roused hawk.
She cornered Eve at the TV studio. Ray was in a corner, wearing a paper collar while a woman powdered the shine off his high forehead. Meredith lost her voice with Eve, then found it. “Is it true? What are you planning with Ray?” Eve hardly moved. That smooth veneer of the easeful childhood that alternated with a sheen of addiction. Eve showed Meredith the clipboard she was gripping and said, “We’re planning to show how to grind your own spices, Merry. You can stay and watch.” Meredith could scarcely control her limbs as she stormed out. Ray strode after her, and she broke into a run.
The lure of breath-holding is how it violates the laws of the gods. Fasting, meditation, and prior hyperbreathing can prolong submersion; uncanny how many souls risk blackout, bloody lungs, damaged tissue, burst veins. Death. Legend has it that the ama divers of Japan brought up pearls, but the truth is more workaday; mostly they brought up abalones to sell the nacre interiors.
She screamed at some apprentices at Bridle who thought it would be hilarious to use beef stock for the vegetarian special. In the middle of the night, with Ray sleeping, she drank a bottle of wine, seized his ID card, and swiped her way into the Culinary Channel’s studio. He’d told her that the subject of the next day’s filming would be lamb stew, and it took more than an hour for her to march the vats of it, and the pans filled with the breakdown of the stages of preparation, out to her car. She took the food to St. Vincent’s shelter. Ha, look at tomorrow’s neat little script, turned into nothing.
So much energy squandered on being foolish. Ray almost got fired for having no idea how to improvise. Eve saved the day by defrosting some trout, taking center stage, and showing how to fillet and grill fish, skinning and boning it with a surgical skill that won her applause. She did not have to ponder much to figure out who had sabotaged Everyday Triumphs, and she phoned Bridle and told the Young Chef. Meredith’s work had been suffering; she burned orders, she was a sleepwalker. While chiding Meredith, the Young Chef smirked and said, “If you’re going to steal hundreds of dollars’ worth of lamb, at least bring it here.” At first she was desperate to be fired, anything but his jollity at her distress. But when he wondered out loud if the kitchen’s fumes had steam-cooked her brain, she absorbed in an instant the truth that genuine adulthood comes when one does not run off because of shame, when one stays and demands a home.
She roamed among the cosmetics counters at Macy’s, seeking potions, wrinkle creams, hydrating salves. Skeletal women in tight black dresses held atomizers and spritzed her with rose and lilac mists. Their tuberous fingers waved like polypi, motioning her closer to the pots of coral paste, the shallow pans of shadows.
A trickling sound issued from their walls; they suspected brocade patches of mold and split pipes too expensive to get to. Meredith wondered if a crack had sprung in the Plexiglas. In homage to Annette, she put items in the water, a battered teakettle, a dial telephone, a broken lock from her gym bag, the shipwrecked items of ordinary existence.
Midway through their ten-year marriage, Meredith had had a fling — the word evoked a stick thrown as far as possible — that Ray, so far as she knew, was ignorant of. Marcus was a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, and she still winced to recall the final meeting, their twenty-seventh in the span of three months, the afternoon at the Fairmont segueing into a grindingly awful finish in the parking lot of Muir Woods, the breezes ripping tufts of furry bark off the red-woods and pelting Marcus’s Cadillac. He was announcing he’d found someone new. When she asked what she’d done, he said, “Nothing. It’s the end we expected.” They’d gone to concerts, and Lord, to go dancing with him. He’d clutched her once and moaned how much he needed her. “I could fall in love with you, you know.” He’d said that. She’d said it back. Could. At the Cable Car Museum, over the earassaulting whine of the gears as the frayed cables were getting soldered to a safer thickness, he’d asked if she could see herself ever living in London. His native city. She started breaking down in his car at Muir Woods, stopped mercifully short of pleading, but when she said she was shocked and ready to cry, he shouted, “Shocked?” A straight ballet dancer could have his pick of women — why, it was a fucking parade. Air refused to enter her lungs; she pushed against the passenger’s door but it was as if she were drowning in a car. The utter shame of her fantasies, the gentle but firm phrasing she’d rehearsed to tell Ray she was leaving him; her heady mirages of soaring in that stratosphere where Marcus traveled, in the ether of the talented and famous; her sharply outlined mental pictures of gadding about London; the girlish rush of seeing a star leaping onstage after he’d sidled up to her at a charity fund-raiser and invited her to spend the night. When Ray had asked her why she was so sad, she’d replied, “Because how can I feel so old without having grown up.”
