Something Rich and Strange Page 6

  “What is this?” she breathed. “What is all this?” Still things came out: a jump-rope handle, a hairbrush without any bristles, the plastic nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. “This is not what I was looking for.”

  “It’s what you found.”

  She stared at him. Expression had finally surfaced in his eyes: a sorrow as deep and complete as if, she Thought, he were watching the world die.

  And then she realized he was.

  A wave fanned across the sand, spilled around him, began to tug the bottle caps, the Styrofoam back into the sea. It tugged at Adam, who lay in water as easily as on sand, indifferent as a seal to the turning of the tide.

  She began to tremble, feeling the weight in her pockets and knowing that there was not time enough in the world to empty them. She whispered, “What are you?”

  Jonah drifted back home at twilight. He moved, he felt, through the evening tide. It sang in the back of his mind, insistent, pervasive, the way the sound of the sea seemed ingrained in the floorboards of the apartment. No window could shut it out, no dream. He found Megan sitting idly on a kitchen stool, gazing at nothing, a peculiar, distant look in her eyes. He went to the refrigerator, got a beer, and glanced at her again.

  “Did you draw?”

  She shook her head. “No. I just walked.”

  “Oh.”

  “You?”

  He nodded. “Same.” He added, making an effort, “I found a couple of things.”

  “Oh.” She drew a breath, subsided. He glanced out the window over the sink. Twilight drew a thin line of sapphire above the sea. He watched it darken, forgetting the beer in his hand, following the pale, elusive frills of foam as the black waves broke. A star moved over the water toward the harbor: a trawler coming home. He drank finally, and remembered Megan, so silent he had forgotten she was there. She got that way sometimes, chewing over her work.

  He moved, touched the cold stove. “I’ll cook.” She murmured something. “What?”

  “Okay.” She added, after a moment, “I’m not very hungry.”

  “I’ll cook that frozen tortellini.”

  “Okay.”

  He opened a cupboard, rattled a pot loose from a clutter of lids. He said without looking at her, “That Adam. The jewelry maker.” She made another noise. “Where does he live?”

  “He does—he said—” He looked up then; she shook her hair over her face, finding words. “He said he was with some friends.”

  “What friends? Where?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  He grunted, kicked the cupboard door closed. He set the pot in the sink, ran water into it. “Reason I ask,” he said to the water, “is Jenny thinks we should get a few more pieces from him.”

  “Oh.”

  He set the pot on the stove, turned on heat. “Did you buy sauce?”

  “No.”

  “You know how to make it?”

  “Yeah. You get out the butter.”

  He gazed into the water, stirred it aimlessly for a while with a wooden spoon. “Then what?” he asked, rousing. “After you get out the butter?”

  “That’s it. You toss some butter and salt and pepper in the tortellini and it’ll be fine.”

  He blinked, pulled earthward by a vague sense of incongruity. “Do we have butter?”

  “No,” she said after a while.

  He turned the water off, looked at her. She was hunched, her face a quarter moon within her hair. He couldn’t find an expression, let alone read it. He set the water aside, pulled a frying pan out of the stove drawer. “Eggs, then. Scrambled?”

  “Fine.”

  “Did he leave a number with you?”

  “What?”

  “Adam Fin. A phone number?”

  She shook her head, straightening a little; he heard her sigh. “No.”

  “Well, then how do I get in touch with him?”

  “I guess you’ll have to wait until he finds a place to live.”

  He cracked an egg against the pan with more force than necessary. “That’s it? Just wait until he wanders back in? It could be days!”

  “It could be. So what?”

  So, he wanted to shout, I have to wait days to find out if the woman singing in the bar he says is his sister, is the woman who sang to me in a cave, or if I just dreamed their voices were alike and that there was the shadow of her long black hair against the rock? His mouth felt dry. He dumped eggshells, knowing suddenly how an oyster felt, waking up to a grain of sand in its bed, trying to live around it, only to find it growing larger, luminous, more insistent the harder the oyster worked to ignore it.

  “I think,” he said finally, “I just think it’s odd he left all that with us and not even a number where we can reach him. It’s expensive stuff.”

