“The sea never changes, and its works, for all the talk of men, are wrapped in mystery.”
–Joseph Conrad
The girl appears at port midday, as fishermen are coming back to shore and sails are being laid out to dry in the sun. No one bothers her; she is a fixture like the thieving wharf rats and urchin boys who beg for work, too pitiful, too far gone. The bottoms of her skirts are ringed permanently wet and her boots squeak as she walks; her curls fall from their knot in tendrils tinged green, tangled like strands of seaweed. Her eyes reflect the color of the sea, a hopeful and glittering blue-green. When the wind sweeps and stacks the clouds, lowering the sky, and the sea pushes up in waves to meet it, her eyes go cold-gray. The sky answers with rain. Most days the sea and the sky are held apart by some resistance to the air, but when rain falls and mist sprays and waves crash, it seems that the elements have fallen through their holds and there is no up or down, just one continuous veil. It seems the way it always used to be, before life stepped out from the water and man inherited the earth. She won’t disappear until long after all the vessels expected back that day have returned, the dimming quiet harbor a forest of mast and sail, with a gentle lapping that may just as well be the song of coming stars.
Lost at sea, the merchant said. The ship was sent East, bearing oil, candle wax, and dry cod, and spent three nights moored at port, with the sailors set to shore, before turning back full of hemp, tea, and cinnabar. Likely a sudden squall had descended, and not pirates, as the ship had not been found. The merchant had already collected the insurance, worth more than every man on board. Didn’t she figure it was so, by now? It had been two years, at least. He tilted the girl’s chin — the graze of nails, the very tips of his fingers — and saw that her eyes were strangely flat and colorless, like ocean water held cupped in your hands. He felt sorry for her. She had come to the door of his counting-house, claiming she had done some sewing for his wife; he let her inside, he admired enterprise, even in the female sex — he assumed that she would bargain for a larger payment. But instead the girl had fallen to her knees, pleading him to speak of this matter long forgot. By the way she carried her body, with a mixture of pride and shame, he knew she had given herself to this sailor. He slid his hand from her chin to her slender white neck and held it there, wrapped. He felt the throb of her pulse quickening. Do you need anything? he asked. Money?
To her, his dreams of seafaring had been like nights spent in another’s embrace, one she imagined to be slippery and elusive, all-consuming and airless. He would come back, penitent, to tell her of these dreams, but she almost wished he wouldn’t. He kept parts of them from her, she could tell, and delivered the rest with a willful naïveté, laughing at his own green nature and romantic desires. He said he wanted to beat back the force of wave and wind with mere muscle, to land a giant wingspanned albatross on deck, to make friends of wild-eyed, painted island natives, to trade pocketfuls of tobacco for exotic fruits, delicate trinkets (for her) at sun-hot, pulsing bazaars. She hated that he held these dreams closer to his heart than he held her, and that he felt, in sharing them with her, they must be denigrated. She hated herself for wishing him devoid of all desire but for her — after all, that he had those other desires was once what most attracted her.
She tried, at first, to take part in these dreams; with sewing money set aside and hidden from her mother, she purchased the book “Robinson Crusoe,” of which people often spoke. She read it slow and careful, cognizant all along that each page brought her no closer to the true experience he would one day, very soon, have. Her memory of its story would sink and bury what later resurfaced as her greatest fear: that he simply lived on elsewhere, shipwrecked and cast away, or worse, by choice.
Oh, but couldn’t she have settled on a boy with lesser ambitions, a dearth of courage, a more passive imagination? He was a blonde freckled boy, thin but strong from lifting cod-heavy nets, and young, younger than her by a year. The most alive and beating thing she’d ever held, unfit for a husband in almost every way, but she loved him, and he was to return from this, his first sail, six months older, seventeen, and with the money to marry. She spoke sometimes of children and he listened. His father died a sailor, and so had his brothers. He had a widowed mother to think of too.
She herself lived then in her family’s cramped city rooms, she and her mother and sisters sewing all but Sunday mornings. She went out midday to bring a pail of dinner to her father, who clerked downtown for a merchant, and then she snuck portside to the fisheries. She was her father’s favorite, and he covered for her.
On their last afternoon, which they spent, as always, on his fishery’s rooftop, she begged him not to leave. They were above the blinding, endless stretch of water, the overcrowding of masts, the smell of codfish being stripped, and that much closer to the lints of cotton pulled in wisps across the sky, blue in a clean and empty way the sea could never be. She asked that, at the very least, he marry her first. They’d been lucky so far he hadn’t put her with child. She looked him in the eyes — his were leaving her, hardening — and wondered if she truly loved him or loved some other, untrue version of him who would stay here with her, poor and ignorant of the world below.
