The Taste of Salt (15 page)

The skin on my face felt tight. I'd never said this out loud to anyone. What was I doing? Ben was just looking at me.

“So you don't want to be the one to save him.”

“I don't. I can't.” I closed my eyes. “I can't.” Here's what I didn't say: That it was my job to protect my brother. To save him. And I had failed.

“Of course you can't.” His voice was almost a whisper. “How could you?” He stood up. “We have a little while before we have to get back. Come walk with me?” I stood up. I would do whatever he asked.

We went down the hill to the beach and took our shoes off. It was a bright March day, but a little cold to be out, so we were there alone. We walked a while, not speaking. “You're really beautiful, you know,” he said after a long while. “It was the first thing I noticed about you. How beautiful you are and how you didn't seem to know it.”

I had been waiting for him to say something else about Tick. I was so surprised that I laughed out loud. I pulled him to me without another thought, our brief contemplation of
not doing this thing forgotten. I kissed him right out there in the sun, with nothing between us, nothing holding us apart. It was only a matter of time now. He was where I belonged.

W
HEN HE ASKED ME
to go on a long bike ride with him the following weekend, I did it without hesitation. I can't even remember what I told Daniel. I just had one thing I had to do and that was be with Ben. I was in kind of a trance.

The day of our ride was a perfect day. I mean really perfect. You know when the air is a tonic, and the sun is gentle and loving on your head and your shoulders, and the breeze blows like it was designed for your skin and your skin alone? It was one of those days.

We had decided that we really wanted to go some distance, so we met in Barnstable, about twenty miles from Woods Hole. There's a beautiful beach there that leads to a network of bike paths along the ocean. Part of it goes right past our part of the Woods Hole campus—there's a little office cabin facing the water there. The cabin is full of old phone books and misplaced files and other detritus—it's hardly ever used anymore. We all had keys to it—sometimes I would walk down there when I wanted some solitude and a view of the ocean.

Ben and I met, locked up our respective cars, and got going without much talk. He went ahead of me. I didn't feel the need to say anything. I just looked at him. We stopped once to drink some water and rest. I think we talked about what a beautiful day it was—nothing special.

When we got near the office cabin, I yelled, “Hey, Ben, let's stop here.” He pulled over. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. I have a key to that office. Want to go in there for a minute?” I knew what I was saying. So did he. So we rolled our bikes up to the side of the cabin that wasn't visible from the road. He stood so closely behind me that I could feel his breath on my neck. It made me dizzy.

Once we were inside, we stood still for a minute trying to act as though nothing was happening. Then he slid his arms around my waist. There was a lot of quiet breathing and the sound of the ocean outside. Words had been removed from my mind. The silence got larger. I felt like I might die inside it, that we might stand there, him embracing me, until the end of the world and I would never say another word. I was thinking that until he said, Oh, Christ, Josie, come on. His voice was hoarse and soft. I turned to face him. He put his hand under my chin gently. Let me look at you, he said. Let me look at you. I didn't turn away or close my eyes. He kept gazing at me, so long that I thought that might be all he wanted. But then he pulled my head toward him and we
started kissing. After a while, he said it again. Let me look at you. I knew what he meant. I stood up and took a few steps away from him. I took off my shorts and then my shirt with a lot of awkward wriggles and twists like I was in my bedroom at home and I wasn't embarrassed and he said, My God. You are so beautiful. He paused. And then he reached out and pulled me toward him and we started kissing again, kissing everywhere. He tasted of salt. He smelled of the sun. I thought it might never end.

Josie and I have been married for nearly four years. I married her to see if I could get behind that sharp unforgiving gaze. Sometimes, I think about the way she looked the day I met her, giving her oh-so-intelligent talk about undersea mammals. The way she stood with her feet planted a little bit apart, like she was going to be challenged any minute (later that very day, I saw that she
was
challenged every minute, that there are people in our business who didn't think she had any right to be there).