At an extremity of breath-holding, a little-talked-about occurrence is a buckling of the body, a triggering of the sexual nerves, an arousal; sexual asphyxiation beckons. At 2:01.1 exactly, this frightened Meredith almost to death, and Ray jumped in to rescue her. She lay heaving and sobbing on the floor, and they called an end to everything. What was the prize? They hadn’t concocted one! What was the point? Why hadn’t they thought clear to the eventual need to drain the tank? They formed a bucket brigade, dashing the water into the garden, and the task was so laborious and ridiculous that they laughed, and when the men arrived to cart the tank away, Meredith and Ray held hands — they had not touched like this in so long that it was like an electrical prod to the tails of their spines.
With her hair tied into the topknot that they referred to as her Pebbles Flintstone, while wearing her UC Santa Cruz T-shirt with its marinara stain near the banana-slug mascot, because who cares if I look like hell, she cooked an omelet that was the most perfect he’d ever seen or smelled or tasted. It was plain. He was about to reach across the table and say, “I do so love you, and—” but he had no idea how to complete his sentence, and during that pause, she said she knew that he was leaving her, even if he didn’t. Yet. His rib cage ached. “She’ll take your show from you, Ray,” she said, her back to him, clearing the plates. “How do you know?” he managed. He should have said, I’m drowning, forgive me, come here. “It’s what pushy women do!” she screamed. She shattered a plate against a wall, in the manner of wronged vixens in movies, which had always struck him as too theatrical and deranged to occur in actual life. “They want to direct you and then eat you alive!” When he grabbed her arm, she blazed. “Go on, men think they’ll live forever,” she spat out.
Beth Ann insisted that Meredith and Lindsay join her in toasting Ray’s departure. “Good fucking riddance!” she cried. Lindsay hooted, “His show sucks anyhow. Cooking shows are porn, stuff we watch but don’t get to eat.” Meredith chomped wasabi peas so she didn’t have to speak, and when she choked, they pounded her back. How happy her friends were now that she’d joined their club of the solitary furies. While packing to move to an apartment on Green Street, she decided to prick her anguish by watching Everyday Triumphs, and what do you know, Eve was on camera with him, teamed up. She shut off the set, but walking past the silent box she couldn’t help but see her husband still bobbing behind the glass, as if in a flat aquarium, trapped in the everlasting digital dots that passed for immortality.
The tank had soaked through the floor. Her boxes of childhood things in the basement were rotted. Her Chatty Cathy doll’s hair sprouted mange. Her school papers were a smear. A plastic mermaid from an old fish bowl was corroded, her arms arrested in uplift, like the priest during the Major Elevation when he declares, “This is My Body.”
She would come to associate his new marriage with pumpkins, because his wedding was in the autumn following their divorce. Squash soup was on the menu at Bridle; a blade slipped and she needed stitches. Pumpkin lattes and candle smoke seeping out of the den-tiled smile of jack-o’-lanterns: She pretended she could inhale his wedding as an aroma of fall. Meredith, what were you thinking? scolded Beth Ann. You snuck into his reception? At the Palace of Fine Arts, the wind threatened to overturn the tables under the sand-colored dome. Meredith hid behind a colonnade, unnerved to be in a pose like the female statues at the top of the dome, looking mournfully down, grieving at the thought of a world without art. Guzzling champagne until she drooled froth, Meredith pitied a tipsy bridesmaid wading into the lagoon. Ray gave a speech about his new bride, thanked her for saving him from loneliness. Eve gazed straight into his eyes, in a way Meredith was pretty sure she herself had never managed. Even at a distance, anyone could see that the welded vision of Ray to Eve was carrying them already to their wedding bed. She could picture them entwined.
