The Mermaid Chair (22 page)

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
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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 un-tamed, 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 t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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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.

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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 t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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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,
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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 salti-ness 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 t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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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 wis-teria 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
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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, trac-ing 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.

Later I would think that if sex was really a conversation, a way of communicating something, what was it we had said to each other? Where had those desperate, eloquent voices come from?

Afterward I lay beside him, still nude, warmed by his body, which gave off surprising waves of heat. There were smudges of mud on my hips, tiny green myrtle leaves pressed onto the backs of my legs. Max roused himself, wandered over, and curled up on the other side of me.

“I feel like that woman in the Gauguin painting,” I said.

He tightened his arm around me. “Which one?”

“That exotic island woman he was always painting. You know. Usually she wore a red sarong.”

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He glanced at the turtle skull I’d placed on the crab trap, and smiled. Then he moved his finger along the gully between my breasts. I saw that his knuckle was bleeding from tiny punctures made by the sharp points of the fan palm.

I heard Max start to snore. Whit’s eyes drifted closed. I could not understand drowsiness after sex. The cells in my own body were simmering in adrenaline.

When he began to breathe in the heavy way of sleep, I lay there and listened. The afternoon floated on the tide, pulled along like flotsam. Whit slept. I watched him. I watched everything with a kind of wonder. Once, a blur of white wings plum-meted toward the creek—a diving osprey falling like an angel toward the water.

I felt evicted from my old life—no, not evicted, sprung. Free.

I lay there—the Gauguin woman—held in the lushness of what had happened, feeling content,
alive.

Only once did I think of Hugh and a spasm of shock swept through me, the rebound of my other life, the terrible moral wrongness of what I’d done. I cupped myself tightly against Whit’s side until it passed.

When he woke, the sun was arching toward the west. From under the lean-to, I could see citron colors flooding along the horizon. He sat up. “It’s late. I have to get back for vespers.”

As I reached for my clothes, he said, “Are you sorry? About this?”

“I don’t have any regrets,” I told him. But it wasn’t true. I regretted that I was married. That I would end up hurting Hugh, had already hurt him. That Dee could be hurt. That all the glue that had held us together for so long was coming
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apart. But I didn’t regret what we’d done. I should have, I suppose, but I didn’t. I knew I would do it again. Unless. Unless
he
was sorry.