My husband had been unfaithful, that much I knew. It had happened before, with previous men; I knew the signs to look for. Sensed it, anyway. A blade in my chest. Salt in my throat.
I felt it all the time, what he had done. As we cut vegetables together, or put on songs in the car, or held hands on an errand somewhere. It was the distance of him, always looking off at some far point as though his eyes were pulled on a bit of string. I would speak to him, and he would respond with the indifference of a stranger, if at all.
I was afraid, this time. I hadn’t been before. I’d only grieved them, the men that had left me. I had accepted that they’d given me up. I’d survived it.
So I couldn’t have said why I was frightened, why as far as my husband drifted I tried to pull him back to me, to smother him within myself. To hold him with my love.
Yet there was another woman in the world, holding him so tightly that he was unable to hide the fact she had him.
Didn’t even try, in the end.
“Who is she?” I asked my husband one afternoon; I’d had enough of the difficulty between us, and that made me courageous. “You might as well tell me. I know there’s someone else.”
He had just come in, looking white from the rain. But under it, another colour. Flushed from having been with her, I knew.
“Be honest,” I said. “You’ve been to see her today, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I have.”
“And? Who is she?”
I was already tired of asking the same questions, of the slowness of him. The lethargy of love.
“I can’t say,” he mumbled, and I flinched, a convulsion of rage.
“No,” I said. “I’m not accepting that. Who is this woman, for God’s sake? What’s her name?”
My husband stood like a sleepwalker, swaying on his feet, his expression vague, something drawn left-handed on a notepad. All unfocused lines.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You cannot be serious. You’re saying you’ve never thought to ask what to call her in all this time?”
“It’s not like that. She doesn’t speak.”
“I’ll bet she doesn’t.”
I wanted to pick the ashtray up off the kitchen table and brain him with it, watch his stupidity leech out of him in a mess of blood and glass. Fury sawed along my bones like a violin bow. And through it that inexplicable fear, not of him, or even for him—that angered me, as well. Not knowing what it was.
“I mean,” my husband said, “that she can’t talk.”
“Oh?”
How typical of him to find a silent lover, one onto which he could impress his every thought and ideal without contradiction. No arguments, only the sound of his own voice, the feel of her mute body against him.
“And where did you meet?” I asked stiffly.
“On the sea.”
This wasn’t as whimsical as it sounded. We lived in a fishing town; my husband ran boat rides for tourists, and had a little motor for personal use he’d take out on the water when the mood struck him, which had been frequently, as of late.
I had a sailing boat of my own, which had been my father’s, once. He’d taken me out on it, taught me how to work with the wind. I had loved him madly, memorised near word-for-word all that he’d taught me. He had died of heart failure quite suddenly, his ashes scattered at the harbour before I’d turned twenty-three.
Being that I was often indoors, designing book covers for romantic novels, I was envious of the time my husband spent on the ocean. The sea was the blood of my veins. The history of it. Now even this I felt had been taken away, tainted by what he’d done to me.
“Are you going to leave me for this woman, then?” I asked. “Or do I have to let you go?”
My husband sat down in a kitchen chair, his sandy boots soiling the floor tiles.
“I can’t live with her,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s not possible,” he said. “That’s all.”
I should have told him to go, thrown all his belongings into the sea. I did neither of these things.
I let him stay.
We discussed neither divorce nor how we were to go on if we were to remain together. We went on as before, each so accustomed to the other that we lapsed easily into the old routine.
My husband still visited his mistress, and I did not speak of it to him.
It wasn’t every day he went out to her. That was his lazy way of trying to hide it, to swaddle his visits in inconsistency so that I couldn’t predict his going, or follow him. But the randomness of this was a pattern itself.
I learned the twists of its spiral, from ocean to home again. I knew when to dress for sailing and go out after him in the second boat, pale as the canvas thrown up on its mast like a flag of surrender.
At first I didn’t dare trail him too closely. I kept back, my ear tuned to the purr of the motor, my eyes burned by the white lip of sun on the horizon as I sought out the shape of my husband there.
Sometimes he went out by morning, sometimes in the afternoon. Rarely at night. Even in the long summer evenings that bloated like over-ripe oranges visibility could be poor. His eyesight—never good—had only gotten worse with age. He wouldn’t wear his glasses. Never had.
Besides, there were more questions to be met with if he came home in the dark, crawling into bed still dressed, unwashed, with salt crust on his clothes. Making the sheets stink with him.
Sometimes when he stumbled in at the end of a day he’d do no more than kick his boots off and go through the house without looking at me or uttering a word. I’d look into the bedroom and find him on his back, his mouth open, like a figurehead from some wrecked ship. I expected to see his throat all full of sand.
