Forget the Sleepless Shores Page 15

  The Emperor at Rome treated with him, they say: sent rings of jacinth and chalcedony mined in desert lands, wreaths and bowls of gold that would never perish beneath the sea, berry-bright still as silt settled on them in the endless twilight, perfumed oils in flasks of faience and honey-colored glass that would not melt in the warmest swells. The Emperor at Ostia left the chests on the wharfside, carelessly open to the swifts and the sun; returning at dawn, the Roman envoys found them filled with slippery weed and glittering scales, stinking like low tide and fishmongers. Dumped out on the planks in disgust, they clattered with lumps of wet amber, pearls in strange colors, cut with letters even the grammarians could not read. The Emperor at Rome sent a cup in silver, chased like a coin of old Sicily with Skylla at her sea-hunt. The Emperor Retiarius left a necklace carved in day-pink coral, the leaves and waving stems of some sea-plant out of which emerged women’s faces and hands, water-streaming, mouths open as if in song. (The elder of the two envoys held it and said it was wet cold to touch, chilling as a tunny’s skin. The younger said it hummed in his hands and he dropped it. He sat all night at the foot of the lighthouse, peering out over the silver-darkened sea; he saw nothing in the water but the reflections of fire above him, its devouring roar louder than any nereid could sing.) The Emperor of Rome was no fool and sent a toga of Tyrian purple, embroidered with gold as heavily as a sunset. The Emperor at Ostia was no fool and left it glinting in the morning sun, the embroidery replaced with fingernail rainbows of mother-of-pearl.

  The Emperor sent no more gifts. The Emperor returned none. The boats began to go out from Ostia again, the tradeships to come in from Alexandria and Rutupiae and Carthago Nova. There were no more sightings of a man as pale as washed ivory, standing where water should bear no one’s weight, no more rumors of eyes open beneath the clear salt swirl, hands catching at poles or slapping the sides of skiffs, hawsers tangling in cormorant-black hair. Pearls and amber, necklaces and nacre were filed away in the coffers of Rome, where perhaps the Emperor thought of them sometimes and perhaps not. He was not a philosopher, this Emperor; he looked out on the sea from his marble balconies at Baiae and called it ours.

  The younger envoy called the sea nothing; he was drowned in a storm off Corcyra, taking passage among a mixed cargo of garum and glassware. He might have gone down singing; none of the sailors heard him. The survivors clung to their splinters and prayed to the gods of sea-swell, of seventh waves, of fisherman’s mercy for the catch too small to keep. Days away on the sea-roads, a man who had once kicked over seaweed on Ostia’s docks woke in tears, imagining a colleague he had not seen in years stood before him like Hector to Aeneas, dressed in garments as wet and shining as sheets of sea-wrack. His eyes had blackened, his fingers were cold as fish-skin as he put a coin in the older man’s hand, folding his palm closed around the crusted thing. It was stamped with the face of an Emperor, proud as a wolf, the crown in his hair slick-leaved, brine running from it. On the reverse, a trident, circled by small fish and snails. He woke with a palmful of water, no colder or more salt than crying. When he whispered the name of Caesar, he was not thinking of Rome.

  THE SALT HOUSE

  Your lights are but dank shoals,

  slate and pebble and wet shells

  and seaweed fastened to the rocks.

  —H.D., “The Shrine”

  He waited on the boardwalk for her, hands in his pockets among the beach roses and dune grass that the wind whisked to combers like a dryer, whispering sea. This small cove between two weathered ledges, angled out to sea like breakwaters; dark as crushed cinders and barren where the waves did not reach, and most of the swimmers and sunbathers had continued farther up the coast to smoother, sandier beaches. Sticks, seaweed, everything drowned in the heat. Even the seagulls that clustered like flecks of ash on the outermost rocks were muted; he almost dodged from its shadow when one wheeled silently overhead. The waves rolled up on the shingle, ship’s portrait, sunlit green, all the sound in the world.