Sarah, he said, exasperated, pacing. You must get used to this. It won’t be but one passage — I’ll sail again, with other ships, as long as I can. This is the life I’ve chosen. And you’ve chosen me.
He knelt and took her own hand to wipe away her tears; he was only a boy, but used to caring for women. She let him make love to her, that was when she felt the closest, her flesh, her heartbeat, her joy, undistinguished from his, but she was angry, for his shortness, for his abandonment, for the way he worded it, You’ve chosen me. Later, alone, she sucked the salt from her fingers, but the taste stayed there, stained.
The fortune-teller read the cloudy glow within the ball, rendered by candlelight, and confirmed: He was lost. She admired the wording used by the girl, that common phrase of sailortown, Lost at sea. Almost certainly dead may have been more accurate, or even, simply, gone, but the world was full of mystery and surprise even she couldn’t tell and a world without hope was not only too dark but also one without patrons. She took her hands from the ball’s crystal warmth and motioned to the girl’s purse, heavy with coin. Is he worth waiting for?
The girl’s pale, shaky hands loosened the drawstring and poured the contents on the table — quite a bundle, for a sewing girl. With a glance the fortune-teller counted it up and then explained the procedure in slow, careful words — she hated for her accent, however dulled by decades spent in the New World, to obscure what was already so foreign to hear. You are two women wrapped together, she said, whose needs are opposed. They will destroy you unless they’re pulled forever apart. That is what I can do, separate you in two, so you will be just one woman at a time.
The girl stayed silent, taking it in, and spoke flatly: I don’t understand how this will bring him back. Only patience and time, she replied, will join you back together; and the only way to ensure you will withstand the wait is to split you in half, to share the time and the burden. It’s the only way you will survive it. The girl seemed uncertain, but drank the herb-dark steaming tea in desperate, hopeful gulps and let herself be brought to the bed. The fortune-teller bent the girl’s legs at the knees and drew her skirts aside, as curtains. It will be less difficult, she said, if you are not a virgin — you aren’t, are you?
The lids of the girl’s eyes were fluttering, falling shut, but the fortune-teller could see the answer for herself: She was not. Even now warm seed trickled from her, undried. A kind of whore then, already. The fortune-teller gathered air into her lungs, and from the girl’s womb she birthed the other woman, whom the girl could slip into at night and who would keep the girl innocent and young, and then she reached inside, against obliging wet walls, and caught and drew with the tip of her nail the sacs of eggs, the tubes, the womb itself, folding in, all strung together as on a rope, and rolled them, red and glistening, inside a velvet pouch for safekeeping. The package was lighter than one might expect and warm as a child, silent as a stillborn. This would complete the fortune-teller’s payment and clear much needed space. She let the girl sleep for a time, the woman slipped back inside her; then brought her to with smelling salts and helped the body to the door.
Twilight, with the tide coming in: it is almost time for her to leave, and almost a relief. She stands knee-deep and numb, seaweed swimming between her legs, bare beneath her skirts. At once the ghost and premonition of so many men’s fingers, and she can never say a word to resist. In the darkness she withdraws to, it is as if she sleeps; the rise and fall of motion, the friction that results, create a lulling comfort that brings her to the next day. He took to the sea and escaped her, but she is changed. She is the one now who must be forgiven, and she believes that she will, for never giving up hope. The horizon is dissolving, and beyond are any number of ships. She imagines she’ll meet his by diving out to it, and the sailors will laugh, so glad to see a New World woman, and catch her in a net, her slithery seal-body all wound in petticoat and skirt. But he will be the only man to embrace her.
Part Two
In sailortown, lamp-lighted taverns at night are nothing like ships at sea. Anchored to the narrow cobblestone lanes, they are sedentary, warm and dry. Still, from within, you hear the shanty refrain “Steadily, readily, cheerily, merrily.” Drink returns to sailors the unsteadiness that keeps them steady. The men are glad for women and taste their wet, open mouths. They are willing partners for the dancehall on the drag, and, maybe, for more. But for those who at sea grew tired of chance and luck and would pay for a piece of certainty on land, there was the Jolly Jack. Outside, the sign-board hangs reef-fastened and carved with the figure of a mermaid, one breast bare and the other submerged in a great swell of hair, her overlong tail coiled ready and tight.
