Smoke and Mirrors (31 page)

It occurred then to Regan that that was what he hated most about women: their practicality. Gwen had always made him use a condom, although he disliked condoms, while she had also used a diaphragm and a spermicide. Regan felt that somewhere in all there a level of spontaneity, of romance, of passion, was lost. He liked sex to be something that just happened, half in his head, half out of it. Something sudden and dirty and powerful.

His forehead began to throb.

“So what’s the weather like out there?” Gwen asked brightly.

“It’s hot,” said Regan.

“Wish it was here. It’s been raining for weeks.”

He said something about it being lovely to hear her voice again. Then he put down the phone.

Regan checked the traps. Still empty.

He wandered into his office and flipped on the TV.

“. . . this is a little one. That’s what
fetus
means. And one day she’ll grow up to be a big one. She’s got little fingers, little toes—she’s even got little toenails.”

A picture on the screen: red and pulsing and indistinct. It cut to a woman with a huge smile, cuddling a baby.

“Some little ones like her will grow up to be nurses, or teachers, or musicians. One day one of them may even be President.”

Back to the pink thing, filling the screen.

“But
this
little one will never grow up to be a big one. She’s going to be killed tomorrow. And her mother says it isn’t murder.” He flipped channels until he found “I Love Lucy,” the perfect background nothing, then he turned on the computer and got down to work.

After two hours spent chasing an error of under a hundred dollars through seemingly endless columns of figures, his head began to ache. He got up and walked into the garden.

He missed having a garden; missed proper English lawns with proper English grass. The grass out here was withered, brown and sparse, the trees bearded with Spanish moss like a something from a science fiction movie. He followed a track out into the woods behind the house. Something gray and sleek slipped from behind one tree to another.

“Here, kitty kitty,” called Regan. “Here, puss puss puss.”

He walked over to the tree and looked behind it. The cat—or whatever it had been—was gone.

Something stung his cheek. He slapped at it without thought, lowered his hand to find it stained with blood, a mosquito, half-squashed, still twitching in his palm.

He went back into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. He missed tea, but it just didn’t taste the same out here.

Janice got home about six.

“How was it?”

She shrugged. “Fine.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I have to go back next week,” she said. “For a checkup.”

“To make sure they didn’t leave any instruments inside you?”

“Whatever,” she said.

“I’ve made a spaghetti Bolognese,” said Regan.

“I’m not hungry,” said Janice. “I’m going to bed.”

She went upstairs.

Regan worked until the numbers no longer added up. He went upstairs and walked quietly into the darkened bedroom. He slipped off his clothes in the moonlight, dropped them onto the carpet, and slid between the sheets.

He could feel Janice next to him. Her body was shaking, and the pillow was wet.

“Jan?”

She had her back to him.

“It was horrible,” she whispered into her pillow. “It hurt so much. And they wouldn’t give me a proper anesthetic or anything. They said I could have a shot of Valium if I wanted one, but they didn’t have an anesthetist there anymore. The lady said he couldn’t stand the pressure and anyway it would have cost another two hundred dollars and nobody wanted to pay . . .

“It hurt so much.” She was sobbing now, gasping the words as if they were being tugged out of her. “So much.”

Regan got out of bed.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” said Regan. “I really don’t have to listen to this.”

It was too hot in the house. Regan walked downstairs in only his underpants. He walked into the kitchen, bare feet making sticking noises on the vinyl.

One of the mousetrap doors was closed.

He picked up the trap. It felt a trifle heavier than before. He opened the door carefully, a little way. Two beady eyes stared up at him. Light brown fur. He pushed the door shut again and heard a scrabbling from inside the trap.

Now what?

He couldn’t kill it. He couldn’t kill anything.

The green mousetrap smelled acrid, and the bottom of it was sticky with mouse piss. Regan carried it gingerly out into the garden.

A gentle breeze had sprung up. The moon was almost full. He knelt on the ground, placed the trap carefully on the dry grass.

He opened the door of the small green corridor.

“Run away,” he whispered, feeling embarrassed at the sound of his voice in the open air. “Run away, little mouse.”

The mouse didn’t move. He could see its nose at the door of the trap.

“Come on,’ said Regan. Bright moonlight; he could see everything, sharply lit and shadowed, if lacking in color.

He nudged the trap with his foot.

The mouse made a dash for it then. It ran out from the trap, then stopped, turned, and began to hop into the woods.

Then it stopped again. The mouse looked up in Regan’s direction. Regan was convinced that it was staring at him. It had tiny pink hands. Regan felt almost paternal then. He smiled, wistfully.

A streak of gray in the night, and the mouse hung, struggling uselessly, from the mouth of a large gray cat, its eyes burning green in the night. Then the cat bounded into the undergrowth.

