Dream of the Blue Room (11 page)

FIFTEEN

I vow to tell Dave everything, and wonder if it will even faze him. When I arrive, the cabin is empty, the bed unmade. I shower and dress, rehearsing my confession. In the tiny bathroom mirror I see a woman I hardly recognize—the circles under my eyes growing darker from so many nights without real sleep, my hair brittle from the ship’s hard water.

In the dining room, I approach Dave at the fruit bar, where he’s preparing two plates. “Hungry?”

“One’s for Stacy. She’s not feeling well. I thought I’d do the gentlemanly thing.” He is freshly showered, his thick hair still wet, his skin glowing. He looks the picture of good health. He spears two juicy pieces of watermelon. They slide off the fork onto Stacy’s waiting plate. He doesn’t even ask where I was last night. For all he knows, I came to bed late and got up early, and he slept through it all.

Back at the table, Stacy is waiting. She looks tired but content. “Good morning,” she says to me.

“You okay?”

“A little under the weather, but Dave’s taking good care of me.”

Dave blushes, sets the plate in front of her. She goes through her water quickly. Then, her own glass empty, she drinks from Dave’s. He gives her a look, and she sets the glass down and smiles at me. “Sorry. I’m so thirsty I could drink straight from the river.”

Dave eats two pieces of toast and reads the headlines of
The China Daily
. There’s a tiny bruise on his neck, just below his earlobe. His lower lip is slightly swollen.

He catches me staring. “Something wrong?”

“No.” I lean over and touch the sore on his lip. “Did you hurt yourself?” There is something startlingly natural about this gesture, some mutual communion that feels right despite everything. As Dave leans into my touch, I feel a wave of tenderness welling up in me, and jealousy, and guilt.

“I have to go,” Stacy says. She looks as if she’s about to cry. When she stands to leave, Dave stands too, as if to follow her, then sits back down. Stacy glances back at us once before leaving the room.

“I’m sorry,” Dave says, staring down at his plate. In a flash I understand. Almost overnight, infidelity has become an unspoken condition of our crumbling marriage. “This isn’t what I planned.”

I stir cream and sugar into my coffee. “I know.”

“You have every right to be angry.”

I spread raspberry jam on a hard white roll. “No. I don’t.”

“Of course you do.”

“Not really.”

“What do you mean?”

“This business with Graham.”

“So that wasn’t my imagination.”

“No.”

He rubs his hands back and forth across the red satin tablecloth. The cloth is speckled with oil stains. “I guess this means we’re even.”

“I suppose.”

“Then why do I feel jealous?”

“Why do I?”

He lays his hands palm up on the table, clenches them into fists, releases. “Did you sleep with him?”

I don’t say anything.

“You slept with him.” He blinks as if waking.

I fiddle with the salt shaker. “You’re the one who left.”

He presses his thumb into the tongs of his fork. I almost reach over and take the fork away, thinking of his beautiful hands, but I catch myself; it’s no longer my right. “Look at your lip, your neck. She drank out of your water glass, right in front of me. Do you think I’m blind?”

He sighs, looks away. “I’m not saying I’m one hundred percent innocent. I’m not saying I haven’t made mistakes.” The couple at the next table turns to stare. The woman is wearing big green earrings shaped like turtles.

I struggle to keep my voice down. “It’s been six months since you touched me, even longer since we made love.” I take a sip of my coffee, just for something to do. It’s barely warm. The cream has gone bad; tiny white specks float to the surface.

“Sounds like you’ve been keeping a tally of my shortcomings.” He releases his fork. The tip of his thumb has little red dents in it. Once, when we were first married, I painted his fingernails while he was sleeping. In the morning, he stared for several minutes at the strange red tips of his hands, mesmerized. He said he’d like to trade places with me, for just one day, so he could know what it was like to be a woman. What happened to that ease between us, that raw, unashamed honesty?

“When you moved out, I expected you’d at least call every now and then.” I’m embarrassed by the bitterness that creeps into my voice.

His jaw clenches, activating a faint dimple just below his left cheekbone. I’d forgotten about that dimple. Strange to think that I could forget the smallest detail of a face I’ve been looking at for twelve years straight. “You care about this guy?”

I nod.

“He’s old for you.”

