O My Darling Read online

  Clark raised his hand, but the boy did not see. A tetherball swung from a pole behind the swimming pool. James Nye lay his towel down on the grass and began to hit the tetherball to himself. Mostly, his fist only grazed the ball, which caused it to ricochet into his face and knock off his glasses. The few times he actually made contact with the ball, it came around and hit him in the back of the head. He proceeded to stalk himself in this manner for some time. Satisfied, he went to the far corner of the deep end and stuck his legs in the pool.

  Clark cheered up watching the kid tool around, his counterpart on the other side of the pool, only a shiny film screen in between replaying on a loop the movie of the sky. To be a boy again, he thought, smiling, to live in a world of small challenges.

  The boy unfolded his towel and withdrew a deflated set of yellow water wings. He put his mouth up to the air valve and began to blow, but was simultaneously squeezing the air back out with his grip. He caught Clark’s interested gaze in the process, and returned an averted smile.

  Suddenly, the boy stood up and looked out toward the shallow end. An old woman in a skirted bathing suit was jumping up and down, shouting hoarsely.

  “What is it?” Clark said aloud.

  The lifeguard shot up in his chair and leapt out over the water. Up in the sky, the kid kicked his spindly legs. His red wind-breaker bellowed up with air. Clark watched with dispassion, finding himself too tired even for tragedy. The boy came crashing down into the water. The old woman clung to his chest.

  “There’s a snake,” she sobbed, “a snake in the pool.”

  Then, coming down the lap lanes in successive shouts, like the calling down a coal shaft:

  A snake in the pool!

  A snake in the pool!

  There’s a snake in the pool!

  The swimmers turned to one another, their cheeks suddenly in high color. Then they looked down below their treading feet, where they could see and yet not see, through the refracted surface, the poisonous man-eating North American chlorinated water snake. Then they began to paddle frantically to the ladders. Several had already started to climb out, but they climbed with such great slowness. Their elephantine feet groped for the rungs. Those who were left in the water gathered in human clots around each ladder, crying out, Hurry! Hurry! Do you want us to be bitten by the snake? In the middle of the shallow end, in the middle of the snake pit, Gundars stood slobbering, searching the water.

  Clark rose and went to the ladders, dusting off his hands. He held his hand out to the swimmers left treading in the deep end, but they refused it. “We need the ladder,” one woman snapped. So instead, he knelt by the edge and waited for one of them to talk to him, but they didn’t.

  By the time the last of them were clearing the ladders, the lifeguard emerged clutching a short, black length of hose.

  “It’s merely a hosse!” he announced, his voice breaking. “Merely a hosse having fallen into!”

  A hose!

  A hose?

  He says it’s only a piece of hose that fell in!

  The seniors turned to one another again, water dripping in rivers off their hard bellies. They pat one another on the back and hand. Their hairdos were ruined, and their faces, exhilarated. A hose! Clark knelt there, watching them.

  Whadid he say?

  A hose.

  A hose, not a snake!

  It was then that Clark noticed the water wings. They were sitting poolside, limp, softly deflating. Clark stood. A glare covered the pool, throwing back the dim sky and its fringe of trees. He walked toward the deep end and looked down into the blue. And when the water began to calm, he could see that there was something large in the pool. Under the surface, and sinking. The outline became clear, as an obvious idea at long last reveals itself to the mind, and Clark felt that a smarter man might’ve already prevented it.

  “James,” he said.

  He was suddenly aware of great distances, of the distance between him and everyone else, between the deep end and the shallow end, which seemed very, very, far away, in another country. He recognized, on some level, that the teenage lifeguard would have to swim across the pool into the deep end, whereas he would only have to jump. Besides, in all the agitation, the kid was still rejoicing, the length of hose held over his head like a flaccid rifle. And the seniors were rejoicing. They suddenly seemed very, very young and absurdly unsuspecting, like characters in a children’s book.

