Aquamarine (7 page)

Alice doesn’t say anything. Jesse tries to catch her expression, but she can’t. The sun behind Alice puts her in eclipse.

“Why do you want to know what happened? You know. Down there.”

“In Mexico City?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” Alice says. “I just think maybe that’s the place to start.”

Jesse abandons her tire, and for a while swims slow, strong laps back and forth across the quarry. Then dives under, coming up through the center of her inner tube, tilts her head back, dipping her hair in the water to get it off her face.

“Okay. That summer—1968—Marty came out of nowhere. They were calling her the Australian Water-Eating Machine. It was like one day she just crept up over the edge of my horizon and was all of a sudden my worst fear. I’d come out on top at the nationals in the hundred-meter free. My times were really strong going down to Mexico City. Which should have given me all the confidence in the world. But it didn’t.

“The rumors just kept drifting around. Marty Finch was a phantom, a pure natural. Of course, at world-class levels, even naturals have to work, but they still have attitude left over from when they didn’t.

“I was seventeen, a hick from Missouri. I’d spent a few months in Florida, at Sea Breeze—you remember it? They’d been turning out winners like Buicks off the line. I was the latest. Mostly I got to Mexico City by being a grind—an infinity of endurance laps and sprint work. You can’t know. They’d only pull me out when my back went blue.”

“Huh?”

“You know, when my heart couldn’t pump up enough blood. I was the little engine that could. I guess a lot of people thought I’d take my event, but no one would ever have called me a water-eating machine. That’s what got to me, I think.”

“And then you met her,” Alice says, as though she is inside the story.

“Yes. I expected her to high-hat me, but right from the start, that first night at the international dinner, she came over to where I was sitting.

(“Let’s be friends,” Jesse remembers Marty saying. “It’ll be more fun.”)

“Weren’t you a little suspicious?” Alice says.

“I don’t know. I was mostly curious as hell. I’d never known anyone like her. She was only eighteen, but she seemed to have already thought herself through, and then remade herself up entirely. I guess I got crushed out on her arrogance.”

What Jesse can’t find a way to say is this was the first time she’d ever fallen in love, that she hadn’t been at all prepared for it, and certainly wouldn’t have expected it to happen with her arch rival. But of course, looking back, it wasn’t the least bit surprising really. Her whole adolescence had been measured out in laps—by stopwatches and pulse rates and protein grams. She had been compressed for so long inside such a tight little shell of discipline, like a grenade. Marty just pulled the pin.

“‘Don’t you want to be bad?’ she’d say.”

“By
bad
...?” Alice says.

“I didn’t know,” Jesse says, and laughs. “I sure wanted to find out, though. We began sneaking off. To town. To the roof at night.”

Down to the showers after everyone else was asleep, is what she doesn’t add.

“Once, we went out of the city, to visit this Mexican girl Marty knew. Serafina Somebody. She’d trained in Brisbane for a time under Marty’s coach. Her swimming days were behind her by that time. Her parents had this huge white-white house on this green-green lawn. In the back, they’d put in a pool. For Serafina, I guess.

“Before lunch, Marty and I fooled around in the water. No room to race and so we just splashed, dunked each other. Fish-swished along the bottom. Playing tag, kind of.” Jesse pauses, trying to make a depth check on the safety of this conversation. “And then Marty came all the way from the bottom of the diving end, sliding up under me. Our faces were about an inch apart, our bodies just not quite touching. You know.”

Neither she nor Alice says anything for a stretched moment. The crickets, which run on high, day and night, in the overgrowth around the quarry, fill in the silence with their white noise, at the same time deafening and beneath notice.

It’s Alice who speaks first. “Bet you had trouble eating that lunch.”

Jesse feels herself flushing, the universal curse of redheads. “On the way back to town,” she says, now in a hurry to finish, “in this rattletrap old taxi, kicking up giant pillows of dust, we made fun of how Serafina talked to Marty: ‘I think of you constantly all these years,’ was what she’d said. We figured it must be a bad translation. Still, we started saying ‘I think of you constantly’ instead of‘hi.’ Afterwards, it was how I began the letters I sent down to Australia.”

“Which went unanswered,” Alice says.