She's beautiful. She doesn't think so. She's not conventionally pretty and she wears her hair super-short and doesn't fuss with herself much. But her skin is so warm-colored and inviting that it always makes me feel like racism is actually based in jealousy that black people are so much
better looking. And her smile, rarely bestowed, makes you feel like you've won a prize.

I try to hang on to those feelings—but it's hard these days. Ever since she picked her brother up from rehab, she's been skittish, either avoiding me or snapping at me. She's always that way after a visit home. Home has never been where her heart is. She won't even talk to me about it much. I've met everyone, of course, and I know that her father and brother both have (or in the case of her father, had) big problems with alcohol. But shared anecdotes? This-happened-to-me-when-I-was-kid stories? None of that. It's like she sprang full-blown from the sea. That's what she'd like me to think anyway.

She seems, sometimes, to have genuinely forgotten large portions of her childhood. I'll ask her about something or tell her some story about when I was a kid and a slightly blank, slightly nervous look will come over her face and she'll say, “Yeah. I don't know. It's weird. I don't remember stuff like that.” I used to worry that she was one of those women with all those repressed memories of being molested, that some horrifying thing would come roaring up from her subconscious and engulf us both. I've never told her that though. I can just imagine the look that she'd give me if I did. The steel doors that would slam shut in her eyes.

She has those same walls of terror with her family. It's
not too bad with her mother but watching her talk to her father (which she does only rarely) is to watch her shrink into an agonizingly shy, angry thirteen-year-old. It's the only time I've ever seen her bite her nails. And though she keeps a picture of her and her brother, Tick, as children on her bureau, she hardly ever talks to him either. One time, kind of out of the blue when we were sitting together in the living room right after one of those calls, I asked her about it.

“You are so nervous when you talk to your family—or you don't want to talk to them at all. It's really something, Jose.”

She looked at me, warily. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that your voice gets squeaky and you can't sit still and you look like you're about to jump out of your skin. What did they do?”

She bit her lip and looked away from me. “You don't understand, Danny. They … my brother and my father, with the booze. You know. They just …” She was silent a long minute. When she spoke, she looked steadily at the sofa cushion. “I'm afraid they'll take me down with them. I just can't let them in.”

I took her in my arms. My heart sustained a small crack for her that night. But as I sat there with my arms around her, her face pressed into my chest, I felt her tightening
against me. I felt that unyielding growing back over her skin, over her heart, over her soul. I thought that loving her would wear that unyielding down. That's what I hoped anyway.

A
FEW WEEKS AGO,
she went out on a dive to examine some of the institute's equipment and check on some whales they'd been tracking. She called me after to see if I wanted to meet her and the other divers for a drink, but I turned her down. I was in the middle of finishing a big grant proposal and I didn't want to stop. She got home that night after I was asleep.

The next morning, she climbed on top of me before the alarm even went off, before the sun was up. She was everywhere, kissing and sucking and whispering. I was surprised—she's not usually like this—but I sure as hell wasn't gonna stop her. Afterward, she lay with her head on my chest. “Good morning,” I said. She laughed, “Good morning.”

“That was a great way to wake up. What got you all worked up?”

I could only see the top of her head. “I just felt like it. You know, just turned on. I get like that after a dive.”

She does, but she hadn't been like that for a while, ever since we got into this whole baby thing. I pulled her a little closer and didn't say any more.

T
HE STORY EVERYBODY KNOWS
about infertility these days is about a woman's desperation. How the couple, usually driven by the wife, will do anything, anything to get that baby. Hock the house, sell the family jewels, have sex standing on her head in the middle of the street if necessary. Anything. But that's not Josie.

We'd been trying for about three months, and she'd just gotten her period again. She didn't tell me but I saw a tampon wrapped up in the trash. We were at breakfast when I brought it up.

“Jose, why didn't you tell me you got your period?”

“I have to tell you when I get my period now?” she said incredulously.

“You know we don't have a lot of time to waste. We shouldn't try for too long without seeing a doctor if nothing happens.”

