They climbed a ladder to a loft above the studio. Miles’ bed filled the small space and there was no place for Marianne to sit. The ceiling was a mass of stars. They were gold when the lights were on and glow-in-the-dark when Miles turned them off, which he did for her with a childlike chuckle.
“Check this out, it’s just like the Hayden.”
There were no windows and the stars were the only light in the room.
“Not enough space to swing a cat,” Marianne said, looking uneasily at Miles’ bed; a black futon on a slatted wooden frame. The whole thing felt sparse and she moved away from Miles, pressing her hand against the wall for support. Miles arched his back and pulled Marianne towards him.
She closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of cigarettes, perspiration, human musk and the tinny residue from his harmonicas. She shivered, trying to pretend this wasn’t her first time. His arms were strong around her, bracing her, holding her down, and she felt herself falling, the glowing stars galaxies, the comets moving in the night sky, and her head spinning as he pressed his lips against her mouth. They were laughing, dancing, and he was licking her face, purring.
“Meow,” she whispered.
Then Marianne was on the train again, the endless roll of wheels beneath her. She felt homeless, moving towards a destination that had no hard point. She could feel her body in motion, spinning through an indifferent universe as she watched her reflection in the black windows, her face distorted by the condensation dripping outside the glass. Something had changed in her. It wasn’t just the old cliché about sex making your eyes sparkle and skin glow. She didn’t necessarily feel better. It was almost nostalgia. Something had gone and would never come back.
The train was crowded at 6:00 pm with people returning from work, dressed in their pressed suits and tailored blouses; just another ordinary day for them. Their faces looked devoid of emotion and she tried to conjure the soft life under the surface, something tiny, vulnerable and hidden, even from their own shiny mirrors in which they shaved and made themselves up each morning. They reminded her of Russell just before he left – his continual disappointment obvious as he walked through the door each evening. How did a person get to that point, she wondered. Her grandfather never fell into a grind, an ‘endless spinning hamster wheel,’ as Russell called it.
Marianne never saw that resentful look on Eric’s face. Right until the end, he was excited about his work, animated when talking to her, or lecturing his students about some idea. What did it matter if he was right or wrong, she thought. His life was full of pulsation and his death was sudden, not the living death of these commuters. She wondered whether she should be happy for him, dying with plans percolating in his head, a single shock of pain. Or perhaps he just never talked about the moments when he sat down, bored and disappointed with the endless administration of papers and dumb questions, asking himself whether he had wasted his life. She wondered whether Eric ever wished he had spent his life doing something more concrete, like joining the fire department or designing buildings.
She closed her eyes, imagining herself a commuter with a daily routine that killed both pain and pleasure, subsuming the important under the urgent, suspended in the motion of back and forth. Or would she, like Eric perhaps, spend a lifetime creating something useless, but only in retrospect, when it was too late to back down. A life of fairytales and false epiphany.
The waves broke against the shore, their soft return to the sea masking the violence of the water as it rose and fell against the sand. It was the end of May and the air was summer warm.
Marianne pulled off her tired jeans and faded T-shirt. The alternative sensations of cool and hot were pleasant as she pushed her feet into the damp sand, walking towards the water. She had the beach to herself, cutting school again in spite of her guidance counselor’s concern. Marianne knew she was only passing because the teachers couldn’t bring themselves to fail her. Her report card for this final semester was going to be terrible, and NYU would receive the results.
As the water deepened, she swam across the tide, thinking of the Maurice Sendak book she loved as a child, with Pierre saying: “I don’t care.” He was eaten by a lion in the end, but the lion spat him out and he learned his lesson. The little verse was in her head: “If you will only say ‘I care …’” She cared, but her schoolwork felt meaningless. At least the ocean still made sense. The waves were large and powerful in the noonday sun, but swimming was easy. She went out further and further, imagining herself a fish, scales glistening; fins opening and closing to let air in.
She was a long way out now, carried by a rip, and would have to fight her way back in. She was a strong swimmer, even a lifeguard one summer, laughing with friends on a tall deck chair. Where were all the friends she used to have? She’d had those clannish visits to the beach, talent shows and pizza lunches back when she first started high school, but she always held something back, and that something grew larger in her. It was no longer a small grain of discomfort lodged just beneath her skin; it was now an abscess that continued to increase in size.
Cheryl was her best friend since sixth grade. They’d done everything together in the past, but somehow Marianne avoided Cheryl the whole senior year.
Feeling the current’s pressure, she assumed the correct position, her body vertical, arms and head dangling in the water. She wasn’t frightened, although there were two deaths last year from rip tides. What else could kill her? Rocks, sharks, drowning, hypothermia. It would be easy to give up, sucked back into the water out of which her species once crawled.
She never had to rescue anyone as a lifeguard. They just did CPR on a plastic dummy and raced each other on the beach. Now she swam against the weight of water, wondering how such a fluid medium could be so powerful. Marianne had to angle herself and swim parallel back to shore across the narrow current. Her body stung with cold and her lungs ached with the effort of swimming.
Eventually she got to shore, her legs lumbering over the rocky bottom, still fighting and breathless. The air was cold now and she couldn’t stop panting as she ran across the sand, seawater flowing out of her nose with mucus and salt as she wrapped herself in the beach towel, lying down to try to warm up in the remains of a setting sun.