The Mermaid Chair (29 page)

I hadn't seen him in almost a month, not since Mother's hospitalization. The absence had created a strangeness, an incipient, self-fulfilling distance between us that I didn't know how to confront. Much of our time apart had been necessary, dictated by circumstances. But some of it—a lot of it, really—had not. I couldn't account for the part of me that remained removed from him.

The church was empty. I slipped back into the ambulatory, pausing at the entrance to the tiny chapel. The mermaid chair sat alone, the clerestory window behind it siphoning in a frail, trimmed light. My eyes went instantly to the mermaids on the chair arms. Their greens, reds, and golds were the only brightness in the room.

As I'd painted my father, I'd imagined the chair as maternal—the pietà, the immense lap of dying. I'd envisioned the mermaids like exotic midwives on either side of him, their wings conjuring up images of angels carrying him to heaven, their fish tails making me think of night-sea psychopomps bearing him into the dark mother of the ocean. I'd imagined them singing eerie, plaintive songs, crying—not the fake pebbles in the boxes in Kat's shop but real tears. I'd thought that when I actually saw the chair, I would be weighed under by all this, but what I felt was the most extraordinary lightness.

I went and sat down. Leaning my head against the twisting Celtic knot, I let my hands hold on to the mermaids' backs. What came first to my mind was the time I'd spent as a child scattering rose petals around the island as if they were my father's ashes, how I'd especially heaped them
here
on the seat of the mermaid chair. I wondered if I could possibly have recognized the residue his death left behind, the concentration of good-byes.

Sitting there, I understood so little, and yet much more than I had before. My father had died here, but in a way I had, too. When I'd sat in the chair all those weeks ago, I'd given myself over to loving Whit, abandoning my old life. I had begun then to die away.

I sensed that Whit had come into the chapel even before I saw him. He called my name. “Jessie.”

He was wearing his robe and his cross.

As he walked toward me, I stood up. The knocking started inside my chest.

“How's Nelle?” he asked.

“Much better. She's out of the hospital.”

His face was pinched, and I knew in a way I can't explain that he possessed the same removed piece inside that I did.

“I'm glad,” he said.

“Yes, me, too.”

I felt the moat widening and thought how like detachment the sounds between us were. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something.

“Father Sebastian told me you wanted to see me,” he said, the formality in his voice unmistakable.

My mouth opened in surprise. “But I didn't.” Realizing how that must sound, I added, “I mean, I'm happy to see you, but I didn't tell him that.”

Whit frowned.

“A while ago when I bumped into him, he made it perfectly clear to me that he knew about us. He was very pointed about it.” I felt awkward saying the word “us.”

“I'm afraid Sebastian has a nasty habit of reading my journal.”

“But that's inexcusable.”

The light flickered in the room. I remembered how it had played on his face when he slept. How he'd washed my feet in creek water. I did not understand the mystifying place where our intimacy had flowed back into reserve.

“You know, I wasn't sure until now that he'd actually read it,” he said. “I only suspected.”

“I had the feeling when Sebastian was talking to me that he was really asking me to leave you alone—without really saying it. I can only imagine how hard he's made it for
you.
”

“You would think so, but the truth is, he's been kinder to me since then. Like he wanted me to really do what's best. He told me I should ask myself why I came here, what it means to me to be hidden here with God. I guess he got tired of waiting for me to figure it out.” He shrugged. “Sebastian is a great believer in facing things head-on.”

People don't want to make sacrifices anymore
.

I think beginnings must have their own endings hidden inside them. Gazing at Whit, I knew that the end had been there the first night we met, back when he'd stood on one side of the monastery wall and I on the other. The sturdy bricks.

Whit knew it. I could tell by the way he'd slid his hands inside the sleeves of his robe, the sadness caked in his eyes. I could see he'd
already
made the sacrifice.

We stood there staring at each other. I wondered if I would've fallen in love with him if he'd been a shoe salesman in Atlanta. It was a bizarre thought, but it seemed somehow the most sensible thought of my life. I doubted I would have, and it was disillusioning to me in the sense of stripping away the last remaining illusions. My falling in love with him had had everything to do with his monkness, his loyalty to what lay deep within him, the self-containment of his solitude, that desire to be transformed. What I'd loved in him most was my own aliveness, his ability to give me back to myself.

