The bed is soaked, the rest of the world drops away.
Meredith staggered to the wharf, let the spray hit her. A sailor was dropping stones to send widening circles into the Bay. At the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum, she stared at a grain of rice on which a miniaturist had written the Lord’s Prayer, the placard stating that each stroke of a letter was made between breaths, and fast fast light, between heartbeats, which the artist had spent years training himself to feel.
The fate of the lobster is famous. Consider also the primitive practice of pouring boiling water on eels in boxes rough enough for their writhing to scale them into a delicacy. Behind the facade, behind the counter, within the tiled place, is the steady drip caused by the kosher butcher. Consider the common blow that strikes a cow in an abattoir; for a fraction of a second, the cow stands with a shocked, full register, equally alive and dead, knowing itself to be both living and gone. People realizing their mortal limits drift about in a condition too profound to bellow, one foot in this world and one in another.
She looked for God in her work. Her palate craved vegetables, tonic water, and creme brulee; she swam in Aquatic Cove with the Dolphin Club. She traveled and found new menus that she convinced Bridle to offer; a few pleasant men dated her until one or the other of them lost interest. Either the passion was extreme and quick to explode, or nothing scaled past friendship. Without giddiness or rancor, she designed a fine farewell party when the Young Chef moved on to Dallas and the owner promoted her to head chef. She copied out her favorite quote from Annette Kellerman, which extolled the powers nigh onto eternity for those who can swim their “solitary course night or day and forget a black earth full of people that push.”
She was neither gleeful nor sad when the news reached her that Eve was hosting a popular program called Grand Escapes on her own, while Ray’s show was canceled. She was neither gleeful nor sad to hear of their divorce. Whenever she picked up the phone to reach him, stuck in neutral, there was no completing the call.
He sent a single word, MARVELOUS, in block letters on a stiff card when, in her third year as head chef of Bridle, the Chronicle featured her for having won one Michelin star.
He buried his father. He inherited very little. He watched a TV program that surprised him by mentioning that the ama divers could walk around for years seeming to be fine, but suddenly, toward old age, their eyes might flare up bright red, their organs rupture.
Meredith at long last took her moldy Chatty Cathy to a doll hospital at Hyde and Pine. A man who looked like a tailor in a children’s fairy tale set aside a bisque torso he’d been gluing together to greet Meredith, who blurted, “Why do girls love pulling the heads off Barbies?” The doll doctor laughed and said, “Wow, I’ve often wondered.” They bantered suggestions: Because the necks are so skinny! Because it makes it easier to play hammer throw, twirling the head by the ponytail! None of this was monumental; there was nothing vital or even cosmically comic, and therefore she treasured the episode as truer to life as it’s lived.
God is everywhere, but more in the center of everywhere. God lies within a step altered out of the ordinary, but more within the center of that new radius of a step.
At the Museum of Modern Art, staring up below the glass bridge, she saw the outline of a child’s feet stopped. It can be frightening to walk that suspension. Larger feet waited next to the child’s. All motionless. Meredith had a distinct sensation of sprouting cuts that were like gills; she could breathe nearly forever at the bottom of this sea. Go on, go on, it’s fine, you’ll see: She sent that heavenward, toward the child. And then the feet crossed the glass bridge together. Meredith left the museum feeling rinsed and cooled.
At a conference in Chattanooga about new American cuisine, she went to the Living Art Gallery, where bedding was set up for people who wanted to sleep surrounded by jellyfish. Pulsating moon jellies, transparent pink tissue like parasols. Living water. Oh, Annette! Didn’t you suggest that power is born from piloting through the sea? Didn’t you write that despite being a mermaid in the movies, you still devoutly desired to see a real one perched on a rock, combing her long green hair?
She ran into him at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, near Rodin’s The Thinker. His hairline had receded. He was back to cooking, he said, at a fusion place in the Mission District. Eve was a network star, living with a high- powered lawyer. “Ah,” Meredith said. He didn’t degrade her by asking for forgiveness. His fists were jammed into the pockets of his jacket. She gripped his elbows. He looked at her eyes in a manner they had never fully managed. She did not know how to mention her own affair without sounding as if she were either evening the score or letting him off the hook. So they did not speak much. But their look conveyed an entirety, without any fairy-tale ending: She was dating someone at the time; he was, too. But now it could happen that from time to time he could call her up and speak, and she could talk to him gladly.
In her youth, her tastes ran Baroque. French tapestries. Layered tortes. Now she craved simplicity. Consomme. Distillations.
Meredith Locke passed from middle-aged to older-but-still-relatively-young. Her legs were marbled with varicose veins from a career on her feet, but she kept her Michelin star and her post as head chef until she turned fifty-eight; without anxiety, without bitterness, she accepted the news one day that despite her faithful screenings, she was discovered to have breast cancer that had spread. Her time had simply arrived; that was all.
Ray Locke moved to a new restaurant, a Latin spot with cobalt walls. It would be his fate to jump from place to place. But for now he was living with a schoolteacher who was friendly with Meredith and understood how life twists about, trying to grab its tail and form circles. She told Ray to go care for Meredith, and then she’d welcome him back.
And so they were together again, for a short while. Her pain by then was extreme.
He brought her a gift he’d bought in Springfield, Illinois, ages ago but never used: a cookbook from the Civil War. In her apartment on Green Street, he prepared a carrageen blancmange. “You’re the only person currently on the planet who’d like this,” he said. “I love you. I adore you, you know.” Her smile, the dark circles framing her eyes, the turquoise head scarf. Once upon a time, seaweed could travel to a druggist’s in the Midwest in the mid- nineteenth century and cost little. It was prized as salubrious for those of a delicate constitution. The carrageen had to be washed thoroughly and boiled, and he added the barest handful to the milk, bitter almonds, sugar, cinnamon, and mace. He fed it to her in spoonfuls. “My dearest,” she said.
In the end, one dissolves into atoms. Her affair with the ballet dancer: How was that so different from Ray with Eve? That desire for grandeur, release, an upper world. God peering down might see it all as some balanced math equation. Finally, wasn’t it the strangest thing that passion should ebb with long-knowing, and yet people are born to want to find The One? Wasn’t that the great human dilemma? What if a person aimed to find God within physicality, to have bodily desire increase? What idiocy to separate God’s love from tactile human love.
At the shoreline at Lands End, Ray and Meredith stood bundled up. Bless Annette Kellerman, who said that water taught modesty of the soul: She remarked cheerily that “after leaving the shore behind, I seemed to shrink and shrink till I was nothing but a flecky bubble and feared that the bubble would burst.”
But they were beyond words now.
His arm was around her, and hers were around him. He leaned down to kiss her at the exact second that she lifted her face to meet his in a lingering kiss.
It is the kiss of their lives.
The salted air. The sea rushes in to cover their bare feet with a spume of lace. The hermit crabs rest below
