The Beauty of Death Vol.1

Fathomless Tides-2

I’ve told myself that this disconnect between us—if that’s what it is—might be due to our difference in age. Or maybe I’d gotten so used to being in a long-term relationship—Bekah and I were married for twelve years before she died—that I’m having trouble adjusting to starting over with someone new, someone I haven’t had over a decade to get to know. Sometimes I think the woman I see is only a surface image, like water, and I have no way of knowing how deep it is or what might swim within those depths. Bekah’s cancer took me by surprise, and I don’t think that I can take another surprise like that. So I begin searching Lila’s bedroom, checking her nightstand drawer, peering under the bed, peeking in her closet…I know I’m not going to find anything that will tell me her odds of contracting a fatal disease or dying in a car crash, but I’m hoping to find something that will at least give me insight into the person I’ve been sleeping with. Something that will reassure me that she’s—not perfect, that’s too much to expect from anyone. Safe, I suppose is the best way to put it. I want to know that if I’m going to dive into her water, I’m not going to drown. Or worse.

I know I’m being ridiculous searching the room—not to mention I’m violating the trust Lila has placed in me by bringing me into her home, her bed, her life—but I can’t help myself.

I step to her dresser, pull open the top drawer, and there, lying on top of a small pile of satin underwear, is a dead bird. A sparrow, to be precise. There’s no blood on the thing, and its body shows no sign of damage. But its eyes are closed, and it possesses the unmistakable stillness that only the dead have. For several moments I don’t do anything. I stand there, my hand still on the drawer handle, gazing down at the dead sparrow and trying to come up with a rationale for its presence among Lila’s underwear. But I can’t think of one.

Lila turns off the shower, and before she can get out I close the drawer as swiftly and silently as I can and return to bed. A minute later she steps out of the bathroom, towel wrapped around her head, skin still dotted with beads of water. She smiles at me, and I do my best to smile back.

The next time I look in her underwear drawer, the bird is gone. She never mentions it, and I never ask her about it.

“Do you ever think about moving in together?”

We’re sitting in a Thai restaurant, waiting for our food to be brought to our table. I’m drinking beer and Lila’s drinking white wine, as usual. I take a sip of my beer to give me time to think about how I should reply. I know Lila’s aware of my stalling tactic, but she doesn’t remark on it. She just looks at me, expression neutral. I hate it when she does that.

“Sure I do,” I say. This isn’t a lie, exactly. “But I need to sell the house first, and with the way the real estate market is…” I let the sentence trail off, hoping that Lila will accept my non-answer and we can move on to other subjects. But she’s not going to let this go, not tonight.

She scowls, starts to take a sip of wine, reconsiders, and puts the glass down on the table.

“I don’t mind being in the house,” she says. She doesn’t say Bekah’s house. She doesn’t have to.

Music plays over the restaurant’s sound system, plinking strings, a high-pitched nasally voice. It’s already set my nerves on edge, and when I speak, my tone is sharper than I intend.

“You just need to be patient, Lila. I—”

“I’ve been patient, Virgil. I get why you’re hesitant to commit—really commit—to our relationship. I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to lose someone like you did. But sometimes you have to take a leap of faith.” She manages a fairly convincing smile. “After all, what’s the worst that could happen?”

I try to return her smile, but I can’t. Because that’s the question, isn’t it? And there’s no way of answering it. No way at all.

“Why don’t you like the water?” Lila asks.

We’re lying in bed. The hotel room is small, the walls painted brick, the floor covered by old, thin carpet that’s more than a little crusty from decades of wet feet walking on it. The room’s dark, though, the thick curtains over the window shutting out the fluorescent glow of the hotel’s outside lights. It’s so dark I can’t see what a shitty room this is—especially for the price we paid for it—but the smell of mildew hanging in the air reminds me.

It’s July, and I’ve come to Virginia to attend a conference for engineers. Lila wanted to accompany me so we could squeeze in some vacation time during the trip, and it was her idea to stay at a beachside hotel in Cobb Cove instead of at the conference hotel. She’s delighted to be here. I’m considerably less so.

“I’m not afraid of water,” I say, a bit too loudly. Lila rolls onto her side and slides up against me. We’re n***d, and her body feels good against mine. I try not to feel self-conscious about the middle-aged softness she’s pressed against. She once told me she likes my body the way it is, that holding me is like hugging a non-sticky marshmallow. She laughed then, and I couldn’t tell if she was poking fun at me or trying to reassure me. A bit of both, perhaps. She places a hand on my chest, as if to calm me. I take a deep breath, and start over, speaking more softly this time.

“We’ve been together over a year now—”

“Fourteen months,” she says.

Although she can’t see me in the dark, I nod.

“And in all that time, you’ve seen me take how many showers?”

“I’ve taken more than a few with you,” she says.

“And we’ve gone swimming in pools, haven’t we?”

“Sure, lots of times. But you won’t go swimming in lakes or the ocean. Why? Did you almost drown when you were a kid?”

“Nothing like that.”

We’re both silent a moment, and then Lila asks, “Does it have something to do with Bekah?”