  Then Clark experienced a moment of pointed clarity. A moment of doubtlessness. A kind of unbearable knowledge, unbearably right—heretofore hidden this whole, dreadful summer, his whole life perhaps—cut through the fog in his mind. What was real? Well, this was real. He and the pool and the boy were the realest things on earth at the moment. He heard the water’s gentle nickering in the gutters, soft laughter from inside. And then he heard his own mortal heart call in response.

  Kagung. Kagung. Kagung.

  It was a lonely moment. But as he felt himself dive into the water, its coolness encompassing him and burying him inside, he recognized it as one of the more sensual moments in his life. He felt the voluptuousness of being born for a reason, of being valuable. He spun around and around under water, his skin covered in bubbles.

  He opened his eyes. For a moment, with his body arrested at the end of its dive, he could not tell which direction was up. He was in a box of water. All four walls were the same color. Then, looking over his shoulder, he saw the boy several feet below, or beside, hovering upright, kicking faintly. James Nye pushed at the water with his elbows, as if he were jockeying with other boys and not with his own end. His dark hair was softly wavering. And although his face was white and his mouth contorted, his gaze rested upon nothing but a pair of eyeglasses that lay below him, in the far semi-darkness. How odd it was to be standing above the boy in such a silent room, no words passing between them, gazing at such a relic of life as a pair of eyeglasses.

  Feeling himself drawing away from the boy, Clark fought the tightness and the coldness until he had a hold of the boy’s slippery arm, and there they were, in a sort of friendly confrontation, at the bottom of the pool.

  James looked up at him, hovering there, his eyes the same color as the pool. His mouth was open and the tongue was lolling in and out. Still the boy looked pleased, as one is pleased to see a friend in a dream.

  Then, just before his eyes began to roll back, the boy raised his arms, and this gesture seemed utterly familiar to Clark. It was a gesture that anyone who was ever a child made a hundred times if he made it once, and it meant Carry me.

  Yes, thought Clark. I’ll carry you.

  PART TWO

  EMERGENCY

  The automated doors of the supermarket opened, and Charlotte stepped into the refrigerated air. Through the plate-glass window, the day outside looked somehow painted or contained, the trees bowing in their late summer heaviness. Humming, she walked through the pyramids of oranges and peppers and melons, and then brought her hand basket to one of the registers. The woman in front of her, wearing culottes and a somewhat dyspeptic expression, paid for her groceries and pushed them out the doors. She moved slowly out across the macadam parking lot, her cart glinting in the sun.

  Just then, an ambulance streaked into view. The checkout girl at Charlotte’s register stopped and put her hands over her ears and shut her eyes. The despondent sound of the siren filled the building, coming and going. When it was over, the checkout girl lowered her hands. She turned and looked outside.

  “Poor somebody,” she said. She was a young girl, wearing thick blue eye shadow, her eyes round as pennies. “On a beautiful summer day like this. Accidents shouldn’t be allowed.”

  “God shouldn’t allow them,” agreed the heavyset checkout girl at the register next to them. Both girls resumed moving the items mechanically over the sensors. Charlotte’s girl scraped a carton of eggs over the sensor several times, then looked at it irritably.

  “A shame,” she said, looking straight at Charlotte, “on a day like thi
s.”

  “Oh,” said Charlotte. “You mean the ambulance? It probably wouldn’t be nice to be in an ambulance on any sort of day.”

  The girl nodded appreciatively. “True,” she said. “Would you rather die on a pretty day or a rainy day, Marly?”

  “Rainy,” responded the chubby girl without looking.

  “I hate sirens,” said the checkout girl, “I hate sirens and dogs barking. And screaming. Ugly sounds. I hate ugly sounds.”

  “Well,” said Charlotte. “It’s part of life, I guess.”

  “What is?”

  “Death,” Charlotte shrugged. “Sure, death. Ugly sounds and ugly things. Accidents.” She smiled at the girl.

  “You wouldn’t say that if that was you,” the girl replied, gesturing with her thumb out the window.

  “Yes I would,” said Charlotte. “I would after a while.”