It felt cruel and astonishing to realize that our relationship had never belonged out there in the world, in a real house where you wash socks and slice onions. It belonged in the shadowed linings of the soul.

I had come to the irreducible thing, just as I had with my father, and there was nothing to do but accept, to learn to accept, to lie down every night and accept.

I closed my eyes, and it was Hugh I saw. His hands, the hair on his fingers, the Band-Aids on his thumbs. How real all of that was. How ordinary. How achingly beautiful. I wanted him back. Not like before but new, all new. I wanted what came after the passion had blown through: flawed, married love.

Whit said, “I honestly thought I could go through with this, I wanted to.” He shook his head and looked down at a fraying place on the dark, carpeted dais.

“I know. Me, too.”

I didn't want him to say anything more. I wanted the letting go to be silent, to go quickly.

Whit nodded. A deep, emphatic nod at something I could not see or hear. He said, “I will miss you.”

“I'm sorry.” My words cracked as I spoke. I felt I'd been the seducer. I'd sat on the sea rocks like one of Homer's sirens and lured him. Even though he was ending it as much as I, I felt
I
was really the betrayer. That I'd betrayed my confessions of love to him, my promise of anniversaries.

“I don't want you to be sorry,” he said. “The thing is, I needed”—he reached out and touched my face, a place near my jaw—“I
needed
to love you.”

He could have meant a million things, but what I wanted to believe was that his grief over his wife had deadened his heart and falling in love with me had resurrected it. I wanted to believe that now he would give his heart back to the monastery. He would go on foraging in the rookery, waking to the sound of frogs in the bent island oaks, to the smell of Brother Timothy's bread, catching these little bits of God showing through.

“It's true of both of us, then. I needed to love you, too.” It came out with so much awkwardness, so much ineptness, I felt as if I should go on explaining, but he smiled at me and stepped closer.

He said, “I told you we'd be damned and saved both. Remember?”

I tried to smile back at him, but it moved painfully on my lips for only a second before evaporating. I reached for him. We held each other without the slightest worry of someone's wandering by. I did not cry, not then. I held him and felt the tides sweep out from the marsh island where we'd made love. I felt a place inside open up, the secret place where I would carry him. And when he'd left, and I was there alone, I felt the pull that must happen inside the egrets when the moon rises in the early dark—that unbearable tug home.

 

I walked to Bone Yard Beach and sat on a piece of driftwood that arched out over the sand. I stared at the ocean, where shrimp boats were roosting in thick, green waves. The tide was coming in instead of going out, which seemed backward and ironic to me. It seemed everything should be leaving. That there should be stretches and stretches of emptiness.

I had lost both of them.

Long ago, at the All-Girls Picnic when Mother, Kat, and Hepzibah had walked into the ocean up to their waists, I'd watched them from nearly this same spot. I began to picture them out there, the way they'd giggled as they'd tied their three threads together and thrown them into the waves. Benne and I had wanted to go with them, had
begged
to go.

No, this is just for us. Y'all stay back there.

Who would've imagined what would come out of the knots they'd made that night?

I tugged off my sandals and rolled my pants as high as I could. Despite the heat, the ocean was still chilled from the winter. I had to go in slowly.

When the water swelled above my knees, I stopped and dug in my pocket for the bits of twine I'd gathered off the lawn at the monastery. I wanted to tie a knot that would go on forever. But not with anyone else. With myself.

All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete myself with someone else—first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.

I sorted through the cotton strands, wondering if something in me had known what must be done even as I'd collected them.

I stood still with the waves cascading against my thighs, elongating as they flowed beyond me toward the shore.

Jessie. I take you, Jessie…

The wind moved sideways past my ears, and I could smell the aloneness in it.

For better or for worse.

The words rose from my chest and recited themselves in my mind.

To love and to cherish.

I took the longest string and tied a knot in the center of it. I gazed at it for a minute, then flung it into the ocean at roughly one o'clock in the afternoon, May 17, 1988, and every day of my life since, I return to that insoluble moment with veneration and homage, as if it possesses the weight and ceremony of marriage.

