Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

“Beef, here, take some money,” the woman says.

“Are you listening to me?” you say. “Isn’t this a police tip hotline? This is important.”

“Yeah, sure, go on, oh, and Jimmy, get me a Coke with that Homewrecker too,” the woman says.

Slamming a hard plastic phone back on a payphone’s metal cradle is much more satisfying than pushing a button on a cell phone, you think to yourself as you slam the phone down. You’ve heard about tip hotlines before, how half the time the person taking the call is spinning their finger by their ear as if the person giving them information is crazy and can’t be believed. What you really must do is get Paul to go in and give a detective the information that he knows.

Since you’re out early from practice, you decide to go see if Paul’s in his office at the college. He’s not hard to find. You know which department he teaches in and his office address is listed. You wish you weren’t going to his office but someplace else, someplace quiet, maybe even to the beach where you vacationed near the equator. You imagine watching incoming waves with Paul and sparks of phosphorescence in the water at night. You’d like to ask him more about his teaching. You know he teaches writing, but what exactly about writing does he teach? Does he have suggested methods? You once taught a class for students who were studying for college entrance exams, and in the training for the class you taught them tricks. You taught them that guessing is always better than leaving the answers blank. Does he have that sort of thing for his students? A checklist of sorts they can go through that helps them write well? You want to know what exercises he gives them to get their juices flowing. Does he tell them to keep a hat filled with favorite lines they have heard and then to close their eyes and pull one of the lines out and start with that? Does he tell them to triple-space their lines so they can see their mistakes more easily? You once had a teacher in a college composition class who told you to do this, but you had to stop after a while because you couldn’t afford the paper it was using up.

When you’re standing at Paul’s office door, you can hear him talking to a student. The student is asking what Paul means by writing from the heart, and he says it means a lot of things, but the thing it means the most is to write something that she feels strongly about. Something that if she were denied the opportunity to write about, she would feel she couldn’t go on. You slide down against the wall next to the door. This could be a long meeting, you think. You start thinking how you would do if you were a student in Paul’s class. Would you even know what writing from the heart means? The only things you think of writing down are things that are not easy to describe. You want to write down how a sunset looks sometimes, but it is impossible for you to put it into words. Some sunsets to you feel different from other ones. The way the clouds sometimes pass quickly over the setting sun gives you a feeling of sadness, but how boring would that be to put on paper, and it’s really not an image at all, is it? you think. Sometimes you want to describe the stars, how their incessant shining can make you feel claustrophobic. Where you live there is no other source of light from buildings or houses to diminish their glow, and sometimes you’d like them to stop winking. Sometimes you’d like to describe how the sound of a loon feels as though it enters through your chest, as if that’s where you hear it first instead of through your ears. You realize why you take photographs for a living instead. It’s so much easier when you don’t have to describe what you feel and can just take a picture of it. You remember how when you first took a photography class in college, you were so excited to see what stories you could tell just with the shots you took. The teacher assigned everyone the task of putting captions of what the people were saying beneath the photos, and you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. You received a poor grade for that class, but it made you want to become a professional photographer. You realized how much you wanted to be able to tell a story without words, and you realized you never wanted anyone to come along and ask of your photos, “And what is that person feeling?” You wanted them to be able to feel an emotion from just looking at the photo, and if they couldn’t do it, then the photo wasn’t worth taking in the first place. From then on you majored in photography. When graduation day arrived, you didn’t even sit in the audience so you could take photos of your classmates, the bright sun shining down on their mortarboards and making the silky cloth look from up above like waves sparkling on a rippling sea. Oh, no, I would be a horrible student in Paul’s class, you think, and you begin to feel sorry for the student too, until the door swings open and out comes this young, beautiful girl with long brown hair in tendrils that curl far past her shoulders and brush the hem of her shorts, which are so short they look more like bikini bottoms. A scent of jasmine seems to be coming from her skin as she walks by.

You can still smell the jasmine in Paul’s office when you knock on the doorframe.

“Prof, I’ve got a problem,” you say. “I can’t write from the heart. It’s all closed up. Can you help me?”

Paul smiles. “Hey, look who’s here!” he says. “What brings you here? Aren’t you supposed to be at practice? Sit down.” He pulls out the chair that the beautiful student must have sat in. The seat is still warm.

“Practice isn’t over yet. I still have time to pick the girls up. I, I…” Paul is leaning in close, and the smell of the jasmine seems to be surrounding you now. You start thinking maybe he’s drawn to you because he just had the beautiful student in his office, and now he’s aroused. “Paul, you’ve got to do something. You’ve got to talk to the police about what you know about that red Corvair. It could mean something to them, and that poor girl Kim from the swim team, well, in a few years that could be Cleo or my girls.”

You notice while you’re talking that Paul’s office is decorated with different plaques. There are framed diplomas and framed awards, all with his name on them. You didn’t realize how academic he was. He wears a white tee shirt and blue jeans most of the time, and for crying out loud, he wears his hair in a ponytail! How would anyone believe from meeting him outside of the college that he wasn’t just some house painter or bartender?

“Have you been talking to Chris?” Paul says. “That’s the same thing she said to me, that in a few years it could be Cleo that this man goes after. I don’t think either of you realize what a huge coincidence that would be. It’s just not going to happen to our girls. The odds have it.”

“But it could happen to some other woman, and very soon.”

“Listen, the incident just occurred a few weeks ago. We don’t know, there may be plenty of witnesses who come forth in the coming weeks and who remember something suspicious from that night. Let’s give them a chance to come forward with relevant information. The information I have is over twenty-eight years old. Whatever I tell them about a red Corvair with Illinois plates could even be a red herring and keep them from following a solid lead.”

“You don’t want to dig this all up, do you? Be honest, you’re just covering your ass.” You wish for an instant that you had swum your entire workout earlier, because right now you feel tense, and you don’t have that dreamy feeling you usually have after you’ve swum a full hour and change.

Paul doesn’t answer you. He covers his face with his hands, but just for an instant, letting his long fingers slide down his aquiline nose until the tips of his fingers rest over his lips. You stand up, ready to go. You know the answers now to your questions. Paul stands up with you. You think he’s stood up to open the door for you, being just as anxious to have you out of there as you are to leave, as if somehow you’re putting to shame all the plaques that line his walls, but instead he pulls you close to him and kisses you. You’re overcome by how good it feels to kiss someone. It’s like being handed a glass of water and drinking it all down, not realizing how thirsty you were when the glass was first handed to you. It has been so long. It has been too long. His lips are smooth and his tongue exerts just the right amount of pressure against your own. You’d like to go on kissing for a long time, because what’s the harm in kissing? You’d like it to be this way forever because you never want it to go farther than this. When you start thinking of Thomas, you force him out of your mind. If Thomas kissed you more often, you’d never be here in this jasmine-smelling office in the first place. You will not let Thomas take away this moment, this one kiss, because that’s all it will ever be, and its memory will have to last such a long time.