World Gone Water (16 page)

“Is that what you really want?” Caitlin asks, looking down at her mountainous breasts.

“I want what's inside,” I tell her.

Caitlin smiles. “I'm trapped here.”

“Yes, you are.”

The rest of the afternoon floats away on the open water. The sun takes a last breath and goes under, darkening the water until the ocean is heard more than it is seen.

“I love you,” I say to Caitlin.

“You are making me crazy,” she says, and the way she looks at me, everything inside her collapsing at once, lets me know that that was the reason I was put on this earth and that she's glad she finally found me.

“I can't believe I finally found someone like you,” I say.

We kiss until a spotlight lights us up and we're told to leave.

“Do you want to drive into Provincetown for dinner?” I ask.

“We should probably check into a motel first,” she says.

I know once we get to the motel, we probably won't leave, that Caitlin will order room service, or order a pizza, and sure enough, she plops onto the blue floral bedspread in a way that lets me know she's in for the night.

“Come over here,” she says, lifting her arms.

“Let me take you out tonight,” I say. “There's probably a ton of great places to eat right off the beach.”

The minute the words leave my mouth, I want to get them all back.

“There's a great place to eat right here,” she says, spreading her legs wide. There's a second where I can turn it into something funny, where I can make a joke or a retort, but while my hope that she will quit saying things like that in favor of something sexier and more romantic is being dashed, I miss it.

I do not what I want to do, but what I feel like I am required to do, until the ugly confidence comes back into Caitlin and she rolls away and turns out the light. Outside, the ocean could be a million miles away.

Caitlin's meeting in Montreal is off Sainte-Catherine, so I wait across the street in a café where no one is smoking but everyone seems to want to. Montreal is our last destination and things between me and Caitlin are shifting. She's holding back now, not
telling me she loves me, not holding my hand. “Decompressing” is what she calls it.

I try to picture Phoenix again, and it's such a former life that I won't be able to name things I see once we land. My grand plan (the new one) is to put my offer on the table: I'll do anything to be with her. We could live the way we've been living, hotels and new cities. I think Caitlin just needs someone to make the move, and the idea thrills me.

I'm still pretty jacked up about it later at dinner and it's all I can do to keep from spitting it out.

Outside the restaurant window, Notre-Dame lights up dramatically and Caitlin turns to see it.

“That's beautiful,” she says.

“I don't care much for churches,” I tell her.

“Me neither,” she says. “But it looks impressive.”

“You don't have a religion?” I ask.

She shakes her head no. “Don't need it.”

I jump up and reach for her hand. She looks around wildly and then looks at me, pulling back. “I think we should be together,” I say.

“We are together,” she says, straightening her napkin in her lap.

“No, I mean I think we should try and …” I'm at a loss for what to call it. “You know, I love you and—”

“Charlie, stop,” she says.

The whole moment is flushed away just like that. The waiter comes to take our order and Caitlin waves him away.

The jet lag from Phoenix to New York to Boston to Montreal kicks in, and all the organs inside me collapse, my veins narrowing until the air burns in my lungs. “Do you love me?” I ask.

Caitlin looks away, wanting the waiter to come back. “It doesn't matter,” she says.

“Doesn't matter how?”

“Please don't do this,” she begs. “This is our last weekend together and we've been having a great time.”

“
You've
been having a great time,” I correct her. “It really isn't a great time having your heart broken.” The words “heart broken” hit her like an oncoming truck.

“What do you want me to do?” she asks, crying a little, which pacifies me in some way. “I can't give myself completely over. I've done that too many times and it never works out.”

“It can work out with us,” I say.

“That's the first thing all of them said too,” she says, composing herself.

“Yeah, but this time will be different.”

“That's the next thing they said,” she says coldly.

“I'm starting to see your point,” I say. I throw my napkin on the table. I play my last card: “Maybe it's
not
worth it.”

