The Mermaid Chair (17 page)

I felt my throat tighten a little. Hepzibah began to rub her thumb back and forth across mine. The friction, the rhythm of it, was soothing. My fingers unknotted, drooping toward my palms.

“I'm just saying I know what it's like to love somebody you think you shouldn't be loving,” Kat went on. “There probably isn't a woman alive who doesn't know what that's like. Half of them fall for their gynecologists and the other half for their priests. You can't stop your heart from loving, really—it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.

“But you've got to hear this, too,” Kat added. “I wish now I hadn't acted on those feelings. There was a lot of hurt caused, Jessie. To be honest, I'm not sure I could've done anything else but what I did, given how I felt and all, and how little I knew. I'm only saying I know what you're feeling and that you should think this through.”

I sank back in my chair, hearing the croak and tick of wood in the seat. I turned and looked at Hepzibah. Her eyes were partly closed.

She said, “When I was forty, back before I started studying Gullah ways, I fell in love with a man in Beaufort who could quote you entire slave narratives passed down by word of mouth for a hundred years. I never knew anybody who cared so much about preserving their roots, and of course what I was loving was mostly my own hunger to do the same thing.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was already divorced by then and wouldn't have minded remarrying, but he had a wife already. Kat is right, that didn't stop me from feeling what I was feeling. I decided, though, to love him without…you know, physically loving him, and it was hard, about the hardest thing I ever did, but I lived to be glad about it. The thing is, he got me exploring my roots, and so much came out of that.”

Benne was leaning up on both elbows listening to these revelations with her lips parted and the bangs of her plain brown hair falling a half inch below her eyebrows. “I loved somebody,” she announced with glowing eyes, and we all turned and stared at her.

“Well, do tell,” said Kat. She seemed genuinely shocked by the declaration. “Who was this lucky man—your gynecologist or your priest?”

“Mike,” she said. “And
I
couldn't get myself to stop feeling love either.” She sat up straight and smiled, pleased to be one of us. “I told him the day he left for college. Everybody was on the dock, saying good-bye to him, remember? And I said, ‘I love you,' and he said, ‘I love you, too, Benne,' and then he got on the ferry.” Kat patted her arm.

The room grew quiet. I realized what Kat and Hepzibah were doing, worrying about my getting hurt, trying to give me a big picture, some perspective I hadn't considered. I could understand in a way the point they were making, but I couldn't let it in. Maybe it's human nature to think one's own situation is the unique and incomparable one, the transcendent exception. Maybe the impulse I felt inside was wiser than all their opinions. I realized I was shaking my head and feeling slightly petulant.

“What if I'm really meant to be with him and I let this slip away?” I said.

“You
are
meant to be with him,” said Benne.

A Benne truth? Or was it an outburst of romantic, wishful thinking by an adult who was mostly a child?

“Nobody can tell you what to do,” Kat said. “This is your life. Your decision.”

“E come a time when eby tub haffa res pon e won bottom,” said Hepzibah, then translated: “At some point in life, you have to stand on your own two feet.”

Kat stepped closer to me, her forehead rippled with little furrows. “Just be careful,” she said.

I stood up. The paint tubes, the palette, the brushes were piled around the fruit bowl as if they'd fallen out of a cornucopia. I gathered them back into the shopping bag.

“I have been careful my whole life,” I said.

I smiled at them, feeling like I
was
standing there on my own two feet.

“I saw your canoe on the dock in the rookery,” I said to Hepzibah. “Do you mind if I borrow it?”

“Help yourself,” she said.

She didn't ask why I wanted it. Neither did Kat. They knew already.

T
he day I paddled Hepzibah's once-red canoe through the winding creeks, I heard an alligator roar. It was mid-March, four days till spring, but warm enough that a few bulls had begun bellowing for mates out on the marsh banks. It sounded like distant thunder. By April there would be enough roaring to shake the creek water. Mike and I used to row the bateau through the hairpin turns when the ruckus was at full tilt, shouting at throngs of sunning turtles to head for the mud holes before they were all eaten.

Earlier, when I'd arrived on the rookery dock and flipped over the canoe, I'd discovered the turtle skull from the table on Hepzibah's porch propped beside the paddle. She'd obviously left it there for me. I remembered how she, Kat, and Mother had passed it back and forth all those years, a reminder of the way they'd knotted their lives together. The skull sat now on the fraying wicker seat at the bow, looking quite ancient, staring levelly ahead as if guiding the boat.

The mint green tint was climbing back into the blades of spartina grass, and around each curve an egret or heron stood like yard sculpture in the shallows. Their patience was unnerving. Just when I would give up on their ever moving again, they would spring to life, spearing a mud minnow.

I snaked along with the tail end of the ebb tide, making two wrong turns before I located the dead-end tributary where Whit had taken us the day we'd come out here together. When the corridor of grass opened into the cove of water where we'd sat in the johnboat and talked, I pulled the paddle across my lap and gave myself over to the breeze. It washed me up onto the tiny marsh island where Whit had built his hermitage on a hillock beneath a sole palmetto palm.