O
n the last Saturday of May, I stood on the ferry dock with Mother, Kat, Hepzibah, and Benne, all of us lined up at the railing, staring at the wind-chopped bay. White ibis were everywhere. We watched them flying in boomerangs across the bay.

My suitcase sat near the gangplank. Kat had brought a basket of purple beach phlox, Carolina jessamine, and pink oleander blossoms, which she intended to toss at the pontoon when it pulled away, like it was the
Queen Mary
. She poured lemonade from a thermos into little paper cups and handed out benne wafers. She had been adamant about its being a bon voyage party.

Having little appetite, I fed most of my wafers to Max.

“Where will you live now?” Benne asked.

I thought of my big, drafty house, the turret and the stained glass over the doorways, my studio tucked beneath the roof.
Home,
I wanted to tell her,
I'll live at home,
but I wasn't sure I could claim it now.

“I don't know,” I said.

“You can always live here,” said Mother.

I looked at the faded orange buoys bobbling on the water, marking the crab traps, and felt the twisted tie deep inside that tethered me to her, to this place. For a moment I almost believed I could stay.

“I'll come back,” I said, and abruptly broke down crying, setting off a whole chain reaction: Hepzibah, then Benne, Mother, and finally Kat.

“Well, isn't this
fun?
” said Kat, doling out paper napkins. “I always said there's nothing like a lot of bawling women to liven up a party.”

Having the opportunity, we fled into laughter.

I was the last one on the ferry. I stood at the rail, as Kat had instructed, so I could see the flower toss. It rained oleander, jessamine, and phlox for all of thirty seconds, but I have wrapped and contained the sight very carefully in my mind. I am still able to close my eyes and see the blossoms light on the water like tiny firebirds.

I stood there watching after the dock disappeared from sight, and I knew they had all climbed into Kat's golf cart by then. As the island slid into the distance, I stored everything away—the bright expanse of water, the crushing scent of the marsh, the wind soaring in canticles across the bay—and tried not to think what waited for me.

 

Hugh was asleep in his leather chair in the den, wearing black socks worn down at the heels, a book open across his chest—
The Portable Jung.
He'd forgotten to close the curtains, and the windows behind him blazed with darkness and lamplight.

I stood unmoving, startled by the sight of him, a kind of fluttering in my stomach.

My flight had been delayed from Charleston to Atlanta because of thunderstorms, and it was late, close to midnight. I had not told him I was coming. Part of it was pure, cowardly fear, but it was also the hope that I might catch him off guard, and in those one or two moments he would forget what I'd done, and his heart would fill with so much love it would override every justified reason to send me away. That was my foolish, unreasoned hope.

I'd let myself in with the key we kept hidden under the flagstone at the rear of the house, leaving my suitcase in the foyer beside the front door. Noticing the light in the den, I'd thought only that Hugh had forgotten to turn it out when he went to bed. And here he was.

For whole minutes I stood there listening to the puffing noise he made with his mouth when he slept—rhythmic, sonorous, filled with the rush of years.

His arm dangled over the side of the chair. The little bracelet Dee had made was still on his wrist. Outside, there was thunder far away.

Hugh.

I thought of a time long ago, the year before Dee was born. We'd gone hiking in the Pisgah National Forest up in the Blue Ridge Mountains and come upon a waterfall. It dropped twenty or thirty feet from an overhang of rocks, and we'd stood a moment staring up at the plunging water, the way it flashed and held the sun, hundreds of tiny, iridescent rainbows fluttering out of it like a swarm of dragonflies.

We'd yanked off our clothes, tossing them on rocks and lady ferns. It was hot, the deep of August, and the water still had the memory of snow in it. Holding hands, we picked our way over mossy stones until we stood beneath the overhang with the water crashing down in front of us. The spray was like a driving rain, the sound deafening. Hugh smoothed my wet hair behind my ears and kissed my shoulders and breasts. We made love pressed against the cliff face. For weeks I felt the water hitting the earth inside my body.