Inside the tavern, the ringlet-blonde known as Marie is a favorite of sailors come from foreign ports. The sailors for whom this town is home, if a sailor can be said to have a home that’s not the sea, won’t touch her; but they look upon those who do with an envy for their ignorance of her story. For after all these years, she is still a desirable woman, even as a whore who for some coin can be bought, even with her sea-eyes turned clear and dull again. Her body is still young, breasts firm and where they should be, with a little waist you can wrap your hands around and tug like a rope. Her pale skin is supple and smooth and, beneath the red lamp, takes on the hue of pale pink you find inside a shell. She is willing to do a few things behind the sateen curtain that the other whores, young and old, will not. She talks little, if at all, but will smile for a story of far adventure and even the lewdest of jokes. She will hold your hand and stroke your beard as a real lover would. She will sit on your lap with her legs spread wide and let you cup her warm cunt or rest your palm on her bare rump beneath her skirts; and all the while you can drink and eye and flirt with the others, bending to pluck your coin from the floor, laughing and taking their breasts from their corsets, nipples worn-red wounds.
The men who touch Marie and take her behind the curtain are left with a queer, deep-sea smell upon their fingers, something like the wreckage of a sunken ship washed to shore, something like a hull scraped raw of barnacles. Even the sailors themselves, who spend months at a time or much longer out at sea, don’t smell quite like this. The smell of Marie will never wash away and will always remind them of their fleeting days in this sailortown, of their night with this whore, of how it felt to push inside her, that brief moment of resistance, as though every time a virgin.
At daybreak the smell of whale oil, pressed from fat, poured and held in drums along the wharves, is vile and sad exchange for the terrifying giant’s call. The stench is strong throughout sailortown, but in the thriving city beyond, the merchants and their wives, sons and daughters detect nothing of it and sleep on. They know the district by the docks to be seamy and foreign, flooded as it is by undesirables, criminals and thieves, whores and fortune-seekers, and rich in tempting trade, silk, opiate and spice, rowed in to shore from the secret deep of ship hulls. Sailortown is a place best left to seamen.
Inside the doss-house: a stretch of rope strung taut from post to post, over which a line of sailors drape themselves to sleep. They look as if hung to dry, passed out on rum, every one, and most come straight from the Jolly Jack. Morning brings the master, with a blade to slice the rope. It is his favorite part of any day, worth the price of hemp. His wife stays stirring at the pot; she can no longer bear to watch. He cuts from the middle, through each twist of rope, one uncoiling, two strands flapping, three — the line snaps and bodies drop and hit the floor, with a thud so solid it’s as though every one has died in unison. The floor’s surface, unlike water’s, doesn’t yield.
There is one man who catches himself on his feet, the splitting of the rope a warning whispered to his ear. He gives the master a weary, heavy-lidded look. He is the only one not freshly shorn, his sun-bleached hair matted and to his shoulders, his beard straggly and thicker around the mouth.
The others groan and swear, “Flabby old prick.” They nurse their knees and elbows, hold their heads in their hands. To the master, it is comic; he cracks a chipped-tooth smile. They are like puppets come to life. The sailors are young and have seen things he hasn’t seen and never will. Their windburned cheeks and tattered clothes, tan chests and limbs scarred in India ink, speak of a queer kind of experience, one that beat back at you with a stick and made of you a type of animal. If he is envious, it is not for their freedom. They don’t even realize that they have none — slaves to their captains, shanghaied by the crimps. Captives of the ocean, just one vulnerable vessel between them and almost certain death.
While the others are still coming to their feet, the unkempt one strolls toward the door. He walks as if he hasn’t slept half-standing, half-collapsed. No one bids him goodbye. As he passes the kitchen, the master’s wife calls, “Don’t you want a bit of breakfast?” There is something about adventuresome men that makes her want to feed them — then send them promptly on their way. Her husband, though he can be cruel, can at least be counted on to stay, start and end each day the same, at the doss-house.
But from the young sailor, she receives no answer. The thick smell of the porridge keeps him walking for the door; it is too warm here, too dry and enclosed. Outside, the fog is rolling back and he follows it through cobblestone twists and turns, past the closed shops of tailors, cobblers and fortune-tellers, out to the main drag, wide and lined with silent chandlers, and on to face the open sea. Sailortown is slow to wake but the wharves are like empty beds, long made and left behind: the fishermen have gone already out to sea; their boats are blurry islands heading for the horizon. That solid line is what he seeks, and the choppiness of waves in between; it is a picture of his life laid out before him: the waves each obstacle, crest and fall, and the horizon the edge you will drop off when sickness finally overtakes, when the rise of water throws you over. Yet no matter how far or long he travels, no matter the obstacles that rise up, that line so far has kept its distance: a reminder that is also a mirage; there is nothing behind it.