  “I guess he trusts us,” she said wearily, and added after a moment, “I don’t know why. Anyway. You don’t even like him.”

  He didn’t answer. He stirred eggs, pushed a couple of pieces of bread into the toaster. He found himself staring down into it, watching the flush of heat along the element. He looked up to find Megan watching him, her eyes speaking suddenly, but nothing he could decipher. Do you? they asked. Have you ever? Would you believe?

  “Jonah?”

  “Huh?” he said, and then, “Oh, shit, there’s no butter for the toast.”

  “There’s some diet margarine.”

  “I hate that stuff. Tastes like salad oil.” He got a couple of plates, spilled egg onto them, added dry toast. He handed a plate to Megan. She looked at it bewilderedly, as if wondering what he expected her to do with yellow lumps and a piece of cardboard. He lifted his own plate, eyed it, and set it down abruptly.

  “I’m going out.”

  He felt her watching him until he closed the door, but she did not even say his name.

  His feet led him to the Ancient Mariner, where he bought a beer and hunched over it, listening, beneath the sounds of the jukebox and some weird woman haranguing the bartender, for an echo of the voice in his head. He upended the beer, drank half, and fell deeper into the music, chasing a spindrift song through the caves in his head. Finishing the beer in another burst of energy, he found the woman eyeing him.

  She looked, he thought, like an oyster. Lumpy, gray, with a ruffled and colorless shell. The bartender, Sharon, who was married to Marty down the street who ran the arts and crafts gallery, lifted an eyebrow at Jonah.

  “Another?”

  “He’ll have one,” the older woman said. “I’m buying.”

  “No, I have to—”

  “Name’s Doris. You can call me Dory.” She brought herself and her glass over, sat down beside him. “If you can hear that much beneath the music.”

  “I can hear,” he said, despite Aerosmith going at it from the jukebox. She fixed him with her oyster eye.

  “Sing me what you hear.”

  “I can’t sing.”

  “You’ll have to, for her. You’ll have to wring music from your bones.” She shoved his beer at him. “Drink it.”

  He could not, he thought, drinking with impolite haste, have heard what she said. He put the glass down, and smelled it suddenly, from the woman, from a crack in the wall: brine, guano, new rain falling in a new season. He closed his eyes, felt the sting of brine behind them. The woman was saying something else.

  “There’s a price. Everything has its price.”

  “Beer?” He reached into his pocket. “I’ve got it.”

  “Money’s not worth much, down there. Gets old and crusty, hidden under kelp; coral grows around it. Coral likes money. It’s hard, you can build on coin. I’ve seen gold like eyes peering out of coral skeletons. No. The price wouldn’t be coin. You won’t want to buy what that coin makes, the way it ends up down there.”

  “What?” he said, mildly buzzed and not having the foggiest notion what the old bivalve was talking about. “What ends up down where?”

  She joggled his elbow crossly. “Down underwater. You should see what crawls out of t
hose rusting barrels. It’s an army of ghosts that eats everything in sight. Eats coral, eats the little plankton, eats the chemicals drawing one fish to another, so they can’t breed, and if they do, it eats their eggs. You think you see everything, with your lenses, your this scopes and that scopes, your radars drawing pictures of sound. You don’t see what’s not there anymore. It makes things disappear.” She turned to Sharon, called in her rattly voice, “He’ll have another.”

  “No, thanks. I’ve got to go.”

  “He’ll have another.” Her hand clamped on his wrist; he saw her eye again, fierce and gray as a gale. “You’ll stay. I know what you want. I can hear the singing in your head.”

  He stood still. His mouth was very dry. He reached for his bottle; it was empty. He waited while Sharon, looking amused, brought another.

  “Where’s Megan?” she asked, throwing the name at him like a lifeline from another world. It was too short and too late.

  He gulped beer. “Megan? Doing some drawing. Or thinking about it. I’m looking,” he said to both women, “for a man named Adam Fin. Tall, blond—” They were both nodding. “He left some jewelry with me,” he added, and saw the oyster eye narrow in a smile. “But no address, no phone.”

