What He Saw

Be that way then, she said. And wished she hadn’t.

She touched the straps of her bikini and walked down to the sea. She preferred diving to wading, but had to wade. Then she bent her knees and tucked into the first swell. She pressed her eyes closed hard and promised herself not to marry him. His last words were coarse and it would have been better to leave him with his own unreasonable words than to say something sooky, like be that way then.

She swam past the three Spaniards who were in the water up to their necks, their hair dry. A man and two women, in their sixties, talking. Their heads sat on top of the water. They were the same distance apart as they would be on the street. He would be drawing them. Gus had sketched them while they stood on the sand. When they fought he often picked up his sketchbook and drew. It made her furious. That ability to switch off and rely on the surfaces around you. You are so yourself, Gus had said. As though you could be someone else.

Elsa was not a good swimmer, but the salt water was very buoyant. She enjoyed floating and doing the side stroke. She had a tattoo of a heart on her shoulder that she could now watch, ploughing through the sea. It was a milagro she’d had put on in Mexico City. It was after her first boyfriend had slept around on her. She changed her mind about cold things ever since that first boyfriend taught her to enjoy the wilderness. She plunged into cold water whenever she could now, as a point of being alive. She wondered what Colin White was doing now. She had last heard from him three years ago, when she was in Santa Fe for a wedding, and knew he lived there. She’d called him, and Colin White said, in his stoned, relaxed way, Hey Elsa. As if they were deep, close buddies.

She pretended the immersion was having sex with the sea. Something sensual. She did not have her contacts in, so she could not see far. She had decided, before taking out her lenses, that she would swim out to the rope that cordoned off the swimming area. Pleasure craft were moored beyond it, their empty masts tilting against the sky. Flanks of fibreglass shining in the sun. She would stay out there until he forgave her. If she saw Gus standing up, or waving her in. Now she realized she would not see him. Okay, she said, at least the time it takes for my fury to
dissolve.

She swam past all the swimmers and saw the rope ahead. It slapped an inch above the water, rimmed with a green mould that depressed her. Beyond the rope were moored the dozen yachts. They varied from thirty to maybe eighty feet. Near her was a bright pink buoy and two people were swimming beside it. She saw that they were friendly. She decided to dunk under and try for the buoy herself. The buoy seemed big enough.

He must have been seventy and the girl was in her twenties. At first perhaps strangers, but then she saw they were together. Elsa thought he was a long way out for an old man but then remembered it was she who was not a good swimmer. She often did that, Gus said, apply her own situation to others. He said it with such disdain, although he said he was just calling it as he saw it. Gus could squeeze down a lid and be cold and self-contained.

The man was bald with white sideburns; he looked military, but a European military. He had a wide mouth and his neck was strong. There was something of the powerful dog in him, a purebred. A dog used to being leashed.

They called out to her in English, and she responded in kind.

Your’e American, the man said.