It was worse if he stayed up with me. He’d be surly, avoidant of eye contact, squinting at the television as if unwillingly disturbed from sleep. When we lay together his face was faraway, thinking of another. No longer loving me enough to pretend.
When he wasn’t at work all he thought of was going to her. Nothing could hold his attention anymore.
I told no one what was happening to me, nor did I think to leave, though I could have done. There were friends that would have had me sleep on their couches under borrowed blankets, allowed to lie in until the windows were thrown open, letting in the musicality of wind chimes and the sea birds come down for breakfast scraps.
I’d done it before. The pain had struck me like a stone, but I’d gotten on with things. I was an adult. I could grow away from him.
This time, however, I could think of nothing else I wished to do but remain. The strangest thing: I didn’t know why. I had loved my husband, but he was a man without great talent or an expanse of dreams. His body was soft, unmade, seeming to absorb the muscle he should have had from active work. His face was as markless as a cloud.
I’d married him for the ease of loving him, the anchor of it, thinking I could drift with him. Trust in the steadiness of his ways.
Now I was without reason to hold onto him I found I grasped with greater resolution. A fevered spite made me grim. Made me sure.
I began to know when he would go out on the water before he did. In the morning I’d rise early, pretending I’d blundered to the couch to sleep only to follow him after he had stirred. Then I’d set out to the boat and take it out to a point he’d pass at a distance, changing my path to his.
In this way I learned where it was my husband went. This, of all he’d done, surprised me.
I’d envisioned an island, low houses pressed like a row of white buttons into gleaming rock. Sheep tearing up a flood of grass. A woman, faceless, who waited, her breasts bare beneath a dress that turned like viscous water on the wind.
I had imagined them drinking champagne and sandwiches of French bread on the spit, my husband’s hand between her legs, making her flow to him like the sea.
But there was no island, no woman.
Though I had not yet followed him there I’d learned the lovers’ meeting place was Pariah’s Circle. It was a place that it was not advised to sail, being that the currents were strange there. Vessels were sometimes pulled under, little found of them after.
It was said that far beneath there was a trench in the seabed, its depths only guessed at, not known. Still, it was not this gully that stirred the unpredictable sea. Two phenomena, side by side, existed at the Circle, scarcely documented or explored. By instinct even those of a scientific fascination with such things kept away.
My husband, by no means a remarkable man, defied his senses, going out to the Circle where he remained for hours at a time.
I supposed he met his woman there, one boat sat empty and idle while the other heaved with the motions of love.
Yet there was something of this explanation that did not ring true to me. I worked at it like an arrowhead in a wound.
In the end I knew that I must risk being seen by my husband. Being made the fool again, faced with unkind eyes that only yearned to turn back into embrace.
I felt that I must see my rival, had to observe what they did together. To understand how she had stirred a man with neither heat nor ambition into both.
Then, and only then could I leave my husband. I did not entertain the thought that I might best my enemy. She had her hand upon his heart, and even should I break the fingers that caged it I could not take it back from her.
He would not return to me, as before, a lost ship brought in from the sea. He would always look back over his shoulder for the other woman, look into my face hoping to see it shift before him into hers.
I was as far from him now as the scattered dead.
There was a day in late August in which even the breeze did not put out the heat, the day I knew that he would leave me.
He had done nothing exceptional that might signify the fact. He ate what I put on his plate, slowly and without thanks. He threw his sweat-dinged clothes on the floor to be washed, which in defiance I had left until the pile crept half way up the wall, like a mark left behind by a flood.
He did not argue or complain, did not smile or joke with me.
He was as before: a creature of indifference. An idea of a man.
We endured one another. Talked little, and of nothing. Yet when I went into my studio in a great show of going to work on that vital day I heard him in the bedroom, getting dressed to go out.
He had packed nothing—when I went into the room after him his suitcase was still in the wardrobe, his untidy drawers and creased clothes on their hangers, undisturbed. He had abandoned the house only in what he stood in, and when I looked from the window he was walking easily away towards the boat.
A weird excitement went over me, a hunter’s thrill. I knew that if I followed him now I would see what I desired. For better or worse, the knowledge was mine.
I didn’t look in the mirror before I set off to prepare the sailing boat, but I knew how I looked. Eyes glossy with mania. My hair a fraying net. Clothes thrown on without a care for the match of them.
Who had I left to dress for anymore?
I was out on the sailboat within the hour. The wind was up. The conditions were flawless. There had been times I hadn’t been able to go, afraid to turn on the motor in case I was heard across the water.
I felt the sun on my skin like an iron run over me. My hair opened behind me like a hand of knots, and I swept it from my eyes, wanting to see all ahead of me.
My husband’s boat was a black triangle on the water, seeking another shape.