Watching him sleep now, I wanted to pull him back into that niche of wild rock. I would have been happy just to pull him into the ordinary niche we'd carved out together with little domestic tools for all these years, but I didn't know how to return to either one of those places. How to make them the same place.

I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over, a million times daily—choosing love, then choosing it again, how loving and being in love could be so different.

Rolling his head to the side, he shifted in the chair. Sometimes I think it was my remembering that woke him, that the waterfall spilled out of my mind and caused him to open his eyes.

He gazed at me with sleep and confusion. “You're here,” he said. Not to me, I realized, but to himself.

I smiled at him, but I didn't say anything, unable to scrape my voice up out of my throat.

He stood. He lifted his shoulders. I don't think he knew what to feel any more than what to say. He stood in his stocking feet and stared at me, a private, unreadable expression on his face. A car went by out on the street, the motor gunning and falling away.

When he spoke, the words sounded curled up and wounded. “What are you doing here?”

I think now of the ten thousand things I could have said to him, whether it would have made any difference if I'd gone down on my knees and canted all my transgressions.

“I…I brought you something,” I answered, and, raising my hand as if motioning him to wait, I went to the foyer for my pocketbook. I returned, digging through it. Unzipping my coin purse, I took out his wedding ring.

“You left this on Egret Island,” I said, and held the ring out to him, grasping it between my right thumb and forefinger, lifting my left hand so he could see I was wearing my ring, too. “Oh, Hugh, I want to come home,” I said. “I want to be here, with
you.
”

He didn't move, didn't reach for the ring.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “I'm so sorry I hurt you.”

He still didn't move, and it began to feel as if I were holding the ring across a chasm, that if I dropped it, it would fall through the earth. But I couldn't draw back my hand. It was held by that mysterious quality that appears in cats when they've climbed to the top of the tree, to the end of the limb, and then, seeing with horror where they are, simply refuse to come down. I went on holding the ring out to him.
Take it, please take it
—hoping so hard I pinched the imprint of the ring into the pads of my fingers.

He stepped backward before turning and left the room.

When he'd gone, I set the ring on the table beside his chair. I set it beneath the lamp, which I could not bear to switch off.

 

I slept in the guest room, or, to be accurate—I
lay awake
in the guest room. As atonement I kept forcing myself to see him in that moment as he'd turned to leave, his profile against the gleaming windows. The hardness he felt toward me had risen to his face and tensed in his cheek.

Forgiveness was so much harder than being remorseful. I couldn't imagine the terrible surrender it would take.

It rained much of the night, coming down in great black wheels and shaking the trees. I saw dawn push at the window before I finally fell asleep and woke not long afterward to the aroma of sausage and eggs, to the overwhelming smell of Hugh cooking.

There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.

That was where our marriage had left off, that day back in February—February 17, Ash Wednesday, the day of ashes and endings. Hugh had cooked breakfast, sausage and eggs. It had been the final thing before I'd left. The benediction.

I went downstairs. Hugh stood at the stove, holding a spatula. The frying pan was crackling furiously. He'd set two plates on the breakfast bar.

“Hungry?” he said.

I wasn't at all, but knowing his abiding faith in the power of such breakfasts, I nodded and smiled at him, sensing the tremor of some quiet new rhythm wanting to establish itself.

I climbed onto the bar chair. He spooned half of a vegetable omelette onto my plate, sausage links, a buttered English muffin. “There you go,” he said.

He paused, and I felt him just behind me, breathing in an uneven way. I stared into my plate, wanting to look around at him but afraid I would ruin whatever was about to happen.

The moment seemed to hang in the air, revolving, deliberate, like a bit of glass lifted to the sun and turned slowly to refract the light.

Suddenly he laid his hand on my arm. I sat still as he slid it slowly up to my shoulder and back down.

“I missed you,” he said, leaning close to my ear.

I clutched his hand almost fiercely, pulling his fingers to my face, touching them with my lips. After a moment he gently pulled them away and put the other half of the omelette on his plate.

We sat in our kitchen and ate. Through the windows I could see the washed world, the trees and the grass and the shrubs silvered with raindrops.

There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meted out in these precious sips. It would well up from Hugh's heart in spoonfuls, and he would feed it to me. And it would be enough.