"Sounds exciting," said Laura. She knew I was lying. Nothing like that ever happened at the camp.
"It"s ugly," I said, turning back to Laura. "Shirley just pulled out a shank. Things are looking bad for the chef."
"Her a.s.s is gra.s.s," Laura said, smiling.
She yawned and let her head fall to the side and I studied her face for a moment-studied the soft sh.e.l.ls of her eyelids; her lips; a tendril of wet, brown hair curled against her cheek. I felt a pull in my chest so hard it frightened me.
"I"m going to marry you in this house," I said. "We can have the wedding in the yard after I clear it out."
Laura wrung the water from her hair. "Is that a proposal?"
"I guess I can do better than that," I said.
She laughed. "I should hope so." Then she closed her eyes and let her body slide down into the water.
"Did you know," she said, "that in exactly one hundred days from tomorrow, you and I will have been together for five years? I was doing the math in the car the other day. Isn"t that crazy? Five years."
I leaned over and kissed her on her forehead. "I"ll tell you what. If in a hundred days from tomorrow I haven"t proposed to you, you can leave me forever."
"Jacob, that"s not what I was getting at."
"No, I mean it," I said. "One hundred days."
"This is silly."
"It"s not silly," I said, suddenly feeling agitated. "It"s not silly at all."
"Are you okay?" she said, sitting up, her skin raw and tender from the hot water.
"I"m fine," I said, but I was angry now. "You deserve someone who"ll stick around and commit. Someone who"ll love and take care of you. I mean for life."
"Jake...you"re talking about yourself, right? You"re scaring me."
"What do you mean?" I said. "Of course I"m talking about myself. Who the h.e.l.l do you think I"m talking about? I mean myself. Jake. Me."
My grandfather was a traveling salesman. He met my grandmother in the winter of 1920, while pa.s.sing through her hometown of Barclay, Virginia. He was twenty-two at the time. She was seventeen.
The way my grandmother remembers it, she was upstairs in her room, doing her homework, when she overheard yelling down on the street. As she came to the window, she spied a young man outside, standing on top of a parked car. He was shouting and gesturing at people, making some kind of sales pitch. A crowd had already gathered around him. In one of his hands he held a little star, which was emitting a cold and piercing light.
My grandmother opened the window to get a better look at the star. She"d never seen light so concentrated before. The little star was shining brighter than all the town"s electrical streetlamps put together.
The star, she soon learned, contained something called neon gas. My grandfather was working for a company called Star Neon, the country"s first manufacturer of neon lighting tubes. The owners of Star paid my grandfather to drive around the South in a new Ford and do promotional demonstrations about the wonders of neon lighting. Neon tubes were still brand-new in 1920. They were delicate and expensive to construct. Only a few businesses in the whole world had neon signs hanging in their windows, and all of them were located in Western Europe. Hardly anyone in the United States had seen a neon light before.
My grandmother watched, fascinated, as my grandfather continued with his demonstration, making his case as to why neon was the light source of the future. Neon was beautiful, he said, holding the star up high. It was enduring. Soon enough, everyone would be using neon to light their homes.
It was at about this point in his speech, according to my grandmother, that he noticed her up in the window and winked at her, making her blush.
Later that night, she snuck out to meet the neon salesman. Less than a week after that, she ran off with him, hopping into his car in the middle of the night and driving off.
The two of them ended up traveling all across the South together. My grandmother learned to help with the demonstrations: she pa.s.sed out pamphlets about the science of neon, she gathered names and addresses. They were a team: two kids in love, living in a shiny black Ford, the whole country spread out before them. They kept blankets and tins of food on the backseat, along with a loaded revolver. At night they slept in the car, huddled together. Sometimes, when they ended up parked out in the middle of nowhere, my grandfather would hang the neon star from the rearview mirror and leave it turned on, glowing through the night.
They traveled together for three months before my grandmother became pregnant. They were in Bristol, Tennessee, when she told my grandfather, who seemed thrilled at the news. He took her out to dinner to celebrate, bought them both fried steaks and wine, and then took her dancing afterward. He even rented a hotel room.
The next morning my grandmother woke to find the car gone. No trace of my grandfather anywhere. She waited at the hotel for three days before giving up on him.
The wrecking yard I manage is down on Orange Blossom Road. There"s a neon sign in the front window of the office: a big, flashing dollar sign that goes from green to yellow to orange. CASH FOR WRECKS!!! And so on.
Wrecking is a lucrative business in our part of Florida. There are more trade-ins per year here than almost anywhere else in the country. During the week, our yard is always busy with acquisitions and parts cataloging. Still, I understand that managing a wrecking yard, even a huge one like ours-a yard that pays a real salary-wouldn"t be enough for some people. I enjoy the work, though. Putting vehicles to rest: rolling them into the lot, dismantling them piece by piece, loading the empty husks into the crusher. I"ve been at the yard in one capacity or another since I was a teenager, when I spent a summer helping the owner, Liam, with the books. By now Liam and I are close friends. He relies on me.
