The Mermaid Chair (31 page)

I heard Hugh’s footsteps pacing the hallway, back and forth.

When they stopped, I could tell he was just outside the door.

I looked around to see if I’d locked it, though I was sure Hugh would never come in without knocking. The latch, an old-fashioned hook and eye, was unfastened. I waited. Held my breath.
Ping, ping, ping.
Finally he moved away.

What had caused him to tread up and down the hallway like that?

When I came out of the bathroom, I wore Mother’s blue bathrobe, my hair wet, combed back and slicked down like enamel. It was when the cool air hit my face that I remembered.

I’d propped my canvases across the bed, the dresser, and the floor in Mike’s room, ostensibly for storage, but I would go in there at times and stare at my work. It was like standing in a gallery inside myself, gazing at the deep, dark marvels. My thirteen diving women, their wild, sensual bodies grandly nude.

I thought of Hugh in there studying them, examining the cast-off pieces of their lives that I’d painted floating to the surface. The kitchen spatulas, the apple peels, the wedding rings, the geese . . . oh, God, the kissing geese.
Our
kissing geese.

Frozen in place outside the bathroom door, I realized that even the colored-pencil sketch I’d made back in February was in t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

265

there, the one I’d hidden for weeks behind the lighthouse picture over the mantel. He would see my enraptured couple clinging to each other’s bodies, encircled by the woman’s exceedingly long hair. Sometimes when I’d looked at the picture, all I could see was her hair, and I’d remembered Dee teasing me, calling my attic studio Rapunzel’s tower, wanting to know when I was going to let my hair down.

Hugh had always grimaced at that, even defended me to her, sometimes snappishly. “Your mother isn’t locked in a tower, Dee,” he said. “Now, stop it.” Maybe he’d thought it was a reflection on him, or maybe somewhere inside he’d known it was true and was afraid of it. None of us ever mentioned the rest of the tale—how Rapunzel did finally let down her hair for the prince and escaped.

Hugh Sullivan was the most astute man on earth. I began to feel a dilating pressure in my chest. I walked to Mike’s room and paused in the doorway. Inside, it was dim, lit by one small table lamp with a low-wattage bulb.

Hugh was staring at my underwater couple
—Lovers in the
Blue Sea,
I called them, after Chagall’s
Lovers in the Red Sky.
His back was to me. His hands were in his pockets. He turned around, parting this night from all other nights, letting his eyes, bruised and disbelieving, come slowly to my face, and I could feel the air around us blaze up with the terrible thing that was about to happen.

“Who is he?” he asked.

C H A P T E R

Thirty-one

pq

Whit

He sat in the music-listening room on a ladder-back chair, staring at the television set, which was perched on a table conspicuously covered with an old altar cloth. It was the top of the seventh of a Braves doubleheader on TBS. Tom Glavine had just struck out. Whit took his pencil and traced a small
K
on the scorecard he’d drawn in the back of his journal.

There was something about watching baseball that took him completely out of himself. It worked on him better than medita-tion. He could never meditate more than two minutes without chasing one thought after another or becoming so self-conscious it defeated the whole purpose, but he could sit in front of a game with absolute absorption. He lost himself in the tension of the play, the strategy, the intricacies of scoring—all the diagrams, symbols, and numbers. He would never have been able to explain to Father Sebastian or any of the others why it was a refuge for him; he just knew he felt exempt sitting here. From the monastery. From himself.

t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

267

Before vespers the abbot had announced Nelle’s latest “tragedy,” as he now delicately referred to her amputations, asking the monks to pray for her, their beloved cook and friend. Whit had stood in choir staring stoically ahead, aware of Dominic turning to look at him. He’d thought then how he’d spent all afternoon waiting for Jessie in the rookery to no avail, only to come back and find Dominic pacing the porch of the cottage.

He’d been the one to give Whit the news, even the part about Jessie’s husband coming from Atlanta to be with her. He’d delivered that portion with scrupulous concern.

