The Man Who Lost the Sea (2 page)

The results—well, they’re as impossible as the foregoing suggests. Theodore Sturgeon’s best stories are triumphant Golems. They stride tall while they shake off the entreaties of the clay of the battleground of which they were formed. They have nothing but their voices.

—Jonathan Lethem
   Brooklyn, New York

He had a grey little job clerking in the free clinic at the hospital, doing what he’d done the day he started, and that was nineteen years back. His name was Llewellyn, and Ivy Shoots called him Lulu.

Ivy took care of him. He’d lived with Ivy ever since she was an owlish intellectual with an uncertain, almost little girl look about her and he was a scared, mixed up adolescent wilting in the interim between high-school and his first job. Ivy was in several senses his maiden experience—first date, first drink, first drunk, and first hangover in a strange hotel in a strange city accompanied by a strange girl. Strange or not—and she was—she was his Secret.

A man like Lulu needs a Secret. A sheltered background consisting of positive morality, tea-cozies, spinster aunts and the violent contrast of eighteen months as a public charge—after the aunts had burned to death, uninsured—had convinced him that he was totally incapable of coping with a world in which everybody else knew all the angles. So he fell joyfully into the arrangement with Ivy Shoots and the Secret that went with it.

He was small and he was pudgy, and he wasn’t bright, and his eyes weren’t too good, and the very idea of his stealing a nickel or crossing in the middle of the block was ridiculous. It seemed to him that all the men around him emanated the virtue of sin—the winks and whistles at the girls, the Monday tales
(boy did I tie one on Saturday night)
, the legends of easy conquests and looseness and casual infidelity, the dirty jokes, and the oaths and expletives—and because they seemed to have no scruples they kept their stature as men in a world of men.

In this, Lulu could easily have drowned. Only his Secret kept him afloat. He told it to no one, partly because he sensed instinctively that he would treasure it more if he kept it to himself, and partly
because he knew he would not be believed even if he proved it. He could listen contentedly to the boasting of the men he envied, thinking
if you only knew!
and
you think that’s something!
hugging to himself all the while the realization that not one among them had committed the enormity of living in sin as he was doing.

When he first went to work at the hospital, he was the youngest clerk in the crowd. He had felt enormously superior to the other sinners who with all their triumphs had not been able to dye themselves as black as he had succeeded in doing. As the years went by, and he became one of the older ones, he patronized the young ones instead and pitied his contemporaries.

All this, of course, took place in his most inward self. On the surface he was an inconspicuous individual who was laughed at when noticed—which was seldom—and he took both the laughter and the anonymity as envious compliments.
You don’t know it and you’d never guess, but you’re talking to a pretty gay dog
.

Life with Ivy was, in some respects, as methodically guarded, as hedged about with limitations as his infancy with the aunts had been. In all their years together it never occurred to him that there was anything very unusual about the fact that they never entertained at home nor, for that matter, went anywhere together. She had her friends, and he had his acquaintances, and they seldom discussed them.

As a matter of fact they talked about very little. Ivy Shoots was a statistical typist, a strange breed to begin with. She was capable of meticulous accuracy without concentration and she spent her days rapidly typing long lists of bond issues and proofing drafts of catalogue numbers and patent listings.

She would arrive home within a few seconds of 5:45 each evening. Lulu, who went to work at six in the morning, would be waiting, with no variation in the pattern. Unvaryingly the potatoes would be on to boil. He had done the marketing; she cooked. They ate; he washed up. It was all very painless and almost completely automatic. He had eight shopping lists and she had eight menus, so that by using one each day they never ate the same food on successive Wednesdays.

He took out the laundry on Mondays, the dry-cleaning on Tuesdays and picked both bundles up on Fridays. She made the bed and handled all of the money. He dusted and swept and put the garbage out. On Saturday mornings she left the house at eight. Sunday evenings precisely at nine she returned.

He spent Saturday mornings cleaning the house, Saturday afternoons at the movies (a children’s matinee, with 5 Cartoons 5), and all day Sunday listening to the radio tuned in loud. Ivy couldn’t abide the radio, so out of consideration for her he used earphones on weekday evenings. And on weekday evenings she read novels—each a book club selection—from the lending library in the drugstore downstairs.

