Authors: Jane Nin
“Sylvie,” he said, “do you want to stop?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Yes. No.” I knew now I was falling
for Jack. And yet—I was curious. “What’s the next scenario?”
“I was thinking a fancy soiree of some kind—you know,
intimate and pervy.”
I laughed at “pervy”—it was nice to hear him joke.
Everything we’d been through so far had felt so deadly serious. And yet it was
sex, which meant at the same time it really wasn’t.
“A party sounds fun,” I said.
“What about you?” he asked, “Any fantasies I’m neglecting?”
“Not really,” I said, “you seem to have a sort of sixth
sense for what I like.” I thought for a moment. “I suppose I’ve never been with
a virgin.”
“Not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said, “but we can surely
put it on the list.”
“Okay,” I laughed again.
Jack decided we should depart Iceland immediately. I deduced
that between the rig accident and the error at the hospital, he wanted to get
his distance on things that were troubling him—and certainly I had no
objection. He had the driver take us right back to the airport where only a few
hours before I’d arrived.
“Where should we go?” he said.
“What—you mean, anywhere?”
“We should probably keep in striking distance of England,” he said. “That’s where we’ll need to be next.” (For his “plan,” I imagined.)
So I looked at the timetables, then chose Málaga. I’d always
liked the word. I’d never just bought a plane ticket to anywhere at the counter
on a whim, and so I stood in a sort of delighted disbelief as Jack did exactly
that.
And so it was that we took a long plane ride and a long taxi
drive and were delivered many hours later via a narrow alley to a small, old
hotel. I could smell the ocean but the night was moonless and I could see
nothing of our surroundings. By then I was deliriously tired—so much so that I
didn’t even have energy to protest when I saw he was booking us separate rooms.
And the next morning I woke and stepped out of my bedroom onto a small stone
patio. Below was a cliff tumbling down to the azure blue of the Mediterranean,
and as the sun warmed the ground the resinous smell of wild anise rose and
mingled with the other smells: rock, ocean, salt.
When I thought that the day before I’d been in Iceland and the day before that in France and that not a week ago I’d been at my boring old job down
in Houston I felt a little dizzy at the speed with which everything could
change.
“Not bad, eh?” appeared Jack’s voice just behind me. Our
rooms, it seemed, were adjacent—the patio was shared. I went to him and
embraced him, and he took one hand and lifted my chin and kissed me softly,
briefly, on the lips. “Shall we order breakfast?”
An old woman brought us trays of coffee and crusty bread and
butter and cured meats, which I devoured hungrily, suddenly realizing it had
been a very long time since my last proper meal. Jack sipped his coffee and
looked out at the ocean, contemplative.
It was the romantic cliché, except for that chaste kiss, our
virginally separate beds. Suddenly my old co-worker’s words materialized again
in my mind:
they want a virgin, or they want a whore, and most of us are in
between.
I frowned a little at the memory.
“Is there something we should talk about?” said Jack.
“What?” I said. I certainly didn’t want to ruin this
beautiful morning with paranoia, or the dating complaints of some woman I half-knew.
“Your situation,” he said. “Career-wise.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t particularly want to think about it.
“I’ll just have to find something else,” I said, shrugging. “I might move
first, though. I don’t know where.”
“That seems a little cart before the horse, don’t you
think?”
“I’ve never loved Houston.”
“No, I mean—Sylvie, you’re smart. You should be doing work
you love.”
“Is there such a thing?”
“I’m sure there could be. What would you like to do?”
I laughed a little harshly, some moroseness creeping into my
manner. “Jack,” I said, “I’m 33. That’s a little old for
What Color Is Your
Parachute
, don’t you think?”
“Don’t shrug this off,” he said, “I’m asking in earnest. If
you could do anything in the world. What would you want it to be?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “Teach bungee jumping? Fly planes?”
For the first time, he spoke to me with annoyance in his
voice. “Why are you being so flippant about this? Stop resisting the question.”
I paused, tried to actually think. The real interesting
jobs, it seemed to me, required actual expertise. Skills. Education. Years of
practical training.
“The trouble is, anything actually fun would involve my
having to go back to school,” I said.
“For…?”
“Say, veterinary medicine.”
“You want to be a vet?” he said, surprised but seemingly
impressed.
“I wouldn’t have said that,” I said. “I’d have to re-do my
bachelor’s—I studied English, which doesn’t exactly tell you much about how a
cat works.”
“I see,” said Jack, “anything else?”
“I always thought art restoration looked fun,” I said. “Then
again, I could just run an olive orchard. I don’t know,” I concluded, “I’m
interested in lots of things. Just really far from qualified.”
“I understand,” he said, and he didn’t say anything else,
and I was glad we were moving off the subject. School sounded fun, but the
prospect of working at the same time—taking out more loans—prolonging the years
of just barely scraping by—was frankly daunting.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked, after a few more minutes
of silence.
“Sure,” he said.
“You were married before, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, and I could see he hadn’t been expecting
that question.
“What happened?”
“You really want to know?”
“I’m curious how you go from a storybook New York Times
social page wedding, to picking up a woman you’ve never met in a bar and flying
her halfway across the globe so she can fuck a bunch of strangers.”
“The short answer is, it’s both easier than you think and
harder than you think to ruin things.”
Elegant, enigmatic, seemingly wise: this statement was so
perfectly
Jack
. Which also meant it left me hungry for more.
“How about the long answer,” I pressed.
“Maybe later,” said Jack, after a thoughtful bite of meat and
bread.
