering up?”
“What I choose to.”
Unanchored and unguided, the boat was tossing like a cork. Mrs. Wakefield turned around on the seat and picked up the paddle again.
“What side do you want me to paddle on?”
“Whatever you like.”
“The left, then.”
“Your lie about the watch didn’t fool anyone except Jessie,” Mark said. “To Jessie anything is possible — you can find a ton of ambergris in the middle of Central Park or a gold watch growing on the side of a cliff.”
“The watch belonged to my husband,” she said. “I don’t know exactly how it got on the cliff.”
“You told Jessie she could keep it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Children like watches. Anyway, I don’t believe in mementoes. They’re too painful. I know that the past is dead,” she said grimly. “I don’t have to keep reminding myself.”
“I’m very glad you’re not in any kind of trouble.”
She shook her head, rejecting the least sign of sympathy. It was the one thing in the world that she knew could break her down; especially sympathy from a man like Mark whose very maleness, powerful and a little rough, made her realize her vulnerability.
“Keep your damned sympathy to yourself.”
“As you wish.”
A gull circled the boat, squawking. He was young and bold and could outfly the wind.
Mark said, impersonally, “I was hoping we’d catch sight of a sea lion. I heard one last night. It sounded pretty close, though Mr. Roma said there aren’t any around here.”
“He’s mistaken. I heard it, too.”
“It’s a hell of a noise.”
“Yes, isn’t it? Almost like a woman crying,” she added. “Did you ever see a dugong?”