The Sea of Light (17 page)

There’s a wind, a heavyweight eight crew out training in the waves, taste of fall in the air. Whenever a young woman jogs past Bren winces a little, turns her face away. I ask if she’s afraid. This evokes a look of suspicious perplexity.

“Afraid that you’ll run into one of your girls?” I tease. “Your
crème de la crème?”

“Oh, hush.”

I tell her, the way I always do: Bren, you are a closet case. Then squeeze her arm briefly to soften the goad. But she really is afraid, and pulls away completely.

“Actually, something sort of humiliating happened this week.”

“At work?”

“Well, yes. I had a visit from a new English professor, Ralph Brown. It turns out Kay left a lot of files and paperwork in her office—you know, lecture notes, things like that. This guy is teaching one of her old courses. Anyway, he found some letters.”

“Letters?”

“That I’d sent her.”

She blushes. Wind whips the red face and I want to cool it with a washcloth. Boz shuffles through a hedge. The leash weaves around branches. We spend some time untangling ourselves.

“So. Did he read them?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t in envelopes.”

“Personal stuff?”

“Some of it.”

“Sweetie, I’m so sorry.”

We sit on a rise, look across dirty, wind-boiled water to the city. She appears, for the first time, to want very much to speak. So I listen.

“He seemed like a nice guy. Skinny. Black. Thick glasses. He had a nervous tic—his cheek kept rippling. Very soft-spoken, perfect clipped English, I even thought he was gay at first, but then I couldn’t tell. It seemed like he was trying to be discreet, you know—he just explained who he was, said that he’d found these with some of Kay’s notes and thought I would want them back. And he kept apologizing for taking my time. It was strange, Chick. Really strange.”

“It sounds traumatic. But also like he was just being decent.”

“Mmmm. I thanked him and shook his hand. Then I went into a state of shock.”

“Did you talk with him about it?”

“Yes.”

“Well? How was that?”

“I honestly don’t remember. I don’t remember a word. And I can’t even guess how he knew where to find me.”

“Maybe someone told him.”

“Who’d know?”

“Bren. Sweet lady. You’d be surprised at how many of our supposedly deep dark secrets are common knowledge. In the public domain, so to speak.”

She stands quickly, firing off a nasty look. Boz growls and stalks away with her.

All of which is to say: Shut up, Chick.

I do. And follow them both, brushing leaves from my rear end.

*

“DeKuts says fear is innate,” she told me once, about fifteen years ago—prelude to the first time I ever received that same nasty look. We were shuffling through dried leaves around a campus quadrangle. Avoiding some upcoming class. Surreptitiously catching the eyes of women strolling by. She’d come from a swim team workout and fatigue dented deep lines around her cheeks and forehead. At the same time, there was a healthy flush to her face, and a kind of rangy willingness, a suppleness, to her body. Unbending stiffness of shoulders and knees lay in the future. Youth has rubber-band resiliency—part of its grace a pure lack of consciousness about pain’s fierce potential to limit motion, to make once-big things small.

“What does he mean, ‘innate’?” I goaded. “Innate in relation to the body? Or innate in relation to the mind?”

“Oh come on, Chick. To the
body,
of course. Same thing, anyway. It’s all one organism.”

“Sure, but so’s an octopus. Or an ant colony, for that matter. You have a lot of separate parts that make up the whole.”

“So what? What are you really trying to say?”

What I really was trying to
say was that DeKuts—whose influence over her I found distasteful, whom I hated sight unseen—sounded to me like a sadistic, misogynistic bastard, and made me, in some way I couldn’t define, terribly jealous. But I wouldn’t tell her that. At least, not then. So I lied a little instead, blurting out the first half-comprehended thing that popped into my head.

“That the body and mind are
separate,
Bren. When your mind’s gone, your body may still be technically alive, but it’s worthless. So nothing—certainly nothing like fear—is innate to
the body. Fear is all in the mind. And personally, I think it’s your wonderful Mr. DeKuts who’s putting it there.”

