It had a texture to it, the loneliness. She felt into it, reached into its crevices and around its blind corners. She came to know it not like the shapes of a new body, not the knowledge of cool skin meeting her palm in the dark, but something rougher, awry, the fleck at the heart of the nacre.
It took her several months to even figure out what to call it, an aimless feeling after midnight. Prowling around the house in black cotton tai chi slippers, the pale blue folds of her Vietnamese silk dressing gown slipping open over her breasts. She’d bought it for him from a thrift store for five dollars, only realizing when he’d tried it on quizzically—the sleeves ending halfway up his arms—that it was really for her. In the endless summers it became her second skin. She slept in it, checked the morning post in it, went outside in the middle of the night calling the cat in it.
She was becoming something else. Her curves deepened, took on a thick solidity like the thighs of a marble statue. Her belly swelled. None of her skirts fit anymore. She cut her brown hair shorter so the waves of it weren’t weighted down, sleeked coconut milk mousse through it so she smelled the beach all day when she turned her head. In the mirror she kept being startled by how plain and unhealthy she looked, an indefinable haggard quality, as if she were coming down with something; until the day when she realized it was simply age, and she had to stop waiting for it to get better or go away. There wouldn’t be again any more rosiness, any fresh prettiness. Her skin was perfectly clear but the light had gone out of it, and she hadn’t even known she had once been luminous. But that had nothing to do with his having left, or the loneliness.
(She took up running, and ran against this deliberately paced, irreversable changing of her body. It seemed to make little difference. The salt sweat trickled from her scalp down the sides of her neck, and she felt it must surely be doing some purifying work; but in the mirror afterward was always the same pale fallen face.)
The loneliness was, she decided, why she couldn’t sleep. After bathing and brushing and flossing and reading in bed, the sensible moment of turning out the light would come, after which she would lie completely poised and alert in the sheets, clear-eyed in the dark as if waiting for something. It wasn’t sex; the months went by and she remained completely uninterested in that (after early solitary experiments that ended in frightening explosions of tears and her body twisted in a breathless cramp, begging for what it couldn’t have). Instead it was possibly (as she moved to the edge of the bed, felt for her slippers, and went to the kitchen for water, though she already had water) the desire to hear another human voice before sleep. As they had lain night upon night, holding hands across the space between them, often talking (without meaning to) into the morning.
The loneliness was a gritchy, uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach; like hunger, but she stood in front of the refrigerator in the dark (leftover Thai noodles, yogurt, strawberries, a head of browning lettuce, almond milk) and wanted nothing there. It was like having nothing good to read.
He had written her, in an abashed tone perhaps intended to be apologetic, but strangely, to her, it spoke instead of self-pity. She felt neutral about this, but it seemed straightforward: How could he claim he’d suffered? Clearly not prohibitively so. He knew where she lived.
Placing the sign for her twelve-step meeting outside on the sidewalk, she saw him from a distance one night, as she peeped through a curtain of vines at the alcoholics standing outside their meeting, talking and laughing. She told herself not to look and she looked. He wore the light blue silk shirt she’d ironed so many times, sprinkling it with distilled water and lightly pressing out the creases with a barely warm iron, a shirt which matched his eyes. From that distance he looked short to her, and unimpressive; but she reasoned that it was in many respects like looking at a corpse: the part she loved was invisible.
In the message he’d asked if he could see her in person, to make amends. Instinctively she knew this was so he could wash his hands of having left her and begin to feel comfortable moving on to another woman, an idea against which he clumsily reassured her (thereby confirming her conviction); and this thought created large empty ransacked spaces in her torso, places where her insides used to be; but there was no point in not thinking it when it was all so inevitably going to be true—like the cancer, like the car accident, coiled on the horizon; like ending her life childlessly, like caring for her parents for a long blank decade, all the things which lay calmly ahead waiting for her, surging peacefully in their place.
When she was a girl, her grandparents had taken her to the coast in their motor home, a novelty which she had been young enough to enjoy. Cleaning the tiny steel sink, sliding the plastic plates back into their locking cabinet after meals. Even more had she fallen in love with the beach, with the house on stilts and its peeling paint (so many layers of pastel) and the sand that insinuated itself everywhere.
She wore her blue bikini for days, never taking it off, not knowing it would be the last bikini she would be unselfconscious enough to wear. She turned brown as the gulf water, which foamed up murky as chocolate milk, concealing stingarees so that they all had to swim in tennis shoes. Every night the surf kept her awake. There was crab-catching and shell-collecting, and when her grandmother took her down to the water at dawn, at low tide, the colors of the sunrise washed up on shore with waves of peach-pink-lavender donax, each half barely big enough to cover one of her fingernails.
One morning on the beach they counted ninety-nine jellyfish, stranded in long indigo strings on the shore, before they grew weary and turned back.
They found little dogfish sharks, their heads cut off by fishermen and thrown back into the water. They found cork floaters, for fishing nets; they floated a sealed bottle out into the surf one morning, hoping it would make it to an island or another country.
Her grandmother was still young and her lipstick was bright, a color called “coral.” She herself wished they would find real coral, in the wrack, but the few bits she found were broken and bleached white by the sun. It wasn’t until she was a woman and he took her to his favorite sea that they found branching forests of coral—magenta, maroon, yellow, orange—the same orange as the lipstick—so much coral, so freely given up by the water. She saved the best pieces carefully, causing trouble at customs. But they made it through eventually, and she bought a wooden box with a glass top and a little lock, and the coral lived then in their bathroom, by the twin sinks and fluorescent-lit mirrors, never seeming to fade.
She doesn’t know where the box of coral went. It bothers her, sometimes, wondering this, at night. Did he take it? Did she not want to have it around? Was it lost or broken? In the loneliness she thinks too much. And anyway there is a salt inevitability, that it would go back somehow, that he would go back, to the long, drawn-out places from where they came.