There were two things in all his life with her which he never opened. They were his pay envelope and the black steel box on the night table. Opening the first was unthinkable, and the second impossible, since she kept the key on a ribbon around her neck. Each of these closed matters was indicative of the total way her mind worked.

She pooled her wages with his pay envelope and kept track of every penny. Lulu neither smoked nor drank. He walked to and from work and brought his lunch in a paper bag. He had no use for cash and—except for his movie money on Saturdays—never touched it. Laundry and groceries were handled by monthly bill—and paid for by mail. It is the literal truth that on nine hundred and ninety-one successive weeks he never once broke the seal on his pay envelope.

There was nothing in such self-control not compatible with the effortless routine of his life, and he put all temptation behind and away from him—along with U.S. foreign policy, baseball games, and the mating of the sapsucker, Ivy’s whereabouts on weekends, and all the other world’s works in which he did not participate. Perhaps it would be more correct to say he simply filed it away, not so much forgotten as simply unremembered.

So life proceeded for nineteen years while wars and seasons crept by unnoticed, touching him no more than ambition or variety did. His life was a quiet succession of children’s matinees, with 5 Cartoons 5, of work in the morning and potatoes to peel at five in the afternoon, and, it may even be noted, the perfunctory performance,
in the speechless dark, on three Tuesdays and three Fridays in each month, of an activity most essential to his secret status.

Evening after quiet evening was spent simply with the radio droning through the earphones into Lulu’s lethargic and semi-conscious mind, while Ivy Shoots sat across the room from him in a straight-backed chair with her novel in one hand and her balsam inhalator—she was perpetually entering or leaving a head-cold—in the other. Whether or not they were happy is an argument for people who like definitions, but it can hardly be denied that a good many of the less restricted are unhappier than Lulu Llewellyn and Ivy Shoots.

In the nineteenth year of their arrangement, Ivy Shoots had a sort of colic of the conscience. Maybe it had something to do with the poor-man’s Yoga she was hobbying at the time—a pseudo-mystic cult which dictated that the higher self, being chained to earth by lies and sin, must confess All to be cleaned and truly free itself. Anyway, she started to brood, and she brooded for three days and nights, and then one evening she began breathing hard—which made her cough—and at last came out with it: “Lulu, you’re a good man. A
really
good man. You’ve never done anything wrong in your whole life. You couldn’t. So you needn’t be ashamed.”

Lulu was, of course, no end startled. He pushed back his left earphone and blinked. “I’m not ashamed,” he said. Then, in utter amazement, he watched her leap up, and go scrabbling for the key of her black box. In a moment she had opened the box and was fanning through the papers it contained. In another moment she had found the paper that was to explode a bomb-shell in Lulu’s quiet life. She simply crossed the room and handed it to him.

“Well, read it,” she said.

He blinked and did as he was told. And he honestly couldn’t understand it, it was a legal form, apparently—all filled out with names and dates and witnesses and the like. He got as far as realizing that and then his mind refused to go on. He waved the paper and said inanely, “What’s this?”

She expelled her breath slowly, looked up at the ceiling as if to remind herself that she could not expect him to understand all at
once, and them gently took the certificate from him. She held it so that he could see it clearly, while she pointed out its significance. She explained each part to him—his signature, hers, the witnesses, the place, the official stamp, and finally the date, some nineteen years before. He nodded as each brick of structure fell into place, right up until she said, “… so you see, we were married that night.” At that last point he looked up.

“No we weren’t,” he said. “It’s some kind of mistake!”

“But I tell you we were, Lulu.” She tapped the paper. “We were.”

“No we weren’t,” he said again, but now with all of the assurance gone from his voice.

“Do you remember that night? Try to remember. Think back.”

“Well, it was a long time ago.”

“The very next day when you woke up there in the hotel. Start then.”

