“Don’t forget the scales the size of dinner plates that ichthyologist found floating in the lake last summer,” he’d said. “They were never identified.”
“Don’t forget the size of some of the sturgeon and carp living in Michigan,” I’d said. “You of all people should know.”
“Laugh if you want, Diane, but I finally know what I’m looking for.”
As an etymologist, I had tried to tell him the word “mishegenabeg” translated into “water snake,” that whatever people had seen in the lake was probably just a big fucking snake, but he wouldn’t listen.
From the floor, my husband reached for my hand. He had a bad back. I held his wrist and placed my other hand on his elbow. He pulled hard against me as he stood, his dark hair flattened to reveal the bald spot on the crown of his head. After the mishegenabeg dream, he threw out his bathrobe and started dressing well again, in pressed slacks and polo shirts. In exchange for his work with the Discovery Group, he was getting a small monthly stipend and had told me salaries and benefits were just things that kept us trapped in soul-killing jobs.
He tucked the photograph into a manila folder and placed it on the mantle, next to pictures of our wedding and a long-ago vacation to Mount St. Helens. He started in again on the sightings he’d heard about at the Federation, how most of them occurred late at night, how some said the creature was at least fifty feet long and the color of moss, how others described it as looking, from a distance, like an overturned boat floating in the water. He told me the Discovery Group had scheduled their first official expedition for September. They were trying to get a reporter from the Tribune to cover it.
“But you haven’t been diving since college,” I said. He’d gone to school in Maine and been a member of the college scuba diving team; during our courtship, I heard countless stories about traveling to the Gulf of Maine with the team on weekends to plunge into freezing waters.
“I was pretty good back then,” he said. “Plus, Ada and Stephen have raised enough money to buy the group new regulators and air tanks.”
“Who are Ada and Stephen?”
“Members of the Discovery Group,” he said. “There are ten of us, which you would know if you took more of an interest. We already have three motorboats, and we’re pooling money for new underwater cameras.”
“So you’re just planning to remain unemployed?” I pinched the bridge of my nose. At the Foundation, his salary had been comparable to mine and our rent had gone up a hundred dollars last year. “Perhaps it’s time you started looking for a real job.”
“Your hair seems different.” My husband reached toward my head, then pulled his hand away, as though I might shock him. I realized I’d forgotten to brush my hair and sweep it back into the customary ponytail after leaving Dean.
“Don’t change the subject,” I said. “And don’t think you’re going to dip into our savings, either.”
“What are we really saving that money for?”
“We could buy a house one day,” I said. “We could travel more. We could spend next summer in the Yucatan.”
“I’m going outside.” Our little balcony had an iron railing, across which we’d strung white Christmas lights last December. After the holidays, I kept bugging him to take the lights down, finally giving up in March. He left the door open and gnats streamed into the living room. I was about to ask him to close the door when he shouted my name from the balcony.
“I forgot to tell you that your mother called,” he said. “I took down a message.”
In the kitchen, I found a note scrawled on the back of a grocery receipt: not a fire, just smoke.
All summer, I’d been trying to write a paper on the etymology of misunderstandings. I hadn’t published much since my first two years at the university, when I placed three well-received papers with Etymology Today. Whenever the chair emphasized the importance of contributing to our fields at meetings, I felt her gaze falling on me. My background was in systematic comparisons, the study of what words had originated from their common ancestor language and which had been borrowed from other languages. What happened, I wanted to know, during the process of foreign words being adopted by another language — surely there must have been misunderstandings. At the start of the summer, I went to the department chair with my idea.
“Sounds more like theoretical linguistics to me,” she said. “What happened to your paper on the etymology of corporate language?”
“It’s going to take more time than I’d realized,” I said. I had lost interest in the project months before.
“Too bad,” she said, pushing a mess of brown ringlets from her forehead. “It’s a timely subject.”
That same afternoon, I went to see a professor in the history department and asked him to tell me about a significant misunderstanding between historical figures, thinking I could start by researching a story. I’m not interested in facts and hard data right now, I said, just talk to me. He looked up from a huge leather book with yellowing pages, told me a brief and unhelpful story about Napoleon, and then went back to reading.
One night in August, Dean wanted to watch the meteor shower he’d heard about on the radio. It was supposed to be the best one in years. He sat in the armchair behind my desk, naked save for the tube socks. He had once told me he wanted to be an architect, like Carlo Scarpa or Kevin Roche, and that he was already preparing applications for graduate school. I had taken this to mean he’d be moving away after graduating in December. In Dean’s presence, I saw myself as I was in my twenties, the perfect, pale softness of my skin. But more than anything, I had come to appreciate how transparent he was, how easily understood: his excitement, his fear, his attraction, all put forth without reservation. I felt a jolt of relief whenever he talked about graduate school; he would leave on his own, I imagined, sparing me from having to become an instructor in suffering.
“When’s it happening?” I was sitting in the chair across from him, still naked, my skirt suit a dark mound on the carpet.
“Tonight.” He checked his watch. “In just a little while. We really should go see it.” He stretched his arms over his head. “Have you heard any more from your mother?”
I told him that I’d given her neighbors a call and they’d said everything was fine.
“Still,” he said. “You must be worried.”
“Meteor comes from the Greek word meteoros,” I said. “Do you know what that means?”
“Will this be on the next test?”
“It means high in the air.” It had rained that afternoon, though the sky cleared at dusk. I picked up my red raincoat and wrapped it around me, tying the belt snugly at my waist. Dean rose and pulled on his shorts.
“So let’s go up high in the air.” I opened my window and pointed to the fire escape. Damp heat gusted into my office.
“Wouldn’t that be dangerous?”
When Dean finished buttoning his shirt, I noticed he’d done it crooked. I walked over to him and redid the buttons, looking into his face, taking my time. “It’s the only way to reach the roof,” I said. “We have to get above some of the lights if we’re going to see anything.”
We climbed the side of the building like thieves. It was risky; security guards patrolled the campus at night and there was a chance we’d be spotted, but right then I didn’t care. When we reached the top of the building, the winds were strong and my raincoat kept blowing open. My thighs hardened with goosebumps. I saw parking lots and a soccer field, the open wound of a construction site, a bright yellow pipe jutting from the hole like a robot’s finger. In the far distance, Lake Michigan was black as a pit of tar.