That’s when she gave me the foul look, blushing slightly in resentment, her lips compressed. And said it, for the first and only time out loud: “Shut up, Chick. You talk too much.”

I told her she was rude, a stuck-up jock. Typically, a combination of superficial pride and genuine core-deep decency kept her from responding.

It caused a rift between us, for a while.

*

The present rift heals quickly, without further discussion. We walk until the dog’s tired, then head back to my place, where we feed him, watch him settle in a corner, twitching with dog dreams, and we think about feeding ourselves.

“Let me take you to dinner, Chick.”

“Why? You feel like stepping out?”

She shakes her head, a little embarrassed. I understand and avoid saying anything; it would only lead us back to the old argument again:

But Bren, if
they
are there dancing in a gay bar, too, it doesn’t matter if you know them from somewhere else, does it?

Yes, she’d say, yes, you don’t understand. You don’t have my job. You don’t know all the risks.

Risks? What risks?

Suppose some rich parent on an alumni committee catches wind of the fact that his eighteen-year-old daughter, his pride and joy, is spending hours a day in a wet racing suit under the watchful eyes of her lesbian coach? Do you honestly think the reaction would be favorable? They’d be howling for my blood.

Why? You don’t mess with those kids, do you?

Of course not! You know me better than that, Chick. I like mature
women,
not girls. And even if—I would never! I think that’s immoral.

So?

So? So? You don’t know straight people the way I do. You don’t have to work with them day in and day out—and maybe you’re lucky—well, good for you. But I know the way they think, and when it comes to
us,
believe me, their minds are full of sleaze. They think we want to jump someone’s bones twenty-four hours a day. Perpetual sex on the brain. Especially in sport—anything to do with human bodies. Like we’ve got nothing else to worry about.

Then I’d sigh, and say something like: For God’s sake, Bren. Maybe they don’t
all
think that way.

But it’s another argument I’d fail to win. So I keep my mouth shut, and make us dinner. I tell myself: Listen, lady, who do you think you are anyway? Marching around in the gay-pride band. Thirty-five years old, two years out of another rotten relationship and you’re still going on casual dates with friends of friends, having occasional mediocre sex, no new love on the horizon, certainly no threat of intimacy to speak of. But you’ve got no problem preaching the therapeutic party line to others. No qualms about telling them how to live their own gay lives. Exactly where has your oh-so-open existence landed
you?

Then it comes to me, like a blessing: I ought to be more charitable. More merciful. To Bren. To myself.

I realize that this saving grace of mercy flows, not from my own nature, but from my mother’s. I thank her for it now, silently.

The sky’s dark outside. Chill blows in the window. I move through a few minutes of blessing and peace while vegetables steam, rice boils, sea trout bakes. Sensing, behind my back, the thump of a dog tail on finished floor. My friend hunched over the table, now, in inexpressible grief. I move all the stove knobs to off and turn to her, reach for her. Her shoulders are shaking. Her face hides in her hands. But she isn’t crying at all—no sound comes out, not a single tear. I offer arms, shirt, breasts. She lets herself fall against all of them, and I hold her while she tries to weep. Painful, I think, terrible. Monstrous aching inside. No cure for this loss, my arms around her a pathetic bandage.

And still, despite that, they feel right.

*

Dinner stays half-cooked. We talk about a lot of things.

Kay, the house, Boz. Her job. This new kid on the team, who will help them win big meets—some girl with a Spanish-sounding name I won’t remember. She asks about me, too: Do I still love my work? Have I been seeing anyone since Marianne? I tell her, Yes. And: No one important.

Mostly, though, it’s good to feel comfortable in her presence again. Even though she’s a wreck, and I feel the dim jangling danger of unexplored emotions sloshing around in the bucket of myself, at least we’re both finally, fully here—at a kitchen table, on a living room sofa, holding hands like friends, reaching to touch a cheek or shoulder.

