She took a long breath and said, “Phew.”
“We experienced a convergence,” said Bob, climbing off me, now, to sit cross-legged on the floor by my feet. “Once in a graduate seminar a guy became an amoeba and accidentally parasitically invaded his girlfriend’s GI tract. She had to go on antibiotics to get him out of her system.”
A joke? Some kind of academic drollery? Bob trying to put us all at our ease?
Meredith, cradling my head in her lap, told me, “I saw you down there, Pete. You became a magnificent Great Plains bison. You almost kicked me in the face.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. You were drowning.” She stroked my head. It was good to feel her fingers roving over the scalp, tracing idle patterns through the unwashed tangle of hair. Sunlight came in every window, and the air smelled of orange blossoms. The drum cassette had long since spooled itself out. It was Saturday and I was alive.
“How about lunch, everybody?” Meredith said.
“Sounds all right to me,” replied Bob.
Meredith’s hands abandoned my head, and Bob helped me up. We made our way — Meredith leading, followed by Bob, then me, feebly — into the sunny kitchen. There was a brief moment of fear when Meredith, leaning over the freezer chest, digging around, in fact, inside the freezer chest, sorting packages, said, “Honey, where’s that chowder I made a while back?” But then she found it, and soon we were seated before misting bowls of potatoes, celery, and clams in a subtle cream broth. Meredith sat on my right and Bob sat on my left; we formed a triangle lit by natural light. Meredith and I hunched forward over our places, not yet eating. Rather, we paid close attention as the anthropologist explained the morning’s accidental near drowning:
“You didn’t have firmly established boundaries, Pete. The dominant animal inside you came right up and occupied your undefended mind. This is great chowder, Meredith. Do you make your stock from scratch?”
“Yes.”
“It’s wonderful”—crumbling, into his wide china bowl, a cracker; spooning up a white crusty spoonful—“perhaps you’ll grant me your recipe. Unless, that is, it’s a treasured family secret.”
“I’d be delighted to give you the recipe.”
“I’d love to have it. I mean that. Anyway, Pete, you’re high and dry and that’s what matters. Right, Meredith?”
“Right.”
“I have to say, if you don’t mind my saying so”—and here Bob helped himself to another vast bite before turning to regard me with that hollow stare of his (what was this guy’s animal? Gila monster?)—“you’re one lucky hombre, Pete.”
“Thanks.” But for what? Having Meredith to be married to? Being alive? I inquired of Bob, “Dominant animal?”
“An animistic persona construct expressed as an embodied archetype. We all contain this. Yours regrettably found itself enmeshed in Meredith’s cerebrocabalistic sphere.”
He turned his gaze on Meredith. Boldly, unashamedly, he looked her up and down. After a minute he declared, “Yes, she is carrying a lot of power.”
What was there to say to this? Anything would be wrong. I lowered my head to watch my spoon stir up a rotary wake in the cooling broth — I was playing with my food. I felt deficient. My insides were ulcerous from coffee and terror. How was I supposed to eat? What was needed was a lengthy session on the can. Listening to Bob offer tribute to my wife—“Truly, Meredith, I am being one hundred percent honest when I inform you that never, never before have I witnessed, within this or any other culture, a keener mastery of the cataleptic condition and its psychic imperatives”—listening to this and watching Meredith nod and smile and say, “Really?”—it made me feel like I was being killed by a knife.
I guess I’d have to say that, all things considered, it’s not surprising in the least that the town meeting minutes I took by candlelight later that evening at Terry Heinemann’s Clam Castle came out, for the most part, illegible.
Or that Meredith’s suggestion about getting naked on the jetty, all slippery and wet above the crashing ocean waves, made me nervous.
“No thanks,” I told her. It was late. The municipal beach was deserted, the night was dark. Jerry and Rita Henderson, and Abe and Tom and the Nixons, and Terry and Claire, everybody, had gone home. Who knew what time it was. Meredith stood on soft sand beside me. I felt overwhelmed by sadness and the conviction that I had failed in some impressive way. By not becoming a coelacanth. By not being a coelacanth. Wasn’t our relationship (marriage) founded on care and the veneration of intimacy and fidelity? Hadn’t I violated this? What could be worse, in a close sexual relationship, than showing yourself to be a different species than your mate?
