I walked down the quay to the Rubber Duck, stepped over the side, and unpacked some of my old defenses against confusion and fear: books, cookies, and a magazine or two. More recently I had added Milk Duds to my arsenal. I stretched out on the tiny bunk and picked up Ladies Home Journal, flipping to a “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column describing a wife’s supposedly flirtatious behavior around other men, a party ending with her slipping out with her husband’s handsome brother.… Confronted with her own secret desires, the wife offered a couple hundred words of apology that looked to me like nothing but a description of the husband’s shortcomings. He had been so distant, so indifferent to her intellectual and spiritual needs. The attractive brother had made her feel noticed for the first time in so long.… I could hear exactly what Lilly would have said to this one: “Get a job,” she’d say. “She’s an idiot, and the husband is a bore. She’s dying of bore-ism with that man.”
I opened my old copy of The Odyssey and a yellowed paper dropped to the deck. I picked it up and opened it: Boppit’s commendation from the armed forces for service above and beyond the call of duty. How could it have been here all along when I’d flipped through this book so often without seeing it? I would give it to Jane. Maybe I’d frame it first. Now I lay it open beside my rocking bed and felt grateful about Boppit, and sad about his untimely death beneath our old Chevy’s back wheels. He’d been a brave dog. A good dog.
I thought about the way Boppit seemed to be confused when his ears flicked up, because they were so uneven. I listened to the slap of waves on the tires tied to the dock. I fell asleep.
I was in a rocking place, someplace where the floor moved. I was pursued, running! I was so frightened I could hardly breathe, and I struggled to run faster. I was in a labyrinth of dark wooden corridors, tiny doors on either side of the narrow passages I rushed through. I heard the thing behind me, the heavy, lumbering animal steps, the sounds it made when it breathed. Somewhere above me I heard barking and a voice. Lilly’s voice! I turned around to retrace my fleeing steps and find a way upward, to the voice and the barking. Endless walls and closed doors and the thing behind me so close! And what was hanging from the doors like little tails? Were they bundles of hair? I had to find the door that would lead upward and away. Then I was not running through the narrow corridors but struggling in the water, everything dark around me and a hand on my arm, pulling me down. I resisted, kicked and pulled until I realized that I was having no difficulty breathing or seeing even though I was submerged. In fact, the water moved against my body in the most wonderful way. I turned to see what or who had pulled me here. The sensations of water against my chest, my legs … how lovely!
But then something broke through the wonderful sensations, something loud and assaultive. Rifle fire? Cannon? BANG! BANGBRSCHHKKKKK!
“Neave?!”
I struggled through the gelatinous sleep, upward to the voice, found myself sitting in a narrow bunk in a neat cabin whose door was wide open and filled with a spiky silhouette. I looked around. I was not deep in watery space but in the little cabin of the Rubber Duck.
“Neave?”
The silhouette was speaking to me: Max Luhrmann, wearing pajama bottoms, his hair standing out mostly to the left of his head and his feet bare. My eyes adjusted and I saw his face pink up, possibly in response to my scrutiny. I couldn’t tell.
“I’m awake,” I said uncertainly. “I’m awake, right?”
Max nodded. “Of course you are.”
“The explosion. There were gunshots or something.”
“That was just Charlie Healey setting out at an ungodly hour with a backfiring engine. He’s two slips down from the Rubber Duck.”
I quieted myself and listened. There it was: the liquid sound of a small boat chugging off into the harbor. “Max, where did you come from?”
“The lab owns another research vessel at this dock. It’s got a bunk. I thought…”
“What? That Ricky would come here and shoot me?”
“No. Yes.”
“You’ve been sleeping two boats down and waiting for him?”
“No. Yes.”
“What exactly did you think you’d do if he managed to follow me and showed up?”
“Stop him,” he said.
He spoke matter-of-factly and he looked sure of himself. He held something that looked like a tire iron in his hand. I noticed the muscles along his forearm, the curving lines running up to the upper arm. He saw my eyes run from his hand up to the shoulder and back to the tire iron. He tucked the weapon behind a hip, a bit out of sight. “Well. I guess I’ll head back.”
His pajamas had slipped down enough to expose the curve of a slender hip. He was close enough for me to smell sleep on him and metal and rope. Just a hint of toothpaste. I crossed the two feet of cabin that separated us, slipped a hand behind his head and pulled it down. He let me. I kissed him.
I was entirely sure of this: he kissed me back. His free hand—the one without the tire iron—made its way around me. He drew the whole length of me against him for just a moment and then, as if a switch had been flicked, his entire body stiffened and then he stumbled, actually stumbled, back and away. I waited, the two of us frozen in place so close to each other that I could still smell the sleep on him. The toothpaste. I kept my feet where they were but tipped the rest of me an inch, maybe two, closer to him. He’d kissed me, really kissed me, before he pulled away.
“I’ll just go back,” he whispered. He whacked the back of one heel against the door on his way through, recovered, twisted quickly, and caught his elbow on the doorway before disappearing back to his watch post.
He didn’t want me. Or did he want me? There had been the kiss, the whole body pressed against me, but then the stiffening, startled rejection.
Nothing I had known about desire was anything at all compared to what was burning its way through me now. He had kissed me back. Hadn’t he? Wasn’t that what I’d felt before he stumbled backward?
Which was truer: the kiss, or the rejection of the kiss?
I spent what little was left of the night pacing back and forth between the cabin’s miniature refrigerator and miniature door, five steps either way, weighing the two against each other. In the end I decided to go with rejection. I lost my nerve, or I came to my senses—it wasn’t clear which—but I decided that I’d have to behave as if the moment were an aberration, an inauthentic moment of distress. He’d recoiled from me: I saw no other way to save myself any dignity.
I hadn’t known that desire could feel like something slashing into your chest and pressing all the air out of your lungs. The skin of my body felt charged and light, expansive and tight at once—it couldn’t contain what I felt. If I’d known how to get out of my own skin I would have blown myself open to get some relief. Why would anyone want this? How had anyone in history survived this, much less longed for it, written poems and novels and songs about it? All this time I’d thought I’d understood my books, understood Electra’s Marais dress, understood what the women at our conferences were buying and selling and hoping for.
I’d understood nothing.
LILLY
What You Go With