  She was out of the sea to her waist before he saw her, striding through the plunge and tumble of waves that should have knocked her head over heels into foam and sun-struck splashes: the white horses of Neptune that thundered in to shore around her, but she could gentle them with her hand. Or she was a tall girl, skinny-dipping in the cold Atlantic, easy in her balance, and he felt his mouth pull a smile that sharpened his face like a frown. No one would mistake him for the sea’s charioteer—a derelict from its docksides, at best, with his faded rusty hair and his face etched back to its lantern lines, so lean that his drab windbreaker hung from his shoulders like tattered sails. If he had eaten breakfast, or if he had even slept last night in his hotel room that overlooked the harbor beneath the quarter moon, reflected alongside bridge lights and refineries, he could not remember. He had worried so much, one nightmare might have been much like another sleepless night. But the tide smoothed into her footprints, the seagulls startled up crying from their dry, salt-stripped rocks; she had remembered him.

  Easily, he could imagine that the sea shed itself from her as she stepped over alluvial pebbles, rivulets like sea fans traced in the clamshell sand. Her hair stranded down her shoulders in glistening mare’s tails, tendrils the last shade of green before black that she flicked back from her dripping face, or sea-wrack had knotted in her own winter-brown hair, as fine with water as sable, that had not fallen past her chin the last time he had seen her. The gleam of her bare skin was mother-of-pearl, or she had not yet tanned under the late summer blaze. She looked streamlined, shallow-breasted, as narrow-hipped as a child. He could not find his face anywhere in hers. Barefoot on the firm sand, she looked back at him with no more recognition than a yellow-eyed gull or granite slabs trawled with weed: he had not remembered that her eyes were so sea-glass grey. Then she crossed her arms over her chest, shy or shivering in the sultry afternoon, and her next step crackled on dead seaweed and half a Styrofoam cup.

  To his daughter, after six years, Alex Marcinko said, “I brought you some clothes,” and she looked like her mother when she laughed at him.

  In his arms, she was cold and slick as harvested kelp; he could not stop looking at the shadow-blue veins in her wrists, the nautilus whorls of her ears. When she laid her head against his shoulder, tentatively, as though he had never cradled her against his chest and sung her to sleep in his tuneless, three-note voice—creaking timbers and grating shells; the wreckage of the sea that he had no more right to—salt water ran from the ends of her hair and soaked into his shirt, more chill than tears; her arms left wet prints around him. He half expected to see brine spilling from her smile, when she finally ducked out of his embrace, but her teeth were neither pearls nor viperfish spines. “Here.” He handed her the backpack before any other words could drop out of him, whatever grit and chafe had gathered since she was ten years old and tossed trailing stems of sargasso weed around her neck like an aviator’s scarf; still he heard the hoarseness of that single syllable, cleared his throat as though the sea wind were drying him out. “I didn’t know your size….”

  But she pulled them on as unselfconsciously as she had waded out of her element, denim shorts and a white sleeveless shirt that clung between her shoulderblades; new sandals dangling from one hand, eyes narrowed against the heat-dazzled sky or her memories as she studied him. Her voice was huskier than he had anticipated, less adolescent. “Thanks.”

  Alex said dryly, “It’s hardly kindness. I think I’d be arrested otherwise,” and this time she laughed like herself. Unexpectedly, her free hand darted out and closed on his: for a second, he felt seafoam webs pulse between his fingers, but she had only squeezed his hand; sure and childlike, his child; and hers. Out past seaweed shadows and sunken quartzite, the sun broke in blown-glass reflections from the water, bluer than the sky. The waves rushed to spindrift on the rocks and drained away.

  “Father.” So formal, she might have been one of his own characters, spliced between the ancient world and the new, but the archaism matc
hed their distance. Once he had held her hands as she swayed for the first time on her own two feet, stooped from his heron’s height to watch her world from this strange and elevated viewpoint, his day-stubbled cheek against her mouse-fair hair. Clothed, ashore, she was still a sea-drift stranger: her grip had not warmed with the sun, and he did not let her go. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “You, too.” He coughed into his hand, but all the right words were triple hooks, barbed and glittering, not to be spoken around. Written pages; hearts. So much of an understatement that the words became a lie: “I’ve missed you.”

