I stood there drinking my coffee in the warm breeze that morning and longed for temperatures a few degrees below freezing. For fumes rising from my cup. For the possibility of putting on a sweater. I’d slept wonderfully in the big bed, a deep, dreamless sleep that stripped my soul and promised a new beginning. When I woke up, the silence in the house — no radio, no clattering dishes, no dog’s paws — had reminded me of winter.
Twice a year, Antje flew to Germany alone to spend a week with her family. I thought of those days as holidays, even if I had to work and the annoying task of washing the dive suits every evening fell to me. Not that I was usually tormented by her presence, but her absence opened up rooms. I stretched out. I did a lot of thinking, without being able to say later what it was I’d been thinking about. By the end of the week, having stretched myself out and thought myself out, I’d look forward to the moment when the place would come back to life.
Lights went on in the Casa Raya. I saw Theo stagger into the living room and over to the little kitchen, where he paused, as though he couldn’t remember what all those appliances were for. Then he filled the espresso pot with water and set it on the stove. He stood in front of the open refrigerator and drank something from a bottle. I couldn’t tell whether it was juice or wine. Though as a matter of fact, bottled juice wasn’t available on the island. Theo scratched his head with his right hand and stuck his left down the back of his pajama pants. He ate a few spoonfuls of something in the fridge, maybe olives or caviar. He emptied the bottle and dropped it on the floor. He poured out his coffee, took a sip of milk from the open carton on the counter, and immediately spat into the sink. Hadn’t Antje told them they should buy only long-life milk on the island? Anything else went bad almost at once, even in the refrigerator. Theo took his black coffee into the bedroom.
When I envisioned the future, I imagined a contradictory picture. I firmly believed that Antje would come back. She’d never spent more than a week away from home. I couldn’t manage the diving school for longer than that without her. She was surely staying in some girlfriend’s house, and I figured she’d keep up the Ricardo act for a few days in order to punish me. Then, one evening, suddenly she’d be there again. At the same time, I saw myself waking up in the morning and gazing at Jola, asleep beside me in the double bed. I saw Antje lying in the bathtub and Jola standing before the mirror. While Antje made breakfast, Jola set the table. I saw Jola sorting invoices while Antje sent e-mails to clients. Snow was falling outside the windows.
I went back inside, shaking my head. I hadn’t taken care of the gecko yet. I tore off part of a paper towel, picked up Emile’s cold little body, carried him into the bathroom, and threw him in the toilet. He wouldn’t flush down. I covered him with toilet paper, flushed, waited, flushed again. Until he finally disappeared.
They were both standing in front of the house. I hadn’t reckoned on more than one of them. On this morning, as on every morning, they waited at the foot of the Casa Raya’s front steps while I backed the van across the sandlot. Jola wore a red dress with a swaying skirt that I hadn’t seen before. Theo looked like he wasn’t awake yet. I got out of the van, walked up to Jola, put my hands on her waist, and kissed her on the mouth. I didn’t know why I did that. I hadn’t planned it. Nor did it feel good.
“Whoops!” said Jola.
Theo looked past us, gave a slight nod, and smiled.
Some fuse in my head must have blown overnight. In the van, I gazed at Jola from the side and stroked her cheek with my forefinger. I put a hand on her knee. She seemed happy, but also a little mixed up. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere. At the dive site, when she turned her back on Theo and me to take off her dress and get into her suit, I had to keep my hands still. I felt like a boy forbidden to test out his new toy, even though it had so many functions he’d yet to discover. Theo was suddenly full of questions about technical diving. Only then did I remember that tomorrow was the day I’d been waiting months for. My fortieth birthday, one hundred meters underwater. No matter what the wrecked ship’s original name had been, I was going to rename it after myself. A few more preparations remained to be made; there were tanks to fill, various pieces of equipment to check, calculations in the dive plan to be gone over one last time. The impending expedition seemed far away to me, like something I’d already lived through and concluded. That perception had to change. I needed my full concentration. I answered Theo’s questions without properly listening to myself. While I was explaining that helium, even under high pressure, had very little narcotic effect, and that this was the reason why divers at hundred-meter depths breathed a helium-oxygen mixture, I looked at Jola, who was standing a little away from us. She returned my gaze with her head slightly tilted to one side, like someone contemplating a piece of furniture, uncertain about which room to put it in.
I thought about how urgently I needed to make a few decisions, and this immediately put me in a bad mood. Then I reflected that such decisions were best left to fate, and my mood improved. I said that the thermodynamic law of ideal gases didn’t take the interaction between gas atoms into account, and that therefore it was advisable to fall back on the van der Waals model when using helium. I thought that I had as valid a right as anyone to follow the laws of logic. Which meant that if Theo, Antje, Antje’s girlfriends, Bernie — if the whole island — assumed that I was having an affair with Jola, then it was only logical that I should actually have the said affair. The thought appealed to me. A man who didn’t want to lose his reason had to make sure that idea and reality were coextensive. As a general rule, one adapted ideas to reality. Sometimes the opposite method was the simpler one. An affair with Jola would ease the sting of Antje’s unjust accusations, give my conviction a retroactive basis, and put me back at the negotiating table. I’d had enough of feeling that I couldn’t explain anything because no one would believe me no matter what I said. I composed a text message to Antje in my head: “Just slept with Jola, so you can stop thinking I’m a liar.” Let her try to get over that.
Jola watched me as I thought. She appeared to know what was in my mind. I smiled. She smiled. I laughed. She shook her head. As though she couldn’t rightly believe what she read in my thoughts. Come to your senses, her look seemed to say. All the same, she’d been coming on to me for days. It bordered on the miraculous that a woman of her caliber was prepared to go to such obstinate lengths to get a man.
I’d apparently broken off my helium lecture at some point in the middle; nevertheless, the Boltzmann constant and Charles’s law of volumes were still hanging in the air somehow. Theo looked unsatisfied.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go for a dive.”