Today the sun doesn’t shine and so the water doesn’t sparkle. The day is all gray but he will pass it as he can, with food and drink and wandering, and if there’s money left, one last night at the Jack. Tomorrow he is set to sail, to return to his true life. He dislikes these flat in-between days, in these in-between ports–they so often seem the same. The taverns and their parrots hung in a cage over the bar, the old captain in the corner (a shark’s backbone for his cane) who grows more quiet with each drink, as if with time his stories leave him, sinking out of reach, rather than rising to the surface. This, the young sailor believes, will never be his fate; he will make sure of it. He grew up landlocked, stilled in a tiny, newly-founded town, pastless. His family was too large and too poor to be sad to see him go. At the first port from which he set sail, he slunk along the crowded lanes, feeling himself small, untested among men. He was drawn again and again to the porthole window of a parlor, and finally he had to enter. He submitted his skin to the needle and blade, and in those subtle rifts so painfully etched, the ink took indelibly. The tattoo is to remind him: He carries his own anchor, and will never let it drop. He wants only to know onward, wants always to be skimming toward the next destination.
Part Three
Walking seaside sobers him; he’s gone the whole length of the wharves and back, and presently he finds his hunger. He wishes for the porridge stirred by the master’s wife, but by now they’ll have sent out the men for the day. Ahead a barefooted wharf rat is pounding against a drum of whale oil, as boys without a chore are wont to do, and the sailor approaches him, asking for direction to a reasonably priced inn to eat. In sailortowns, he finds it’s best to ask the locals.
The boy nods agreeably, gestures back to the drag and describes a path down through the alleyways. His arms are thin and he has eyes stained yellow, a hollowed-out face like an old man’s, but his voice is light and sweet. He speaks with one eye on the sailor, the other wandering. “Haven’t been to port long, have you, sir?”
“Since yesterday.” He waits. He is not accustomed to being called sir, as sailors seldom attract much respect.
“Sail out soon?”
He nods, averting his gaze. In the distance behind the boy the figure of a woman has appeared, coming slowly their way from the far end of the wharves. It is rare to meet a lady — this one in full skirts and petticoats, no less — in any sailortown, much less along the sea, so he takes her for a well-dressed whore, perhaps not even on the lookout so early in the day, just on a solitary stroll from her brothel. The lives of whores outside their brothels have always provoked a certain curiosity in him, ever since his first time, with a pretty black-haired girl once found an orphan, living on the streets with other urchins and no real memory of her origins. She’d had a bit of toughness glinting sometimes in her eyes, a readiness to fight. Unlike the other sailors, he doesn’t see the whores for certainty, but for these shows of life that unpredictably break through, as a fin or fluke cuts the surface. Yet, always, those same whores feign enthrallment with the sea-life of a sailor and slyly bring the focus back to him. The night before, he pressed one for the tale of her sailortown girlhood and she thought him a tease, pulling him behind the curtain and herself on top of him. “There now, ain’t this better than talk?” she said as she worked, all flat belly and bones for hips.
“Can’t blame you, sir,” the boy is saying. “Wouldn’t stay here long if I could help it. A whole queer world out there to see. I want to sail one day too.”
He again examines the boy, the deep hollows of his old-man cheeks, the yellow in his eyes tinged even on his skin, tight-clung. It’s clear the boy won’t reach the age of a sailor, and if he did, no ship would have him. He nods toward the woman, who’s gone back the other direction. “She lost her way?”
“Pardon, sir?” The boy, squinting, turns. “Ah, that’s just Sarah. You could say she lost her way, or this is it.”
They watch as she steps from the far wharf onto the gravelly strand and wades out into the water, without lifting her skirts. She stands there, facing the flat gray sea, as though the cold Atlantic cannot affect her. “What is it she’s doing? Do we stop her?”
“She won’t go no further. She’s tied to land.”
The sickly wharf rat tells her tale as it is known, the name of the lover who left her behind, only to be tossed, or sunk, or hijacked, from his ship, like so many other sailors gone from this port. Her belief in his return has lasted years and made her mad. Some say decades she’s been a haunt of these wharves; black magic has kept her young.
“She once made a bargain with a witch,” the boy says, “in exchange to join him.”
She’s walking toward them again, skirts darkly wet, tendrils flying in a pick-up of wind. Closer, the sailor can see: not a lady at all, her dress filthy and tattered; and not lively, seducing, as a whore — no sly strut, no smile, painted and coy. Like on the boy before him, years beyond her young body seep somehow through, as though the soul that underlays, preternatural, has overcome the skin.
“Join him — in his death?” He forces a laugh and spits, but the wind knocks it back. He wipes his bearded chin.
“Only the witch knew the workings of the spell,” the boy whispers, so sweet and solemn, and leans back against the drum, proud of his knowledge and sharing of it.