I wore the pair of old bogging boots Mother used to wear to harvest oysters on the shell reefs, going out with Kat and Hepzibah, picking bushels for their New Year's Eve roast. Stepping out of the canoe, I sank over my ankles into mud. It was the exact consistency of cake batter, and it emitted a rotten stew of smells that I had grown up loving.

I dragged the canoe up into the grass. Sweltering, I peeled off my sweatshirt and tied it around my waist, then stood in my black T-shirt listening for the whir of Whit's johnboat. It had been at the dock when I'd left. I looked at my watch. I'd come at the same time we'd come before—when I thought he would be making his rookery rounds.

As I regarded the enclosure of water, the nearly perfect, hidden circle it made, I thought I heard the boat engine, and I froze a moment, watching the black skimmers swoop down and the surface churn silver with mullet, but the sound died and a moat of quiet surrounded me.

I'd brought a floppy basket filled with art supplies, thinking I would try to paint a little if Whit didn't show up. Honestly, I needed some actual reason for being out here, other than wanting to see him, something to fall back on.
I came out here to paint,
I could say.

As I retrieved the basket from the canoe, I impulsively picked up the turtle skull. It was silly to lug it around, but I didn't want to leave it behind. I picked my way through the needlegrass and palm scrub. When I arrived at Whit's lean-to, I laughed out loud. He'd stolen the design from depictions of the Bethlehem stable.

When I stepped under the sloping roof, I had to stoop slightly. A wire crab trap sat in the shadows near the back like a small table, with a cast net folded up beside it. He'd braided a cross out of palmetto leaf and nailed it up on a board, but other than that it could have been a hideout built by almost anyone.

Standing there, I knew why he loved this place. It was a different sort of cloister—secluded by water and marsh, a place untamed, without abbots and creeds, only instinct and the natural rhythms that had always existed here.

I placed the turtle skull on top of the crab trap, admiring the bleached-ivory look of it. I told myself it had belonged to a female, a three-hundred-pound loggerhead who'd dragged herself onto Bone Yard Beach year after year to fill the sand with eggs. Dad had taken Mike and me there one summer night when the beach was crawling with hatchlings. We'd watched them rushing toward the sea, toward a swatch of moonlight out on the water.

I laid my hand on the turtle skull and felt the backwash of Hepzibah's presence. Of Kat's. Even my mother's and Benne's.

I set up the tabletop easel I'd found at Caw Caw General, positioning it on the ground, arranging the watercolor tablet on it. I spread out my palette, charcoal sketching pencils, brushes, and a jar of water, and then, removing the boots, sat cross-legged in front of the paper and stared at the white space.

I'd already painted a dozen or more mermaids for Kat, staying up sometimes until after midnight to finish one. I'd started out doing the typical thing—mermaids on rocks, mermaids under the water, mermaids on top of the water—until I'd grown bored and begun to paint them in ordinary but unlikely places: driving a station wagon along I-85 in Atlanta with a baby mermaid strapped in a car seat in back; balancing on her tail fin before a stove, clad in a “Kiss the Cook” apron, frying fish in a skillet; and my favorite—sitting in a chair at a hair salon getting her long, silken tresses cut into a short, angular style with bangs.

“Now you're cooking,” Kat had said. The paintings had sold immediately, and she'd begged me to bring her more.

Earlier I'd been struck with the idea of painting a mermaid paddling a canoe, wearing a life jacket, but now, as I held the pencil, I found myself making a line drawing of a woman's forehead and eyes, sketching it along the bottom edge of the paper as if she were peering over a wall. I drew her arms stretched over her head, her elbows pressed against her ears, giving the impression she was reaching with both hands for something over her head. I didn't know where the peculiar image was coming from.

I dampened the paper, laying on overlapping washes of blue, decreasing the pigment as I moved down the paper, creating lighter shades at the bottom around the woman's head. I painted in her head and arms, using sienna and umber. Her eyes were wide open, apprehensive, peering upward across the empty blue spaces that filled most of the paper. As a last touch, I shook the brush, gave it two quick snaps, creating a purposeful spatter along each of her arms.

When I put the brush down, the image appeared silly to me. But as I leaned back and looked again at what I'd done, the spatter beading her arms struck me as air bubbles and the variegated blues as levels of water. The painting, I decided, was upside down.

It was
not
a woman peering over a ledge with arms reaching up but a woman diving. I turned the picture 180 degrees and saw that it captured the moment when her arms and head first pierced the water, cutting cleanly into the emptiness below.

I kept staring at it. The moment I'd seen it reversed, I'd known—it was right
this
way.

I heard the droning of a boat engine far away, and my hand moved to my throat, lingering there as the sound grew closer. I pictured Whit approaching the island, catching sight of Hepzibah's canoe, wondering who was here. The noise dissolved as he cut the engine. A dog began to bark. Max.

Anticipation rose in my chest, the strange, euphoric energy that had made me increasingly unable to sleep or eat, filling me with endless renditions of the two of us together. It had made me bold and reckless. Had turned me into someone else. What would happen would happen.

