The Taste of Salt (10 page)

My name is Ray and I'm an alcoholic. It took me a long time to be able to sit in a room like this and say those words. I had to lose almost everything I loved before I could say that. I had to cause so much damage before I could say it.

Sometimes hitting bottom isn't a dramatic thing. There isn't a car accident. There isn't a death. There is just the moment when you sit there with the bottle and you say to yourself, “I can't do this anymore.” I had that moment in the dirty, depressing apartment I moved into after Sarah, my wife, asked me to leave. I couldn't sleep—I'd had a few—and I found this old picture of me and Sarah. It must have been taken not long after we met. I had a book under one arm and the other arm around her. We were smiling at each other like
two people who had spent the night spooned together and woke up happy to be together, eager for what the new day would bring. How could I have thrown her away? I rolled over, got out of bed, and dug out the phone book. I called and got the address and time of the nearest AA meeting. It wasn't until the next morning. I sat awake the rest of the night, getting drunk, watching television, catching broken moments of sleep while sitting up. And then I went to that meeting, still smelling of beer. I didn't know what would happen next. But at least I walked through the door.

Once you get willing, then things can begin to open up. That's how it's been for me anyway. I slipped once, a few years ago—started thinking I had it all under control. But after that, I surrendered again and good things started to come. I've got a life now, volunteer down at the library, got friends in these rooms, got stuff going on. But not everything's right. Some wounds take longer to heal.

I've got a daughter. Her name is Josie. She's grown now, a marine biologist; studies fish, studies the ocean. I'm so proud of her. When she was a little girl, she was always fascinated by the water. I used to watch her out in the backyard. She doesn't know that I ever looked at her that closely. But I did, sometimes. She could turn on the hose and watch that water run out of it for hours on end. Or when I had to water
the lawn, she always wanted to help me: to hold the hose or be a part of it somehow. Her brown legs all covered with sparkling drops of water, such a beautiful child.

One time, when Josie was eleven or so, she talked me into going down to the beach with her. I was pretty deep into the drinking by then, too; it was definitely an everyday thing. But I could still be persuaded by her smile.

I was a little high, just feeling good, not over the edge or anything. It was a sunny day, and she had been riding her bike around the block the way she did. She loved to do that. I was sitting on the porch, watching the day go by, and her mama and her brother, Tick, were off somewhere, and she pulled her bike up in front of me and said, “Daddy, you wanna go down to the lake with me? You never go. Wanna go with me today?”

And I said yes. I got into the car and settled a beer in a paper bag between my knees. I thought it would be nice to look at the water and hold it and watch her and sip. She looked at the bag once, but she didn't say anything. Just hopped into the front seat next to me. She was getting leggy, looking more and more like her mama every day. She wore her hair in two braids, and one was coming undone. She had a serious look on her face. “So, little miss,” I said, “what is it you do at the lake so much?”

She turned from the window to look at me and her face
brightened. “I like to skip rocks. And I like to look at stuff I find. It's not like the ocean. I really want to see the ocean sometime. There's way more stuff living in the ocean. But sometimes I can see a good fish or some vegetation or something.” Vegetation. How about that? Eleven years old and talking like that, so smart. But the kind of smart she was seemed to have no end. I had my limits and I wasn't all that interested in the physical world, in understanding it and finding out where each piece of it fit together. She was. She wanted to know every bit of it. Started keeping lists of things around her—leaves, rocks, the different animals she saw—not that we had many, living right in the center of the city. But whatever she saw, she wrote down as soon as she could write. And you couldn't keep her away from those nature shows on TV. Anything she could watch she would, especially stuff about the ocean. She spoke again, interrupting my thoughts: “I like the water on my feet, too. The way it feels. I love the way it feels to be underwater.” She fell silent. “How come you don't like the beach, Daddy?”