“How could you know?” Jesse says, turning suddenly inside her inner tube, making the rubber screech.

Alice shakes her head. “I don’t know. I could smell treachery coming, I guess. It’s easy now, now that it’s a story. When you were going through it, it was life. Always much harder to get the plot line on.”

“And of course,” Jesse says in her own defense, “everything was moving so fast. Plus I wanted to take everything as a good sign, a lucky charm.”

The scene in her imagination comes up white, and she’s back down in the showers, late at night. She and Marty lying next to each other on a bed made of layers and layers of towels.

“Marty would get all confessional,” she tells Alice, “which I tried to take as a sign of something. But there was something off, even about the confessions. Like everything else about her, they were a little too easy. She hated to swim, she told me. It was just her ticket. Out of Pemby, this desperate place on the edge of the bush.

“I was impressed that someone only a year older than I was already had a plan. Me, I’d done almost no thinking about my future. I got into swimming because I’d been good at it right off, and because it was something my parents didn’t understand. It got me a little away from them. I was a big star here in New Jerusalem, which seemed to me as big as anyone could possibly want to be. Marty had a larger oyster in mind. She was going to be in the movies. She thought she had the California look, figured she’d get parts in surfer movies.”

“Didn’t she have a TV show?” Alice says. “I remember reading something in one of those ‘Where Are They Now?’ articles.”

“I saw that, too. Something about an underwater private eye. It was only on down there, I guess. I mean I never saw it.”

“It can’t have really been about an underwater detective, can it?” Alice says. The idea sets her off laughing. “I mean how many underwater crimes are there? Or underwater criminals, for that matter?”

Jesse smiles sheepishly. “Maybe I’ve got it wrong. Anyway, the actress stuff was all part of this grand plan of hers, and a big element in it—although of course we never talked about it—was that she had to take the gold. Which meant she had to beat me.”

Jesse doesn’t say that this is what she turns on. That the friendship was calculated, that the seduction was just a piece of the arithmetic.

Alice puts it together anyway. “And you’re thinking that if you get someone infatuated with you, it’s hard for them to maintain a true killer instinct, to really care about beating you anymore.”

“Oh, I can’t know that for sure,” Jesse says. “It could as easily be true that Marty liked me well enough, and aside from that, simply got through a hundred meters that particular day three-tenths of a second faster than I did. It could be just that.”

“But if she liked you well enough, why did she disappear?”

Jesse shakes her head. “It’s all just stupid to even think about anymore. The times we made have long since been passed by the newer, faster girls they’re making nowadays. What happened that afternoon is something no one even cares about anymore. Except me, and I’m tired of caring. Sometimes I even think I’ve made up most of Marty Finch, invented this big betrayal to transform my own plain loss into something complicated. For sure, I’ve changed her in my mind over these years. Aged her, made her more sophisticated. It’s like I keep translating her into whatever I need to keep the anger going.”

And the passion, she doesn’t say.

“So I can keep pulling a charge off her. Touch the wire. Keep feeling the current twitch through my fingers,” Jesse says, being almost completely candid, almost candidly complete. Holding back only a few things, colors mostly. The night-white light down in the showers, and the aquamarine.

“Here.” Neal pulls Jesse gently by the shoulders, then points up. “Right there.”

At first she can’t see what he’s talking about. He tamps the dead flashlight down on his open palm, and the batteries jostle into place, making a connection that throws a shot of light on the problem—a crack up near the highest part of the vault in the Azure Grotto.

“Do you think it means anything?” she says. “Anything important, I mean?”

“Don’t know. We get to thinking of this as an attraction, our place of business, that it belongs to us. But it really belongs to nature. Nature’s always going to have the last word on it.”

“What’re you going to do?”

He takes off his baseball cap and runs a hand around his forehead and temples, where sweat has gathered. “I’ll call Tim Sutter up in Columbia in the geology department. See if he can come down here and have a look. In the meantime, we should probably close off the grotto.”

“It’s what a lot of people come for. It’s the main attraction, really. Next to the xylophone.”

“We can give a reduced ticket. Hope enough people decide to come down even if it’s not a full show.”

“Oh, we’re going to lose a bundle, aren’t we?” Jesse says. “Why couldn’t this happen in January?”