I saw Max first. He loped up with his tongue dangling from the side of his mouth. I bent to pet him and, glancing up, saw Whit stepping over a rotting palmetto log. When he spotted me, he stopped.

I went on rubbing Max's head, my breath moving rapidly in and out of my nostrils. I said, “So this is the hermitage the abbot knows nothing about.”

Still he didn't move, didn't speak. He wore the same denim shirt with the cross around his neck and held a tan canvas sack in one hand. I had the feeling it contained books. The light made brush marks on his face, obscuring it just enough that I couldn't read his expression. I didn't know if he was paralyzed with happiness or surprise. It could have been trepidation. He clearly knew what I was doing here. His entire body gave off the knowledge of it.

He slid one hand into his pocket and began walking toward me. I could see bits of gray shining in his black hair.

When he got to the easel, he dropped the sack and squatted beside my painting, relieved, I think, to have something to do.

“It's good,” he said. “Very unusual.”

I moved my thumb around the base of my finger, the place where my wedding rings had been. The skin felt bare and newly grown. Tender. He pretended to study the painting.

“I hope you don't mind me coming here to paint,” I said. “I would've asked your permission, but…well, it's not like I could pick up the phone and call you.”

“You don't have to ask my permission,” he said. “This place belongs to everybody.” He stood up but continued to look down at the picture with his back to me.

Around us the grasses rippled and swayed as though underwater. I wanted to go and slide my arms around him, press my face against his back, say,
It's okay, it is. We were meant for this,
but I couldn't be the one who said it. He had to hear it some other way, from inside himself. He had to believe in the rightness of it, as I did.

He looked painfully stiff standing there, and I wondered if he was struggling to hear the voice that would tell him what to do, the voice that would not be wrong, or if he was only barricading himself.

I told myself I would stand there in my bare feet one more minute, when it would be plain that the only dignified thing to do was put on my boots, gather up my art, and leave. I would paddle back and never speak of this again.

He turned around abruptly, almost as if he'd heard my thought. I stepped toward him, close enough to smell the saltiness coming from his chest, the damp circles under his arms. Light blazed up in the blue of his eyes. He reached out and pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around me. “Jessie,” he whispered, pushing his face into my hair.

I closed my eyes and put my mouth at the opening of his shirt, let my lips open and close on his skin, tasting the flesh at the hollow of his throat, the taste of heat. I unfastened each small white button and kissed the skin beneath it. The wooden cross dangled over his breastbone, and I had to move it to one side in order to kiss the bone's small arch.

“Wait,” he said, and pulled the leather cord over his head, letting the cross drop to the ground.

When I reached the button tucked inside his belt, I tugged his shirt out of his jeans and kept unbuttoning until he stood with his shirt wide open, a soft wind lifting the edges of it. He leaned over and kissed me. His mouth tasted like wine, left over from mass.

He led me into the flecked light of the hermitage, took off his shirt and spread it on the ground, then undressed me, lifting the T-shirt over my head, unsnapping my khakis, pulling them into a puddle around my ankles. I stepped out of them and stood in my light blue panties and matching bra and let him stare at me. He looked first at the indentation of my waist, that curve where it flares out to my hips, then glanced back at my face for a moment before letting his eyes wander to my breasts, then downward toward my thighs.

I stood unmoving, but there was an avalanche going on—an entire history sliding away.

He said, “I can't believe how beautiful you are.”

I started to say,
No, no, I'm not,
but stopped myself. Instead I unhooked my bra and let it fall down next to his cross.

I watched him stoop and unlace his boots. The skin on his shoulders was glazed with sunburn. He stood up, barefoot, bare-chested, his jeans low on his hips. “Come here,” he said, and I went and leaned into the smoothness of his chest.

“I've wanted you from the beginning,” he told me, and the way he said it—his eyes fixed on my face, a frown of purpose across his forehead—sent a tremor through me. He lowered me to the ground on top of his denim shirt and kissed the soft places on my throat, my breasts, my thighs.

We made love with the tide sweeping in around the island and Max asleep in the sun. There was a mystifying scent in the air, like burned sweetness. I decided later it was the smell of wisteria floating out from the island. As he moved above me, I heard the high-pitched call of an osprey coming from the height of clouds. I heard crab claws scurrying in the brush.

The ground was lumpy, gristly with vines and sprouting fan palms. One of them was jabbing into my shoulder, and my body had goose-pimpled over in the cool air, from the deep, cobalt shadows at the back of the lean-to. I began to tremble. Whit slid his hand under my shoulder, cradling it away from the pointy shoots on the palm. He said, “You all right?”

I nodded. I didn't mind any of it. I wanted to be here, lying on a tide-swept piece of earth, belonging to it, watched by the marsh, by the birds circling our heads.

He smiled at me, touching my face with his other hand, tracing the rim of my jaw, my lips and nose. He burrowed his face into my neck and breathed deeply, and I disappeared into the moment—Whit, the blood and bones in my body, the wildness of loving him.

I inhabited those moments in a way that was usually lost to me. They came through an amplifier that made the movement of our bodies and the pulsing world around us more vivid and radiant, more real. I could even feel how perishable
all
my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even, and the impassive way I'd treated them.