More than the work, though, I enjoy the yard itself. For all the business that goes on-for all the sawing and loading and jacking, for all the squealing metal and busting gla.s.s-the property is generally a quiet and restful place. The lot covers two acres; the maze of wrecks stretches back from the office almost to the interstate. You can spend hours walking its deep alleyways, getting lost, listening to the towers of flattened cars creaking in the wind.
The lot is especially beautiful when it"s stormy out. The rain drums and pings off the crumpled metal, making everything glisten for a brief moment. On rainy days I usually give my a.s.sistants, Jesus and Marco, the afternoon off and just man the shop by myself. No one seems to want to bring in a car on a rainy day-to drop off their ride and then have to wait in the bad weather for the bus or a cab to take them home. The time drags by. I read or listen to the radio, to the old country station I like. Once in a while a car will glide past on I-35 in a cloud of water. The songs keep coming through the radio: songs full of yodels and whining slide guitar and all the otherworldly sounds I love about that music. Here"s a song about a woman who murdered her husband by dipping the mouthpiece of his horn in poison. Here"s another, about a man whose wife flew away in a huge silver blimp.
And while the songs come, one after another, I"ll examine the neon dollar sign flashing in the shop window, and I"ll think of my grandfather; I"ll picture him speeding across an open landscape in his Ford Model T, alone behind the wheel.
He came back into my grandmother"s life periodically, through the years, haunting her. Out of nowhere the doorbell would ring and she"d answer it and there he"d be, standing on the porch, holding his hat by his side. He"d tell her how sorry he was, how badly he wanted to work things out. If she"d only give him another chance. He"d be selling something else by now, ladies" shoes, or typewriters, or parlor furniture for Beaulieu and Sons. And of course my grandmother would be dating someone new, someone kind and reliable-the type of man her own daughter, my mother, would eventually marry-and even though she knew better, even though she understood exactly how things would unfold, my grandmother would come outside to meet him.
He kept hurting her, over and over. He"d come back and stay with my grandmother just long enough for her to become attached, even hopeful, and then he"d vanish. Poof. Gone.
ii.
LAURA AND I LIKE TO JOKE THAT WE MET ON THE BOTTOM OF THE ocean, that we swam up to each other-just two lonely people drifting along the dark, empty moonscape of the ocean floor-and introduced ourselves.
"h.e.l.lo," I said, which, underwater, came out more like: "Mebbo." Bubbles tumbled from my mouth as I spoke.
"Hi," Laura managed, her hair swaying around her face.
The truth is that Laura and I met at the aquarium, where she was doing evaluation work for its public relations department. I had gone to the aquarium to see an exhibit that had just opened, an exhibit on deep ocean life that was causing a big stir in the news.
The exhibit was called "Creatures of the Deep: Life in the Bathypelagic Zone," and everyone I knew was talking about it. The opening had been a big event for the state of Florida. Politicians had come, and local celebrities.
The exhibit featured fish from the deepest parts of the ocean, strange, frightening fish that had never been on display before. Until this particular exhibit, no one had been able to successfully bring any bathypelagic fish up from the depths. The captured specimens had always died as a result of the ma.s.sive changes in pressure that occurred as the traps were brought up toward the surface.
But in acquiring their specimens, the marine biologists at our aquarium had used a brand-new type of trap from Australia called a PrAc, which stood for pressure acclimatization. A PrAc trap gave a fish time to adjust to a low-pressure tank by reducing the atmospheric pressure inside the trap a fraction at a time, over a period of days.
Even Liam was going on about the exhibit. He called me at work to push me to go. "They have weirdos you have to see to believe," he said.
I could hear seagulls behind his voice. Liam owned five wrecking yards around the state and was basically retired. He lived with his wife on their houseboat, which was huge, with three stories, like a penthouse bobbing on the water.
"I"m not much for aquariums," I said. "I"ll send Jesus or Marco. They"ll report back."
"No. I insist. Take the day off tomorrow and go see this exhibit. It"ll clear your head."
"My head is clear," I said.
There was a pause from Liam"s end. Just the birds, the lapping waves.
"What?" I said.
"Your head isn"t clear," he said. "It hasn"t been clear since you broke up with what"s-her-name. Angie? Angeline?"
"Anne," I said.
"It hasn"t been clear since her."
"I"m fine," I said.
"You"re taking time off," said Liam. "Go see some fishes. Tomorrow."
So I did. I took the day off and I went through the motions. I drove up to the aquarium, the whole time just wanting to go back to the yard. The exhibit did take my mind off things, though. It was easy to lose myself once I"d made it through the line and down the long, winding ramp leading to the exhibition"s main gallery.
The gallery was a world unto itself, a winding maze of underwater gla.s.s tunnels and exhibit halls. Behind one window was something called a gulper eel, a black, eight-foot serpent with razor-sharp teeth and a mouth that billowed open like a sack, wide enough to engulf a small child. Behind another window swam a deep-sea angler, a vicious animal with beady eyes, and oversize fangs sticking out of its mouth. From a stalk on its head hung a little lure that glowed bright white, like a bare bulb, swaying back and forth to attract victims.