“Didn't grow up around it. Don't like being wet.” I took a little taste. Growing up like I did, down south in one of those blink-and-you'd-miss-it little towns, I never did learn to swim anyway. She didn't know that, and I was embarrassed to tell her. Sarah had made sure that the kids knew how to swim. We both thought they needed to learn
everything they could; that they should go to good schools and learn everything that would help them feel comfortable wherever they went. I'd spent so much of my life feeling uncomfortable. I didn't want that for my children. “I'm glad to be going there with you though, little bit. Real glad.”

She smiled a small smile. We pulled into the parking lot and got out.

There were just a few cats out fishing, casting their lines over and over again into the greenish water. The air was very clear—“Fresh as if issued to children on a beach.” That's what Virginia Woolf wrote in
Mrs. Dalloway.
I like her stuff, especially
To the Lighthouse.
I like a lot of writers that people don't think a guy like me would like. We got out of the car and Josie ran down to the rocks along the shore, yelling, “Come on, Daddy, come on!” I followed slowly, still sipping, still feeling pretty good. It was, I dunno, my sixth beer? My seventh?

She was taking her shoes off and wading into the water. She wasn't afraid at all. I stood on the shore, a safe distance from all that water, just watching her. The sound of the waves was kind of nice, I had to admit. I found a rock to sit on—didn't want to get sand in my pockets. And I didn't go so far as to take off my shoes. Josie ran and splashed and picked stuff up and put it down, perfectly content. I don't know how long this went on. Peaceful.

After a while, she came up to me and grabbed me by the hand. “Come on in, Daddy. Just take your shoes off. It's really great, you'll see.” And she squatted down, like the little girl she was, and exuberantly started untying my shoes.

I nearly kicked her in the face. That's how fast I got up. She fell over backward onto her rump and looked up at me, already starting to cry. “No, damn it. I hate the water. I'm not going in there. If I want to take my shoes off, I'll do it myself. Damn it. Damn it. I don't want to go in the water, okay?”

Her face, her beautiful face just crumpled. I would have given anything to explain. I would have given anything to have that moment back and be gentle with her. I would have given anything not to have done what I'd just done. But I was drunk and I couldn't stop. I couldn't think. I ain't gonna blame it on the booze, because that's the kind of cop-out I've learned not to take in these rooms. No, I hurt my child myself. Me and my drunk ass. I was so scared. I couldn't let her see that. So I let her cry in the sand for a little while instead. After a while I said, “We better get on back, Josie. Your mama's gonna wonder where we are. Stop, girl. You aren't hurt.” And that's all I said. That's all I ever said. That's the way I left it. If only I could have explained. I think that's when I started to lose her. Right at that moment.

I've got a son, too. Name of Edmund, but we call him Tick. He takes after me. Smart as you please—and a stone drunk. I don't know when it started. I was too drunk myself to see at the time. I couldn't help him. I couldn't even help myself. And I hadn't let go. He's drunk away almost everything now, and he uses other stuff besides. It breaks my heart. He's sober for now and I pray for him, but I don't know. I don't know if he's got what it takes to stay clean. It's a long road and he's got to walk it. No one can walk it for him—I learned that in these rooms. Even so … Lord, how I wish I could do it for him. With all my heart I wish it.

As long as I can remember, I've liked being out of the house. Whatever house it was. When I was a kid, I rode a school bus about fifteen miles away from home to the Dean school. I usually sat in the back and tried not to hear the cool kids talking about me—my hair or my clothes or something, everything that was wrong with me. The school bus didn't even come to our neighborhood—Mom had to drive me up into Cleveland Heights and then I'd wait there for the bus and then it was another hour (with all the stops) before we got there. And I always stayed after for science club or catching up on homework or even, for a little while, field hockey (those skirts!). In the summers, I went to camp (I got scholarships and did work study and stuff), and then
when I got older, to whatever academic or aquatic summer program would have me. I worked to earn spending money, too—babysitting, restaurant hostessing, waitressing at local diners. Anything to be out of the house. Home and all it requires—the bills, the organizing, the talking to your loved ones—that stuff makes me nervous.