Whit had not had the presence of mind to ask Dominic until later how he’d come to know all this, when he discovered that Hepzibah Postell, the Gullah woman, had come to the monastery and explained everything to Dominic. Why would Hepzibah come to Dominic, of all people?

All through vespers Whit had yearned to come here and turn on the doubleheader and disappear into the game. He’d burst out of his choir stall like a racehorse so he could get the game on before the other monks came herding in for community time.

They inevitably spent it watching the evening news. It mostly boiled down to watching Tom Brokaw announcing Reagan’s latest social cutbacks. The last time he’d come in here, they had been watching a segment on how to “dress for success”—

something about designer suits by Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein—and the monks had sat there with such rapt attention he’d wanted to stand up and shout,
But you’re wearing
robes! The point of their robes was the exact opposite of dressing for success. Surely they saw that. He’d gotten up and left. On weekends Brother Fabian would put one of the monastery’s scratchy old
268

s u e m o n k k i d d

331⁄3 rpm records on the stereo, usually Wagner’s
The Ring of the
Nibelung.
He would turn the volume so loud the air would tremble with the bass.

Tonight, when the monks had arrived to find that Whit had commandeered the TV set and filled it with the announcers’

play-by-play, they’d complained to Father Sebastian, who had sovereign jurisdiction over the room. Sebastian had scrutinized Whit before telling the men to stop whining, it wouldn’t kill them to miss the news once in a blue moon. They had all left and gone back to their rooms to wait for compline, except for Dominic and Sebastian.

He wanted to be angry at them, to use this as just more justification for leaving, but the sight of the monks shuffling off in various degrees of huff was no different, really, from his own ar-rogant refusal to be in here when they watched Brokaw or listened to Siegfried and Brünnhilde.

It reminded him suddenly of the whole point of existing here with these curmudgeonly old men—that somewhere on the face of the earth, there needed to be people bound together with ir-revocable stamina, figuring out a way to live with one another.

He’d come here with such idiotic notions, expecting a slight variation on utopia—everybody loving everybody else, returning good for evil, turning the other cheek left and right. Monks, it’d turned out, were no more perfect than any other group of people. He’d gradually realized with a kind of wonder that they’d been picked for a hidden but noble experiment—to see if people might actually be able to live in genuine relatedness, to see if perhaps God had made a mistake by creating the human species.

He seemed to think constantly these days about what it meant to be at the monastery, to be part of it—the whole outra-t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

269

geous thing. He thought equally about Jessie, what it meant to love her, to be part of her.
That
was outrageous, too. What he’d not thought about was her husband. A real person, a man who’d rushed here to be with his wife at a moment of crisis. What was his name? He forced himself to remember.
Hugh.
Yes, Hugh. It repeated in his mind with the drone of the stadium noise, with Skip Caray and the baseball trivia question.

Hugh was the ruptured place in Whit’s conscience, one that had—in a self-protective act—gotten walled off. Even now, after two walks and the bases loaded, when he should have been completely immersed in the game, Whit could not stop thinking of the man. He could see how Hugh, the very reality of him, had been inside all along, quietly turning to an abscess. The poisonous mess starting to leak.

After the third out, everyone in the stadium stood for the seventh-inning stretch, and he stood up and put his journal down on the chair. He thought of the day he’d told Jessie he loved her. They’d been in the rookery, lying on the blanket.

We’ll be damned and saved
both, he’d told her. And already it was happening.

He closed his eyes and tried to listen to the song the fans on TV were singing. He’d thought he could blot everything out, calm the anxiety that had begun on the porch with Dominic, but all he wanted now was to bolt and go to her. He felt consumed with the need to pull her into his arms. To claim her again.
Jessie,
he thought. He could barely stand still.

Across the room Dominic sat in an old lounge chair with his hat in his lap. After Whit had confessed to Dominic all those weeks ago that he’d fallen in love, they hadn’t spoken of it again.

