He could not describe the sensation of being underwater, but if anything, this time was even more intense than the dive lesson. It put the car-crash reality of his life in perspective. The closest he had come to this kind of experience was when he was in the hospital five years before after lifting a too-heavy crate of steaks.
Richard never allowed himself to relax. Always he felt pressure. His life was a constant round of being late, hustling, making do, and catching up. Even on the rare occasions when he was ahead of schedule, he would prep in advance for future chores so that eventually he forgot what it meant to unwind. Even in his sleep he dreamed of chores he had done during his waking hours so that his entire twenty-four-hour day ended up being an endless treadmill of anxiety. In the hospital, nothing had been expected of him except sleeping and eating; the pain was a minor inconvenience. He had the unprecedented luxury of sitting on the toilet for a leisurely bowel movement instead of straining while someone pounded on the door with a delivery that waited for his approval. Technically, that had been his last time off till now.
If he could have only imagined that a place like this existed. Underwater, there was no blame. Underwater, there was no possibility of talking with Ann about their troubles. Underwater, the possibility of Ann leaving him became more remote. A relief. All one could do underwater was marvel at the perfection of the world that one normally let pass by. Like Wende’s breasts. Floating facedown in the ocean, his ears stoppered by water, he joined the fish in their fishy daydreams.
The truth was this leisure made him feel guilty because during those long ago summer days with Chloe, learning about the joys of French food, Richard had found his bliss, and he had pursued his love of cooking all these years, cocooned away from those who worked just for money. People, for example, like Ann. Just because he followed his bliss didn’t mean he should have allowed Ann to support his dream. It wasn’t as if that bliss kept Richard from having to hustle, kept him from getting tired and discouraged. Kept him from doubting if it was worth the price he was paying. Everyone encouraged one to “live the dream,” but no one talked about how to pay for it.
Floating above a particularly spectacular growth of coral, Richard would have exchanged it all to be a fish — just not one fated for his own frying pan.
He was learning the hard way that even divine cooking didn’t make one immune to being unloved. Sadly, food wasn’t always enough.
Toward the end of what he would call his Summer of Food, Richard had gone over at the preappointed time to Chloe’s to practice a pâte brisée. Claude was away at baseball practice. He found Richard’s interest in cooking with his mother a little freaky and now made himself scarce.
The kitchen was empty. Sun streamed in and filled the air with floury dust motes. Richard made himself at home, sitting at the kitchen table and thumbing through Larousse’s The Best of French Cooking. Time passed. He looked up from the recipe for a complicated torte ganache, and his head was hot from the sun beating through the window. How long had he been there? He got up and filled a glass with water from the sink when it occurred to him that he had heard no sounds from upstairs. Was the house empty? Had Chloe forgotten? Suddenly he felt strange, as if he were trespassing. What if her husband or Claude came in and found him?
“Chloe?” he called up the stairway.
Nothing.
He should have left, gone home. Even years later he could not say why, but he stayed. Instead, he climbed the stairs and entered the room he knew was the master bedroom. It was the one Chloe always came out of dressed in her Capri pants and sleeveless shirts, trailing musky perfume, ready to cook.
The bedroom was disappointingly ordinary, not the French boudoir of Richard’s nighttime imaginings. No flocked wallpaper or gilded mirrors. The realization that he had been picturing it startled him. He looked hard at the king-size bed, memorizing for later its chenille spread, creepily like the one on his own parents’ bed, trying to picture Chloe’s brown hair splayed on the pillow. Somehow he knew she slept on the right side, by the window. He walked to the dresser, ostensibly to look at the wedding picture of the professor and Chloe, but even as he bent to compare the younger Chloe with the one he now knew, his hand was yanking the handle of the top drawer. There, as he’d hoped, were her undergarments. He clutched at a lacy bra and brought it up to his nose — it smelled of Chloe’s signature perfume mixed with her skin, only more so. Then he saw underwear — in flesh tones and black — not skimpy and shiny and candy-colored, like glimpses he’d caught of girls’ at school, but not the big beige granny pants of his mother either. He felt a flush through his body — intense pleasure and discomfort combined — utterly unlike anything he had experienced alone in his room at night. He picked up the underwear and balled them under his nose, feeling the stiffness of the crenulated lace waistband, but they smelled only of detergent and line drying, a soft powdery baby smell that did nothing to encourage his fantasies. He held the panties up to the sunlight, imagined Chloe’s narrow, boyish hips in them, the Bermuda triangle of her dark pubic area. He spread the panties and examined the cotton insert at the crotch. Pristine. Inexplicably he brought the fabric to his tongue, tongue against dry cotton, and felt another fierce shudder. Just at the moment he was ready to sink to the ground to relieve his unbearable tension, he heard a watery slosh from the bathroom.
Impossible. His heart hammered up into his throat. “Pervert” would be the kindest of labels. Chloe would tell his mom and dad in the guise of concerned parenthood. He would be expelled, grounded, ridiculed. He was doomed. He threw the underwear back in the drawer and slammed it shut with a bang, and then tiptoed back to the bedroom door. Clearly, he had lost his mind.
“Chloe?” he said, his repentant voice weepy. He was dead meat.
Nothing. A minute later, another watery thump.
He walked to the bathroom door and knocked. “Everything okay in there?”
Nothing. Then the softest of moans.
There was the disgrace of being discovered snooping in Chloe’s bedroom, more specifically in her underwear drawer, or the larger cosmic catastrophe of doing nothing. Wasn’t this one of those moments you read about in books, a character-defining moment that could screw up your life forever if you chose wrong? He opened the door.
Chloe lay naked in the bathtub, her knees and breasts and head forming islands in the filmy grayish water. Her head rested on the lip of the tub, but she didn’t open her eyes at his entrance. On the bath mat was an overturned amber vial of pills.
“Fuck, fuck me,” Richard breathed as he bent down to touch her skin, which could only be described as feeling like a refrigerated piece of raw chicken. The water, gone cold, rippled with her shivering. “Did you take these?” he yelled, his Mrs. Robinson suddenly morphed into the senior hearing-impaired, but she shrugged him off in her deep slumber. He had no idea what to do. He tried to lift her out of the water, but her previously lusted-after, lithe body was now as heavy and unwieldy as a sack of ancestral potatoes. He put a sneakered foot on the tub rim for leverage, but that didn’t work either. Finally, thinking all the while how he was going to catch hell for getting his shoes wet, he stepped in with one foot, trying to brace under her arms and lift, his fingers oblivious to the fact that they were brushing against nipples, but he almost slipped, nearly braining them both. If he let go, he worried, she would slip beneath the water and drown. Oh my God. Fuck. Me. Now he stepped in with both feet as Chloe’s weight started to burn the muscles in his arms. With his outstretched foot, in a balletic feat that almost cost him his hamstring, he yanked the chain of the plug, then squatted down as her head lolled on his shoulder and the soapy amniotic water around them drained away.