  “And you want,” Dory said, chuckling, “a certain pair of earrings.”

  He had to breathe twice before he could answer. “Yes. You know him.”

  “I know him.” She drank her own drink, sea green and rimed with salt. “I know her. They’re mine, him and her. My first and greatest and most wild children.”

  Four

  Megan dipped her hand in the tide, drew the shining out of the sea.

  It flowed like gossamer from her hand, cloth woven of foam, of light. In the bright morning it was barely visible, yet of substance: wind stirred it, or invisible tides. She draped it around her neck; it wound itself through her hair. She continued walking. Long ribbons colored like mother-of-pearl floated in on a breaking wave, lay in the wet sand like reflections of sunset. She picked them up, wrapped them around her wrist; they streaked the air behind her with changing shades of blue. The next wave brought her a living crown.

  It was a band of giant, irregular pearls hung with a net of tendrils to which seahorses clung, and tiny sand dollars, delicate, feathery worms, minute, transparent fish. She put the crown on her head; the net fell over her shoulders like a cloak. Now, she thought, I must have my scepter, and the sea rolled it to her feet: a stark white bone with a starfish impaled on its pointed tip. She raised it, and felt the net wrap around her so tightly a seahorse embedded itself in her cheek.

  She sat up. She was tangled in sheets. Jonah, uncovered beside her, mumbled something and groped. His hand found nothing; one eye opened, thoughtless as a fish’s eye. She felt her cheek, shook him until the other eye opened.

  “Jonah. There’s a seahorse in my cheek.”

  He squinted at her. “There’s no seahorse in your cheek.”

  “Are you sure? I can feel something scaly.”

  “There’s no seahorse.” He yawned. “That’s a baby starfish.” He rolled out of bed, padded to the bathroom. Megan, rubbing her cheek with one hand, untangled herself with the other. She reached for her glasses.

  When she put them on the world turned to water, and she saw it, washed with moonlight and foam: the stairway down into the sea.

  She woke up. She was tangled in sheets; Jonah was gone. Then she realized he hadn’t been there. It was still night, and he had never come home. She pulled herself across the bed to peer at the luminous dial on the clock. Five minutes to three in the morning. She dropped back, her eyes wide in the dark, remembering. He had left his scrambled eggs on the counter, gone out abruptly. She had scarcely noticed; all her attention had been on Adam, lying in the surf on the kitchen floor. Maybe, she had thought after a while, Jonah had gone for butter. She got up finally, scraped cold eggs into the garbage, and made a tuna sandwich with the toast.

  She had fallen asleep listening for him.

  She put her glasses on, turned on the lamp. She went into the kitchen to see if he had left a trace of himself: a beer bottle, a fossil. Then she looked among his rocks to see if he had left a note. She flicked on the bathroom light: no message on the mirror. She sat down on the bed, hugging herself, feeling a hollowness in her bones, as if she were blown out of glass and the blow falling at her out of the dark would shatter her.

  She whispered, “Jonah.”

  She heard his key in the lock then. The door opened. She went out to meet him, found him standing in the doorway, blinking at all the lights. He held the doorknob with one hand, and the door frame with the other; seeing her, he swayed in surprise and would have sat down on the floor if he hadn’t been hanging on.

  “It’s you,” he said.

  “I live here,” she said a trifle crossly. “I’m Megan. If you’re looking for someone else, you got the wrong apartment.”

  “How did you know?”

  “How did I know what?”

  “That I’m looking for her?”

  She felt herself grow rigid with shock. Her mouth shaped words; no words came for a moment. “Who?”

  “Who?”

  “Who her?”

  “What?”

  “What her are you looking for?” It came out, to her ears, all in one word. He blinked, swaying again, then deciphered it.

  “Her.”

  Her voice rose. “Her who?”

  “The singer.”

  “You met a singer?” She covered her mouth with her hands. “You met a singer with that band that night?”

  “No.” He shook his head so emphatically his glasses nearly fell off. “I haven’t met her yet. I can’t find her.”

  She felt an absurd urge to laugh and cry and throw a brachiopod at his head at the same time. “Jonah, what the hell are you talking about? You have a crush on some singer in a band? Is that where you’ve been? Listening to her?”

