The Salted Air Read online

  THE LESSON

  What happened to me is simple. My boyfriend Harvey was depressed. He had probably been depressed long before he met me, but I persuaded him to see someone, he listened, and after that he was officially depressed. The new title came with meds. Taking meds was no issue for him. Drugs made you feel good, this much we both knew.

  The period of decline was long and frayed, and I’ve spent too much time telling too many people about it. But the very end went like this: Harvey felt so good he stopped taking his meds. It’s a common story, I know. One night while he was off his meds he swallowed all the painkillers he could fit in his mouth. Which was a good thing, it turned out, because he threw the whole mess up on the bed, and he was fine. He lived. We told no one.

  And this is where my culpability begins.

  It happened a second time, but it was more ambiguous. It was an accident. At least it went down on the forms that way. What happened was that Harvey was high and drunk, and, he said, he thought he was swallowing different pills from the ones he had swallowed before. This time he took few enough that he could not be roused, and he woke in A & E with me sitting beside him. This, I think, is where my culpability began to blossom.

  The third time I wanted to teach Harvey a lesson. When I told my father I wanted to teach Harvey a lesson, he said this wasn’t true, but I think it is true. I think, somewhere inside me, I knew suicide was on his mind. We didn’t discuss it, don’t get me wrong. And if anyone had mentioned that it might be a bad idea for me to go away on that particular weekend, I would never have left. If Harvey had asked me to stay or had even held onto me a little too long during our last hug, I would not have gone. But none of it happened like that, and so I went off to teach him a lesson about his power over me. About what he could do and could not.

  THE PUMA

  Harvey died eighteen months ago, and I haven’t lived in my own place since. For the past couple of months or so — since before Christmas — I’ve been staying with Lois, an old friend of Mum’s, who gives a reckless laugh in reply to almost anything, then frowns into her cell phone, all the wrinkles coming to life around her eyes, and says, ‘Carl is a fuckwit.’ Carl is the ex-husband.

  Mum stayed with Lois in this very house overlooking Island Bay when she first moved away from Dad and me. This was not a separation, at least not in name, but I think it marked my mother’s friendship with Lois as a bond of resistance, a bond formed in opposition not only to their own husbands but to the very essence of maleness — which, for women of their generation, may be distinguished by both cruelty and irresistibility. Men lurk at the centre of their lives, vital and despicable, a malignant kidney.

  I sit here beside Lois on a white leather sofa, smiling and drinking wine that I know is too expensive for me to appreciate. When she heard that I had come to the end of my stint at the ‘mountain retreat’ — her words, not mine — she insisted I come to live with her. She would hear of nothing else. She has known me since I was four, since my parents arrived in this country. I think of Lois as ‘the Puma’. On the one hand, she’s a woman’s woman, always sparkling with sequins or silver or fluorescent-coloured contact lenses, always laughing and tilting her head in sympathy, a devotee of cushions, massage and cocoa butter. But then I know she wears this carapace of femininity uneasily, distrustfully. Beneath the jewels and linen she is fierce as a wild cat, and I would not care to contradict her.

  My respect for Lois quietens me. The subject before us now is men, but what can I say to such a woman as Lois? A man is not a separate sort of thing for me. I think of my relationship with Harvey, and it strikes me that we may as well both have been women. But I am grieving, and so my opinion regarding him may be suspect.

  But, then, I know it is suspect, so maybe it can be trusted after all.

  ‘What are you writing?’ Lois asks. She is familiar with the notebooks, has read hundreds of pages of my mother’s. Observed me scribbling on envelopes. Seen me staring with a bit too much focus out a darkened window.

  ‘Show it to me,’ she says. ‘No, better yet, read it.’

  This is not my not-quite-a-diary. It’s the last of the family notebooks, pinched from our home before I left. So, then, it’s a public space, of sorts, and I’ll share. Or maybe now that our family is broken, it’s become private. Somehow I don’t know any more. Either way, I read.

