Lies That Bind Us(32)

But the dive was more than fun. Against all the odds, even Gretchen didn’t drown. We braved water that was about twenty-five meters deep, navigating a reef with sizeable rocks that formed a kind of underwater cliff face that was home to all manner of plants, fish, and other creatures. Kristen and Brad saw an octopus, and I saw some kind of pink, squiddy-cuttlefish thing with big baby eyes and little flouncing tentacles jetting over the reef, which was, I had to admit, pretty damn cool. Simon guided us all to a hole from which a speckled bluish moray eel watched us, all beady eyes and nail-like teeth that gave me the willies. We moved around with flashlights, scanning the pocks and hollows in the rock for crabs and little lobsterlike crustaceans and anemones, but I was at least as transfixed by the luminous blue of the water around us, the sensation of looking up through cascading bubbles and schools of flashing silver fish toward the surface. It was electrifying.

And I was graceful. I’m used to feeling bumbling, clumsy, and the gear—especially the flopping fins on my feet—had made me feel worse in the boat, but in the water I became a mermaid, moving effortlessly with little kicks, rolling and turning in a kind of disbelieving rapture. I had been so glad when I found I would be able to talk with my mask on, to stay connected to the others, but once in the water, exploring the darker depths and glimpsing the first gleaming shoals of colorful fish, I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to keep it to myself, the thrill, the surprise, the simple pleasure of it.

And amazingly, everyone felt the same way. Not the quiet secrecy part—the joy. In fact, the less experience we had, the more we reveled in it, so that those of us who had been most apprehensive—me, Gretchen, Kristen, and Marcus—had the best time. Simon and Melissa exulted in our pleasure, vindicated, and only Brad showed any sign of sourness, the dive not “challenging” him as much as he wanted, not showing him marvels greater than he had seen before. Everyone, Kristen included, ignored him, and eventually he came round, joining in the general exuberance even as we bundled into the Mercedes, crooning, à la Dean Martin, “When the bite on your heel’s from a massive great eel, that’s a moray!” The fact that it was him made it funnier, and the moment became rare and precious because you know in your lying heart that nothing this good can last; you want to preserve it in crystal forever, a few perfect minutes in time that you can hold and step back into whenever you want.

We had an early dinner—linner, Simon called it, after Seinfeld—at a harborside restaurant in a town whose name I didn’t even catch, and it too was perfect, higgledy-piggledy houses, all painted bright, cheerful colors long ago and then left to age in the sun. They might have been there centuries, repurposed from time to time, added to, renovated, but essentially the same. I suspected that some of them, like the villa we were staying in, had Venetian or Ottoman roots, and I found myself thinking amazedly of how houses got knocked down at home, scooped off the landscape to make way for something bigger and shinier in ways that left not so much as a scrap for the archaeologists of the future to see what might once have sprouted from the Carolina clay. I thought of Mrs. Robson—Flo—who had moved into assisted living at the age of eighty-five, leaving the house she and her husband had built half a century ago across the street from my Plaza Midwood apartment. The house was demolished two months later, a pair of tracked diggers breaking it down to the foundation and a bulldozer scraping the remains away while Flo stood by, watching for as long as she could stand it. The shiny new condo that had taken its place was half-finished now. I doubted I’d ever see Flo again, and the only trace of her presence would be in aging town records.

Here there was continuity, the past reaching back centuries, always lived in, always handed on to the next generation. No doubt I was romanticizing something fundamentally un-American, something that would lose its appeal if I had to actually live in it for any length of time, moldering and small as it was, no doubt I would soon be crying out for the neat, pristine newness and flexibility of life in the United States, but right now, through my out-of-focus tourist eyes, it looked pretty great.

Even the food was unreasonably good. Though we had chosen the place at random, we couldn’t have hoped for better: mussels cooked in white wine and crispy fried sardines with olive tapenade and crusty bread brought to the table beside the marina by the elderly lady who ran the place and her bashful daughter. Simple food, made from fresh local, staple ingredients according to family recipes and prepared exquisitely. More tradition and continuity.

“You know what you’d pay for this in New York?” Melissa remarked, pouring more wine.

“Or London?” Simon agreed. “Forget about it.”

“Not sure you could even get this in Charlotte,” said Marcus.

“Well, no,” said Simon with that knowing smirk that pulled the side of his face out of handsomeness, “I wouldn’t think so.”

“We have some pretty good restaurants in Charlotte now,” Marcus said.

“Bojangles?” said Simon.

“I mean real restaurants,” Marcus answered. “High end.”

“And don’t be knocking Bojangles,” I added.

Marcus grinned at me.

“My shoulders ache,” said Kristen, stretching. “I suppose diving is more of a workout than I thought.”

“You’re using different muscles,” said Brad.

“It’s more about using the muscles you always use differently,” said Simon.