  He blinked at her again, his eyes round and heavy behind his glasses. “It’s not a crush. It’s an obsession.”

  “For a woman you haven’t met?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  “What,” she said tightly. “Don’t. I. Understand.”

  “Obsessions. They don’t have anything to do with what’s real. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “Jonah, it’s three in the morning and you’re shitfaced! Don’t tell me this has nothing to do with me. You’re obsessed with rocks and you leave them all over the house—”

  “Fossils.”

  “Don’t tell me that has nothing to do with me when I step on a worm tube getting out of the bathtub! Where are you going to put this obsession? On the kitchen counter?”

  “In my head,” he said, and she made a sound she had never made before. He let go of the doorknob, raised a hand, and lurched a half step. “Now,” he said. “Now. Now.”

  “Don’t ‘now’ me.”

  “She’s a dream—”

  “I gather.”

  “I mean in my head. I think. That’s where she sings. In my head.”

  Megan closed her eyes, wondering if she were dreaming Jonah. But he was still there, breathing fumes and gazing at her hopefully. “Jonah.”

  “Megan.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, she sang at the bar, too.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And then in the cave.”

  “What’s that? Some jazz club?”

  “The cave,” he said patiently. “Around where I was looking for fossils. She sang. And whales sang. Maybe they sang because she drew them there—”

  “Did you dream this?” she asked sharply. He shook his head again, top-heavy.

  “I thought yes. Then no. That’s why I have to find Adam Fin.”

  She felt her throat close; her hands closed over her arms. “Adam,” she whispered, and heard the sound of water, running into dark, secret places. “What does this have to do with Adam?”


  “Adam,” he mocked. “Adam. You keep saying his name. I don’t even know her name. The old oyster wouldn’t tell me. ‘Ask her,’ she said. ‘Ask her. She’ll tell you the price of her name.’ So I have to find Adam Fin. I was just out asking people.”

  “Why?” Her voice jerked. “Why Adam?”

  “Because he knows where she is. When she walks on land. He knows her.”

  She felt the blood run cold and thin under her skin. The stairway, she thought, out of the sea. She went to Jonah, took his arm very gently away from the door frame, and locked the door behind him, though she knew that in the end, no door would keep out the sea.

  Jonah, bleary-eyed and stubbled, sat behind the shop counter the next morning, his eyes on the Compend, which was written in some troublesome language of which he only understood a word or two here and there. The conch shells, and big cowries and the chambered nautiluses on the shelves sang faintly to the rhythm of the waves. Their music, delicate as notes played on a glass, kept drifting between his eyes and the page. He listened as intently to the bell on the door, to the quality of voices, though they all spoke the obscure language of the Compend. Jenny, cheerful and efficient, only disturbed him when she had to; she seemed to sense how he needed to seep, fossil-like, into the wall, while he waited for Adam Fin’s pale, calm face, his mocking eyes.

  Finally, after hours of listening for a voice that never spoke, he despaired, snapped the Compend shut with a sound that made Jenny start.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “I’m just about to leave for lunch, Jonah. You seem a little under the weather. Have you caught a bug?”

  He smiled a little, crookedly. “Some kind of a bug, yeah. Megan’s upstairs. Call her and she’ll cover your lunch break. I have to get out of here.”

  “Well,” she said, her voice mild, innocent of subterfuge, “I hope you feel better soon.” She reached for the phone. She had never heard the music of the chambered nautilus, Jonah guessed. She had never wept over a darkly glittering shadow, a scent of brine. For a moment he envied her.

  He drove the truck to the cove again, knowing he would find nothing. He wanted to stand at the mouth of the cave, just stand there, in the place where she had been, not hoping she would be there, but to feed his heart with memories. The tide was coming in, but he climbed along the side of the cliff anyway, then around its face. Tide licked at his heels, as he made his way across the long bones of rock Ruthless afternoon sunlight scoured the cave clean of shadows; the rough, exuberant waves shouted but refused to sing. Still he stood there, staring at the sea life along the cave walls and trying to find the mystery behind the barnacles.