“How old is Stacy?”

“Twenty-five.” He studies my face, objectively it seems, as if he is looking at a stranger. “How did this happen?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. Maybe it started with the woman in Chelsea.”

“I never slept with her.”

“You didn’t have to.”

He takes his napkin from his lap, folds it into neat halves. “There’s no reason to bring her into this.”

“Do you remember where we were going the day you rescued her on the Palisades?”

“Upstate for the weekend.”

“Do you remember why?”

He shrugs.

“It was our anniversary. Our tenth. We never even made it to the B&B.” Surely he remembers how he rode back to the city with her in the ambulance. I for one can’t forget driving the car back to the city alone. “You spent the entire next day at the hospital.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

“You saved her. That was enough. You could have let the medics take it from there.”

He fishes an ice cube out of his orange juice with a spoon, drops it in again. “I did what I needed to do.”

“What about the week before you moved out? You came home from work on Wednesday night, and the table was set when you got there. I had candles, wine. I’d made New York strip. I was wearing the yellow dress.”

The look on his face tells me he remembers none of this. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“We’d just sat down to eat when the phone rang. I asked you not to get it.”

“I’m an EMT.”

“That night you didn’t have to. You weren’t on call.”

“I have responsibilities.”

“It was her. You hadn’t even had a bite of your steak. Not a single sip of wine. You put on your coat and walked out.”

He folds his napkin into little triangles. “She needed me.”

He keeps folding the napkin. I half expect the elegant shape of a swan to emerge, but it isn’t origami, just a nervous habit. He folds until the napkin is a small tight square with perfect corners. “Christ, I’m her only friend. You can’t begrudge her that. The woman has third-degree burns over her entire face, for God’s sake. Have you seen her face? Did you know that her boyfriend left afterward? He told her he couldn’t look at her. Can you imagine what that does to a person?”

“I’m just saying…”

“Aren’t you being a little selfish? Look at you. You’re healthy. You’ve got everything in order.”

“You say that like it’s a flaw. Like I should be punished for it.”

“That’s not what I mean. But that poor woman, she was suicidal.”

“You have to draw the line somewhere. You can’t save everyone.”

“I can’t just walk away.” He gives up on the napkin and starts salting his eggs. He salts them and salts them, then he starts in with the pepper. “So I’ve never been the perfect husband.”

“I never wanted perfection.”

He reaches over, puts his hand on top of mine. “This thing with Graham. Are you sure you’re not just doing it to hurt me?”

“What’s between me and Graham has nothing to do with you.”

“Okay,” he says, taking his hand away. “I’d understand if you wanted to stick it to me. Maybe I deserve it.” He picks up his water glass and is about to drink from it when both of us notice the waxy print of Stacy’s pink lipstick on the rim. He sets it down again. “It’s just—” He stares into his eggs, which glisten with tiny grains of salt. “It’s strange to think of you with someone else.”

Matt Dillon comes over. “Would you like anything else?”

“We’re okay,” Dave says.

Whitney Houston’s honeyed voice spills over the loudspeaker. Matt Dillon balances a tray of coffees on one hand and says, “I hope you are having very good honeymoon.”

“Thanks,” Dave says, “but it’s not our honeymoon.”

“You can pretend,” Matt Dillon says. He smiles and walks away.

Dave tugs at his collar. “I’ve missed you.”

“Really?”

He looks hurt. “Of course. Not just for the last two months. I’ve missed you for a long time. You stopped needing me.”

“No, you just thought I did.”

I think of long nights sitting by the window when he worked the graveyard shift, willing him to come home. Each time he went out I held my breath, certain that one day, ministering to a gunshot wound in some greasy alley, he’d feel a knife of pain through his heart, look down, and see that he’d been stabbed. I imagined the blood seeping through his white shirt, the look of surprise on his face, his hand going to his chest, trying to stop the flow. In that moment, would he be as practical as always? Would he consider the depth of the wound, the angle of the blade, the probabilities and proclivities of his own desperate heart? Would he count the miles to the hospital, click them off on some mental odometer, or would he begin to panic, his heart beating faster, then slowing, rattling toward his death?

“What about Stacy?” I say.

“Last night, she fell off the wagon, and she came to me for help. It was all pretty innocent.”