“Only the witch, eh?” He feels he should pat the boy on the head, tousle his ragged chop of hair, but he’s ashamed to realize he would rather not touch him. “So there’s as much land-lore as sea-lore. That’s just stories. She’s just a pitiful girl who can’t let go of the past.” But he is acting tough for the boy. For those without a future, nor much of a present, a past even of tragedy is something. For those who won’t see the world, but know that it exists, an afterworld cannot yet be considered.
“Run off now, boy.” He puts his hand in his pocket, quickly counts what’s there, and draws out a coin. “Here.”
But the boy hoists himself atop the drum and sits kicking his bare heels, solidly thudding. He looks as if settled in for a show, already paid for, thank you. The sailor turns and the woman is there, not two fathoms away, breathing, gray-eyed and real.
Part Four
She stares: From a distance, he’d been just another sailor — though clearly a loner, a dreamer. That he was there, seaside, spoke of his longing to be gone; she could recognize that. But then he reached his hand out to the boy: His restlessness caught by the boy’s need, so like his pacing, long ago, interrupted by her tears. And when he turned, hair grown, face buried in beard, the lines around his weary eyes, the sun-worn skin — freckles so entrenched they’d become his new tone — she saw just the changes she’d imagined time and courage would erode. He looks at her, expectant. Finally, it is him, slipped to shore overnight when she could not be here to meet him. She wants to move. She can’t move, and neither does he come to her. Her voice is a letting-out of air, just a whisper. “William.”
He looks over his shoulder to the boy, but she holds her stare. “Come again? Do I know you?” But as he says this, he sees she bears a certain familiarity: Picture her wind-blown curls tightly coiled and upswept, skin powdered white as clouds, cheeks come alive with rouge. Picture the drunken glow of men and red lamp all around her, painting her gently obliging. Last night at the Jack, this woman entertained one man after the other, and for a time he had his choice of three girls, so many men were enthralled with this one and willing to wait. But she talked little, and he’d gone for the sassy bone-thing. Now she is alone. Now named Sarah, a woman clinging to the life of a lost sailor, not wrapped in the cloak of his death. “I do know you.”
She gives him a curious, hopeful look, and advances. He has to still himself from stepping back. With a finger held in the air before his face, she traces his features, squarish jaw, bump of lips, slope of nose. She did not seem this way in the tavern, not so intense. If anything she seemed a little absent, though always attentive. Here is a whore with a past. He almost believes it now, about the witch. The other men must have felt this way the night before, but he feels it now: that she is more than willing–that she wants him. Her eyes on him are like a snare, his heart a wing beating within his chest. He feels himself alive, as when tossed upon the stormy sea.
“Come with me,” he says suddenly. “I’m starved. I’ll buy you a bite to eat.” He begins to walk away, and she trails him like a shadow, certain and shy. He can hear the boy behind them thumping his heels against the drum and humming a shanty refrain.
They cross the drag, now flooded with sailors, some already drunk and catcalling the favorite whore. “Marie, Marie, marry me!” one calls. It is common, he knows, for whores to choose a working name. Sarah walks with her eyes on him and only him — he can actually feel them, steady and gray, at his back. “Keep your prick to yourself,” he mutters to another sailor, who, laughing, gestures back obscenely. The doors to the chandlers hang open, floating out the earthy smells of linen, wood and rope. A stand is selling paper bags of oysters. He leads her onto a sidestreet from the boy’s directions.
In a doorway ahead lies a young sailor’s body, slumped over and still, and Sarah slows as she approaches — so used she is to probing bodies for a likeness to her lover. It is as if she must still make sure it isn’t William, make sure that this is real; as though, however solid in appearance, the man with her might be a mirage, copied from memory by her eyes and placed wherever she lands them. She could be the creator of a world of many Williams, existing here and there, simultaneously. One, the innocent, lost forever at sea.
“Leave him alone,” his voice calls back.
She shakes the idea from her head. There is only one true William; every man, however changed, goes on in one body for life. And he, the only love that’s ever touched her, has finally returned. He is before her, he walks on ahead. He hasn’t even embraced her. He has always controlled the amount of distance between them, while she would always have them touching. But as Marie she has become used to caring for men. Some need you to come to them, some will come in time to you, but all in weakness require a woman’s touch to restore them. This sailor slumped in the doorway: He is not actually so young, just thin and small, with deep lines around his eyes, across his forehead, his dark hair and beard sprinkled as if with salt, dried there after a squall. If he breathes, it’s so slight that she can’t catch it.
“Come on, he’s sleeping it off.” Ahead, William waits.
