Our Wives Under the Sea (8)

(My friends often told me in these early days that we were similar, something I always thought bizarre, although Leah pointed out that all they meant by this was that we both talked fast and watched movies in the evenings after work. In truth, I never thought there were too many points of congruence between us. We were both small, though I was specifically short and Leah specifically skinny; we both hated loud noises and bad manners and enjoyed the peculiar clench of city space. Beyond that, there were few similarities. On occasion, particularly with friends like Carmen, it occurred to me that this perceived resemblance between Leah and myself had more to do with the two of us being women than it did with anything real. You’re just like twins, Carmen said once. I wish I had what you have. I found myself wanting to point out that she and her boyfriend Tom actually had a lot in common, though this didn’t seem a point on which she longed for me to press.)

I watch movies alone now—Leah’s concentration is not what it used to be. When I can’t sleep, which is often, I take myself out of the spare room and watch movies on the living room floor until the sky grows light beyond the telegraph poles and my back starts to hump from sitting so long with my arms curled over my knees. I watch only movies I’ve seen before—impossible, I think, to follow something new, to find the will to do so. I put Jaws on, once, although this turned out to be a mistake and I turned it off within the first ten minutes. The first time we watched that movie together, Leah went into great detail about all the ways she would have gone about catching the shark, about the technology available, the ways in which our ability to observe and understand marine life has advanced since the mid-1970s. After talking like this for several minutes, she suddenly grinned at me, cutting herself off and rolling her eyes to the ceiling—but this is boring, she said, I don’t want to be boring. We’re watching a movie. I shook my head and turned down the sound on the television. No, I said to her, no, not boring at all.





LEAH


Jelka prayed, because that was what Jelka did. Matteo said nothing, only checked and rechecked the oxygen systems and announced every time that we were fine, still fine, still breathing. I’m not entirely sure what I did. It occurred to me several times, in a mildly hysterical manner, that a submarine going down was not in itself a terrible thing. It occurred to me several times to say this—What are we worried about, this is just what we’re supposed to be doing! I didn’t say this, of course, only held my finger against the transmission button at ten-second intervals and registered dead signal each time. Typically, it should take a manned submersible craft anywhere between three and four hours to reach the deepest point in the ocean, depending on the size of the craft and its engines. I wondered, in a fairly distant way, what would happen when we hit the bottom and couldn’t control the ballast tanks to bring us up again. I wondered how it was that the system had cut out in all meaningful ways except when it came to the CO2 scrubbers. I wished, with a vehemence that felt vaguely misplaced, that I had thought to bring a deck of cards with me. I imagined the three of us sitting at the bottom of the ocean and playing old maid.

The deep sea is dark, particularly when the lights on your submersible craft have cut out for reasons unknown. I did my best to keep my gaze away from the windows, thought of strange-shaped ocean creatures peering in at the three of us and smiling with all of their teeth.





Twilight Zone





MIRI


There was a cocktail party to celebrate their going away; white wine and Twiglets held in a hotel conference room by the Centre for Marine Enquiry and three men in turquoise suits playing bossa nova music on a platform near the door. I spent much of the night caught up in interminable conversation with a man who specialized in seaweed (specialized in what sense I wasn’t sure; he introduced himself as such and I didn’t care to probe). Which one is yours, he asked at one point, gesturing toward the group that stood farthest from the buffet, as though asking me to identify my jacket from a pile. Leah was standing at the outer edge of the group, holding a glass and talking in a tone that seemed flushed through with bright authority, though I wasn’t close enough to hear what she was actually saying. Her dress was white and clung to her like sealskin. She didn’t often wear dresses, though when she did it always seemed she chose the ones that looked like something else: cocoons and folded paper, carapaces, wet suits, wings. Like an insect that mimics something else, at a distance it could often be hard to tell quite what it was that you were looking at. Dressing for formal events, I often thought of her like this: sheathing herself with the intent to deflect. She didn’t much enjoy being looked at. There’s a lot of it about, the seaweed specialist said when I pointed Leah out and explained what we were to each other. My brother’s wife has a sister, you know. Same thing.

The venue was overbright, my mouth raw from hot coffee drunk too quickly sometime that afternoon. A strange atmosphere—something like tension in the walls, in the way people spoke to each other. I felt stripped of too many of my senses, concerned about my rhythm, about the exact small sequence of movements required to put my hand on Leah’s arm. Earlier in the evening we had fought, I forget about what exactly. Certainly not about her going away or any reservations I might have had about the trip. If it were possible now to look back and feel at least secure in the fact that I had predicted something, noted some foul planetary alignment and spoken my fears aloud, that might be of some comfort. As it was, I suspected nothing. Leah had gone and returned many times before and I had no reason to presume this trip would be any different. What we’d argued about had been something banal, impossible to recall and easy enough to guess at: Leah never wiping the surfaces down unless prompted, Leah never giving me two seconds just to stare into space without asking me what I was thinking. Very often, people argue as a way of expressing the fears and frustrations they cannot say aloud. It would, perhaps, be easy enough to claim that Leah’s impending departure was what prompted me to pick fights unnecessarily and often, but to be perfectly honest I’m not certain that’s what it was. Often enough it’s occurred to me that fighting is simply something I’m given to, like picking at my cuticles. Whatever it was we fought about, the climax was loud, fraught, and quickly forgotten. We had never been very committed fighters—bit and scratched and then grew bored, too quick to appease and to declare ourselves the ones at fault. The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.