“You’ll be good for her,” I say. And it’s true. Dave is good for everyone. Surely he sees in Stacy a person who will bring out his best traits—yet another woman he has been called upon to save, the way he once saved me.

SIXTEEN

Nancy Eliot wore jeans and a red T-shirt, and she came bearing food and news. It had been less than a year since our class graduated from Murphy High School in Mobile, but my recollection of her had already grown vague. I remembered this about her: she was president of the debate team and was always possessed of a great number of facts. She had statistics, case histories, a whole list of bibliographical references to back up any statement. Which is why she could not be disbelieved, which is why I could not dismiss her news as hearsay or prank, some ugly rumor outside the realm of truth.

It was my Christmas vacation, and Dave and I were sitting in a diner on Canal Street in Mobile. No kisses had been exchanged between us, no inklings of romance. In New York City we were friends, weekend regulars, movie companions. He had flown down to Pensacola to visit his brother, and I’d invited him to spend a few days in Mobile, promised him an authentic taste of the deep South. He’d been sleeping in the guest room of my parents’ house. Two days before, we had dined with Amanda Ruth and her new girlfriend, Allison, at The Mariner. On that night, I had thought that this was not
my
Amanda Ruth, the Amanda Ruth who kept our secret, who would never think of holding hands in public. “What has she done to you?” I wanted to say, meaning Allison, with her military hair and baggy jeans, her obvious ways. I was angry to learn that they’d spent the weekend at the river house. I thought of them sitting together on our pier, grilling shrimp on our grill, making love on our old mattress.

“Have you met Mr. Lee?” I asked Allison while we waited for our food. What I meant was, “Does he know?”

Amanda Ruth and Allison looked at one another, as if they shared some secret, some truth to which I was not privy. “Sort of,” Allison said.

“It didn’t go over too well,” Amanda Ruth confessed. “A couple of weeks ago I called to let Mom and Dad know I was bringing someone home. I figured I’d break it to them when we got there, and they could deal with it. When Dad came home from work, Allison and I were standing in the kitchen with Mom. She was trying to act like it was no big deal, but I could tell she was in shock. Dad wanted to know where my boyfriend was. He’d made big plans to go deep-sea fishing with this new guy he thought I was bringing home. He’d already made reservations for the boat, and he’d even bought a fishing rod as a gift for the future son-in-law. Just imagine the look on his face when I told him there was no boyfriend, that it was Allison I wanted him to meet.”

“Brave,” I said. “Definitely risky.”

Dave speared a hush puppy with his fork. “How did your dad react?”

“He said something about not having any of that filth under his roof, then stormed out of the house.”

“I’ve never seen anyone so furious,” Allison said.

“You know how Mom is,” Amanda Ruth added. “She pretended nothing had happened. She asked if we wanted some cling peaches with Cool Whip.”

At the diner on Canal Street, Nancy Eliot set the plates before us: a grilled cheese sandwich for Dave, a burger for me. Two tall glasses of iced tea, a thick chocolate milkshake to share.

What I remember most about this day is that everything seemed to be going fine. I hadn’t yet had any time alone with Amanda Ruth, but we’d made plans to see each other before I returned to New York, after both Allison and Dave were gone. She had said that we could drive to the river, maybe barbecue some shrimp, take the boat out to Petit Bois Island.

I was having a good time in Mobile with Dave. I was excited about seeing Amanda Ruth one on one, and happy to be going back to New York, to my studies and the friends to whom Dave had introduced me—professional types who dressed tastefully and had interesting furniture. Dave took me to off-Broadway plays, restaurants that served foods I had never even considered before: Ethiopian and Greek, Indian and Malaysian. I was eighteen; he was twenty-four and seemed incredibly mature, unlike any boy I had known in high school. I found him attractive, kind, funny, and couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to kiss him.

“Anything else?” Nancy said.

“This will do it.”

She took a few steps away from our table, then turned and came back. “I guess you probably heard.”

“Heard what?”

Nancy placed both hands on our table and leaned over, as if to tell a secret. Her voice was low, her eyes wide. There was a spot of ketchup on the right shoulder of her T-shirt. A blue Bic pen toppled from her apron pocket onto our table. “A girl from our class was found dead this morning. Her body was left behind the skating rink. Strangled.”