He thought briefly of pursuing the cat, of freeing the mouse from its jaws . . .

There was a sharp scream from the woods; just a night sound, but for a moment Regan thought it sounded almost human, like a woman in pain.

He threw the little plastic mousetrap as far from him as he could. He was hoping for a satisfying crash as it hit something, but it fell soundlessly in the bushes.

Then Regan walked back inside, and he closed the door of the house behind him.

T HE S EA C HANGE

Now is a good time to write this down,

now, with the rattle of the pebbles raked by the waves,

and the slanting rain cold, cold, pattering and spattering

the tin roof until I can barely hear myself think,

and over it all the wind’s low howl. Believe me,

I could crawl down to the black waves now,

but that would be foolish, under the dark cloud.

“Now hear us as we cry to Thee

For those in peril on the sea.”

The old hymn hovers on my lips, unbidden,

perhaps I am singing aloud. I cannot tell.

I am not old, but when I wake I am wracked with pain,

an old sea wreck. Look at my hands.

Broken by the waves and the sea: and twisted,

they look like something I’d find on the beach, after a storm.

I hold my pen like an old man.

My father called a sea like this “a widow-maker.”

My mother said the sea was always a widow-maker,

even when it was gray and smooth as sky. And she was right.

My father drowned in fine weather.

Sometimes I wonder if his bones have ever washed ashore,

or if I’d know them if they had,

twisted and sea-smoothed as they would be.

I was a lad of seventeen, cocky as any a young man

who thinks he can make the sea his mistress,

and I had promised my mother I’d not go to sea.

She’d prenticed me to a stationer, and my days were spent

with reams and quires; but when she died I took her savings

bought myself a small boat. I took my father’s dusty nets and lobster pots,

raised a three-man crew, all older than I was,

and left the inkpots and the nibs for ever.

There were good months and bad.

Cold, cold, the sea was bitter and brine, the nets cut my hands,

the lines were tricksy, dangerous things; still,

I’d not have given it up for the world. Not then.

The salt scent of my world made me sure I’d live forever.

Scudding over the waves in a fine breeze,

the sun behind me, faster than a dozen horses across the white wave tops,

that was living indeed.

The sea had moods. You learned that fast.

The day I write of now, she was shifty, evil-humored,

the wind coming now and now from all four corners of the compass,

the waves all choppy. I could not get the measure of her.

We were all out of sight of land when I saw a hand,

saw something, reaching from the gray sea.

Remembering my father, I ran to the prow and called aloud.

No answer but the lonely wail of gulls.

And the air was filled with a whirr of white wings, and then

the swing of the wooden boom, which struck me at the base of the skull:

I remember the slow way the cold sea came toward me,

enveloped me, swallowed me, took me for its own.

I tasted salt. We are made of seawater and bone:

That’s what the stationer told me when I was a boy.

It had occurred to me since that waters break to herald every birth,

and I am certain that those waters must taste salt—

remembering, perhaps, my own birth.

The world beneath the sea was blur. Cold, cold, cold . . .

I do not believe I truly saw her. I can not believe.

A dream, or madness, the lack of air,

the blow upon the head: That’s all she was.

But when in dreams I see her, as I do, I never doubt her.

Old as the sea she was, and young as a new-formed breaker or a swell.

Her goblin eyes had spied me. And I knew she wanted me.

They say the sea folk have no souls: Perhaps

the sea is one huge soul they breathe and drink and live.

She wanted me. And she would have had me; there could be no doubt.

And yet . . .

They pulled me from the sea and pumped my chest

until I vomited rich seawater onto the wave-wet shingle.

Cold, cold, cold I was, trembling and shivering and sick.

My hands were broken and my legs were twisted,

as if I had just come up from deep water,

scrimshaw and driftwood are my bones,

carved messages hidden beneath my flesh.

The boat never came back. The crew was never more seen.

I live on the charity of the village:

There, but for the mercy of the sea, they say, go we.

Some years have passed: almost a score.

And whole women view me with pity, or with scorn.

Outside my cottage the wind’s howl has become a screaming,

rattling the rain against the tin walls,

crunching the flinty shingle, stone against stone.

“Now hear us as we cry to Thee

For those in peril on the sea.”

Believe me, I could go down to the sea tonight,

drag myself down there on my hands and knees.

Give myself to the water and the dark.

And to the girl.

Let her suck the meat from off these tangled bones,

transmute me to something incorruptible and ivory:

to something rich and strange. But that would be foolish.

The voice of the storm is whispering to me.

The voice of the beach is whispering to me.

The voice of the waves is whispering to me.