  **

  He had never considered his wife in connection with the sea before she got pregnant: the year his first play was produced at the ART and he had written the role of the sky-dreaming sister for her, though she was acting that month in a kabuki production of Euripides; the year that the familiar boundaries of the world started to fracture and oil smothered the arctic seas, and she was the woman he loved, Annata Southworth. Their apartment that overlooked a perpetual snarl of construction, brownstone rows scaled over with ivy leaves and sinewy wisteria; a trellis for their fire escape, vine-choked like a casualty of Dionysos. He still worked on a typewriter, then, the same black dreadnought of a Selectric he had used for all his papers at university; their rooms were jackstraw-stacked with books and records, hand-me-down fabrics hung up for curtains in the doorways, and Annata would curl on their spring-shot bed and watch him clatter out drafts and trash and sometimes the right words, that she always read before anyone else. If I could pick a muse, he half-teased, she would be you. Her upslanting face flickered with expression like leaf-light, her ginger-beer hair uncoiled past her hips and some nights he woke spider-twined in its strands. No matter how little he sometimes realized he knew about her, past the municipal facts of birth and employment and her name on their marriage license, favorite movies and music she played to fall asleep to and the chocolate fur on her voice late at night in the dark, he never took off his wedding ring.

  The air conditioner was clogged up with ice, so they had put up all the sashes to the summer night: resinous with heat, the skyline and the bedframe and their sun-exhausted limbs all preserved in the dog days for autumn to turn to amber; memories washed up in time. In the afternoon, they had wandered alongside willows and swan boats, bronze ducklings and their mother still made way for half a century after their creation, the green-shaded avenues he remembered from his childhood and Annata had noted with no small amusement how proprietarily he introduced her to each statue. Are you going to give me the keys to the city, too? and he had taken her hands and placed them on Edward Everett Hale’s bronze feet. Of course. It’s yours. It’s all yours. So she lay beside him on the uneven mattress, the sheets around her ankles printed like a medieval menagerie in brown and gold; light-dappled from the bedside lamp, its waxed shade pressed with grasses and flower-heads and a blackened crater like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot where Alex had once knocked the shade awry as he hurried out of the room and the bulb nearly burned through before he came back. The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death was playing in the other room, steel-stringed slide and melancholy. When she said dreamily, “Let’s go to Nantucket,” he was so tired and comfortable and wordless with her hair spilled like spices and treasure across his chest that he only smiled.

  “There once was a man….”

  “Alex.” But her tone was still sleepy, yearning: “Come on, we’ve never been. We could get up early and go tomorrow. I don’t have rehearsal until after six o’clock.”

  More than a little wistfully, he sighed and watched the bends of shadow that the little electric fan on their dresser made against the wall as it whined back and forth, white noise and less breeze than the open windows. “I need to work, Annata. I’m sorry. This scene has imploded: Danais and Lucrezia and Verginia all sound alike and I want to kill the lot of them. Besides, it’s summer. We’ll be knee-deep in tourists, and that’s if we survive the drive.”

  “Fine. Let’s go to Gloucester. Or Salem, I don’t care.” She tossed out the names casually, half-breathed, but he would have been a poor lover not to know, after five years, the difference between drowsiness and anticipation. “Somewhere I can hear the waves. I miss them.”

  “I thought you grew up in Burlington.”

  “Yes.” A note that might have been a laugh skimmed her voice, hooked her mouth up at the corners. “But the sea’s in my blood.”

  “That is,” he said idly, “one of the peculiar virtues of salt.” Almost he was content to lie there and consider the ways in which the phrase would make a good title—Lot’s wife and Salt Lake City and the sins for which deserts burned to slag, and he never worked with Biblical myths. But he knew even less about her family, the plane crash, the remarriage, the pale-eyed woman and her coppersmith husband who had given their daughter away, and she so rarely offered to tell him; he asked, “How did that happen?”