  THE SHED

  When we lived in America, we had a long, sloping yard behind our house. The grass was almost never cut, and it seemed to me as a child that the yard was rich in half-concealed objects, tree stumps and abandoned birdbaths, the corners of overgrown gardens, a misplaced spade. Back in the corner of this space, on a shoulder of land that jutted out over the bed of a nameless creek, was a shed without a door.

  My parents used our garage to store their lawnmower and Spartan assemblege of gardening supplies. They used this shed for nothing. I never once so much as heard them mention it. So this shed without a door was vacant — no, it was better than vacant. It was lined with wooden shelves and a crooked workbench, and every surface was crowded with junk: cracked flowerpots, paint pots rimmed in pink and corroded lime, jars of seeds that shook like rattles, a vice hairy with dust.

  If you sat on the wooden floorboards, you could hear the water surging in the creek below. There was a window of opaque glass, and in the afternoons the shed was flooded with foggy light. I still have a memory of lying on that floor in a warm cloud of light, my feet sticking out the open doorway and my head empty except for the lulling burble of water. Lying there was comfort, deep and untroubled, and even as a child I felt that it would be all right to stay on that floor for a long time, to stay there without my mum or dad and to let my body simply uncurl. Unwrap itself like a present in that cloud of light.

  I think of Harvey as that shed.

  PHANTASMAGORIA

  After I finish reading the entry about the shed, Lois pulls me close to her, into the minor padding of flesh between my body and her ever-more-prominent bones. She kisses my neck — not a peck, but an open-mouthed clamp, vampiric and tender at once. When she lets me go, she shakes her head at me.

  ‘You know what your trouble is?’ she says.

  ‘What’s my trouble?’

  ‘You’ve got to stop thinking of people as houses.’

  Upstairs that night in Lois’s guest bed, I begin a letter to my mum, then stop. A letter seems like such a wholesome idea, but what does one say in a letter? Why not call, email, text, message her? A letter seems less like communication and more like showing off. People used to write letters to be collected, edited and bound into volumes. What’s personal in that? But now I sound like my father. Of course a letter is precious and of course I will write one, only not tonight and not in Lois’s guest bedroom.

  Lying still, I enter that fantastic realm of half-sleep. I feel myself stepping into it, feel it rising around my shoulders like the algae-thick surface of a pond holding up your hair as you sink. Half-sleep is an inhuman place, and I don’t like it. What does Keats call it? A phantasmagoria, a wonderland in reverse. Spiders and headless joggers and flower faces gleaming black like dishes of motor oil.

  Maybe that isn’t Keats, maybe that’s just me.

  ONCE

  I have a memory of first moving into the house on the river terrace in Palmerston North. I must be six years old. We have shifted from the rental where we lived for my first two years in New Zealand. We are unpacking, and it is after my bedtime, but my parents don’t seem to have noticed. A chair is lying on its side. Kitchen utensils are arranged on tea towels across the floor. A potato masher, a spatula, a slotted spoon I still possess. My mum discovers the light for the back veranda and turns it on. We all step outside. Fluttering around the yellow bulb is a swarm of newly hatched praying mantises, circling and circling.

  IN HARVEY’S CHILDHOOD BEDROOM

  After Harvey’s funeral, I stayed at his parents’ house for a couple of days. Irene and Gary Wells. This period is a haze. I think of it as h
aving taken place underwater. I close my eyes and I see tears on Irene’s face. I see Gary sitting on a chair in a room by himself. Inexplicably, I hear sitar music. Sometimes I picture raindrops on a window. The window is the very one in Harvey’s childhood bedroom where I slept during the days immediately following the funeral. I see this room and feel the space of it surrounding me, and for a moment I think I’m there with Harvey after his funeral is over, and this thought is not the least macabre. What’s macabre is the realisation of what comes after, of who I was really there with.

  If I try to focus on this face that was lying there beside me, a face, like mine, worn down by grief, I find I am unable. I can see the chest beneath the face, its clumps of hair thicker than Harvey’s were. I can picture the hands, larger than Harvey’s but with his same fingers. Even in my mind’s eye I squint at the sight of the belly, the paunch which I sometimes remember as yellow, the colour of jaundice. But that’s as far as I can go without feeling those hands on my body.