  “I guess,” said the girl. “Yeah, I guess so. After being dead a while I guess you just have to accept it.”

  “Ghosts don’t,” said Marly.

  “No, they don’t,” agreed the checkout girl.

  “My uncle, he lives in a stigmatized property. Do you know what that means?”

  Charlotte and the checkout girl shook their heads.

  “A crime of passion happened there and a lady shot her husband. My uncle got a good deal on it. Because nobody wants to live in a bad luck place. You can buy up those stigmatized properties if you’re smart.”

  “What a load of junk,” snorted the checkout girl. “If you’ve got something coming to you, you got it coming.”

  Charlotte looked outside again at the blank, sunny day. She felt suddenly suspicious of it. She didn’t want to go outside. She wanted to stay in the grocery store, talking with these two girls, as if she herself was still young and underemployed and unaccountable for the things she said.

  “Seventeen dollars and five cents,” said the checkout girl, holding out her hand.

  “Wait, wait,” said Charlotte. With an awkward laugh, she took a chocolate bar from the rack and laid it on the belt. The girl put her foot on a pedal and the chocolate bar moved along toward her.

  “Doesn’t that make your teeth hurt?” the girl asked.

  “I love chocolate,” Charlotte confided.

  “I do too,” said Marly.

  “I eat it in secret,” said Charlotte.

  “Me too,” said Marly. “Alone.”

  “Oh God,” the first checkout girl said, her shoulders tensing. “Here comes another one.”

  This time, the sound of the siren rose up as if from the ground. When the ambulance passed, the whole building trembled again with the sound. All the customers stood still, faces slack, listening. The two-ness of the ambulances had caught their attention. The vehicle edged through the intersection, screaming, then raced on.

  The girl relaxed her shoulders. She sighed and handed Charlotte her bag of groceries.

  “Two ambulances,” said the girl. “That’s not a good sign. That’s not a good sign at all. A big accident or something. A double murder.”

  “A double murder on a Monday morning?” scoffed Marly.

  The young girl looked back outside where there wasn’t anything left but some traffic and traffic lights changing. “I guess I’d rather die on a pretty day,” the girl said to no one. “When there was quiet. If I had a choice.”

  “Well, you don’t get a choice,” said Marly. “Zip zap, it’s over. Nobody comes around with a menu.”

  “How do you know,” said the girl earnestly. “You don’t.”

  Charlotte lifted her bag off the belt. There was something then, something that made her shiver. The cold supermarket air? She crossed to the automated doors, and they opened for her. Behind her, the checkout girls were peering into their sensors, trying to divine what they said.

  LIFE LIKE BREAD

  An hour later, Charlotte was racing down a very slick hospital hallway, clutching her purse to her stomach. When she slipped turning a corner, the purse fell to the floor spilling pennies. The purse behind her, she ran now with her hands out like a blind woman. The faces of the orderlies congregating by the candy machines were indifferent to her, their kingdom of halls stretching out with cold brightness, and somewhere in this labyrinth, Clark passed her going the other direction on a gurney. His face was pale and bloated and full of tubes, his not-quite-shut eyes now horrifying in their loveliness, and Charlotte almost let him pass by, right out of the realm of nightmare, before pursuing. And even then she only clutched the pillow where his head was, unable even to speak his name and hence identify herself as his wife. The speed of the gurney pulled her along, the breathing of the orderly loud in her ear. Soon her hand was removed from his pillow, and the gurney disappeared between two swinging doors, and she stood there, absolutely still—tearless, nonexistent—until someone lead her to a chair.

  The boy Clark had tried to save in the swimming pool was taken to a separate hospital for children. She was glad he was not there, because the first time they wheeled Clark out of the ER that afternoon, his innocent and cold-looking feet sticking off the end of the gurney, Charlotte found herself full of unimaginable violence. She hated that boy. She was furious, and her fists trembled with nothing in them, and she was angry at this strange town, which had lured them there, and for what? For dead-end jobs and for fighting and for sinking and for losing?