  Outside, the night smelled of warm tar and wisteria, downtown haze and cooking tomatoes from the next apartment over; not salt-edged winds, water that shocked the skin cold even in August. With his hand cupped to his wife’s hip, Alex felt her breath draw in, hesitate, and he wanted suddenly to bundle her in his arms and not hear what she said next. Or he had no premonitions, only the sunset stretch of hindsight and his slight, sincere surprise: he could not look back except through her shadow.

  “My great-grandfather was a seagoing man. He shipped aboard a whaler out of New Bedford and before he was sixteen, he’d seen China and the South Seas and rounded the Horn…. He married a woman from Boston and he must not have done too badly for himself, because he set her up in a house within sight of the ocean, like she was a captain’s wife and all she had to do was look out to sea to bring him back. But one year he didn’t come.” On the other side of the bedroom door, the maroon batik curtain that barely swayed between the fan and the slow night, the needle lifted off the record with a faint click and hiss and Alex could not have timed the cue better, but a cold key turned in him to remember that she was not rehearsing; this was her own tale. “He drowned off Point Barrow.” He had not challenged her; she countered as though he had, “There are records. Ezra McKay, because people were still named things like that in those days. He was a boatsteerer. The whale splintered his boat and the other five men surfaced, shivering and freezing, but my great-grandfather never did. But the news didn’t get back to New Bedford until the Galatea did, in the fall of ’85, and by then my great-grandmother was six months pregnant.”

  She was silent for so long that when he eased his arm out from underneath her, there were pinpricks in his fingertips and he chafed at his palm to work the blood back in. A coil of her hair had circled his wrist; he tugged playfully, chained to her: unnoticed, and he slipped his hand free. “Who was the father?”

  Her smile was all edges again, wry-cornered, delicately disbelieved. “He was. My great-grandfather. She swore that up and down.

  “It was in the spring. She had woken in the night to hear him calling softly underneath her window, she said, like he couldn’t get in on his own. So the Galatea wasn’t expected back until the ice started to close—he was her husband, and she hadn’t seen him in two years, and she did love him. She went downstairs and unlocked the door, and she let him in. All that night, she held him in her arms.” She spoke very low, a bedtime story for lost sailors’ souls. “But when she woke in the morning, there was nothing beside her but a mass of seaweeds and slime, all tangled with pearls and shells and mud, and she screamed and no one could stop her screaming.”

  “Jesus.” He would have reached again to hold her, but she had turned and burrowed down into the pillows, her cheek against washer-worn tigers, camels, bridled rhinoceri; he could not tell if she was disappointed in him. “She died in Danvers State,” Annata said. Half a sigh, so she might only have been wearied from the day’s heat, the dead weight of family past, “Inland. She never could look on the sea again. There’s a sort of local legend that her bedroom smell
ed like a dockyard for years afterward, all rotting weed and scales and harbor wood, until the house burned down in the thirties—we’ll drive out there sometime, you don’t believe me. The foundations are still visible. But I don’t know where she’s buried, and I don’t even know where she had the child. My grandfather. It’s all a mess; her sister’s family never formally adopted him, but they had it put about that he was theirs. The husband was a banker, you see. A nice, practical, respectable profession,” sarcasm drawled so heavily on the words that Alex could hardly think of a worse condemnation: frozen seas and tumult, ledgers and the bland chink of cash. “Not at all the kind of man who would spend his pay on drink and native women at the wild ends of the earth and disappear for three, four years at a time, leaving his wife lonely to all sorts of temptation, and doesn’t every growing boy need a father to look up to? My grandfather never even knew about his birth mother or the circumstances of her husband’s death until he’d reached his majority, and then only because there were legal issues and the family lawyer was obliged to tell him. He didn’t tell any of his children until he was dying, like the last act of a melodrama. One of those old, rattling family secrets that surface unexpectedly and unwelcome. And now—” She rolled over onto her elbows so that the lamplight cleared her eyes nearly to the color of her burnished, tousled hair, as though she had handed him something very precious or entirely worthless. “—I’ve told it to you.”