She holds a hand out to the sailor’s lips, barely parted, and feels a weak, warm breath. He will wake. She sees that his pockets have been pulled inside out — robbed, and maybe now he has nothing but his next job at sea. A man who stays a sailor when he has gone gray, and isn’t a captain, likely has no wife or other life to come home to. How lucky for William that she has found him, has waited. She knew he couldn’t be forever lost; he was too strong, too determined, for that. But what tragedy was it that befell his ship so long ago? Had he been captured, enslaved? Whatever the truth, life at sea, once so romantic-seeming in his eyes, must have hardened him. No wonder he is cold and quiet with her: She was right, and he had been so sure. It will take patience, then, to earn his forgiveness; she will have to win him back–but at least time now can finally move forward.
They walk on, and deep in the silent alleyways, with only the squeaking of her boots to be heard, he comes back to himself, as though he had been drunk on a spell that she cast. There is more to her than that she is a whore, but still, she is a whore. That sailor she stopped on: easily he could become him, he is perfect prey for the cat act — sober, yes, but alone; wooed, almost, by the boy’s rendering of her story. He half-expects her to press him suddenly to a wall, drop to her knees and take him in her mouth. His eyes falling shut, his body unmanned, she’ll slide her hands skillfully to his pockets for all he’s worth. Albeit, not much. The boy, of course — so sick, so sweet — is in on it, and will accept a share of his coin after all. He stops, turns to her and says, “I’m no fool, you know.”
She falters in her step. “No, you’re not.”
“I know what you are. I saw you last night, at the Jack. No, stay where you are, don’t come closer.”
“You were there? You saw me — you saw Marie.” Her gaze falls and seems to take in the wet, tattered skirts, the cinched waist, her small, feeble hands: she holds one out, the skin pale and sea-shrunk at the fingertips. She looks up, eyes wide, almost pleading. “You paid a girl to be with you.”
“Yes, of course. What do you take me for? I don’t go around giving out coin and meals for nothing in return.”
“Please,” she says. Her eyes seem, even, to be losing color. “Let’s sit down somewhere and talk.”
She is a beautiful woman, perhaps more so for her sad state. He strides on, vaguely assured of his upper hand, and takes at a corner cobbler the last bend the boy described.
Part Five
At the inn, they choose the far end of an empty table. It is past the normal hour for dinner, and most men have moved on to the taverns. Half the candles are already lit, it’s otherwise so dark inside on this gray afternoon.
Across the room a wench moves between three solitary somber sailors, chattering on to cheer them up, and when she sees them, they’re brought bread and butter, cod stew and a jug of wine. Sarah pours as she would as Marie at the tavern, though her hand subtly shakes. He eats hungrily, watching her coldly, waiting. She must explain herself first, then he will open and do the same for her.
“I’ve done terrible things,” she says, “but I was desperate. You see that, don’t you? It’s not me in that place, could you tell? Of course I’m there, but I’m hidden. You may not believe this, but it really is Marie. She does it for me.”
She speaks while staring into the middle distance, and he understands that there is a difference between the two: Marie is all pretend, and Sarah is too real. Marie might rob him of all he has, but Sarah is not capable of deceit. He relaxes, chewing his stew.
“What else have you done?” He wants to know everything, the truth behind the boy’s story, even if he has no right to ask. To soften the question, to remind her, perhaps, of who’s paying for this meal, he pushes her dish toward her. “You aren’t eating.”
She takes a tiny spoonful and swallows. She won’t tell him of the merchant, the first time she was paid — and as herself, a greater betrayal. Afterward, lost, ashamed, she’d gone to the fortune-teller, who gave her Marie. She was spoiled and saved on the same day. Marie took her to the tavern that first night, and she never came back home. They wouldn’t have had her anyway.
“I’m the fool, you might think,” she says. “I waited longer than anyone thought I should. I prayed, slept on the floor, gave up sewing with my sisters to listen for the voice of god. I went every day to port. My mother said she no longer knew me or understood what I did. My father said his favorite had become a shameful shell, he couldn’t bear to see me. In the end, I even sought,” she whispers, “dark magic.”
He nods shortly to encourage her on. “Yes, the boy told me.”
He nudges her mug toward her and she drinks, just a taste, gazing then into the wine. Red and thickly wet as the stain of blood that soaked the fortune-teller’s sheets. Her blood. She remembers waking, the disorienting sensation that half her mind was still asleep, muddled in a dream. She became used to it, that same feeling upon her each morning, the night before a merciful fog. She drinks again, this time long and slow. It has been some time since she has felt this lucid, this present. It is William.
“And you?” she blurts. “Won’t you tell me what has happened to you? What have you seen? Where have you been?”
He sighs and sets down his bowl, having cleaned it dry with a heel of bread. This, even from her. So she is really no different. Like the others, she thinks what makes him happiest is to speak of himself. But he lives his life, he doesn’t retell it: It is his own.