  What I want is to recall pushing these hands away. To remember that I was left alone in Harvey’s childhood bedroom with only the rain on the window.

  But, then, this is not a story about grief. It’s about love. Or something close.

  SALT

  I heard the knock, and I knew who it was. There was something in the knock that told me everything. When Harvey’s older brother Bruce opened the door and he was still wearing his white shirt and tie from the dinner we’d been to with his parents, I somehow knew he would still be wearing this shirt, this red tie. He came and sat on the end of the bed without asking, but I didn’t mind. He put his head in his hands and then, smelling of musk and cologne and wine, he began to cry right there in front of me the same as Harvey used to do. Just a full-on cry without the least modesty or reservation.

  Sometimes I think there are no separate emotions. That there is only one emotion, one intensity of feeling, and it takes in everything: rage and joy and love and sorrow, all of it. It’s the fullness of it, the wholeness of it, that matters. And Bruce’s grief there on the end of the bed in which I was lying was so whole it seemed to fill Harvey’s childhood bedroom. Before I knew it, I could feel it with me beneath the duvet, and so I told Bruce to join us, his grief and me. I folded back the sheet and guided his body into the warmth. I held his head on my shoulder and touched his hair and said nothing at all.

  Both of us were still crying when I turned his face to mine. When I felt his shoulder blades above me. When I opened my palm on the top of his head. I remember tears on both our faces during all of this, and the taste of salt seems bound up in everything. The tang of it on my lips. The grittiness of it in his hair.

  I often think of that knock. Of how much I knew when I told him to come in.

  THE BOY IN MAGORIA

  Lois is gone by the time I wake the next morning. I make coffee and drink it outside on the deck overlooking the grey knob of rock that makes this house worth a million dollars. The bay is bright and flat, a hammered surface, but the island is caught up in mist, and for a moment it looks as if the mist has issued out of a hole in the island itself. But then, before my eyes, the mist dissolves, the sun appears, falling on a slope of green, and the island sharpens, crosses from phantasmagoria to ordinary magoria.

  Aside from that once, I don’t think Harvey and I ever visited the sea when the sky was not overcast or the wind less than galeforce. It gave our trips a romantic anguish, our returns a powerful intimacy I still miss. It was Harvey who always wanted to go to the bay to stand in the ruins of the gun emplacement while the wind drew up the locks of his hair like Medusa.

  I wonder, was it all for the homecoming after?

  TODAY I FOLLOW THE DOWNWARD-SLOPING BLOCKS BESIDE stone walls and shady plots and sea glimpses to the bus stop. I think I’m going to the sea with a small notepad in my pocket to celebrate the little twinge of positive recollection that came to me this morning after a night spent in a darker place, but, by the time the downtown bus stops, I’ve given up on this idea altogether.

  I get off near the waterfront and walk amid hired bicycles and a sprawling family of tourists in forest-green windbreakers. Lean men are hawking ice creams from wheeled stands, but I don’t trust the sharpness of their smiles and I look away. The smell of grease and seawater furls, unfurls. The wind mounts. A white poodle jogs by all on its own. For some reason, the poodle returns me to last night’s unwelcome recollections. To hands about to touch me. A mouth beside my own.

  I step into the art gallery, but it’s crowded, so I retreat to the city library and sit down in front of the great glass windows. I jot down something of my morning, a few unrelated thoughts. The rest I write in my head, which goes at twice the speed. After that, all I want is to read, but the book I’ve brought, something non-fiction pinched from Lois’s shelves, is unwelcoming and I stash it back in my bag.

  I browse, pace, wringing my hands. My chest hurts for a book. But which book? I wander, my eyes following numbers that mean nothing to me. I turn. Poetry. I skim. Spend an hour with the ‘drainless shower of light’ that is still Keats. Dependable Keats. It is not until I’m outside looking for somewhere to eat that it occurs to me I did not look up the poem about phantasmagoria. But, then, maybe it was a letter and not a poem at all.

