Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (35 page)

“There
was
more than his dreams,” she admits, almost a full minute later. The statement has the slightly abashed quality of a confession. And I have no idea how to respond, so I don’t. She blinks, and looks up at me again, the pale ghost of that previous smile returning to her lips. “Would it bother you if I smoke?” she asks.

“No,” I reply. “Not at all. Please, whatever makes you comfortable.”

“These days, well, it bothers so many people. As though the Pope had added smoking to the list of venial sins. I get the most awful glares, sometimes, so I thought I’d best ask first.”

“It’s your home,” I tell her, and she nods and reaches into a pocket of her skirt, retrieving a pack of Marlboro Reds and a disposable lighter.

“To some, that doesn’t seem to matter,” she says. “There’s a woman comes around twice a week to attend to the dusting and trash and whatnot, a Cuban woman, and if I smoke when she’s here, she always complains and tries to open the window, even though I’ve told her time and time again it’s been painted shut for ages. It’s not like I don’t pay her.”

Considering the thick and plainly undisturbed strata of dust, and the odors, I wonder if she’s making this up, or if perhaps the Cuban woman might have stopped coming around a long time ago.

“I promised him, when he told me, I would never tell anyone else this,” she says, and here she pauses to light her cigarette, then return the rest of the pack and her lighter to their place in her skirt pocket. She blows a gray cloud of smoke away from me. “Not another living soul. It was a sort of pact between us, you understand. But, lately, it’s been weighing on me. I wake up in the night, sometimes, and it’s like a stone around my neck. I don’t think it’s something I want to take with me to the grave. He told me the day we started work on the second painting.”

“That would have been in May 1939, yes?”

And here she laughs again and shakes her head. “Hell if I know. Maybe you have it written down somewhere in that pad of yours, but I don’t remember the date. Not anymore. But…I
do
know it was the same year the World’s Fair opened here in New York, and I know it was after Amelia Earhart disappeared. He knew her, Amelia Earhart. He knew so many interesting people. But I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

“I’m in no hurry,” I answer. “Take your time.” But she frowns again and stares at the smoldering tip of her cigarette for a moment.

“I like to think, sir, that I am a practical woman,” she says, looking directly at me and raising her chin an inch or so. “I have always wanted to be able to consider myself a practical woman. And now I’m very old. Very,
very
old, yes, and a practical woman must acknowledge the fact that women who
are
this old will not live much longer. I know I’ll die soon, and the truth about the mermaids, it isn’t something I want to take with me to my grave. So, I’ll tell you and betray his confidence. If you’ll listen, of course.”

“Certainly,” I reply, struggling not let my excitement show through, but feeling like a vulture, anyway. “If you’d prefer, I can shut off the recorder,” I offer.

“No, no…I want you to put this in your article. I want them to print it in that magazine you write for, because it seems to me that people ought to know. If they’re still so infatuated with the mermaids after all this time, it doesn’t seem fitting that they
don’t
know. It seems almost indecent.”

I don’t remind her that I’m a freelance and the article’s being done on spec, so there’s no guarantee anyone’s going to buy it, or that it will ever be printed and read. And withholding that information feels indecent, too, but I keep my mouth shut and listen while she talks. I can always nurse my guilty conscience later on.

“The summer before I met him, before we started working together,” she begins and then pauses to take another drag on her cigarette. Her eyes return to the painting behind me. “I suppose that would have been the summer of 1937. The Depression was still on, but his family, out on Long Island, they’d come through it better than most. He had money. Sometimes he’d take commissions from magazines, if the pay was decent.
The New Yorker,
that was one he did some work for, and
Harper’s Bazaar,
and
Collier’s,
but I guess you know this sort of thing, having done so much research on his life.”

The ash on her Marlboro is growing perilously long, though she seems not have noticed. I glance about and spot an ashtray, heavy lead glass, perched on the edge of a nearby coffee table. It doesn’t look as though it’s been emptied in days or weeks, another argument against the reality of the Cuban maid. My armchair squeaks and pops angrily when I lean forward to retrieve it. I offer it to her, and she takes her eyes off the painting just long enough to accept it and to thank me.