“Well …” He tapped the paper, his eyes wide, and she nodded. He said, “Oh.” And after a bit, his only defense, his only reference: “Fellow on the radio said …” He stopped, trying to remember exactly what the fellow had said. “He said you can’t do that get married all at once, drinking and all.”

“It happened nineteen years ago, Lulu.”

Lulu sat looking at the marriage certificate. It began to blur before his eyes. He whispered, “Why did you do it, Ivy?”

“I wanted to get married, that’s all. I couldn’t … do it any other way.”

It wasn’t really an answer to the question he had asked her, which concerned only him and an old piece of paper—not her at all. But he found he could not repeat the question and after a moment he didn’t even try. She was nineteen years in the past, saying, “I was going to tell you, but I was afraid. I didn’t know you, Lulu—the way I do now. I didn’t know if you’d be angry or hate me, or leave, or what. I was going to tell you,” she added after a pause, “but I waited so I could be sure you wouldn’t be angry. And in a week …” She closed her eyes. “… you were glad. You said that. It was the only thing bad you ever did, or thought you did. It was the only thing. And now you see you didn’t do anything bad after all. I—I
know it must be a shock, but …” She shrugged then, opened her eyes, and smiled at him.

“Well!” she said briskly, “I’m glad you know now. At least you won’t have that on your conscience. You!” she added, with the completely sincere but naive fondness that often seems only a hair’s breadth from scorn. “You doing
anything
bad. The very idea!”

He sat in his usual chair in his usual plump slump, with his feet in his shoes—he wiggled them to be sure—and his heart going not much faster than usual. He was all the parts of a man, alive and feeling, with the same name as before and the same weight cradled the same way on the bent springs of the same chair. Yet he could not have been more different had he become six feet tall or shrunk to midget size, or even if he had changed species and become a squirrel or a philodendron.

He just sat there wondering numbly where he had changed, and why so drastic a change seemed not to show somewhere. Something inside him had crumpled, but its precise nature eluded him. He put his hand on his round little stomach as if to find it, but everything felt the same to his touch.

Why did you do it, Ivy?

But he couldn’t ask the question aloud. Instead he stood up suddenly, and because of some freak lack of control, his voice came out harsh, whiplike. “Ivy, you let me think …”

She whirled to face him, paling.

He was sorry his voice had done that, he was sorry he had frightened her. He was bewildered by the fact that he felt fright too. He opened his lips to speak, and saw the absolute attention her sudden fright had gained him. He knew then that his next words would be words she would never forget. They came, and they were, “I guess I might’s well turn in now.” He shambled past her, saw the fright leave, and the color return to her face.

“Yes, you must be tired,” she said cheerfully. “I felt funny there for a second. I guess what I need is a bite to eat!” She began to trim the crusts off some bread slices and to hum a no-tune she was fond of. Lulu had heard it for so long he was unaware of whether or not he liked it. It was a random sequence of notes within a range of about
four tones. But unlike any other music, it was phrased not by bars nor melodic units, but by ladylike sniffs from her perpetually dripping nose.

Lulu found himself watching that nose as he slowly undressed. It was slightly bulbous at the tip, reddened and highly flexible, the results of years of blotting and mopping and repeated testing during the rare times when the drip was absent. He looked at the nose and he said to himself,
nineteen years
, and somehow that made sense to him. He got into bed and lay down to stare up at the ceiling until she retired.

She stopped by the bedroom door. She had the black box nestling in the crook of one elbow and a small sandwich in the other hand. She chewed and swallowed and then patted the black steel affectionately with the sandwich.

“Don’t you ever forget, Lulu! Anybody tries to make out you did a wrong thing in your whole life, this box has all the proof in the world it’s not so.”

She came in and put the box down on the night table, and patted it again. She hummed for a moment longer, then took another bite out of the sandwich and said, “My, I feel so
good
now that it’s in the open. Lulu, I’m filing that paper under M in the writing-desk. Don’t forget—in case you ever need it for anything. It doesn’t need to be in the box any more.”

She washed up her things and put them on the rack to dry and after a while she came to bed. It wasn’t Tuesday night or Friday night. It was Sunday night. They went to sleep without talking.