She found a book by an underwater photographer, a gift from him: swimmers wearing little or nothing in pools, lakes, tanks. The pictures fleshed out her idea of happiness: eyes shut with rapture at the body being suspended, as if the people in the photos were dropped to safety from a height. Look how peaceful they were, their skin almost melting, ravishing beyond belief.
The business with the tank and timing themselves started as a joke that became a game that became a method of dealing with the silence in the house.
Their bathing suits were stale from disuse. Polite — courtly, almost — they took turns mounting the ladder. There was a five-foot clearance between the tank’s lip and the ceiling. Immersed, Meredith bubbled the water with exhalations so that she appeared to be boiling. She was tall and pale, her shade of hair was apricot; her pageboy was unchanged through a decade of marriage. Ray timed her at 22.0 seconds. She whip-kicked to the surface and climbed out, her suit sagging. She took the stopwatch. He lasted 32.33 seconds. Though they lacked any interest in training to compete, they tracked their scores on a whiteboard. They shared quite a laugh: Tom Sietas’s breath- holding world record for being in water without inhaling bottled oxygen beforehand was 10 minutes and 12 seconds. They’d never get close.
On Sundays she always cooked eggs Benedict from a recipe popular at Bridle, the restaurant near the Presidio, in Cow Hollow on Chestnut, where she was a sous chef. Ray also liked toast and marmalade, the vitreous orange of it marbled with what looked disturbingly like burst capillaries. Today a red dot marred her soft-poached egg. Ray played a recording of Handel’s Harp Concerto so loudly that Meredith could swear the vibration entered their utensils, so that they ate breakfast with tuning forks. “Do you want more?” she said, because it was easier to ask than “Are you having an affair?” “No,” he said, more sharply than necessary, not looking at her. They were childless.
Meredith blamed their hours over the years: She put in nights at Bridle; Ray worked days as the host of a cooking show filmed in the Culinary Channel’s studio at Fort Mason. Endless periods of standing caused a continual knife-like pain to shoot into her legs. The hotshot Young Chef favored creating foam on the plates. foam this, foam that! It looked like spit. She abhorred it. When she cut her hands, he ordered her to squeeze lemons, to teach her to be careful. She was old enough to be his mother. At the kitchen’s porthole window, she gazed into the dining room, where the clientele seemed like children — wait on me, feed me — in some eternal realm, while she dodged eddies of burning chaos. Lifting her fingers off the fogged-up window, she left behind the shape of a clamshell.
She struggled to find openings to speak to her husband. The agony of that; they’d been friends really for just about forever before they’d married, had moaned about their separate heartbreaks until he’d said, “Shall we save each other from this pointless waste of time?”
She was fascinated at how far people could go to defy the body’s limits. Many variations of static apnea exist: In 1993, Alejandro Ravelo held his breath in a pool for 6 minutes and 41 seconds. In 2008, David Blaine lasted 17:4.4 in a vat on The Oprah Winfrey Show but inhaled plenty of bottled oxygen ahead of time. (He was an illusionist — some people asked if he could be trusted.) Tom Sietas broke this record on Live with Regis and Kelly, 17:19. There’s free diving with and without fins, and with weights to plummet on one breath for distance. But Meredith’s heroine was Annette Kellerman, the Australian called the Million-Dollar Mermaid because she’d perform ballet in tanks filled with tables, plates, chairs, and lamps, as if to say: This is home, and I am a breathless dream inside it. Annette was selected in 1908 by a Harvard professor as “the Perfect Woman” because her contours were a virtual match for Venus de Milo’s.
Ray Locke was one year shy of forty, and Meredith Paganelli Locke was forty-five.
They’d married when he was twenty-nine and she was thirty-five. Both of them young, back then; now they’d slipped into new categories, Ray still young but Meredith middle-aged. He’d proposed at the Japanese Tea Garden, the stream gurgling below the lacquered bridge, when they were rising stars at a restaurant inspired by Alice Waters. He grew up in a wealthy clan on Russian Hill, but she was the only child of elderly Italian parents in the Sunset with a view of the cables for the N Judah streetcar, vacillating like tightropes. Different worlds, but she and Ray met at high school food competitions at the Moscone Center, and one day, in his mother’s spotless kitchen, they concocted a sourdough starter that exploded, and who could say why that tickled them with such horror and delight that it led to walks to buy joss sticks in Chinatown and her showing him how to whisper into a corner at the Neptune Society Columbarium so that his words traveled past the ashes of many pioneers and entered her ear in a far corner, and every Halloween they climbed to the Twin Towers to drink wine stolen from his father’s cellar and, gazing down at the city glittering like pearls blinking a message in a black sea, who can say why they did not think of kissing but felt instead a peace that held them fast.
