Our Wives Under the Sea (21)

The weather was changing, wet and bulbous and warm. One day, I sat in the window of the bedroom all afternoon and watched the flying ants foam the glass, collecting in the tip of the guttering and overflowing, falling to the gravel drive below. That night, around ten or eleven o’clock, the phone rang but the person on the line refused to speak when I answered. The number that flashed on the phone display looked to be that of the Centre, but no prompting would persuade the caller to speak and after four minutes of silence I once again heard the dial tone. After this, I sat on the floor of the kitchen and thought about Leah, about the shape of her feet and the way she spoke about her father, the special voice she used to talk to cats, her kind frown, her intonation, her fingernails. I thought about the time we kissed at the movies and a guy jerked off behind us and I complained to the management. I thought about fucking her on the floor of her uncle’s bathroom when we were staying over before a wedding. I thought about the way she often liked me to tell her what to do in bed. I thought about the day it first occurred to me that, should she die, there would be no one in the world I truly loved. You can, I think, love someone a very long time before you realize this, notice it in the way you note a facial flaw, a speech impediment, some imperfection which, once recognized, can never again be unseen. Are you just now realizing that people die, Leah had said to me when I voiced this thought, tucked up beside her on the sofa with my knees pressed tight into the backs of hers. Not people, I had said, just you.

At the start of the fourth month of Leah’s absence, I witnessed a fracas on the message board for wives of imaginary spacemen. One woman accused another of failing to treat her fantasy with due courtesy and the thread quickly descended into a frenzy of recrimination about how one wife’s imaginary trauma stacked up against another’s.

MHIS HAS BEEN GONE FOR SEVEN YEARS, one woman posted, MTP [Mission to Pluto]. NO SIGN. NO CONTACT. NOTHING. CREW PRESUMED DEAD. NO HOPE OF RESCUE. THINK ABOUT THAT BEFORE YOU TELL ME MY STORY IS “CONTRIVED.”

I just think, another woman posted in response, that if you were really so cut up about your husband’s absence you wouldn’t be posting details here the way you do.

Check the community guidelines, a third woman, apparently fancying herself site cop, added to the discourse. Don’t come for other people’s stories. Offer the same respect you would expect. “Have Grace in Space.”

She says there’s been no contact but she posted just last week about her husband sending her one last message while orbiting Pluto, a fourth inserted herself at this point. We’re not saying it’s a bad story, we’re saying just try to be consistent.

I read this thread in its entirety over the course of about an hour. Once I’d finished, I drank several glasses of wine in quick succession and typed in the comment box that Pluto was no longer a planet. fURTHERMORE, I added, unaware I had clicked on all caps, IF YOU PEOPLE DON’T WANT YOUR HUSBANDS THEN WHY DO YOU GO TO THE TROUBLE OF MAKING THEM UP IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Directly after posting this, I closed my laptop and dialed the number I had for the Centre. The call went straight to voicemail, so I left a message I now remember very little about.



* * *



I dreamed a lot during that time and in uneasy colors—pale water leaking from the cupboard, the notches from an unfamiliar spine strewn cold across the windowsill. One night, I dreamed a congregation: fifty women in formal hats declaring themselves the acolytes of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament of Our Wives Under the Sea. The church was tall, a plunging upward streak of ceiling that leered into the distant vaulted rafters, then fell beneath our feet to corresponding depths. I sat with legs curled up inside a pew and peered into the vast abyss that should have been the floor, the chancel, aisle, and transepts. The space beneath us seethed with almost-movement—dark surge of something otherworldly. The woman who had once asked me about Flat Stanley stood up toward the altar, arms out, her hair flowing oddly upward. The convocation raised their hands in imitation and I looked toward the front, expecting a song, a benediction, a prayer for those long lost. The USS Johnston, said the woman at the altar, is the deepest shipwreck thus far located, at over twenty thousand feet. The known wreckage pieces consist of two turrets, a propeller shaft and propeller, two funnels, a mast, and several unidentified pieces of debris. At the point of sinking, only 141 of the vessel’s 327-strong crew were saved. At least 90 managed to disembark the vessel before she sank, but were never seen again. There was a murmur in the congregation, a sound that I was slow to recognize as Amen.



* * *



In the fifth month, I began to assume she was dead, which made things both easier and harder. I felt nothing and then utterly kneecapped by it, wanted so desperately to know what her last thought had been and whether it had been about me. I called Sam crying but when pressed at first could only say that the cat I’d been looking after had died. Oh sweetheart, she said—the warm midnight weight of her voice, distant rustle of duvet covers—you know my mother used to tell me that cats know when it’s time to go. We had one when I was little and one day when she was about sixteen we couldn’t find her anywhere, assumed she’d run off. Anyway two days later we found her, all curled up in a box of picnic rugs in the shed at the bottom of the garden. She just knew it was time to take herself off, you know?

In response to this, I kept on crying and told her I’d made it up, that I didn’t know why I’d said that thing about the cat.