Then there was a fish that seemed to be wearing all its organs in sacks hanging on the outside of its body. Across the hall was a fish with extra rows of teeth inside its throat. And whipping around in a tank by the water fountain was a slimy, worm-like animal called an Atlantic hagfish.
Also known as the slime eel, read the hagfish"s information plaque, the hagfish eats by burrowing inside of unsuspecting pa.s.sersby, then devouring them little by little from the inside out.
The hagfish thrashed about inside its tank, leaving gooey smear marks on the gla.s.s.
They were like monsters, these creatures, like things come to life from my childhood nightmares. These were what hid beneath all that beautiful ocean. These were what lurked in the darkness.
I walked over to a bench in front of the angler"s tank and sat down. I began thinking about Anne again, and how badly things had ended. How, like always, I"d changed into someone I hardly recognized, someone I hated.
"She"s really amazing, isn"t she, the angler?"
An attractive girl was standing beside me, twenty-four, maybe twenty-five years old. She was wearing a blue skirt and blazer. A security tag hung from her neck on a chain.
"She"s the ugliest thing I"ve seen in my whole life."
The girl smiled. "Well, granted, she"s not about to win any pageants. But the guys like her. See all those fins sticking out of her stomach?"
I noticed a crop of little tube-like shapes protruding from the angler"s belly.
"Those aren"t actually fins. They"re male anglers. The males, they attach themselves to a female and fuse to her body. And then after a while their insides dissolve and they become these pouches of sperm she can use when she feels like reproducing."
"That"s sweet," I said.
The girl laughed. "Was that totally disgusting, what I just told you?"
"Which part, the fusing to the female"s body, or the insides dissolving?"
Her smile was lovely, almost too wide for her face, with a single dimple in one cheek. "I"m sorry," she said. "You talk to kids all day and you get a little loopy. I"m Laura."
"Jacob," I said.
"So, Jacob," she said. "What do you like best about the new hall? I"m doing a survey."
"I don"t know. I"ve just been in here. The ugly room."
She sighed and shook her head in a teasing way. "Come with me," she said.
I got up and followed Laura through the gallery. Children ran past us, laughing and yelling. I watched her walk, watched the way her dark hair swung across her back.
We came to a room off the main throughway. Like in the others, the walls here were all gla.s.s. Behind them hovered schools of differently colored jellyfish. They glowed brilliantly in the dark blue water. Their movements were so elegant, the way their bells expanded and contracted in a dreamy, billowing slow motion. The rhythm was like breathing, like a deep, slow breathing. Then, all at once, the whole bunch changed colors in unison, like the turning panels of a kaleidoscope. The bells went from violet to green to bright yellow.
"Better?" said Laura.
"Better."
"This is my favorite room. Look at that one, over there," she said, gesturing at a lone jellyfish hovering in a tank across the way. It was enormous; it looked like some kind of mutant, with a bell that was at least five feet across. Its huge tentacles lay coiled along the tank"s floor. It was hideous but lovely at the same time, a huge upswell of color and light.
"It"s amazing how much pressure these animals live under. This jelly, right here-you find it almost two miles beneath the surface. The pressure down there feels like an elephant standing on every square inch of your body. Isn"t that wild?"
She waited for me to answer. The giant jellyfish was glowing a pale orange. The light coming from its bell was soft, like firelight, and Laura appeared very beautiful in it.
"Would you like to go out to dinner with me?" I said.
"You"re asking me out?" she said.
"Usually, when I find a woman I like I just fuse myself to her body. But I"m trying something new."
Laura laughed. "So, Jacob," she said, holding up her pad again. "What"s your favorite part of the new hall?"
"That depends on what you"re doing later," I said.
I did my best to win Laura over once we started dating. I liked her right away. She was bright and driven and funny. There was a toughness about her, too, a stubbornness that I found s.e.xy. If she began reading a book she"d always read it all the way through, even if she hated it, especially if she hated it.
"I feel like it got the best of me if I put it down," she said to me one night, when I woke up to find her sitting in the bathroom, on the lip of the bathtub, reading a novel she"d already read once and disliked for its confusing ending.
It made me smile, seeing her in her nightgown, squinting at her book in the bathroom in the middle of the night, so tired, but so determined.
"What?" she said, looking at me.
"Nothing," I said.
"What?" she said again, laughing now. She threw the book at me.
I couldn"t get enough of her those first few months. I took her to all my favorite places. I took her to a restaurant out on the pier. I bought her a pair of rhinestone cowboy boots and took her dancing at a place I loved, a country music bar that was located on an alligator farm. To get in you had to cross a rope bridge suspended above the hatchery, with all those yellow, prehistoric eyes staring up at you.
"Okay, I give up. I surrender," Laura said to me, laughing as we left the dance floor and returned to our booth, both of us tipsy. She flopped down and put her cowboy boots on my lap. "Where have you been all my life?" she said.
I pulled a tack from one of her boot heels. "I should tell you something," I said.
She squinted at me. "This isn"t the part when you tell me you"re married, right?"
"I"m not married," I said.
"You"re not in love with someone else."