Caitlin wants to disagree, I can physically feel the pull inside of her, see it in her expression. But she wins out over it and looks right into me and says, “I just can't.”

The restaurant in Montreal feels like an outpost on a dream map and I wish I could close my eyes and transport myself.

“Where's the waiter?” Caitlin asks.

“You sent him away, remember? You think he's going to rush right back?”

“Don't get that way,” she warns. “Let's try to have a nice meal.”

“I'm not hungry,” I say. “I'll see you back at the hotel.”

I walk out, passing the waiter on his way to the kitchen, and the two of us take a few steps in the same direction, walking like Siamese twins. “She knows what she wants,” I tell him.

Paroled into the cold night, I head in the direction of Notre-Dame. The shadows vibrate on the pavement and I start to think about how Caitlin is right. Why give yourself up to someone fully?
I was sitting there trying to deny what I knew was true. Months from now I'd be tired of her, or she'd be tired of me, the excitement of newness worn and forgotten.

I tell her she's right when she gets back to the hotel. “You were totally right,” I say. “I don't know what I was thinking.”

“Who's she?” Caitlin asks, pointing at the redheaded hooker in the bed next to me, who is rolling a joint.

“It's Diedre, right?” I ask the hooker. Diedre nods. “This is Diedre,” I tell Caitlin.

“Nice to meet you,” Diedre says without looking away from the joint.

If I hear what I think I hear—Caitlin crying in the hallway, stomping down to the elevator—it doesn't faze me one iota, and Caitlin can take her traveling act to California, for all I care.

Dr. Hatch,

Remember what you said about how the thing that affects your life the most—death—doesn't hardly involve you in any way? Remember I said how it affects other people's lives and we talked about my parents, about the vacuum of nothing I was sucked into when they died? I'm writing to you from there again.

The love of my life is dead. You never met Talie, but she came to see me a couple of times at SRC. It was her slut friend, Holly, who got her killed. I don't think I've ever mentioned Holly to you and I'm not going to start now. Talie was always getting into trouble with Holly, and this time it wasn't trouble I could get her out of. The police found them both in a Dumpster with their clothes torn off.

The funeral was at Saint Francis Xavier, the church adjacent to my old school, Randolph College Prep. The only people who came to the funeral were her foster parents, her biological father, me, and the boyfriend I'm sure she was going to leave.

I stayed after everyone was gone to be alone with Talie one last time. I wanted to open the casket and see her again, have her pop up and say, “Let's go.” I feel completely untethered without her. You never know how much you need someone until, well, you know.

I used to tell Talie I was going to go to Europe, that I was going to fly away and shed everything anyone ever knew about me and everything that was in my past. Whenever I told her about moving to Europe, she would say, “The unknown is more frightening than what you know, no matter how shitty what you know is.” The unknown is what there is to fear, she would say, and the future is definitely unknown. I told her I feared my
past
. But it isn't so much that I fear what I have done, but I fear I am missing some vital component—the gene that makes you walk on green and stop on red, the thing that tells what the difference between red and green even is. My fear isn't of my future; it's that my past lives there, happily, shimmering in the warmth it creates, perpetuating the voice that assures me,
It's all right, it's okay
.

I'm feeling the same sense of loss I felt when I told Karine I was sorry. She came to see me before she disappeared (I know you're dying to hear me talk about this, so here it is), and we sat and did a crossword puzzle. I used a blue pen and she used pink so that when the puzzle was solved, we'd know who did what.

I told Karine I was sorry and she looked across the metal table at me and said, “I forgive you.”

Right there, at the metal table, a half-finished crossword puzzle between us, I realized how much I'd lost in life. When I said I was sorry, it started in my mind as a casual thing to say. But when Karine looked at me like she did and said she forgave me, I knew she had been waiting to hear me say it, and I realized that what I had done to her was the biggest loss in her life.

It made me think about my own loss and I saw myself as something small and stupid, with a grin of infinite hope on my face.

