Her calves were slim and tan, Jonathan remembers. Covered with blotches and scrapes.
I folded my fingers, Ruby remembers. Then I blushed. My throat felt sunburned.
Ruby said, “I know, it’s so embarrassing. But all this salt on my poison ivy — God, what I wouldn’t give for a bath! They never told me there wouldn’t be any water here…”
Jonathan gestured at the ocean surrounding them and then they started laughing. Hysteria, they have told each other since. They were so tired by then, twelve days into the course, and so dirty and overworked and strained by pretending to the students that these things didn’t matter, that neither of them could understand that they were also lonely. Their shared laughter felt like pure relief.
“No water?” Jonathan said. “I haven’t been dry since we got here. My clothes are damp, my sneakers are damp, my hair never dries…”
His hair was beautiful, Ruby remembers. Thick, a little too long. Part blond and part brown.
“I know,” she said. “But you know what I mean. I didn’t realize they’d have to bring our drinking water over on a boat.”
“Or that they’d expect us to wash in the ocean,” Jonathan said. Her forearms were dusted with salt, he remembers. The down along them sparkled in the sun.
“And those cots,” Ruby said. “Does yours have a sag in it like a hammock?”
“Like a slingshot,” Jonathan said.
For half an hour they sat on their ledge and compared their bubbling patches of poison ivy and the barnacle wounds that scored their hands and feet. Nothing healed out here, they told each other. Everything got infected. When one of the students called, “Look what I found!” Jonathan rose and held his hand out to Ruby. She took it easily and hauled herself up and they walked down to the water together. Jonathan’s hand was thick and blunt-fingered, with nails bitten down so far that the skin around them was raw. Odd, Ruby remembers thinking. Those bitten stumps attached to such a good-looking man.
They have always agreed that the worst moment, for each of them, was when they stepped from the boat to the dock on the final day of the course and saw their families waiting in the parking lot. Jonathan’s wife had their four-year-old daughter balanced on her shoulders. Their two older children were leaning perilously over the guardrails and shrieking at the sight of him. Jessie had turned nine in Jonathan’s absence, and Jonathan can’t think of her eager face without remembering the starfish he brought as his sole, guilty gift.
Ruby’s husband had parked their car just a few yards from Jonathan’s family. Her sons were wearing baseball caps, and what Ruby remembers is the way the yellow linings lit their faces. For a minute she saw the children squealing near her sons as faceless, inconsequential; Jonathan later told her that her children had been similarly blurred for him. Then Jonathan said, “That’s my family, there,” and Ruby said, “That’s mine, right next to yours,” and all the faces leapt into focus for both of them.
Nothing that was to come — not the days in court, nor the days they moved, nor the losses of jobs and homes — would ever seem so awful to them as that moment when they first saw their families standing there, unaware and hopeful. Deceitfully, treacherously, Ruby and Jonathan separated and walked to the people awaiting them. They didn’t introduce each other to their spouses. They didn’t look at each other — although, they later admitted, they cast covert looks at each other’s families. They thought they were invisible, that no one could see what had happened between them. They thought their families would not remember how they had stepped off the boat and stood, for an instant, together.
On that boat, sitting dumb and miserable in the litter of nets and equipment, they had each pretended to be resigned to going home. Each foresaw (or so they later told each other) the hysterical phone calls and the frenzied, secret meetings. Neither foresaw how much the sight of each other’s family would hurt. “Sweetie,” Jonathan remembers Ruby’s husband saying. “You’ve lost so much weight.” Ruby remembers staring over her husband’s shoulder and watching Jessie butt her head like a dog under Jonathan’s hand.
For the first twelve days on the island, Jonathan and Ruby were so busy that they hardly noticed each other. For the next few days, after their conversation on the ledge, they sat near each other during faculty lectures and student presentations. These were held in the library, a ramshackle building separated from the bunkhouse and the dining hall by a stretch of wild roses and poison ivy.
Jonathan had talked about algae in there, holding up samples of Fucus and Hildenbrandtia. Ruby had talked about the littoral zone, that space between high and low watermarks where organisms struggled to adapt to the daily rhythm of immersion and exposure. They had drawn on the blackboard in colored chalk while the students, itchy and hot and tired, scratched their arms and legs and feigned attention.
Neither of them, they admitted much later, had focused fully on the other’s lecture. “It was before,” Ruby has said ruefully. “I didn’t know that I was going to want to have listened.” And Jonathan has laughed and confessed that he was studying the shells and skulls on the walls while Ruby was drawing on the board.
The library was exceedingly hot, they agreed, and the chairs remarkably uncomfortable; the only good spot was the sofa in front of the fireplace. That was the spot they commandeered on the evening after their first conversation, when dinner led to a walk and then the walk led them into the library a few minutes before the scheduled lecture.
Erika Moorhead, Ruby remembers. Talking about the tensile strength of byssus threads.
Walter Schank, Jonathan remembers. Something to do with hydrozoans.
They both remember feeling comfortable for the first time since their arrival. And for the next few days — three by Ruby’s accounting; four by Jonathan’s — one of them came early for every lecture and saved a seat on the sofa for the other.
They giggled at Frank Kenary’s slides, which he’d arranged like a creepy fashion show: abyssal fish sporting varied blobs of luminescent flesh. When Gunnar talked for two hours about subduction zones and the calcium carbonate cycle, they amused themselves exchanging doodles. They can’t remember, now, whether Gunnar’s endless lecture came before Carol Dagliesh’s filmstrip on the herring gulls, or which of the students tipped over the dissecting scope and sent the dish of copepods to their deaths. But both of them remember those days and nights as being almost purely happy. They swam in that odd, indefinite zone where they were more than friends, not yet lovers, still able to deny to themselves that they were headed where they were headed.
Ruby made the first phone call, a week after they left the island. At eleven o’clock on a Sunday night, she told her husband she’d left something in her office that she needed to prepare the next day’s class. She drove to campus, unlocked her door, picked up the phone and called Jonathan at his house. One of his children — Jessie, she thinks — answered the phone. Ruby remembers how, even through the turmoil of her emotions, she’d been shocked at the idea of a child staying up so late.
There was a horrible moment while Jessie went to find her father; another when Jonathan, hearing Ruby’s voice, said, “Wait, hang on, I’ll just be a minute,” and then negotiated Jessie into bed. Ruby waited, dreading his anger, knowing she’d been wrong to call him at home. But Jonathan, when he finally returned, said, “Ruby. You got my letter.”