Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

You gasp so quietly, almost to yourself, when he leans over you to take a picture from his wallet, which is behind you on the bed. You think you should stand up now and leave. Your gasp frightened you. You had no idea how it would feel to have him so close to you. You wonder if there’s something the matter with you. If all of a sudden you’ve developed the disorder Thomas read about in the article where you’re hypersensitive to everything. Or maybe there’s nothing wrong with you, and this is the most normal your body has felt in a long time. Normal because you want to be close to someone and you want them to touch you. You feel warmth coming off Paul as if he were pavement on a hot day. You wonder, for a moment, if it’s the room. But then you realize the heat is coming from you as much as it’s coming from him. You look at his wallet pictures instead of leaving. Chris with long hair blowing in a breeze. Cleo as a baby being held up in the sky by Chris as white, puffy clouds float by. Chris from behind as she’s looking at a cathedral. Of course, you think, he would take a picture of her from behind. What man wouldn’t? Paul is smiling as he shows you the pictures. You accept the wine he has brought out of his bag. You drink from a hotel cup that still tastes like the plastic it was wrapped in. You do not expect the phone call from home. It’s Thomas wanting a recap of the day. You do not tell him you are in Paul’s room. You do not tell him you are looking at a picture of Chris’s great rear taken by Paul, and that you feel as if you are seeing Chris’s great rear through Paul’s very own eyes. You tell him you’re in the middle of dinner. You tell him you’ll call him later. “Wait,” he says. “Make sure the girls do some of their studying while they’re there,” he says. You can hear him running the water from the kitchen tap as he talks. You hear him swallow. You are amazed that you know the sound of his swallow, its timbre and tone. You would know it anywhere, the way a mother knows the sound of her own child’s cry. “Talk to you later,” you say.

Paul tells you more things that night than you have ever told Thomas, or anyone else. They are things from long ago, the embarrassing things that Thomas would not have listened to you talk about, because to him they would sound trivial. You tell Paul these things and he laughs. His laughter makes you even funnier. You really are quite funny, you think to yourself. You feel as if you have turned that darned purse upside down, you have turned it inside out, you have shaken it and let all the lint float down onto the hotel linen. You let him touch your cheek, you turn your face as if you would kiss his hand, your lips on the flesh of his palm. The TV next door gets louder, the show is a comedy. Now, in addition to the children’s laughter, you can hear the canned laughter of a popular show. “Is this how you handle all those students who come to you with questions about their prose?” you ask, your words spoken into his hand. He laughs. He keeps his hand on your cheek. He is looking at your face.

“I have confessions of my own,” he says.

“That sounds ominous,” you say, jokingly. The canned laughter gets louder.

“No, I mean real confessions. Ever since that news piece about the serial murderer killing all those women in Denver, I’ve been on edge. I have to tell someone about what happened to me once — well, really, what happened to someone I met.”

“Tell me,” you say.

“All right,” he says.

This is Paul’s story. This is him telling the story in the room with the lights still off and only the light from the parking lamps outside coming into the room. This is him interrupting his story, just for a moment, to find another bottle of wine in his bag, and opening it and pouring it for the both of you into your plastic cups. This is him saying, “This is a story I’ve been trying to write, because I thought it would lessen my guilt.” This is him giving you the facts. This is you thinking this is a joke, or this is him trying out a story on you that he hasn’t finished yet because he wants to know if it will hold your interest.

“It happened a long time ago, just after Chris and I came back from Greece. We were so young. We were taking it slow. She wanted to separate for a while. She suggested we date other people, to see if we were sure about dating seriously.” He doesn’t look at you when he says this, sitting next to you on the bed. He is looking at nothing or he is looking down at the wine in his cup. He is wearing a white tee shirt. You look at his chest, seeing his heart beating slightly beneath the cotton. His voice sounds quiet. It is a voice you think he uses when he wants to capture the attention of his students. You think he is probably the kind of teacher who never has to reprimand his students to get their attention. All he has to do is whisper, and they lean in closer to him to hear everything he has to say. You do lean in closer. You can feel the breath from his words blowing across the hairs in your ear, and the sensation sends shivers down your spine. You learn that he knew a woman named Bobby Chantal. You try to picture her. She looks just like Chris in your head, blond and perfect. You try another picture of her, because she couldn’t possibly look like Chris. There couldn’t be two perfect Chrises. You picture Bobby Chantal with dark brown hair and a curvy body. Paul is quiet. “Go on, I’m listening,” you say. He nods. “This is difficult for me,” he says. He takes a deep breath and continues. You would like to take notes. You would like to reach over him and pick up the hotel stationery and the hotel pen loaded with the barest minimum of ink and begin to write what he’s about to tell you because you have the feeling that you’ll want to replay his words in your head later, when you are apart from him, and you don’t trust yourself to remember them well. Today you have already forgotten to remind your youngest to pack an extra pair of goggles for the swim meet, and at the last meet her one pair broke right before her event, and she had to borrow her friend’s that were too big, and when she came up from finishing her race you could see the water sitting in the eye cups, the wavy line of it going halfway up her eyes.

“… I said yes, and then we went for a drive,” you hear Paul say, and then you could kick yourself, because you realize you have already forgotten a part of the story he is telling. What he said yes to you can’t quite remember. Yes, now you remember, Bobby wanted to go for a drive. He had just met her that day, not far from his college campus. It was a cool summer’s day. Fall was in the air, but it hadn’t yet started to change the colors of the leaves. She met him after he had just gotten out of his creative writing class, while they were both standing on a long line at a coffee shop. The cool temperature made everyone want an afternoon coffee. He had joked with Bobby Chantal, saying by the time they were served they could have had a coffee sitting down at the nearby restaurant. “That’s a good idea. I’d like to sit down for a while,” she had said, and she got off the line and started walking toward the restaurant. “Do you mind if I join you?” he asked. They had a coffee at an Italian restaurant where the odors from the kitchen were so strong that even their coffee smelled like garlic and basil. She was easy to talk to. She was older than he was, but still young, and very attractive. She told him about growing up in a small house on Cape Cod, and how she used to bandage her little dolls so that they looked like mummies. She didn’t call her dollhouse a dollhouse, she called it a doll hospital, and then when she was older she went off to nursing school. He pointed out how beautiful the sunset was going to be. He could see pink clouds rolling in. She suggested going on a drive. He recommended they go up the highway a bit, and then to a lake where there was a place to sit and talk. As they drove, she told him the stretch of highway they were on was the stretch that was famous for making Vietnam vets have violent flashbacks, its rolling green hills reminiscent of Nam. What was stranger, she said, was that many vets came from far away just to travel the stretch, to see what memories it could stir up, as if stirring them up could somehow vanish them. Paul found this fascinating. “I might use that in a story someday,” he told Bobby. She held out the flat of her hand to him. “Don’t forget to give me a percentage of the royalty check,” she said. A little ways up the highway there was a rest stop and a lookout. “I bet there’s a good view up there of those mountains that look like Nam,” she said. “Let’s stop here instead of going all the way to the lake.”