Some people just don't get the chance to live in the world.

Talie never got a start, and everyone I know—including me—is to blame.

After the hearse became a black dot on the road, me promising to catch up, I crossed the lawn to Randolph Prep. William Randolph, the school's founder, died at sea. I used to stare at the portrait of him in the main hall, standing on the bow of a ship, maybe the one he went down on, straining to peer so far into the distance, maybe looking for what sailing would lead him to next.

“A banker by profession, Randolph was an avid sailor, captaining many voyages around the world,” read the engraving under the portrait.

Details of his death weren't dramatic enough to reach the status of legend. Simply put, he was hit in the head when a sudden wind swung the sail into him. Randolph and his crew were one full day of sailing away from the shore. The banker/sailor never regained consciousness, and the exact moment of his death went unmarked by a dying word or wish for the world.

What a shock it must have been, the initial blow to Randolph's head, coming from his blind side. He probably never imagined he'd die while sailing, a sport at which he had become accomplished.

In my mind I tried to trace it back, not a straight line between Randolph's death in the water and his birth, but I wondered at the steps between the two events. Fate is too easily made the usual suspect. William Randolph could've been killed in any number of ways: an automobile crash (at high speed, or by a careless driver), an airplane wreck, a gunshot (self-inflicted, or random, accidental fire), a heart attack (in his sleep, or while shopping for chocolate bars in the local grocery store)—all could be uselessly labeled fate.

What are probably the facts: Someone introduced William Randolph to sailing, he enjoyed it, and he was killed, accidentally.

But what I really used to wonder about when I stood in the main hall, and what I often think about, was how easily the chain could've been broken. William Randolph might not have met someone who
could introduce him to sailing; he might not have enjoyed it, it might have made him so sick he swore never to leave land; sailing might have proven too difficult for Randolph to master. None of the steps that led to Randolph's death was a conscious decision to do this over that, but if just one thing had gone the other way, his story—his life—might have had a different ending.

I find Dale at Max Maxwell's, the bar at the Phoenician supplying the beverage service for the World Gone Water party. An hour early and standing around the Mojave Ballroom, its taupe-colored walls producing their own kind of nauseating light, I decided a drink would calm my nervous stomach. I knew one drink might lead to two, three, or four, but the caterers, with their suspicious eyes, forced me out of the ballroom and down to Max Maxwell's.

Dale looks like he's been at the bar since Talie's funeral.

“Are you coming to the party?” I ask.

Dale sips weakly from a glass of bourbon. He looks at me through the mirror behind the bar and sips again. He closes his eyes, as if he's trying to circle the wagons around a thought, but when he looks up again, this time directly at me, his face is blank. “You should come,” I say. “Talie was a part of Buckley and she'd want you to come.”

My capacity to say things that may or may not be true has reached the level of artistry, and I feel the full force of this statement's design.

“Did I see you at her grave this morning?” Dale asks.

Suddenly I notice the grass stains on his knees, dirty green swatches painted on his suit pants.

“I am not particularly fond of you,” I want to say to Dale. “Talie didn't love you,” I want to say. “Talie was in love with someone else,” I want to say. “I don't want you hanging out at Talie's grave,” I want to say.

“I just got back from picking up the winner and her husband,” I say.

“The winner?” Dale asks.

Just mentioning it to Dale brings my anxiety full circle, the anxiety I felt waiting in the ballroom for Carol Bandes, our winner, and her husband, Martin, to arrive, the result of what happened when I made the official gesture of picking her and her husband up at their house in Flagstaff by limo, taking them to a private jet, and flying them to Phoenix for her makeover and the party.

I want to tell Dale what happened, but then again I don't, and I let Dale's question float off into space. I decide to skip the drink. I want to skip the party, too. I'm not even sure that I'm
required
to show. I was only to be the agent who brought everything to a conclusion (as little as I had to do with that), but nothing was ever said of me seeing it through to the end.