She says quietly, stirring her stew, “Or was it the shores that lured you?”
“The shores,” he says, in disgust. “Every port is the same — there are sailortowns, you know, on every coast. Some seamier than this one.”
“They never made you think of home?” She considers that they may have been a comfort.
“No. They make me yearn for the sea.”
She blinks from this blow, then peers at him, steady. “Please tell me what has kept you. Have you done all you wanted? Been all the places you dreamed? I do hope so.”
“I’ve been everywhere, of course: Africa, the islands, the Orient. Europe is the same old cesspool you hear about.” He stops, suddenly attuned to the faithful way she is listening. He draws a breath; her interest does seem true. He’ll try to explain what he never has before. She might even understand, for she looks at him as though she can recognize a truth behind his flippant words, and he need only speak it.
“A sailor’s life is work,” he says, “not adventure. The reward is the sea, not the shore. It’s the sailing. It’s not like being on this earth. You forget yourself. It’s otherworldly, and you can count on it to go on almost forever.”
She waits for more. She’d expected a sailor’s yarn, enchanting female song leading his ship astray; or perhaps a pirate’s tale, his outlaw captain’s crazed pursuit of treasure or revenge — any story that might attest for his prolonged absence, any odyssey that might express fulfillment of his former dreams. But he is through. She wants to show that she is changed, but her voice goes hard.
“It takes lives away, that sea. It takes you from the people who love you.”
“But you don’t think about that,” he says back, almost angry. “You just keep on. You forget everything else.”
She sets her spoon in her bowl, and its handle slowly sinks into the stew, gone cold. “And that’s why you didn’t return. It wasn’t me — you didn’t even think of me. You forgot, is that it? Or are the whores and native girls just less burden?”
An answer catches in his throat, and he sees suddenly what he should have all along: the love in her eyes that has cleared and brightened them. Her whispered word at their meeting becomes loud enough to hear. William. The name, according to the boy, of her dead lover. She sees in him the man she still holds a claim to, she sees a ghost come back to life. He shivers, as though to keep his blood pumping, coursing. She stares at him with that love, waiting for his answer. He feels its encircling grip.
“I’m sorry,” he says, finding he must inject the certainty into his voice. “But I’m afraid you’re mistaken. I’m not who you think.”
“What do you mean? Why would you say that to me?” Her chin trembles just slightly; there is a dimple in its center, as if touched by a finger — so impressionable is she. And he, an unwitting deceiver who’s let things go too far. He has taken advantage of her wavering sanity — without intending to, exactly, but just as cruelly as the Mother at the Jack, who must keep her there, tied to land. He hasn’t even laid a hand on her, but he has made a mark.
“I don’t know.” And he doesn’t know why he would deny anything of which she is so sure, why he would take away what little she has to hold onto. He doesn’t want to hurt her. He has been with many women since he tattooed himself a man, since that first sail made of him a sailor. But he has never been with one who wanted more than just a man, more than a sailor, more than the pay that would allow her next day. Yes, he wants her in bed, he wants what the other men had, but the draw he feels to her is more than just sex. He brought her here believing that in exchange for his coin, he could get what he desired, but now, entrapped, he feels he owes her something.
“Listen,” he says, “I’ll buy your whole night. Don’t go back, it’s no place for you. There must be some other way to live.”
She stares. “How can you say that? I would never take your money. I’ll stay the whole night with you, my whole life, but it’s mine to give. Remember: I’ve chosen you. It hurt that you said that, but you’re right, it’s true. I’ve been choosing you the whole time you’ve been gone, no matter what it seems. And I still choose you.”
No one has ever spoken to him this way, with such certitude and possession. It frightens him, and he is never afraid. Any answer he could give seems the wrong one to say, and he has none that will make sense.
She sets her chin, darkens her eyes, and the hardness returns to her voice. “You must think me ruined. What you meant was, I’m not who you thought. It wasn’t real. You’re glad you left and have stayed away. It must make it easier for you to believe you never really knew love. But you did. And your poor mother: she died without you, you know.”
Her words are nails keeping him to his seat — for couldn’t he just leave, extract himself from her waking dream? But as with all dreams, there is truth in hers. When he left his poor family, his pastless town, no one asked him to stay — not even his mother, whom he had thought would be the one to care. It had been almost easy, even as he felt himself of no consequence, and the little death in that.
The wench is moving across the room, lighting the rest of the candles. One of the sailors seems to have fallen asleep, his forehead to the table, hand hung limply to his side. But it brushes against the wench, fondling her skirts, as she goes by, and she doesn’t even flinch.