I wondered what he felt as he went to it, to her. Excitement, probably. The dreamy anticipation into which he’d long slipped from me. And I thought of her, anxious, waiting for him, cupping a hand to her brow as she sought him out across the ocean.
I hated her. A cold kind of hate. I could not imagine myself striking her, ripping up the roots of her hair, pulling her into the water like in one of the sordid dramas I’d taken to watching on mindless afternoons, feeding vicariously on another woman’s revenge. I did not think I would even speak to her.
I would only look, and she would look back, jealous, curious, perhaps fearful of what I would do.
I could not seem to picture what kind of woman she would be. My husband had no fixed type; I had met some of his previous partners, seen pictures of others, as random as a drawn lot. She might be anyone. I wondered if I would know who she was, or find myself facing a stranger.
Pariah’s Circle approached, mapped out by a loose border of rocks in a formation like a whale’s mouth, as though nature itself had seen fit to mark the spot. I saw no boat by it, yet my husband spurred on with an urgency that suggested he’d seen something. Someone.
I hung back as far as I could while still keeping him in view, my eyes watering in the sun’s glare. My shirt glued down to my back.
The motorboat had stopped, was silent. I saw my husband move to the side of it and lean down, a hand outstretched.
There was someone in the water. I could see the vague outline of a dark head, arms going out to my husband in return.
My stomach rolled. I pushed onwards, wincing at the ripple of my sails in the breeze, afraid of alerting my husband to me. Spoiling the moment. But he only looked at the swimmer. He did not yet touch her, though I saw that he wanted to. I could not tell why he held back.
The same antagonised glee as before shook me hard. I pictured myself taking hold of my husband, striking him with a bit of equipment from the boat. Leaving his bleeding body to be picked to bone by aquatic animals. But I was an ordinary woman, one of morals guided by law. I surely could not bring myself to kill.
Still, I was changed by the rage in me. I could have done anything.
The waves, the wind led me closer, and the figure in the sea became more defined. Yet as it did so I became confused by it, uncertain of what I saw. Vaguely it had a woman’s shape, a wet sheet of something like hair. But the skin was as grey as fish scale, the flesh made up of many overlapping tentacles, moving over and over to replicate movement and expression.
The pockets between those tendrils formed the dark pits of eyes. A mouth open in invitation. All of them empty.
It looked enough like a person from afar, or perhaps somewhat closer, with bad eyes. But my husband was near enough to see what it was, but still he looked on as though it was a beautiful woman. I could hear the low tones of him murmuring to it.
I could not hear a reply.
My anger passed, succeeded by something else. Fearful, bewildered, I tried to understand what it was that I was witnessing. This was surely no mermaid. Another form of life, then, a mimic. My husband, a fool, had found it here, living alone at the Pariah’s Circle, and had fallen in love with it. I pictured him afloat on the water, his body bound in its weird embrace.
It had mesmerised him, somehow, perhaps with a chemical or scent, by the hypnotic turn of the arms that it was built from. There seemed no other explanation. It was clear from the form of him—sensual, relaxed—that all he perceived was a woman, tender and devoted.
Then I felt the knock of something passing beneath the sail boat, and for the first time I looked down into the water. Then I was sitting down flat, my legs having flown out under me. I kicked myself away from the edge, clinging to the base of the sail rig with such force the boat rocked.
How to describe what I saw, unlike anything even the local biologists had imagined might inhabit the trench—
Filling the dark water were a mile of thick tentacles, each as thick as a dolphin, weaving across and over each other in a lazy, continuous cycle. There was no head, no body at all that I could see, only those horrible limbs, puppeting the woman-thing my husband thought he loved.
Did he believe that it loved him in return? I could only imagine he did. He did not see, as I did, the game it played with him. There was desire in the patiently revolving arms: the sensuous expression of hunger.
How long it had danced with him, drawn him in, hard, to its home.
I watched my husband get down on the side of the boat and begin his climb into the water. The woman figure opened out its false arms, weaving them about his neck. Still he did not see, did not look down or seem to feel the greater limbs of the thing from the trench stirring around him.
Quietly I got to my feet and turned the boat, taking care not to draw attention to the vessel. The thing that had my husband did not stir in my direction.
It didn’t want me, only him.
I broke free of Pariah’s Circle, clear water under me again. It was when I looked back to see what had become of my husband that I glimpsed red blood like a Rorschach print, in the shape of two lovers of ease there.
Lost at sea, they’d say of him afterwards, the motorboat having been found drifting, empty, many miles from the place I’d found him. And though I wept and tied a bushel of flowers to the harbour railings I recalled that he had wanted to go. That he had known that he would not come back. Had never wanted me again.
Let the sea have him, then, I told myself, for it had loved him more.