As you might imagine, this skittishness has made married life kind of tough. But then I never expected to be a wife. By the time I met Daniel, when I was thirty-three, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get married. I had come to think that perhaps I was just too odd. Too black in a white profession. Too female in a male profession. Too in love with my work to love another person. Did I really want to spend my whole life with someone else? Genetically, we are only 1.23 percent different from chimpanzees. And they are not at all monogamous. Why should we be any different? That's what I believe. You'd think that I'd have raised this topic with my husband, my discomfort with monogamy. But somehow I've always been shy about doing that, as fundamental as it is. Scared, I guess. I'm scared a lot of the time.

There is a small part of me that suspects I got married because I was tired of looking around, tired of the dry spells of being single, tired of the game. Daniel appeared right at that time. He loved me. And I loved him. But he loved me more.

Although I was ready to stop running around when I met Daniel, there is one thing I miss: sexual variety. I love sex and I'm enthusiastic about it and so I didn't have much trouble finding people to have it with, even though what they say about most scientists' social skills is true. Talking to other people—generally a good preamble to getting into bed with them—is often not something they are particularly good at. But I can do what I need to do to make certain things happen. If I have to talk, I'll talk. If I have to flirt, I'll flirt. I'll even enjoy it. Ever since I had my first lover when I was sixteen and even before that when I started to figure this whole thing out, I knew that sex was going to be a way to an essential mystery, something it would take me a long time to understand and even longer to get tired of. This is going to sound silly, but I have Prince to thank for this. Me and my friend Deena snuck into a screening of
Purple Rain
one weekend when we were hanging around the Randall Park Mall and, frankly, I was never the same after that. Until then, my crushes had mostly been chaste fantasies of adventure with one passing teen idol or another—we were spies together, we climbed mountains together, sometimes the boy of the week would take my hand. But after I watched Prince weep and moan and smile his way through “Purple Rain” (And don't even get me started on “The Beautiful Ones.” Amazing.) something crossed
over in me. I hadn't thought about kissing a boy much, until that moment. Even when I lay on my bed thinking about Theo from
The Cosby Show
for hours and hours, I thought of
being
in his presence, not of kissing or anything further. But after that movie, it all made sense. Touching another person's body would be the point of it all. It wasn't like I didn't know about sex. My mother was unusually frank about that kind of thing—maybe because of having been a nurse. She gave me the whole rundown when I turned twelve. I found the mechanics of it very weird. But now I got it. Why wouldn't you want to do all that? All that kissing and stuff? Why wouldn't you want to be as close as you could to another person's glow, when you felt it? I still think that, to tell the truth. It makes being married hard.

My lovers weren't scientists, mostly. Sometimes this made for limited dinner table chat. But sometimes I wasn't very interested in a lot of talk anyway. Often I just wanted skin to skin, the smell of it, the textures and the sounds and the animal pleasure, the feel of the sheets under my back, my head on someone's chest, the taste of his sweat in my mouth.

I make it sound as though it was always glorious, and of course it wasn't always. And I make it sound as though I never loved anyone, and that isn't true either. But that simple contact was also something I loved.

I was in one of those relationships when I met Daniel. The guy's name was Max. He was a bartender at my favorite bar in Honolulu. Diving culture involves a lot of hanging around bars. There are the long, glorious hours you spend underwater and then there are the hours you spend celebrating what you found there or what you did there. Most scientists I've met aren't avid divers. Because I loved it so much, I spent a lot of time with divers and their friends.

Max was Hawaiian. He had long glossy black hair that felt a little bit the way rippling water does over your skin. His body was lean and muscular from surfing and lifting weights, but it was nearly hairless and soft as a child's. He didn't particularly like to talk, which I at first found comforting. I had recently broken up with someone who wanted to do nothing but talk and my ears needed a rest. But after a while, Max's silence started to seem confining.