“Who?”

At that moment, I harbored what one might call a prurient curiosity, nothing akin to grief. I was anxious to hear the whole story—the who and when and where, the how, and, if possible, the why. The first face that came to mind was a cheerleader named Samantha Arnold with a crazy boyfriend who once beat her up at a party while his friends stood around doing nothing. She was the sort of girl to whom a tragedy of that nature might occur, the kind of girl whose sudden death would not come entirely as a surprise.

“I didn’t really know her,” Nancy said. “Last name Lee.”

Last name Lee
. This was the moment of separation, the moment when everything changed. I went through the list of names, trying to think of someone else with the last name Lee, anyone else. Panic, followed quickly by relief, the vague memory of a girl named Danielle, who sat in front of me in chemistry. She was dowdy and sweet; she rarely passed a chemistry test. Our sophomore year she gave me a little paper sack filled with Halloween candy.

“Danielle Lee.” I said it, rather than asked it, having already deemed it fact. I looked to Nancy for confirmation.

“No, not Danielle. Amanda Ruth Lee. Remember her? Cute girl. Chinese or something.”

Dave was up already, risen from his seat. He was sitting beside me, his arm around my shoulder, his face bent down to mine. “Bring us the check,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were friends.”

“Bring us the check, please.” Then he was folding me up in his arms. He managed to pay without ever letting go, somehow slipping the wallet out of his pocket and placing a stack of dollar bills on the table. “Let’s go for a drive,” he said, helping me up, leading me outside into the warm December sunlight. It was late afternoon. He opened the car door and placed me in the seat—I was not in control of my own body, he had taken charge of everything. The car started up and we were moving, his hand was on my leg and he was driving, neither of us speaking, oldies playing on the radio, Smokey Robinson singing “Tracks of My Tears.” Within half an hour we had reached the coast. Our windows were down, the air smelled of salt and oak and Sunday barbecue, only the hint of a chill in the air, everything was clean and fresh and the sky was clear, and the ocean seemed barely to move, more white than blue in the sunlight. Dave stopped the car at the public beach, then came around to my side, opened the door, and helped me out of the seat. He held my hand and led me over the sand dunes, past the public showers, and down to the water.

From the road the waves looked minimal, but close up I could see the ocean churning, could hear waves crashing on the sand. Yellow signs had been posted to alert beachgoers of a riptide. There were no lifeguards on this desolate stretch of beach, just the signs: “Warning! Strong undertow. Swim at your own risk.” There was the sound of the waves breaking, and foam crackling as the waves washed out, cars moving past, a motorcycle gunning down the two-lane road, and the foam dissipating, followed by another wave. In the distance a white sail. Bits of sargasso weed strewn along the sand, an amorphous jellyfish washed ashore and dying. Dave bent down in front of me and unlaced my shoes. He slipped them off my feet, removed my socks, rolled my pant legs high above my ankles.

I had a memory of her, Amanda Ruth, kneeling before me in the gymnasium, unknotting my shoelaces. The ends of my laces were frayed, they had become tangled in the eyeholes. Her hair glowed beneath the fluorescent lights. On the other side the boys were playing Kill the Boy in the Blue Shirt. The boy in the blue shirt was Roland and they had killed him, he lay groaning on the floor and I felt her breath on my knees, her fingertips brushing my ankles.

Dave slipped off his own shoes and we were walking, and this was not breathing, this was not moving, I was not walking down the beach knowing this thing; this knowledge was not real. The sun beat down. It was snowing in New York City when we left, but here in Alabama it was too warm; Amanda Ruth always wished for cold weather at Christmastime. “I’ll come visit you during the winter break,” she had said, that last evening together at the boathouse. “Maybe we’ll get snow. I want to see the tree at Rockefeller Center.”

Dave bent and retrieved two live pairs of angel wings that had just washed in with the tide. He held my palm open and placed the wings there, along with a handful of sand. Their shells were yellow and pink and blue, and the tiny animals, which had no perspective beyond this small handful of sand, continued to burrow, digging straight through the wet sand to my hand. I could feel the tickling pressure of their rubbery tentacles against my skin. I placed the lump of sand in the water, rinsed my hands.