At a dive in the Haight, over poisonous drinks with her girlfriends, Meredith wondered aloud about the affair. “Do you have proof?” asked Beth Ann. “It’s gone to his head, having his own show,” said Lindsay, on her third drink. Susan chimed in that groupie types do it with anybody on television and Meredith should ask her friend Eve, who was Ray’s director. “I’d stab him in the heart,” said Teresa, and during the gales of laughter, Meredith set down her martini in a panic, because the bar seemed to be filling with something that was rising and lapping at her chin. The sconces were tendrils electric with light. Beth Ann voted for it being Lola, a platinum-blond ex-girlfriend of Ray’s. “Lola’s trouble,” Teresa said. Maybe, though, it was a lot of silly groupie chef-show girls, hanging about the studio. Susan asked if she’d made a mistake to buy these spiked heels that by the way were killing her feet — and she hoisted her foot with its stylish shoe onto the table. Teresa screamed with amusement, constructing a plot for them all to lie in wait, catch Ray red-handed. Their faces looked buttery, their mouths stretched, their hair sprouted into fright wigs. In the ladies’ room, sloshed, Meredith splashed water on her brow. She couldn’t find the words to say to them, But he’s my best friend, or at least he once was.
He hugged to himself the knowledge, almost sexual in its intensity, that he could stop before any damage, while simultaneously knowing just as powerfully that there was no way to hold back; the exquisite pleasure of going past the verge, drowning in kisses and frantic stolen grasping.
Of course there came the inevitable tipping into lies. Meredith waited at the War Memorial Opera House, the cars sailing by on Van Ness. Tonight was Tristan and Isolde. Her cell phone rang; Ray said he’d be filming late. He taught audiences how to cook inexpensive, fast dinners. Leave my ticket at the will-call window, and I’ll join you after intermission, I hope. Her teal gown was backless with a fishtail. She cinched the belt of her raincoat; a summertime mist was forcing the crowd inside. She gave away for free both tickets to a young couple, Wagner devotees who were ecstatic. While treating herself to a napoleon in a pastry shop, the fellow at the counter asked if she was married, and, wanting to be invisible, not thinking, she replied, “No.” He drawled, “So what’s that on your finger?” She recalled an old joke as she held up her diamond band. “This? This is to keep the flies off.” His grin was savagely unwavering, until she squirmed, and rose up, and paid, and fled, transparent even to strangers.
Eve Robideaux invited Meredith to the Ferry Building for an afternoon of teas. She ordered hers iced, in a glass so cold it was weeping. She thanked Meredith for getting her into rehab years ago, right after they’d met as line cooks at Bridle. Meredith had urged Eve to get into television after Eve repeatedly harped about cooking being a bore, unending hard work and nothing permanent to show for it. Bloated whales came and ate up your handiwork. It had been Meredith who put Ray in her care when he voiced the same frustration with being a chef. “We’re worried, Merry,” said Eve, fiddling with her saucer. “You look down.” Tea made Meredith slightly ill, but Eve loved how it announced her being past an obsession with scotch; her parents had paid for the stay at a rehab favored by celebrities. Her childhood was like Ray’s, pony rides at birthday parties, winter intercessions in Gstaad (where the wealthy dispensed with a sensible placement of vowels); her parents shelled out the clams to get her into that culinary temple, Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and their princess could throw away what she’d learned there. Eve was a seductive example of being worry-free, of moving on. She was compact, dazzling; at thirty-two she could pass for twenty. Meredith’s shaking hand spilled some tea that painted a maple leaf onto the tablecloth. “Are you ill? Should I worry about you?” said Eve, her expression knitted in concern. “Oh, a touch of something. Flu. I’m fine,” said Meredith, clattering down her cup.
Her sheltered childhood, gladdened by visits to the tomato frogs at the Steinhart Aquarium. Wearing a boucle