Her voice is steady, with no obvious emotion behind the words. It’s how she always sounds when she talks about Bekah, and I know it’s an effort for her to act so casual about the subject of my first wife, who died of a single melanoma diagnosed too late to save her.

“No.” In the last year—excuse me, fourteen months—I’ve learned to say as little as possible when discussing Bekah with Lila. The more details I share, the harder it is for Lila to maintain her pretense of not feeling threatened by my dead wife’s metaphorical ghost. Still, I can’t stop myself from adding, “She knew about it, of course, but she didn’t make an issue of it.”

This last part is a lie. Bekah urged me several times to see a therapist about my problem, but I always resisted her suggestions. I didn’t consider myself broken, so why would I need fixing?

I feel Lila stiffen slightly next to me, and I know even the bit of information I added is too much. So I begin answering Lila’s original question, as much to distract her from thoughts of Bekah as to share the truth about my phobia.

“When I was ten, my mom and dad split up. My dad moved into an apartment, and I spent every other weekend with him. Sometimes he had to go into work on Saturday nights. At least, that’s what he told me. I figure he was most likely hitting bars and trying to pick up women. He rented a lot of movies on VHS and left them lying around, R-rated films my mother would never let me watch. So when Dad was ‘working’ Saturday nights, I’d pop whatever movies he’d rented that week into the VCR and have my own private film festival. One night, the movie I put in was a cheap Jaws rip-off called Blood in the Water. I’d never seen Jaws, but I’d heard it was really scary, and I hoped this other shark movie would be just as good. So I was equal parts excited and nervous as I hit PLAY.”

I stopped talking then, lost in a memory of the first shot of the film: an open expanse of ocean. Dark-blue water that looks almost black, as if a vast canyon is filled with liquid shadow. Like the room we’re in now. For an instant I have the sensation we’re submerged in shadow, surrounded by it, in danger of being suffocated, and I can feel panic building in my chest. With an effort, I push the fear away, and when I start talking again, my voice sounds normal, or close enough to it.

“It was a low-budget film,” I continue, “with no special effects to speak of. They hardly ever showed the shark, and when they did, they used stock footage from nature documentaries. Whenever someone was attacked by the shark, the actor would thrash around in the water and scream while someone off camera squirted fake blood onto them. Still, I was ten, and the movie seemed plenty scary to me. In fact, the lack of budget worked for the film in one aspect. Because they couldn’t show the shark very often, it increased the suspense. You couldn’t see what was in the water, and that meant the shark could be anywhere at any time. There was no way to know, no way to prepare.”

I pause again. I feel something wet on my cheek, and it’s several seconds before I realize I’m crying.

“Dad didn’t come home that night. He’d had too much to drink and slammed his car head-on into a telephone pole. My mom was out of town for the weekend, and this was before most people had cell phones, so I had no way to reach her. She got back into town Sunday night and when she came to pick me up, she was furious my dad had run off and left me alone. We didn’t get the news about what happened to him until the next day, when a police officer came to my mom’s house.”

I stop talking, brush the tears from my face, and wipe my hand on the sheet. I hope Lila doesn’t notice.

“That’s awful!” she says. “You poor thing!” She hugs me tight then, and we lay like that for a time, both of us awake, neither speaking. After a while, Lila says, her voice soft, hesitant, “I don’t understand—”

“—what that story has to do with my fear of water,” I finish. “It’s hard to explain. See, when my dad died, I realized that bad things are always out there, hidden like the shark in the movie, and they can strike at any time without warning. One moment the water is calm, the next…”

“So in your mind, water—or more specifically, the ocean—equals death?”

“Yeah. At least, that’s as close as I can come to understanding it. Kind of a f****d-up version of post-traumatic stress disorder. My fear of the ocean lessened as the years passed, although it never went away completely. But then Bekah died, and it triggered something in me, causing my fear to come back full force, if not stronger this time.”

I’m embarrassed that Lila now knows the truth, but I’m also relieved that I’ve gotten the explanation over with.

“So, do you think less of me?” I ask, afraid of her answer.

“You came to the beach because I wanted to, because it was important to me, despite your fear, didn’t you?”

“Well…yeah.”

She pulls me over onto my side to face her and she kisses me. Her hand reaches between my legs and our kiss deepens.

I wake from a dream in which Bekah’s cancer is a self-replicating microscopic shark swimming beneath the surface of her skin, making millions of copies of itself as it and all its ravenous progeny devour her healthy cells. At first, I’m not sure where I am, and I softly say my dead wife’s name, reaching across the bed in search of her, but I find nothing. Then I remember where I am—and with whom—and I’m glad Lila wasn’t present to hear me say Bekah’s name.

I don’t know what time it is, but I can see a sliver of blue-gray light between the curtains, and I know dawn isn’t far off. I assume Lila is in the bathroom, but when I glance in that direction, I see no light glowing under the bathroom door. That doesn’t mean anything. Lila wouldn’t need the light in order to find the toilet, sit on it, and pee.

I hear whispering then, the sound so soft that at first I think it’s caused by a breeze blowing outside. But then it becomes louder, and I realize it’s coming from the bathroom. It’s Lila.