Our Wives Under the Sea (16)

“I don’t think,” I say instead, “that you’re eating the right things.”

“Is that it,” she says to me, then abruptly takes up the orange and throws it against the wall. It hits the brickwork with the wet cottony sound of an internal organ. I watch the orange roll across the floor and think about laughing, picture some soft internal part of Leah skittling over the kitchen tiles and vanishing beneath the fridge.



* * *



Leah worked at the aquarium as a teenager. It was the sort of dirty-glamorous history I loved about her, an image I wanted to roll around in—my Leah with her shag-cut hair at seventeen, feeding dolphins in a wet suit cut off at the knees. I never knew her at this age, of course, though I’ve seen pictures. She showed me a sleeve of them once, early on, passing a hand over her face when I laughed at her dyed-black hair, her nose ring, and her overtweezed eyebrows. I was just trying something, she said, my mum hated the hair dye so I did it even though it looked terrible, you know. In one photograph, a teenaged Leah crouches by a tall, cylindrical tank containing what she identified to me as a giant Pacific octopus named Pamela. We were pals, she said, in a voice that I thought seemed to strive for offhandedness. Did you know they taste with their skin? Octopuses, I mean. In the old days, I used to enjoy this, Leah’s seemingly never-ending list of useless facts, acquired from a teenagerhood spent changing the water in clownfish tanks and encouraging children to handle spiny creatures in the touch pools. She told me a story once that I often thought about afterward, replayed for myself like a favorite movie. Leah, aged eighteen: letting a girlfriend into the aquarium one night after-hours, sharing vodka shaken up with supermarket lemonade and kissing on the floor beside the Open Ocean tank in view of reeling schools of yellowfin tuna, of sardines and moon jellies and stingrays, of copper rockfish and hammerhead sharks. She had, so the story went, stuck intrepid hands down the girl’s bootcut jeans and afterward taken her into the octopus room to meet Pamela, though on doing so she had found the creature had died in her tank sometime in the late afternoon.

When I returned to this story later, I would superimpose an eighteen-year-old me over the top of the girlfriend, scribbling her out and sketching my lines in more permanent ink. In this edited version, we would kiss—eighteen-year-old Leah and me—and then afterward she’d take me to the octopus room, rap her fingertips on the glass cylinder, and Pamela wouldn’t be dead. She would rise up out of some corner and shiver toward us, pulsing flex of a parasol opening and closing, the mantle and suckers and the head like something primed to burst. She would feel her way across the side of the tank and in this scene (or dream, or version) I would know, because of my astonishing ability to know such things, that she had intended to meet me, that for any other girlfriend she would have died but that for me she had waited. I would splay my hand against the glass and imagine I felt the great gelatinous give of her body, the folds and spongy inner membranes, the secret place where her three hearts beat out blueish copper blood. All quite fantastical, of course. By the time I was eighteen, Pamela was dead and I had yet to kiss a girl.

I got so depressed when she died, Leah told me once. It wasn’t really my job to look after her, you know, I was just a volunteer, but sometimes when the senior staff were feeding her they’d let me touch her. They’d open the top of the tank and she’d sort of boil up toward you, all these arms wrapping up around yours, all these suckers, and then she’d just sort of hold you there, look at you. She didn’t try to pull me into the water, exactly, but it could be difficult to get her to detach until she was ready. She’d hold me there, my chest up against the edge of the tank, sort of bent over and staring down at her. And then she’d let me go. They said she liked me—I don’t know if that was true, but it was nice.

Leah had long been a martyr to gifts that centered octopuses in some fashion. The same way that anyone who makes the mistake of committing to an animal will receive chicken-or elephant-or dolphin-themed gifts every birthday and Christmas for the rest of their lives, so Leah was constantly writing notes to thank people for octopus jewelry and octopus trinket dishes and cake forks with octopus handles that were semi-impossible to hold. I had, for the most part, made a point of avoiding this trope, except once, on Leah’s thirtieth birthday, when I gave her a sleeve of promotional postcards from the aquarium at which she’d once worked. It was something I’d found quite by chance, on an eBay listing, a book of branded cards, at least fifteen years old, each labeled THE STARS OF OUR SHOW and showing images ranging from the aquarium’s single giant sea turtle to the otter tank and the dolphins and the penguin exhibit. The last card but one showed a tangerine-colored octopus, its left eye swiveled toward the camera, its tentacles thrown up above its head, as though tumbling downward through air, rather than water. The printed label at the bottom left-hand corner of the card read: PAMELA—GIANT PACIFIC OCTOPUS—ESTIMATED AGE BETWEEN 3 AND 4 YEARS OLD. I had given the cards to Leah and she had cried about them and kissed me, and I’m really only telling this story now because it makes me look good, and because Leah always took the postcard of Pamela with her on work trips after that.

When we met, Leah was working in research and conservation for a facility that specialized in the protection of coastal and deep-sea ecosystems. This was before the Centre—long before it even existed, in fact, which often surprises people. I think it has something to do with the name, the Centre for Marine Enquiry, a blandness that implies longevity, a patrician sense of having always been there, of being a long-established institution, which of course it is not. As it was, Leah didn’t move to the Centre until many years after we met, having worked the full span of her twenties for the same small operation. On an early date, she poured olive oil, dipped bread, told me a story about a company she’d once hoped to work for that specialized in applying the physical adaptations of underwater species to industrial innovation. They had engineered a new type of door handle that mimicked the structure of sharkskin and made it more difficult for germs and viruses to attach. Sharkskin is basically made up of millions of tiny teeth, she said, pouring wine, talking with her mouth full. They’re called “dermal denticles,” isn’t that great? Practically speaking, a shark’s skin is almost as likely to do you damage as its mouth is. It didn’t really end up being my area—I’m more straight biology—but I still love the idea of finding a way to harness odd little things like that to do some kind of service. We ate Russian beef stew with dill and talked the way people do on early dates, extravagantly confessional, every statement an attempt at some self-defining truth: I’m the type of person who cries at movies, I’m the type of person who works better alone. After the restaurant, we drank Dark and Stormys at a bar unfamiliar to either of us, talked about favorite meals and favorite places. The night was wet, air close and flannel-damp, reports of ball lightning hitting the power lines some half a mile from my home. I’m a Catholic, I said at one point, so I believe in punishment but not reward. When we kissed—first kiss, wet-palmed, tongues stickled with ginger—I thought about sharkskin and pushed my hand into the space where Leah’s shirt had pulled free from her waistband. The next morning, I woke too early, my bedroom window filled with sharp segments of light.