How deep? said I. But Harry didn’t answer. He was too busy tending to the pump. As was only right. Suck and hiss of air, mischievous lip-lop of waves, cat’s paw softly batting. And then the sun rose, sparking light in the black bituminous shale of the cliffs, awakening from their nests the fulmars and kittiwakes, which began to wheel with haunting cries above us.
Harry Owen said, He’s off the tether.
This in itself was not alarming. The tank on my father’s back allowed for that, for several precious minutes at least.
Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Twenty-five.
Seven minutes the apparatus allowed. But by no means twenty-five.
There was a silence then, but for the playfulness of the cat, batting at the gunwales.
Harry Owen said, He’s gone.
What else could he say? Reluctantly, we hoisted in the tether.
Harry slowly rowed back, while I remained holding tight to aft, staring out to sea. There was no splash or scar to mark the place where I became an orphan. No matter how I looked I could not find it; nor would I ever, in the days to come.
• • •
The days to come.
Ironical positioning, that.
• • •
For it seemed to me then that there were no days to come. Seconds, minutes, hours; passing time, keeping it, counting it; what were these to me? I was done with all that. Time was stopped, and I with it. Though I was aware, in my dim way, of tumult around me, of running feet, of voices raised, and banners, too, upon stern, upright masts; of shrill police constables and of fishermen who set out upon the water to troll for the body of my father who, it was presumed, had slipped his tether, gotten lost down there in the dark, and drowned.
The diving suit weighed more than he did. Much was made of that, after the fact.
His body, though, was never found. Of course it wasn’t. He was too subtle for that, far too subtle, he was a subtle man, a tactful man, oh father mine. And gone.
• • •
Suddenly there’s a scratching at my window screen. Look—it’s she, outside. She’s holding something up, something she found out there beneath that stark, polished rib of palm, something she wants me to see. Two halves of something, bone white, brilliant, unmatching. Disarticulate. Occluded by glare.
• • •
She doesn’t want me to tell it, that’s the problem.
• • •
Too late. Too late. I am launched now, in one sense, at least.
I’d like to be able to say: they met at sea. There is a gracefulness in that, an ease of telling. An economy. They met at sea, they were at sea, they parted by sea, exeunt. But no. It was never that simple. The problem is they should not have met at all, at sea or anywhere else, neither on the street nor in a room, in a field, on a beach, he and she, Leo and Clotilde, two opposing elements that should have repelled, resisted; that did repel, resist, for a time; that still resist me, at any rate. The two of them, unmeant; of emphatically disparate stuff. Until brought together. A collision, I the result. And then once again: the molecules fly apart, will not hold.
• • •
She was a beauty then, though. That’s what Harry Owen said of her. She was irresistible, your mother. Irresistible. Who knows what fantasies took root and blossomed in that charming little Eden, the pale and tender hollow of your mother’s heat-bared shoulder. That’s what he said. He rhapsodized all right.