Jodie Picoult - Songs of the Humpback Whale - A Novel in Five Voices

When I am inside the elevator, with the doors closing, I lean back and breathe quickly. What am I doing? What am I doing? Is it infidelity, I wonder, if you are pretending to be someone that you aren’t?

I let myself into the hotel room and I am relieved by its overwhelming familiarity. There is the bed on the left, and the bathroom behind the door, and the thin sanitary strip around the toilet that the maid leaves every morning. There is the folding stand for luggage, and the room service menu, and the wavy patterned curtains made of some flammable substance. Everything is just as I have left it, and there is some solace in this.

I lie on the bed, my hands at my sides, completely naked. The air conditioner, making the obligatory hum that all hotel cooling units do, stirs the hair on my chest. I picture the face of this waitress, her lips moving down the length of my body like water.

Although we had been dating, I did not have intercourse with Jane for four and a half years There were two women on the side, women who meant nothing. You know the phrase: there are certain women you sleep with, and others you marry. It was quite clear which category Jane fit into. Jane, who smelled of lemon soap, and who matched her headbands to her handbags. I had been working for a while at Woods Hole by the time Jane entered her senior year at Wellesley, and I got into a routine. I’d see her every weekend (the commute was too draining for anything more) and we’d go out. I’d feel her under her bra and then take her back to her dormitory.

That last year, though, something happened. Jane stopped fightingmy hands as they groped through layers of clothes in the dark. She started to move my hands herself, so that they would touch certain places and slide with certain rhythms. I did everything I could to stop her. I believed that I knew the consequences better than she.

We had sex for the first time in the balcony of an old movie theater. She had been provoking me to distraction downstairs, where we were surrounded by other people. I pulled her to the balcony, which was roped off for renovation at the time. When I took off her clothes, and she was standing in front of me haloed in the light from the projector, I realized I wasn’t going to fight her any longer. She rubbed herself against me until I was certain I would explode and then I grabbed her hips and pushed myself into her. I started to lose control, the warm sponginess like a closing throat, and then I realized that Jane had stopped breathing. She had never had intercourse before.

I know now I must have scared her to death, but I wasn’t thinking rationally back then. Once I had tasted honey, I was not about to go back to bread and water. I began to call Jane daily and make the commute from the Cape two or three times a week. I was working with tide pools then, and I spent the day staring at them, at the hard-shelled invertebrates and the kelp, entire societies that were devastated in the ruthless blast of a wave. I turned over the horseshoe crabs and unraveled the tentacles of the starfish without interest. I took no notes. And when a mentor at Woods Hole confronted me about my attitude: I did the only thing I could: I stopped seeing Jane.

I was not going to make a name for myself if I spent the day thinking about being in the throes of passion. I told Jane many things: that I had the flu; that I had switched to a project on jellyfish and had to do background research. I spent more time devoted to my job and I called Jane occasionally, with distance keeping us safe.

About this time I witnessed a miracle: the birth of a pilot whale in captivity. We had been studying the mother’s gestation and I happened to be in the building when she started labor. We had her in a huge underwater tank for easy visibility, and naturally when such a marvel occurs everyone stops what they are doing and comes to see. The baby spit out of its mother in a stream of entrails and blood. The mother swam in circles until the baby had become oriented to the water, and then she swam beneath it in order to buoy it to the surface for air. “Tough break,” said a scientist beside me. “Being born underwater to breathe oxygen.”

That day I went into town and bought an engagement ring. It had not occurred to me before: the only thing that could be better than becoming famous in my field was to do it with Jane by my side. There was no reason I could not have my cake and eat it too. She possessed all the qualities I knew I would never grow to espouse. By having Jane, I had hope. I understood sacrifice.

Jane. Lovely, quirky Jane.

Would she believe in second chances?

Suddenly mortified by my behavior, I cross my hands in front of my groin. I pull on my clothes as quickly as possible and zip up my suitcase. I have to get out of here before this waitress comes. What have I been thinking? I drag the suitcase down the long hallway and into an elevator, hiding behind balustrades to make sure she isn’t coming. Then, calmed by Muzak, I take deep breaths and plummet to ground level, thinking of Jane. Jane, only of Jane.

According to Indianapolis Jones, the DJ on this radio station (and no relative of ours), the temperature has reached 118 degrees. “One hundred and eighteen,” my mother repeats. She lifts her hands off the steering wheel as if it too is boiling. She whistles through her front teeth. “People die in this kind of weather.”

We have stumbled into a drought and a heat wave, mixed. It also seems that time is passing much more slowly here, although I imagine that could be due to the temperature. We are destined for Indianapolis, but I don’t think we will ever make it. The way things are going this car will explode in the heat of its own gas before we get there.

It is so hot I can’t sit up anymore. I never thought I’d say it but I wish we had the old station wagon back. Inside, there was plenty of room to create shadows. In an MG there’s no place to hide. I’m curled into the smallest ball I can manage, with my head pointing down on the floor mat. My mother looks at me. “Embryonic,” she says.

Sometime before we actually cross into the city of Indianapolis the temperature rises another three degrees. The vinyl in the car begins to crack, and I point this out to my mother. “You’re being ridiculous,” she tells me. “That was cracked to begin with.”

I feel the pores on my face breathe. Sweat runs down the inside of my thighs. The thought of entering a city-concrete and steel-disgusts me. “I mean it. I’m going to scream.” I summon up every morsel of strength I have left and shriek, a high pitched banshee sound that doesn’t seem to originate from any part of my body.

“All right.” My mother tries to put her hands over her ears but she cannot do this and drive at the same time. “All right! What do you need?” She looks at me. “A Sno-cone? Air conditioning? A swimming pool?”

“Oh yes,” I sigh, “a pool. I need a pool.”

“You should have said that in the first place.” She nudges over the suntan lotion that sits on the seat between us. “Put this on. You’re going to get skin cancer.”

According to the Indianapolis Department of Tourism, there is no city pool, but relatively nearby is a YMCA where we could probably pay admission to swim. My mother gets directions and (after stopping off for Uncle Joley’s letter) drives to the building. “What if it’s an indoor pool?” I whine. But then I hear it: the screams and the splashes of kids, towels dragging on concrete. “Oh, thank God.”

“Thank Him after you get inside,” my mother murmurs. You know the way your body feels on the hottest day of the summer, when you actually get within swimming distance of a cold, blue pool? How you feel more relaxed than you have in the seven hours you’ve suffered from heatstroke-as if all you had to do to cool off was imagine that you would finally be able to dive in? This is exactly the way I feel, waiting with my back pressed up against the cinderblock yellow walls of the YMCA. My mother is negotiating. It is not their policy, the woman says, to let in nonmembers. “Join,” I whisper. “Oh, please join.”