Boz whines to go out and we walk him together, bundled in sweaters against the breeze from river and bay. Ambling between streetlights, fire hydrants. The dog seems happier, jumps against my thighs in some sort of supplication and gives a canine version of a smile, I think. I rub his chest. Taking a shine to the idea of him, of keeping him, despite myself. Watching us, Bren laughs. A full laugh, prematurely ended—she’s cut it off intentionally like an unwanted digit. Walking back against the wind, she takes my arm. Whistles some tune. The good mood begins to make me nervous. It’s like being on the edge of something—her grief the true reality to take into account, the more permanent underlying condition she is likely to relapse into at any second—and, instinct tells me, I ought to maintain a certain detachment. But I let her take my arm; because we’re friends, because she has done it so many times before. I let her press the arm with her fingers; because, I tell myself, sixteen years means something, and it’s okay to trust.

Keys in the door. A burst of comfort and warmth. Boz off the leash, light dimmers turned, sweaters off. We broil dinner, throwing everything together: too-dry fish, stale rice, fatigued vegetables. Bren eats with surprising appetite. Watching, I feel good. And I eat too. The danger signals fade away. Between bites she is matter-of-fact.

“Ever cremate anyone?”

“No. When my mom died they had a wake—the whole traditional thing. Billy got drunk again, it made Dad furious. They went into the basement and yelled at each other. Marianne showed up late, she and I had our last big blowout fight, in front of everyone. Pat’s kids started crying. So did his wife. The whole thing was a mess. Still—it was good in a way. It was a time and a place to get it all out, you know? All the grief, all the mess.”

“Well, when you cremate someone—”

“What, sweetie?”

“—They make you pick out an urn. I chose one—just any old one—it didn’t seem to matter. Later, though, I had second thoughts, that maybe Kay would have wanted something special. Like a vase in the shape of an old whaling ship.”

She laughs. So do I. She scrapes her plate clean, drops fork and knife across it with a sudden clatter.

“Anyway, they give you the remains in a plastic bag. It looks like dusty chips of gravel—not ashes at all, really. The bag is sealed. And you put it in the urn, you take it away.” She glances up at me, her face uncertain. “I’ve been fighting with the bunch of them long-distance, the whole Goldstein clan. They told me the cremation was some sort of defilement, they wanted a regular burial—a coffin, gravestone, all of that. And some rabbi to bless her. As if it would wipe out everything about her life that they didn’t care to see. Me, for instance. But she hated that stuff, you know. ‘Keep me out of the ground, Bren!’ she said. ‘Keep me out of the ground, and away from those men in their little black hats!’”

It sounds just like Kay. I can feel myself smile.

We clean the table, wash dishes, wrap food up and stash it in the fridge. Bren dries utensils, places them neatly in rows in the cupboard drawers. She hums softly, seems happy again.

Now it’s late. Boz is sacked out on the pseudo-Oriental rug. I scratch his ears for good-night, give Bren a forehead kiss and tell her to sleep well, ask one last time if she needs another blanket. No, she says, not a blanket.

In the bathroom I wash up, brush teeth, glare at the mirror and mentally slap myself around. I am putting on a little weight. Short-featured Irish face hovering at the borderline of early middle age, wrinkles etched around eyes and mouth. Always too serious to be cute; now, too old as well.

Instinct blinks some danger signal again, warning me to think a while, figure out what is going on. Bren. Food. The dog. The ashes.

Phrases well up in me—from prayers, I think, from long ago. Our light, our sweetness, and our hope. Banished children of Eve.

And I tell myself: Stop it, Caroline. Give yourself a break. These dynamics are exhausting. Grief’s dynamics always are. But the day is over, and so is the pain. Just go to bed. Just go to sleep.

My bedroom light’s on. In the hallway, she stops me.

“Chick. Come here.”

I am here, I say. Then my face is between her hands and she’s kissing me.

“Bren, no. Just wait.”

I don’t want to, she says. But there’s a kind of terror on her lips, in her voice. I pull back, see the struggle—between the terror and her mastery of it. Part of the mastery, though, is a masking that doesn’t work. The failure makes her sullen.

“Bren, listen to me. We need to talk this one through.”