“Anyway,” she continues, “mostly he was able to paint what he wanted. That was a freedom that he never took for granted. He was staying in Atlantic City that summer, because he said he liked watching the people on the boardwalk. Sometimes, he’d sit and sketch them for hours, in charcoal and pastels. He showed quite a lot of the boardwalk sketches to me, and I think he always meant to do paintings from them, but, to my knowledge, he ever did.

“That summer, he was staying at the Traymore, which I never saw, but he said was wonderful. Many of his friends and acquaintances would go to Atlantic City in the summer, so he never lacked for company if he wanted it. There were the most wonderful parties, he told me. Sometimes, in the evenings, he’d go down onto the beach alone, onto the sand, I mean, because he said the waves and the gulls and the smell of the sea comforted him. In his studio, the one he kept on the Upper West Side, there was a quart mayonnaise jar filled with seashells and sand dollars and the like. He’d picked them all up at Atlantic City, over the years. Some of them we used as props in the paintings, and he also had a cabinet with shells from Florida and Nassau and the Cape and I don’t know where else. He showed me conchs and starfish from the Mediterranean and Japan, I remember. Seashells from all over the world, easily. He loved them, and driftwood, too.”

She taps her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray and stares at the painting of the mermaid and the lighthouse, and I have the distinct feeling that she’s drawing some sort of courage from it, the requisite courage needed to break a promise she’s kept for seventy years. A promise she made three decades before my own birth. And I know now how to sum up the smell of her apartment. It smells like time.

“It was late July, and the sun was setting,” she says, speaking very slowly now, as though every word is being chosen with great and deliberate care. “And he told me that he was in a foul temper that evening, having fared poorly at a poker game the night before. He played cards. He said it was one of his only weaknesses.

“At any rate, he went down onto the sand, and he was barefoot, he said. I remember that, him telling me he wasn’t wearing shoes.” And it occurs to me then that possibly none of what I’m hearing is the truth, that she’s spinning a fanciful yarn so I won’t be disappointed, lying for my benefit, or because her days are so filled with monotony and she is determined this unusual guest will be entertained. I push the thoughts away. There’s no evidence of deceit in her voice. Art journalism hasn’t made me rich or well known, but I have gotten pretty good at knowing a lie when I hear one.

“He said to me, ‘The sand was so cool beneath my feet.’ He walked for a while, and then, just before dark, came across a group of young boys, eight or nine years old, and they were crowded around something that had washed up on the beach. The tide was going out, and what the boys had found, it had been stranded by the retreating tide. He recalled thinking it odd that they were all out so late, the boys, that they were not at dinner with their families. The lights were coming on along the boardwalk.”

Now she suddenly averts her eyes from the painting on the wall of her apartment,
Regarding the Shore from Whale Rock,
as though she’s taken what she needs and it has nothing left to offer. She crushes her cigarette out in the ashtray and doesn’t look at me. She chews at her lower lip, chewing away some of the lipstick. The old woman in the wheelchair does not appear sad nor wistful. I think it’s anger, that expression, and I want to ask her
why
she’s angry. Instead, I ask what it was the boys found on the beach, what the artist saw that evening. She doesn’t answer right away, but closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly, raggedly.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to press you. If you want to stop–”

“I do
not
want to stop,” she says, opening her eyes again. “I have not come this far, and said this much, only to
stop.
It was a woman, a very
young
woman. He said that she couldn’t have been much more than nineteen or twenty. One of the children was poking at her with a stick, and he
took
the stick and shooed them all away.”

“She was drowned?” I ask.

“Maybe. Maybe she drowned first. But she was bitten in half. There was nothing much left of her below the ribcage. Just bone and meat and a big hollowed-out place where all her organs had been, her stomach and lungs and everything. Still, there was no blood anywhere. It was like she’d never had a single drop of blood in her. He told me, ‘I never saw anything else even half that horrible.’ And, you know, that wasn’t so long after he’d come back to the States from the war in Spain, fighting against the fascists, the Francoists. He was at the Siege of Madrid and saw awful, awful things there. He said to me, ‘I saw
atrocities,
but this was worse…’

And then she trails off and glares down at the ashtray in her lap, at a curl of smoke rising lazily from her cigarette butt.