A door closed in her face right after I said that. “Is that what you want?”

“No, but if we want to have a baby, we might have to.” Somehow, we had never talked this through.

“I don't know, Danny. I don't think I want to go through all that. I mean, if it happens, great, but if not.…”

“Look, Jose, you know as well as I do that our chances are slipping every day. Don't you even want to try?”

“We
are
trying.”

“You know what I mean. Do everything we can.”

She drew in a deep breath and looked deep into her cup of coffee. “No, Danny, to tell the truth, I don't.”

What? What was I supposed to do now? She was the one with the uterus. If she didn't want to go further, we wouldn't. I didn't say anything more that morning or that evening, or in any of the mornings or evenings since that day, about a month ago. But we started touching each other less and less after that, the absence of her swelling belly creating a space between us. We hadn't had sex in about two or three weeks so when she climbed on me all revved up like that, it felt good. Hell, it felt great. But it didn't fix anything. It didn't get her pregnant. It didn't make me feel like she loved me.

A Sunday afternoon. Ben and I are together at his house, in bed. Since Leslie left, we are free to meet there, and because he doesn't live anywhere near me, I can manage it. I'm grateful Daniel and I have two cars, even though I sometimes feel guilty about how much gas we use. I almost never feel guilty about Ben. He has become as necessary to me as air. Or so it seems.

He smells like the ocean, salty and fresh and unexpected. I love that about him. That and how warm his skin always is. He told me once that his normal temperature is a couple of degrees higher than 98.6; some people's are, you know. I am licking various parts, his hipbones, his shoulders, kind of moving around, grazing his chest with mine the way I know he likes. He is kissing the parts I have guided him
to over and over. We have figured how to please each other over and over. I try to keep my eyes open the whole time I'm making love with him, even when I'm coming. I don't want to miss any of it.

But the last few weeks, I've felt a slow, steady sliding away. I don't even know how I know it. It has made me wild and a little desperate when I'm with him. I keep whispering in his ear, “I'll do whatever you want.” And he moves me around and kisses me and touches me but I don't feel my wildness being met by his anymore. It was at first. But now he can get enough of me.

Afterward, we lie together. Sometimes I wish we could go out more. I wonder if that would make a difference, being able to be out together like a couple. Anyway, his hand is on my stomach and we are both breathing heavily. I roll over toward him and look directly into his eyes. They are so utterly, richly brown. Like mine. “Ben, do you want to be with me?”

He laughs a little. “I think I'm with you right now.”

“No, I mean … you know …
be
with me. Do you want me to leave Daniel? You never ask me to.” I pause. “I would if you asked me to.”

His hand goes still on my hip. “You would?”

I feel as though I can no longer breathe normally. Part
of my brain is asking why I'm even going down this road. Do I even mean what I'm saying? I'm not sure I would leave Daniel for Ben. But I can't stand watching him slip away. “I would.”

Ben doesn't say anything. Then he takes his hand off of my hip and rolls onto his back. “That's an awfully big decision, Josie.”

I sit up. We are not touching each other anymore. Rage is forming a rocket in my chest. “Yeah, but I would make it. I would make it for you.”

“I don't know if I can ask you that, Josie. I just don't know how I'd feel about it, if you did that. If …”

“If what? I'm thirty-six years old. I can decide things for myself. If we want to be together badly enough, we can be. If you want it. If
we
want it.”

He swings his legs over the side of the bed. He gets up, picks up his shorts and underwear, and sits back down to pull them on, his back to me. Then he speaks. “Well, I don't know if I want it.”

The air goes still. “What do you mean?”

He's getting up now. I want to pull him back in bed with me. “I mean that I don't know if I want to go on with you … in some kind of permanent way. What we're doing.… Well, Jesus, Josie, sometimes I don't
know
what we're doing.” His
back is to me, he's sitting on the edge of the bed. He doesn't turn around. “I still want to be with you. But I don't know how I'd feel if you gave up everything for me.”