  I might never know.

  As I’m getting ready to leave the café where I’ve had lunch, I spot this guy Lyle coming out of the toilet. Apparently, he has not eaten here, just ducked in to use the loo, and I catch him in a hurry to be on his way. I stand, a nervous impulse, like I’m an old-fashioned fellow rising for the lady of his party, and I end up following him outside, both of us frantically talking, or at least trying to talk, over the grinding gears of a bus.

  Lyle is not an old friend, nor an especially close one, but he has potential. I don’t mean romantic potential — I can’t think of these kinds of things just now — though this may be partly what I mean. What I mostly mean is that he is easy to talk to and slightly meek and has never lied to me. Cynically, perhaps, my expectations don’t extend much further.

  ‘You’re back in town,’ Lyle says. He has been trying to say some version of this for about half a minute and has almost given up when the bus finally passes us by. At once the street sways into a relative silence and there is a long moment of agony. It is the agony of arriving at the crossroads you come upon in early conversation, when the negotiation is not yet complete. What kind of talk is this? An easy chat, hello, goodbye? Or will you turn the corner into some detail that compels you to devote ten minutes to being informed and informing in your turn. Or is it something more? Are you settling into some undiscovered rhythm of a new sort of day?

  ‘Excuse me!’ The café door opens, flinging sunlight over all us pedestrians. A man in a fluorescent vest turns, a white bag in his hands. Standing there in the café doorway, the focus of our attention, is a woman about my age but very thin. Something bothers me about her. Then I notice her apron with the name of the café in gold letters.

  I let my hand fall on Lyle’s wrist. ‘I haven’t paid.’

  He looks confused, is straining to step away.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Don’t go.’

  Inside the café I hand over the money card that withdraws from my parents’ account — all three of our names are on it — and then glance back to the window. Lyle is standing with his back to me. He is a nice boy. Younger than me by a few years, with sharp corners on his body. Am I going to flee from him? I might, except that I’ve already flirted, and to walk away seems too much like a breach of contract.

  STORIES AND THEIR ENDINGS

  There is this story from the early days of my parents’ lives. They are both eighteen years old and at university. My father is so boundlessly optimistic that he bypasses arrogance and qualifies as Messianic. My mother is circumspect. She’s biding her time. She doesn’t know a man who would not give anything to sleep with her. In photos, she wears pigtails, leather, a face of full make-up like a sexy clown, a black tee-shi
rt and a flat, almost depressed expression on her face. Her life is somewhere beyond the margins of photographs, daring her to come and live it.

  At a party, she agrees to go home with my father. He is stumbling, euphoric, but she turns to him and says, ‘This story does not end the way you think it does.’

  They go home and my father falls asleep alone on the sofa. My mother goes into his bedroom and locks the door.

  Four years later they are married. So who was right?

  THE PRODIGY

  Lyle and I end up at a bar. Neither of us are drinkers — in fact, I am fairly sure I have heard Lyle bemoan the drinking culture of this country on a previous occasion. Nonetheless, here we sit beside last year’s artificial Christmas tree with our small drinks in front of us. Like Harvey, Lyle is not especially talkative. He is not withdrawn. He simply doesn’t seem to mind the silence that I also pretend not to mind.

  At first, we do not talk about Harvey, the surest link we have. In fact, funeral aside, I have almost never seen Lyle without Harvey present. I know they were close, especially in the last months. I have no idea how the two of them became friends. Harvey was older than me and, therefore, almost a full decade older than Lyle.

  It’s unspoken that we will not discuss Harvey, but I don’t mind talking about Harvey, not today. For the first time in months, I want to talk about Harvey.

  I ask Lyle how he came to know Harvey, and he tells me they went to university together. This explanation requires logistics. Lyle first attended university when he was sixteen. ‘Maths,’ he says. ‘Full scholarship. I took Shakespeare to break it up, and there was Harvey.’