Of course the old monk had to know it was Jessie. Why else
270

s u e m o n k k i d d

would he have pulled Whit aside like that and given him this extra bit of information about her husband’s being on the island, staying in Nelle’s house with her?

He wanted to concentrate his distress on how upset Jessie must be over her mother, and yet he stood before the television and could not keep himself from imagining her with Hugh. In the kitchen with a glass of wine, the solacing embrace, telling small jokes to break the agony—the myriad ways Hugh might comfort her. He felt frightened by the lifetime of small, secret rituals they must’ve shared at moments like this, the magnitude of such things.

The man is her husband,
he told himself.
For the love of God,
he’s her
husband.

C H A P T E R

Thirty-two

pq

Hugh

His wife stood in her mother’s island home in South Carolina and calmly told him the name of her lover.

“His name is Brother Thomas,” she said.

For a moment Hugh stared at the drops of bathwater sliding along her neck toward the opening of her robe. Her hair was wet and plastered back from her face. He watched how she took a sharp breath with her mouth open and let her gaze drop.

They were in the doorway of her brother’s old room, and he reached out and placed his hands on the doorjamb. He watched her without any pain at all, stood protected and benumbed in the last seconds of a dying illusion, the truth flying toward him with the speed of an arrow, but not yet there. It allowed him to see her one last time before the tip gashed into him and everything changed. What he thought standing there was how beautiful she looked with the bathwater still netted on her skin, running in drops between her breasts.
How beautiful.

His name is Brother Thomas.

She had said it with complete candor and matter-of-factness as if she were telling him the name of her dentist.

272

s u e m o n k k i d d

Then it slammed into him—more pain than he’d known in his life. It rocked him backward on his heels, as if there had been a blast of wind. He went on holding the sides of the door, wondering if he might be having an attack of angina. The power of the feeling was crushing.

He stepped back, engulfed suddenly with fury. He wanted to smash his fist into the wall. Instead he waited for her to raise her eyes to his face again. “Brother Thomas,” he said with lacerating calm. “Is that what you call him when you’re fucking him?”

“Hugh,” she said. It came out broken and splintered. It sounded pleading in a way that enraged him even more.

He could tell she had shocked herself with the admission; her eyes seemed dazed and frantic. Stumbling toward him, reaching out to grab his arm, she looked like a scalded animal trying to understand what had happened to it.

When her hand found his arm, he wrenched it out of her grasp.

“Get away,” he said through his teeth.

He watched her back out of the room, her lips moving with no words coming out and her eyes wide. He slammed the door and locked it. She stood outside.

“Hugh, open the door. Please, Hugh.”

There was scarcely any light in the room, and he’d stared at the back of the door, at the shadows running across it like pieces of wire and black vines. He wanted to wound her with his silence. Later, though, it occurred to him that he may have wanted to protect her, too, from the pulverizing things he could have said.

She went on calling him for an unbearable amount of time.

When she finally left, tears shot up behind his eyes. He sat on t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

273

one of the twin beds, trying to choke down the urge to cry. He wouldn’t have Jessie hearing him cry. He needed to get hold of himself. The force of his anger had started to frighten him. He had an overwhelming need to go to the monastery and find the man. He wanted to take him by the throat and pin him to the wall of the church.

He stayed in the dark little room like that for hours. In the beginning he was gripped by repeated convulsions of anguish, by an actual trembling in his limbs. After that subsided, he was able to think.

When he’d asked Jessie the question—
Who is he?—
he hadn’t really believed there was anyone else. Not really.

The possibility that there could be another man had come to him in a flash of intuition as he’d looked at her paintings. He’d been shocked by them, by their highly charged eroticism, by the depth of the plunge the woman in them was taking. It had been like looking at a death—Jessie’s death. Her previous life, all the old adaptations and roles, were breaking away and rising to the surface while the woman kept going deeper and deeper. He’d stood there confused, puzzled by what she might be plunging toward. And then he’d seen the sketch of the two lovers embrac-ing at the bottom of the ocean. The flash had come instantly. It had struck him to the heart.