He seizes Sarah’s hand and holds it, pale and cold, to his beard. He saw Marie stroke another man this way the night before. “Isn’t there somewhere we can go, to be alone?”
Her fingers bristle his beard, raising the hairs along his neck, his arms, his legs. “Oh, William, you haven’t forgotten, have you?”
The waves are white capped, and about a league out, illumined in flashes of nature’s electric light, a sheet of rain is moving in. The horizon is empty of man’s vessels, all expected back today have long returned, and his own is still moored somewhere among them, set to sail with drums of whale oil, candle wax, and dry cod — perhaps prepared by the very fishery whose roof they stand atop, side by side.
“Crow’s nest view,” he says, a little quiet. This height, this sight of a storm, have never before made him so uneasy. He always thought he wanted the sea — but is it the sea that wants him? He wishes he drank more of the wine and could now close his eyes and imagine the unsteadiness he feels is the rocking of the world beneath him. But it is Sarah, her grip on his arm. If she were to jump — and why not, she’s half-mad — she would take him with her. He is her William.
She tilts her head to the sky. The clouds are low, thick and near-black. A round of gulls circling are pure white and calling. On clear days the distance to the sky can seem infinite, but now she feels she almost could reach it, break the tension of its surface with her finger, release all it holds back. A single droplet of rain touches her forehead. “We’re going to get wet,” she says. “Do you mind?”
He doesn’t answer, just stares out to the water, and she knows he’s dreaming of seafaring. She’d meant to ask, Why did he return now? But the answer comes to her on its own: It was the currents of the sea towed him here, it was his ship carried him back. There’s so much he hasn’t told her of his time away, and won’t. The rums he has drunk, the stumbles through foreign ports, the opium highs, the fortune-tellers’ advice, the doorways he has slept in, the seabirds he has caught, the spices he has sifted, the sand between his toes, the fruits he has tasted, the ripe natives’ breasts, and all the trinkets he has fondled but hasn’t bought. All that time, he wasn’t hers.
“Take this off,” she says, unbuttoning his shirt. “Do you mind?” On his arm a stain of India ink, an intricate anchor, scrawled as if calligraphy. She traces it with her finger. She imagines it’s the first letter of his true name. His words still echo: I’m not who you think. “Why this?” she says. “Why not a mermaid or your mother’s name?”
He faces her and sees her eyes gone black. Her hair is falling from its knot, whipping in the growing wind. He knows she wants to be his anchor; she wants her name engraved on his arm. He knows, despite this net that has descended, ensnaring them together, that he will escape from it by night. He will leave when it’s easiest: as she sleeps. She kneels before him; he takes her breasts from her corset.
The waves rise and break and the sky lets loose. The rain when it falls is precise and sharp as sewing needles, piercing beads that run down their skin, as though the water comes from without and within. It tastes clean. He joins her on the ground that is the rooftop and lifts up her skirts, kisses her there. She can’t hold her back: She feels Marie sliding from between her legs — the whore she has hidden, the one he’s been chasing after — and herself slipping back deep inside, to the hollow cleared in their body. She finds that she is able to speak, but her voice comes from that muddled place, far away. “I can’t ever have a child. She cleaned me out. I’m empty. Do you mind?”
Their lovemaking is rough, but she knows that is more her doing than his. Every way in which he touches her is unlike the way that she remembers, and she fights it a little. She fights to get past Marie, to keep the woman who willingly receives the touch of any man away from the man she loves — though so much of what she loved is gone. Gone his sweet clumsiness, his misplaced mother-love. This new man is skillful, deliberate, and strangely selfless. He doesn’t stop until she is through. For that moment she is aware only of herself, whole, and separate from him — and that she cannot bear. William, whoever he is, isn’t with her. Dead or alive, it’d never mattered; he is already gone, come one with the sea. She had never let go. Held taut at water’s edge, tugged back in to shore, she was caught between Sarah and Marie. The rope could lead nowhere else.
The rain moves inland, weakening and leaving them behind, and in the still that follows she says the only thing of which she is certain.
“I don’t know you, do I? You were never mine.”
“Don’t say that. Close your eyes. You know me more than anyone.”
The sun is pirate’s gold, stolen by one day, recovered by the next. It rises on departing ships: They set out East, masts standing proud, white sails catching wind, heading for the horizon and continents beyond. The boy, who slept slumped against a drum, wakes to a splash of water glittering his wharf. He rubs his dry eyes. The night before, a kind sailor slipped him a half-empty bottle, and he drank from it until the world obligingly blurred and closed on him. It must be the rum: the body of an old woman swimming nude against the waves, hair loose and flowing, legs strong as a tail. Or else the lore is true: a mermaid enchanted, once lost ashore, now returning to sea.
