An attractive girl was standing beside me, twenty-four, maybe twenty-five years old. She was wearing a blue skirt and blazer. A security tag hung from her neck on a chain.
“She’s the ugliest thing I’ve seen in my whole life.”
The girl smiled. “Well, granted, she’s not about to win any pageants. But the guys like her. See all those fins sticking out of her stomach?”
I noticed a crop of little tube-like shapes protruding from the angler’s belly.
“Those aren’t actually fins. They’re male anglers. The males, they attach themselves to a female and fuse to her body. And then after a while their insides dissolve and they become these pouches of sperm she can use when she feels like reproducing.”
“That’s sweet,” I said.
The girl laughed. “Was that totally disgusting, what I just told you?”
“Which part, the fusing to the female’s body, or the insides dissolving?”
Her smile was lovely, almost too wide for her face, with a single dimple in one cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You talk to kids all day and you get a little loopy. I’m Laura.”
“Jacob,” I said.
“So, Jacob,” she said. “What do you like best about the new hall? I’m doing a survey.”
“I don’t know. I’ve just been in here. The ugly room.”
She sighed and shook her head in a teasing way. “Come with me,” she said.
I got up and followed Laura through the gallery. Children ran past us, laughing and yelling. I watched her walk, watched the way her dark hair swung across her back.
We came to a room off the main throughway. Like in the others, the walls here were all glass. Behind them hovered schools of differently colored jellyfish. They glowed brilliantly in the dark blue water. Their movements were so elegant, the way their bells expanded and contracted in a dreamy, billowing slow motion. The rhythm was like breathing, like a deep, slow breathing. Then, all at once, the whole bunch changed colors in unison, like the turning panels of a kaleidoscope. The bells went from violet to green to bright yellow.
“Better?” said Laura.
“Better.”
“This is my favorite room. Look at that one, over there,” she said, gesturing at a lone jellyfish hovering in a tank across the way. It was enormous; it looked like some kind of mutant, with a bell that was at least five feet across. Its huge tentacles lay coiled along the tank’s floor. It was hideous but lovely at the same time, a huge upswell of color and light.
“It’s amazing how much pressure these animals live under. This jelly, right here—you find it almost two miles beneath the surface. The pressure down there feels like an elephant standing on every square inch of your body. Isn’t that wild?”
She waited for me to answer. The giant jellyfish was glowing a pale orange. The light coming from its bell was soft, like firelight, and Laura appeared very beautiful in it.
“Would you like to go out to dinner with me?” I said.
“You’re asking me out?” she said.
“Usually, when I find a woman I like I just fuse myself to her body. But I’m trying something new.”
Laura laughed. “So, Jacob,” she said, holding up her pad again. “What’s your favorite part of the new hall?”
“That depends on what you’re doing later,” I said.
I did my best to win Laura over once we started dating. I liked her right away. She was bright and driven and funny. There was a toughness about her, too, a stubbornness that I found sexy. If she began reading a book she’d always read it all the way through, even if she hated it, especially if she hated it.
“I feel like it got the best of me if I put it down,” she said to me one night, when I woke up to find her sitting in the bathroom, on the lip of the bathtub, reading a novel she’d already read once and disliked for its confusing ending.
It made me smile, seeing her in her nightgown, squinting at her book in the bathroom in the middle of the night, so tired, but so determined.
“What?” she said, looking at me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“What?” she said again, laughing now. She threw the book at me.
I couldn’t get enough of her those first few months. I took her to all my favorite places. I took her to a restaurant out on the pier. I bought her a pair of rhinestone cowboy boots and took her dancing at a place I loved, a country music bar that was located on an alligator farm. To get in you had to cross a rope bridge suspended above the hatchery, with all those yellow, prehistoric eyes staring up at you.
“Okay, I give up. I surrender,” Laura said to me, laughing as we left the dance floor and returned to our booth, both of us tipsy. She flopped down and put her cowboy boots on my lap. “Where have you been all my life?” she said.
I pulled a tack from one of her boot heels. “I should tell you something,” I said.
She squinted at me. “This isn’t the part when you tell me you’re married, right?”
“I’m not married,” I said.
“You’re not in love with someone else.”
“I’m in love with you.”
“What?” she said. The band had started up again, and she had to shout over the music.
“I’m in love with you!” I said.
She grinned. “I’m in love with you too, fool!”
“Listen, though.” I paused, trying to figure out how to put it. An image of Anne came back to me: Anne lying curled up on the bed, crying. Screaming at me through her hands.
“Why are you doing this?” she yells. “Why are you ruining us?”
And I can see myself standing over her, not caring, saying terrible things to her.
“Who are you?” Anne says through the cage of her fingers. “For eight months everything’s great, and then, one day, out of nowhere, you’re saying these things to me. You’re killing me!”
And I don’t know what to tell her. I only know that something in me has changed and I don’t want to be with her anymore. Instead I want to hurt her, to lash out and cut deeper until she never wants to see me again. I want to tear her apart.
“I have problems, sometimes,” I said to Laura. “I have trouble…”
“Shh,” she said. She ran the back of her hand down my cheek. “We’re just getting started, right? Nobody’s buying rings yet?”
I felt a tremendous gratitude. “No. Nobody’s buying rings,” I said.
Coincidentally, though, a week earlier, an aunt of mine had died and I’d ended up inheriting, among other things, her engagement ring—a plain gold band crowned with a one-carat diamond—which I’ve been waiting to give to Laura ever since.
In our old apartment, I kept the ring hidden in a drawer in my desk. In our new house, I keep it in a small room off the main hallway, one of the dark, empty rooms Laura never goes into. I hid the ring beneath the floorboards—I pried one up and placed the wrapped ring box in the dark hollow. It makes me feel good when we get into bed at night to know that the ring is nearby, that it’s tucked like a seed deep inside our home.
There are moments, though, when I’m tempted to throw all this caution to the wind. Moments when I want to just go ahead with it. Laura and I will be lying in bed, talking, or taking a shower together, and suddenly I’ll feel this great urge to give her the ring—to go dig it up from beneath the floor and offer it to her right then.
But I tamp the urge down. I remind myself of what can happen when you rush things, when you’re not careful. I think of examples, such as a certain photograph Laura brought home from work not long ago. The photograph showed a killer whale stretched out in the middle of a country road. The whale was lying on its side, one fin in the air, the other crushed between its body and the ground.
The picture was taken at the site of an accident the aquarium’s transportation crew had. They were driving
