Our Wives Under the Sea (12)

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I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It’s nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about their partner and not wish they’d get to the point a little faster: OK, so, you’re saying he likes long walks, you’re saying she’s a Capricorn, skip to the end. It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.

The thing about Leah as I knew her was that every so often when I was pissed off and sitting on the sofa, she would grab my legs and start to pedal them, chanting tour de France tour de France until I laughed. The thing about Leah was that nine times out of ten she couldn’t bring herself to be unkind about anyone, but then three times a year she would say something so blisteringly cruel about someone we knew that she’d clap both hands to her mouth and turn in a circle as though warding off evil. At a point perhaps six months after we’d first started seeing each other, she read a book in which a pair of lesbians emailed each other meaningful lines of poetry and shortly afterward she asked if this was the sort of thing we should be doing, too. If you ever send me poetry, I texted her, I’ll cut your tits off, and over the course of the next week and a half she emailed me every poem from The Complete Works of Wilfred Owen, signing off every email with a winking face and a heart.

She told me once that when she was young she would imagine herself with scales that grew beneath the membranes of her skin—a flaking layer of silver-blue between her bones and the surface of her body that would prevent her from becoming waterlogged if she were ever to drown. I used to think of her like this, before we fucked or when she rolled over toward me in the night; about hands pulling her down beneath black water, about scales growing over her eyes.

She taught me to swim because I couldn’t, held on to my waist and buoyed me along. If I wanted to teach you the way I was taught, she was always saying, I’d hold you under. We’d go to the lido in the mornings and sit in the café afterward, damp in our clothes and eating bacon sandwiches and Leah fishing ice out of her Diet Coke.

She invited me to a dinner party with her friends from university: a guy called Toby who lived in a basement flat masquerading as a flat-pack furniture emporium with his much more attractive girlfriend, Sam; a couple of lesbian marine biologists called Allegra and Jess who weren’t a couple but had been at some storied prior time; a benignly boring guy called Dan and his loudly bisexual girlfriend, Poppy, who had backcombed her hair like a televangelist and seemed to leave lipstick marks on literally anything that came within a yard of her mouth. I remember that night the way one remembers pivotal things, although in truth nothing earth-shattering happened. I found I liked Toby and Sam far more than I had expected to; they told jokes that weren’t at one another’s expense, did a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? bit that mostly involved slopping wine about and insulting each other before bursting out laughing. Haven’t I got a bitch of a husband, Sam asked me, winking, vamping up her voice like Liz Taylor. I remember someone put on “Edge of Seventeen” and Toby danced around the kitchen with Jess, mouthing along to the words. Someone had brought Lillet and Jess made Vespers in an assortment of plastic tumblers. There was a vegetarian lasagna, pork chops, and a bowl of mushrooms cooked in port, none of which went together. At one point, Allegra leaned across the table toward me and asked if I didn’t think Leah looked exactly like Jean Seberg in Breathless. They’d studied on the same course at university and apparently this resemblance was something that all of their classmates had noted. I looked at Leah, currently ferrying cutlery over from the counter—Leah with her short hair and her swimmer’s body, the way she moved about the kitchen. I don’t know who Jean Seberg is, I thought of saying, instead nodding my head and saying, Yes she does actually, wow I’d never thought of that before. Someone upset a glass, which spilled its contents before shattering across the kitchen floor, and I was relieved it hadn’t been me. I like the idea of living in the city, Jess said, but I think it’s just because I hate the idea of being anywhere where I can’t immediately locate any other gay people. Sam opened a bottle of red wine from the co-op and someone asked if there was anything for dessert. If you say pavlova I’m going to fucking kill myself, Dan said—actually the only thing I remember him saying all night—I don’t know why people think pavlova is an acceptable thing to serve just because you’re having a dinner party. Across the table, Leah winked at me, and I thought in an unwonted flash that I utterly adored her. What’s wrong with pavlova? Toby asked, looking hurt. Someone put on an Ella Fitzgerald compilation. Have you not been with a woman before, Poppy said to me at one point, red-wine mouthed and leaning toward me with the affect of someone who might have designs on my tonsils. Have you? I asked and she burst out laughing. Oh honey, you know how people are like “I’m gay for Jennifer Aniston, I’m gay for Gillian Anderson,” well I’m straight for Dan.

At the end of the night, Allegra came toward me, bearing down in a gesture I couldn’t immediately read and which made me lean back in my chair a little farther than I’d intended. I haven’t come to embrace you, she said, you’re just sitting on my jacket. I turned red and fished the jacket out from under me, handed it over without managing to find something intelligent to say.