Our Wives Under the Sea (28)

Among the many things my father collected, he had a stash of old New Yorker magazines, dating back as far as 1972. He kept these in a series of old wine crates that he stacked in his garage and periodically allowed me to root through, I assume to get me out of his hair. I was thirteen when I found a copy from July 1989 that contained a profile of Sylvia Earle. Entitled “Her Deepness,” it was a detailed rundown of a long and wildly impressive life of deep-sea exploration, and I immediately whisked it away to read. One of my favorite parts of the article, the whole of which I read seven or eight times in the space of one weekend, was when Earle talked about the Tektite habitat, explaining that the Washington review committee in charge of selecting teams to man the station hadn’t actually expected women to apply at all. There were still some remarkably prudish attitudes in Washington in those days, she said, and the people in charge just couldn’t cope with the idea of men and women living together underwater. It was seemingly for this reason, really more than any desire to push the envelope, that the first female dive team was born. It makes sense when you think about it, my father said when I brought the article to him, actually a pretty neat solution to a problem. Really they should take this into account with space exploration, too. No chance of crewmates getting involved with each other when it’s all women—no distraction, no nookie, no silly buggers. Clever in its way.

I said nothing to this, although later on I lay and thought about these women, imagined myself a crewmate aboard the Tektite—the ghostly shoals of fish beyond the bubbled portholes, the tangled kelp, the stillness, the sudden scuds of light.

Now, on the floor of the main deck, I thought about this again, tried to remember the longest any team had submerged on the Tektite, the longest it was advisable to submerge.

“Do you smell it?” Jelka said, and I looked down at her, unsure of how long she had been awake.

“Smell what?” Matteo said, though his expression did not match the question, as though he already knew the answer. It was the smell of something burning, of meat straight off the bone.





MIRI


I run beside the canal in the early mornings and afterward I usually go to the café near the municipal leisure center, where I drink two coffees in quick succession before heading back. There is a man at the café by the leisure center who has on at least three occasions written his number down on my receipt when I’ve paid for my coffees. I’m not entirely sure why he keeps doing this when at no point has it yielded results—perhaps he believes that as yet I simply haven’t noticed, perhaps he’s just a sexual predator—but either way, he does it again this morning as I hand over my change. I am briefly annoyed at the whole situation, briefly alarmed, and then it occurs to me that all I need to do is tell him I have a girlfriend (which is not true, I have a wife, but people seem to find that cute in a way they don’t when I just say girlfriend). I look at him for several seconds, holding my coffees in both hands and not saying anything, and then I say to him, abruptly, “Please stop doing that,” and leave without taking my receipt.

This happened once, a long time ago: Leah and I on an early date and a man in between us at the bar, forcing a leg between our stools with the forward-thrusting motion of someone preventing an elevator door from closing. Are you sisters, he had said, and she told him yes and then kissed my open mouth.



* * *



Leah is in the bathroom, the sound machine playing, the phone ringing. My bad tooth is aching, though I’m doing my best to ignore it. Our quarterly water bill is in the region of twelve times above average and I have no clear idea of how we’re going to pay it.

I’ve been going through the papers from Leah’s transfer to the Centre, trying to make sense of a number of things I thought I already knew. I am unsure, for instance, of exactly when it was that Leah’s job became obscure to me, when I stopped knowing what it was she was doing on a daily basis while still assuming I did. I am thinking, again, about the going-away party, about the people there I didn’t know. I am thinking about a man Leah described in joking terms as “The Boss,” as though she were referring to Bruce Springsteen, pointing out a man in pressed jeans and a sports jacket who didn’t make a speech when others did, but afterward ate a total of twelve cocktail sausages from the buffet table and apologized when he jostled me en route to the salad bowl. I remember him the way I think you often remember unimportant things: too clearly and in too much detail. The way your memory will relinquish important things yet conjure the bright sense of a boring landscape or a throwaway conversation, so I remember the dark upward sweep of his hair and the etched insignia on his ring, like the lines of an eye. I remember the way he stepped back politely to give me space and asked if I’d enjoyed the party, and I remember, too, the way that shortly afterward he departed without ceremony and no one commented on the fact that he had gone. We are prouder than ever before, a woman from the Centre declared into a microphone, of all we as a company have achieved, and more certain than ever before that we stand at the vanguard of further discovery. We know already that life exists everywhere, even in the places as yet inaccessible, and we know, too, that that life has things to teach us and must be sought out.



* * *



I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poorly hidden behind a curtain. I see her impatience in the skin of my neck, her anger in the way my hands move. I see her when I press my tongue into the inside of my cheek with irritation yet refuse to do anything to make a situation better. I see her when I assume people are worse than they turn out to be.