He picks up her right hand, puts the left on his shoulder. “Sweetheart. What say we do the Dance of Minor Cave Dilemmas.” He pulls her into the corny fox trot he uses to sidestep bad moments. He can’t stand for her to have any. “Heaven,” he sings into her ear, the notes so close they buzz in her ears. “I’m in heaven. And my heart beats so that I can hardly speeeeeak.” He twirls himself out and snaps back in, Gingering her Fred. “And I seem to find the happiness I seek. When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.”

They shuffle awhile, which they can do only with a bit of difficulty. In addition to being pregnant, Jesse, at six feet, stands several inches taller than Neal. She stoops a little and stretches her arms and they box-step around the worn floor of the cave.

“We’re doing great,” he tells her.

“We are, aren’t we?” she says, as though his saying it makes it true.

“Sure we are. You’re selling houses like hotcakes. And if we come up a little short, my family can kick in. They’re doing great with the little Balkan circus. They’ve even got winters into the black now, with the clown college. We’ve got prosperity floating all around us. We should save our worries for the hard times. These aren’t them. These are the times we’re going to look back on from the hard times as our golden moments.”

While she’s dancing, Jesse closes her eyes and looks through to their future. There’s she and Neal and Willie and the baby and the camcorder Neal hasn’t bought but surely will, so he can over-record Olivia’s life. There they all are, filling the frame. There’s no room for anything else. Not so much as an inch at the margins for an edgy skywriter.

“I might stay down here a little while,” she says, sitting down on the bench along the wall. “Cool out. You know.”

He nods, and looks at her in a way that makes her see that he knows. Maybe not that it’s Wayne. Maybe not even that it’s someone. But she can tell he feels the displacement of the energy she usually has for him. Maybe he has been putting it down to the pregnancy, to some hormonal flux. But what about after the baby is born? She suddenly feels a flush of sickness, which she hasn’t experienced since the earliest days of her pregnancy. She’s enraged at herself. She doesn’t want the tacit knowledge of her faithlessness—her unspoken confession met by Neal’s unspoken forgiveness—corroding the connection between them.

Once he has left and Jesse is alone, she sits against the wall and tilts her head back so she can look into the blue of the vaulted ceiling. She is feeling her present pressing in on her. She needs to get away. And so she closes her eyes and makes the blue go to aquamarine. This is how it happens. Inside her lids the color gets born again. First in a flat wall, then fragmented, smashed into wavy panes, the way a pool bottom looks when the water is broken by swimmers, shot through with sun. Aquamarine and then the slap of her hand on tile and she’s coming up, shooting out of the water for the hundredth, the thousandth, time.

The color is a straight shot back. From here she can clear the frame of blue-green and let in the dead white. The night before their event, down in the showers. The part she dropped from the story as she told it to Alice Avery. She and Marty lying next to each other on those vast, soft piles of towels. The white tile pulling in moonlight through the open windows, a drip in the near distance—rapid, urgent. And farther off, wild dogs howling through a restless night of their own.

“What?” Jesse hears herself whisper. She is seventeen, with all her stores of curiosity intact.

Marty props herself up on an elbow, so tan she looks black against the backlighting of the tile.

“I broke fifty-nine. Fifty-eight-forty.”

“You lie.”

“I don’t,” Marty says. “That’s the thing. You know I don’t.”

“How come it’s not all over the place, on the gossip lines?”

“It was last night, late. Everyone was gone. Only Ian was with me. He clocked it.”

“Ian might have a lousy watch.”

“Might. Never can tell,” Marty says.

Jesse laughs, both because she’s nervous about being down here in the middle of the night, and because here they are, at the Olympics, and Marty’s trying to pull the cheapest sort of club pool psych-out.

“Fastest,” she whispers now, tapping her own heart. Then, tapping Jesse’s, she says, “Second fastest. Everyone else eats our wake.”

Jesse stands listening to her pulse pounding in her temples, and to the dogs, for the light years until Marty says, “Seems to call for something, doesn’t it?” Even though the words are spoken low, they seem to Jesse—wholly unversed in the mechanics of seduction—to ring off the tiles. Even though it is the lightest imaginable touch, Jesse feels the whorls of Marty’s fingerprints burning into the soft skin at her throat.