“Baby,” he called me for the first time. The only word I heard, the word that held me down, that kept me intact. What I remember most is the sense of loosening, a separating of particles that began in the chest, a feeling of coming entirely apart. But Dave was there, broad and tall and solid, he pulled me in to him and held me up, his body and his voice surrounded me. “Baby,” he said again.

If it were not for his calm presence, the firmness of his arms around me, I would not have been able to stand there on the beach, to move my legs, to speak or eat or propel myself forward through the afternoon.

“Talk to me,” I said. Dave understood immediately that I desired to be transported to the world of facts, of science and certainty, a domain he knew well. He needed only to decide what fact to hand over to me, by what method he would bring me back to him. We walked several minutes in silence. “There,” he said at last, bending to pick up a large spiral shell. He held it to my ear. The sea rumbled into my head. “Let’s talk about sound,” he said.

“Okay.” There, we had a subject, something definite. My only goal was to listen.

“Sound enters the ear through the auricle, where it is concentrated and delivered into the external auditory meatus. It causes a vibration of the tympanic membrane, the drum.” In one ear, the shell, the hollow roar of the ocean. In the other, Dave’s voice, clear and monotone, telling me that the ocean did not exist in this shell, that it was only amplification and vibration. In this manner he disclosed the mystery of the seashell, transformed myth into fact, led me out of the darkness, back to him.

We stayed at the beach until dark—walking, standing, sitting in the shadows made by moonlight and sand dune. As we drove toward home he said, “Would you like to go to the river?”

“Okay.” I heard my voice in the closed space of the car. The windows were up, the air conditioner on. It was only us there, moving forward along the dark road. Beside the road were houses on stilts, the dunes, the dark of the beach.

The short drive to the river seemed to take hours. When we got to Amanda Ruth’s house, he said, “Do you want to be alone?”

“Yes.”

He sat in the car while I walked through the yard and down to the pier, out to the boathouse. I spent over an hour in the barbecue room, on the old mattress where Amanda Ruth and I slept the week before she left for Montevallo. At some point, I fell asleep. I dreamt of her. When I woke up I turned in the bed, expecting to find her there. I knew that I was dreaming, and believed that Nancy’s words too were a dream, and that my walk with Dave on the beach had been a dream, and that now I would wake beside her, and she would emerge from sleep slightly fussy, confused, the way she always did. But when I rolled over, I rolled over onto nothing, just a damp pillow with no case, a musty blanket. I opened my eyes and looked out the window. The river moved slowly past, all black and warm in the moonlight. In the near-dark I made out the shapes of things. Amanda Ruth’s sunglasses lay on the metal box beside the stove. Her flip-flops were slung haphazardly beside the door, as if she had just stepped out of them. I walked out onto the pier, searching. Nothing. I was alone. I began to panic. I went back inside, still hoping, still believing in the possibility of the dream, that Amanda Ruth had not been killed, that she was in the boat, waiting, knowing that I would find her in the dark, that I would come to her in my half-sleep, touch my mouth to her collarbone, her hair.

In the blue room the water was low. The boat knocked about. I felt happy for a moment, convincing myself that the sound of the boat in the water was really the sound of Amanda Ruth, that she was below deck, knocking her knuckles against the fiberglass walls, calling me. I stepped into the boat, avoiding the two fishing poles that lay on the slippery floor, their reels slightly uncoiled, the lines gone slack. I went down into the cabin, which was moldy and damp, and found the light switch with my fingers. There were the two long cushions that met at the bow and widened into a V, where we used to lie, our heads together, talking. There was the tiny stove, the closet with the low, flimsy toilet, the doorway where you had to stoop low so as not to bump your head. She wasn’t there. I went up on deck, felt my way to the salt-stiffened chair, rested my head on the steering wheel.

Moonlight crept through cracks in the wooden walls. The water below the boat was black; the place smelled of night and old rain, of some dark thing sleeping. I thought of long summer days, when the canvas tarp was raised and sunlight flooded the room, and the water took on the blue brilliance of lapis stone. Amanda Ruth would sit on the edge of the boat, fall backward into the water, and moments later come up laughing, silver droplets clinging to her eyelashes. She wore a yellow bathing suit, with straps made of tiny blue beads. There was nothing so blue as that room, nothing so real as Amanda Ruth.