“We’re really different,” I said, in tranquil, rising tones intended to suggest the beneficial aspects, whatever they might be, marriagewise, of biological diversity.
“Hmn.”
“Well, I guess it’s not so bad.” What nonsense.
We stood staring at waves rolling in, and at the distant black water shaping the horizon. On any other night I might’ve asked Meredith, “What are you thinking?” Tonight this seemed an ominous line of inquiry, particularly with what felt like acute hydrophobia coming over me — I had to turn away from the breaking waves and concentrate on the yellow streetlamps hanging like bleached moons over the Clam Castle parking lot. Our purple Toyota glowed brown beneath their light. Other cars, in varying shades also tinted a gaseous brown, were parked far away, but no people were around. Only those cars washed in lamplight, and the dark restaurant, and a green Dumpster that gaped open, spilling fishy trash.
It was well past bedtime. Most good people were in their homes, making love or sleeping, washing dishes or listening to music or getting up to check on a sick child, reading, talking on the phone, drinking. We were just kicking sand, my honey and I.
“Want to go?” I said, and we walked to the car. We drove home past booby-trapped houses shrouded in fan-shaped leaves and gray hanging mosses. I was thinking, as I guided the car along the spooky streets, of children. It seemed to me that Meredith, silent beside me, might also be thinking about children.
That night we cuddled in bed, but it was melancholy cuddling. I wasn’t sure what part of her to touch. I rested my hand on her hip, she slept curled in a ball.
A few days later I set out, alone, on foot, to comb the neighborhood for likely recruits for the home school.
The day was overcast. A gray impenetrable ceiling of sky seemed hammered to the tops of tall trees and the roofs of houses. Campaign slogans came to mind: PUT THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE WITH PETE. A VOTE FOR ROBINSON IS A VOTE FOR SANITY. GOOD OVER EVIL, THE ROBINSON WAY. That’s the great thing about politics: success rests in unashamed immodesty. Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. These particular campaign poster slogans spoke to the morbid depression I’d been feeling lately. Was it inordinately grandiose to assume a general public despair, on a cheerless day like today?
My first scheduled stop was Dave and Jenny Jordan’s, over on East Manatee. Other houses with children were closer, but Jenny Jordan had seemed so sympathetic and kind, that morning in the library during Mother and Child Story Time. It was probably wise to pitch the school to a friendly listener before taking this act to strangers. Also, little Susy Jordan was the perfect age for the school, right around seven or eight. If I could enroll Susy, who was widely known to be bright and talented, I could then drop her name with the parents of other children, as a draw.
The Jordans’ modest wood-frame home, fifth on the right past the intersection of East Manatee and Fountain, sits only a short distance, about a block, from Jerry and Rita’s moat-enhanced corner-lot villa. Walking past the Hendersons’, I kept careful watch for serpents. What exactly did I expect to see? Vipers bellying forth from watery nests to slay hapless pedestrians? No, your moccasin is a docile creature, unless disturbed at home. The waters in Jerry’s moat sat brown and still. The drawbridge was up, everything seemed peaceful. For fun I threw a rock. The splash sent ripples against the poured-concrete banks of the moat, but nothing happened as a result, and so I continued on down the somber lane bordered in diminutive purple wildflowers. Along the way I checked the shrubs and flower patches for a viable burial site for Jim’s liver, which seemed an appropriate follow-up to the foot, seeing as it was an organ and therefore rich in multicultural symbolic properties of an altogether different order than hand or foot (by which reasoning the genitals, being both organ and extremity, would come, naturally, last in the interment procession); and also because the liver was so big, considering its origin inside a little old bald guy, and thus quite easily detectable by Meredith, down in its hiding place beneath the restaurant-sized bag of fish sticks, deep at the icy heart of the freezer chest.