  Amidst the impersonal sounds of machinery and the squeaking of doctors’ shoes in the hallway running somewhere else, Charlotte waited at his bedside. By then, her anger had abandoned her. For she saw that life was merely proving what she already suspected of it—its essential infidelity. Its caprice. For once you’re born, she knew, the world that brought you forth so arrogantly washes its hands of you. It recuses itself. She knew all this long ago.

  When the doctors came to Charlotte, she tried to concentrate very hard on the things they were saying but somehow she had already managed to imprison herself into widowhood. He looked so dead. You could say he was sleeping a thousand times and he still looked dead. And if he was dead, how was it there remained so much left to tell him? Looking at his handsome, long-jawed face, the doctors rattling on, at last tears stung her eyes. For there was so much left to tell him. She wanted to tell him it was all right, that he wasn’t a freak. She was. She was the freak! She was the one so afraid of losing things, so freakishly afraid, that he was the first person she had ever dared love since the day she was taken screaming from her mother, for surely she had screamed then, those many years ago. And now, she could barely say I love you without blushing, as if it were a perversion. She inched along through life, a woman on a crossbeam. She wanted to tell him that perhaps if it had been different, if she had lived in a different world, a brighter childhood, she might have been capable of dreaming of the things he dreamed of. What? A child of their own, opening a book of fairytales on the carpet? She leaned closer, trying to see into those half-closed eyes.

  “Clark,” she said. “Love.”

  She stayed hovering like that, crouching almost, waiting for his eyes to open, until one of the doctors made her take a pill in a white cup and she felt her mind cloud over as she fell asleep in a chair, beside that body a thousand nights familiar.

  Morning broke. She was awoken by a tap on the head and found herself staring into the eyes of her husband. Of all things, he was grinning, his long, brown arms stretching out from his white paper dress. His jowls were swollen as if they were still engorged with water. For a moment, before she was fully awake, she thought the squeaking wheels of gurneys were birdsong, and that she and Clark were back at home. And perhaps they were. He laughed. She laughed too. She didn’t want to laugh. She wanted to be angry. She climbed onto the gurney, kissing his face.

  “You’re alive!” she cried. “You jackass!”

  She embraced him with her whole body. He looked astonished, his blue eyes wide open, taking in every inch of the room. And then the nurses marched in with their cold-headed instruments and their
angry flirting. The doctors came and conferred with Charlotte and she once again hardly heard anything they said. A reporter from the Daily Clementine materialized with his camera, the flash filled the room, and she saw Clark pose gamely from his bed, hands folded in front of him.

  Late that evening, they let him go. When they walked down the hall, Clark in hospital slippers and a borrowed exercise suit, everyone clapped. The news of his heroic actions had spread through the wards, and all those who were healing or dying in their beds, sutured or medicated, suffering from ailments with no poetry in them, took heart.

  Nobody, including Clark, knew exactly why it had taken three minutes to rescue James Nye from the water. Gundars had fainted, and all the old folks could do was gather around the deep end and shout and stomp their feet. Drowning victims sometimes panic, dragging down their saviors, but Clark did not remember a struggle. He could not remember anything after diving in, seeing the kid, the kid reaching up, and experiencing a feeling of supreme patience and assuredness, the ridiculousness of making appointments.

  Three treacherous minutes later, he’d reached the surface and lost consciousness. The seniors dragged him to the deck as he began to sink back down. A veteran of the Korean War gave him CPR, after helping the kid first. The child was not breathing. They were both unconscious to the world.

  Where was he, those hours? Clark did not try to describe his half-death, and Charlotte did not ask. She only wanted to be quiet and walk quietly, so as not to disturb the Fates and have them reverse their decision. She turned on all the lights in the house and made a bed for him on the sofa where she could be near at all times. In the kitchen, opening a can of peaches for him, her hands shook so wildly that she had to tell him there were no peaches. News reached them later that same day that James Nye was alive and there was no apparent brain damage. This news made Clark take a deep breath, raise his fist to his mouth, and begin to cry.