I wanted desperately to know him, to understand what he was,
who
he was, what he, seemingly so good at things, had managed to ruin. But
I would wait for his story, and not pester him for it. For a little longer, at
least.
After a leisurely breakfast we picked our way down a steep
little path down to the beach. The water was warm and nobody seemed to be
around so I took off my clothes—I felt Jack watching—and walked out into it.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d swum in the ocean.
Certainly I’d never been tempted to swim in the swampy, polluted waters of the Gulf of Mexico. And before that? I remembered a vacation to Southern California, with a man
I was provisionally dating, and his insistence that we get in. But the Pacific
had been cold, and neither the swim nor the affair had lasted long.
This, on the other hand, was the opposite. It was as if the
ocean had been poured just for me. It was cool but only enough to counteract
the woolly heat of the noontime sun. The sky was this perfect cobalt blue dome
over us. And not a soul in sight, still. It was like infinity, but safe. It
did—it made me feel like I could do anything, be anything. Like the world was kind
and infinitely full of perfection. I had always thought of it as the opposite:
cruel or indifferent, and unyielding. Of course I knew both were true and that
the trick was that wherever you were, it became impossible to remember the
other. Impossible to believe in it. And yet, it still existed.
The world was kind, and the world was cruel. I was a virgin,
and I was a whore.
Because what was a virgin, really? It wasn’t about whether
the sacred vestibule of your vagina had ever been violated by some cock. It was
about whether you could trust, and how completely. About whether you could love
like you had never, ever been hurt.
This last realization dawned on me with a tremendous
physical force and I felt my arms and legs go weak. I didn’t know if I could
love like that. How do you forget pain, after all? I’d never so much as
suffered a broken bone but the knowledge of heartbreak was all through my body.
Tears welled in my eyes and rolled generously down my cheeks
to join the kindred waters in which I floated. I was weeping soundlessly but it
was hard to breathe in, which made it more difficult to keep my mouth and nose
above the waves.
I wasn’t frightened, really. I was sure if I slipped below
the water my little philosophical mood would yield to the more urgent
necessities of survival. But as I gasped I did accidentally inhale a mouthful
of ocean and it set me to coughing, and I tried to paddle more but already I
felt my breathlessness in my muscles—they were not as strong as they should be.
And maybe, for a moment then, I actually grew scared, because a thought flashed
across my mind, the phrase,
drowned from crying
, and I found this
downright hysterical.
So despite all of this, I began to giggle, or whatever
version of giggling can be accomplished when one is already half-underwater and
short of air, and unfortunately the fact that my giggling spent even more of
that air made me slip completely below the surface, just for a moment—the fact
that things were about to get actually dangerous, and all because of me just
thinking
too many thoughts
—it only made the situation more absurd, and funnier.
But I managed to flail my arms and legs enough to get my
mouth and nose above the surface once again, and I gulped some air, and I also
laughed aloud, and I heard my voice in the air—a ridiculous, girlish laugh like
a child watching a cartoon character fall down some stairs—and that contracted
me with even more laughter, and again I sank, and this was when I realized I
had better start swimming for the beach, to a place where I could stand.
What I hadn’t figured on was that some current I’d drifted
into had other notions. I paddled and kicked and seemed to make no progress. I
was tiring quickly, too. More and more of my breaths were half-mouthfuls of
water, and each bout of coughing left me limper, more vulnerable to the ocean’s
whims. I thought maybe I should just try to float, and let it carry me out
while I recovered some strength, and so I rolled over onto my back and tried to
do just that. Float. Breathe. Breathe.
I wasn’t laughing anymore. I closed my eyes and tried to
still my panic. I could swim, if only I could get my muscles back.
But you
are so tired
, my brain fearfully warned. No. Concentrate on just breathing,
just staying calm. I didn’t even want to look at how far I’d gotten from shore.
I just closed my eyes and tried to keep existing.
Breathe
,
I reminded myself,
breathe
.
And then there was Jack. There was splashing beside me and
then I opened my eyes and saw his face. We made eye contact, so he knew I was
alive, and conscious, and then his arm was beneath me, his grip tight on my upper
arm. He didn’t say a word. Just swam, hard, holding me afloat beside him. I
closed my eyes again, felt the water dragging against me as his powerful
strokes launched us forward, forward.
“Put your legs down,” he said finally, and I did. There was
soft sand just below us. He didn’t let go of me. We stood for a moment as I breathed
more freely, my shoulders and head above the water.
“Can you walk?”
I nodded. He continued to hold me as we took slow steps
toward the shore. As the water grew shallower I realized just how weak I’d
gotten out there, and before we were even clear of it I dropped to my knees,
and he knelt beside me, and I began sobbing outright.
I was naked and on all fours, weeping into the ocean.
“You’re okay,” said Jack. “Hey, it’s okay.” And he stroked
me, and kissed my wet shoulder, and then I leaned into him and he held me
tight.
He was still wearing all his clothes.
We sat like that for a very long time, until I began to
shiver, despite the sun. So he stood, and helped me to standing, and then we
walked up the beach to where the sand was dry, and he stood there, dripping,
and gently toweled me off. Then he spread the towel on the sand and I flopped
down onto it and watched him as he peeled off his sodden clothes and stood naked
in the suddenly blinding light.
He dried himself, then spread his own towel out and sat
beside me.
“What happened?” he said, after a little while. “I thought I
heard you laughing.”
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t… it
wouldn’t make sense if I tried to explain it, probably.”