“You don’t have to go on,” I say, almost whispering. “I’ll understand – ”

“Oh hell,” she says and shrugs her frail shoulders. “There isn’t that much left to tell. He figured that a shark did it, maybe one big shark or several smaller ones. He took her by the arms, and he hauled what was left of her up onto the dry sand, up towards the boardwalk, so she wouldn’t be swept back out to sea. He sat down beside the body, because at first he didn’t know what to do, and he said he didn’t want to leave her alone. She was dead, but he didn’t want to leave her alone. I don’t know how long he sat there, but he said it was dark when he finally went to find a policeman.

“The body was still there when they got back. No one had disturbed it. The little boys had not returned. But he said the whole affair was hushed up, because the chamber of commerce was afraid that a shark scare would frighten away the tourists and ruin the rest of the season. It had happened before. He said he went straight back to the Traymore and packed his bags, got a ticket on the next train to Manhattan. And he never visited Atlantic City ever again, but he started painting the mermaids, the very next year, right after he found me. Sometimes,” she says, “I think maybe I should have taken it as an insult. But I didn’t, and I still don’t.”

And then she falls silent, the way a storyteller falls silent when a tale is done. She takes another deep breath, rolls her wheelchair back about a foot or so, until it bumps hard against one end of the chaise lounge. She laughs nervously and lights another cigarette. And I ask her other questions, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with Atlantic City or the dead woman. We talk about other painters she’s known, and jazz musicians, and writers, and she talks about how much New York’s changed, how much the whole world has changed around her. As she speaks, I have the peculiar, disquieting sensation that, somehow, she’s passed the weight of that seventy-year-old secret on to me, and I think even if the article sells (and now I don’t doubt that it will) and a million people read it, a hundred million people, the weight will not be diminished.

This is what it’s like to be haunted,
I think, and then I try to dismiss the thought as melodramatic, or absurd, or childish. But her jade-and-surf green eyes, the mermaids’ eyes, are there to assure me otherwise.

It’s almost dusk before we’re done. She asks me to stay for dinner, but I make excuses about needing to be back in Boston. I promise to mail her a copy of the article when I’ve finished, and she tells me she’ll watch for it. She tells me how she doesn’t get much mail anymore, a few bills and ads, but nothing she ever wants to read.

“I am so very pleased that you contacted me,” she says, as I slip the recorder and my steno pad back into the briefcase and snap it shut.

“It was gracious of you to talk so candidly with me,” I reply, and she smiles.

I only glance at the painting once more, just before I leave. Earlier, I thought I might call someone I know, an ex who owns a gallery in the East Village. I owe him a favor, and the tip would surely square us. But standing there, looking at the pale, scale-dappled form of a woman bobbing in the frothing waves, her wet black hair tangled with wriggling crabs and fish, and nothing at all but a hint of shadow visible beneath the wreath of her floating hair,
seeing
it as I’ve never before seen any of the mermaids, I know I won’t make the call. Maybe I’ll mention the painting in the article I write, and maybe I won’t.

She follows me to the door, and we each say our goodbyes. I kiss her hand when she offers it to me. I don’t believe I’ve ever kissed a woman’s hand, not until this moment. She locks the door behind me, two deadbolts and a chain, and then I stand in the hallway. It’s much cooler here than it was in her apartment, in the shadows that have gathered despite the windows at either end of the corridor. There are people arguing loudly somewhere in the building below me, and a dog barking. By the time I descend the stairs and reach the sidewalk, the streetlamps are winking on.

THE MERMAID OF THE CONCRETE OCEAN

There are natural and man-made calamities and anomalies with which I become fascinated: the Peshtigo Fire (October 8, 1871),
La Bête du Gévaudan
(1764-1767), the Johnstown Flood (May 31, 1889), the Tunguska event (June 30, 1908), the lion attacks at Tsavo (March–December 1898), et cetera. Among the more obscure of my fascinations are the 1916 Jersey Shore and Matawan Creek shark attacks, one of many inspirations for “The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean.” This story eventually found a place in
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir,
which also drew inspiration, repeatedly, from the 1916 shark attacks.