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Surfacing

by Allie Kleber

Begun 9/30/04
This version: 12/5/04

She cut a swath of quiet through the bustling office as she passed. Engineers were chatting by the water cooler and others by the coffee machine; secretaries were leaning across their desks, the better to catch every tidbit of gossip; even the janitor was whistling his way from the men’s room. She sailed impassively through the seethe of them, greeting no one and saying nothing. Arriving at her office, she slipped inside and walked straight to her desk, sitting down and reaching for a neat pile of papers on the left-hand side.

Just as she began perusing the top sheet, someone knocked at her door. She sighed, put the paper down, and smoothed out her mid-length black skirt with one hand.

“Come in!”

A short, middle-aged man with a large bald spot opened the door and stuck his head inside. His body followed, and he came to stand in front of her desk, grinning down at her with a genial expression and a wandering eye. She looked back at him with an expression of polite expectation, colored with a vague undertone of boredom.

“Zoë Pagels?” He asked unnecessarily, as though he hadn’t read the nameplate on her door. She nodded. “I’m Don Murphy, the new co-manager. It’s my first day, and I figured I’d come around and introduce myself to everyone in the office. Particularly the pretty ones.” He gave her a conspiratorial wink.

Zoë inclined her head slightly in response to his greeting, but didn’t react to the innuendo. He paused a moment, slightly awkward, then continued.

“So you’re the entire advertising department of this little branch, eh? All by yourself, at such a young age—what was it, twenty-seven? That’s mighty impressive. Must be a big responsibility for someone who was prom queen not too long ago.” His easy, appreciative grin was back. “I’ll bet you were, too.”

She ignored him. This was getting far too uncomfortable, and she had work to do. Just then, another head peeked into her office. The over-friendly Don Murphy had fortuitously left the door ajar.

“Zoë, I’ve got something to talk to you about. Oh, are you busy?” The head, which belonged to a brown-haired young man, aimed a fetching blink in her direction. She graced him with a small smile.

“No, it’s all right, Alan. Mr. Murphy was just introducing himself, but I’m sure he has many other acquaintances to make. Mr. Murphy, allow me to introduce Alan Feldman, one of our best and brightest engineers. Alan, Mr. Murphy is our new co-manager.”

The two men shared a hearty handshake, and Mr. Murphy excused himself. Alan shut the door behind him before turning and settling himself languidly in the chair facing Zoë’s desk.

“Well, he’s old enough to be your father.”

She grimaced, before turning back to the document she was holding in an absentminded sort of way. “No, he isn’t. My father probably has a good ten years on him, and he isn’t nearly so friendly.”

There were a few seconds of uncomfortable silence.

“Zoë, don’t you want to hear what I have to tell you?” Alan was making an effort to sound hurt. She glanced up at him and gestured for him to go on. He rolled his eyes at her good-naturedly, and continued.

“You’re on vacation next week, right?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “If I know you, that means you’re just going to sit at home and read, but get this. They’re sending me out to this conference at some little coastal university—it’s a small trip, just to get a feel for a few of the newer companies that’ll be attending—and I thought, well. You should come! It’s still really warm for September, so we could go swimming, and maybe get you out of this city for awhile. Do you ever leave it?”

He barely paused long enough to give his rhetorical question room to breathe. “It would be two, maybe three nights, and I hear the town is really pretty. So what do you say?” He blinked at her again, catching his breath and looking relieved that she hadn’t tried to interrupt his spiel.

Zoë was surprised. She hand Alan had been officially dating for a couple of months now, and the fact that they were doing so at all was only because she had finally tired of the dogged persistence with which he’d pursued the matter. They did little more than the occasional dinner date, since she discouraged any bleeding of personal life into the workplace, and her hours tended to run long. The idea of spending a large part of her rare week off with him, particularly with the inclusion of not only one, but several overnights, was not something that had occurred to her.

“I don’t know, Alan. I was planning on something a little less involved. Maybe a play or two . . . this seems a bit, well, expensive. Among other things.”
“Oh, no,” he replied cheerfully. “We’d only have to pay extras. The cost of the hotel room and meals are being taken care of by the company. They really seem to like me, you know?”

She did know: everyone liked Alan. He was incredibly bright, charming, and refreshingly unaffected. It was difficult not to be disarmed by his easy office banter, his instant concern over the most trifling of personal difficulties, and his ridiculous boyish exuberance. A year younger than Zoë, his own advancement was equally notable. He was every woman in the office’s dream date—a fact which none of them kept very secret—but since he’d arrived at their branch nearly a year ago, he’d only had eyes for Zoë. Lovely, with wispy blonde hair, clear blue eyes, and an eternally aloof expression, she was always noticeable in her failure to rise to the tempting bachelor bait. Zoë, characteristically cynical, guessed that it was probably an attainability thing: he had no shortage of female admirers, but he was only interested in her, the one young woman who had in fact completely ignored him.

Zoë was aware that all of her peers in the office had been giving her catty looks and calling her the “Ice Queen” behind her back, even before Alan had shown up. It hadn’t bothered her too much—it certainly wasn’t the most original insult she’d ever had thrown her way—but eventually even she had gotten tired of saying “no.” Dating Alan wasn’t exactly a chore, either. He reminded her of a big, adoring puppy, and she thought she might keep him around for a little while. However, this did not extend to letting him break too far into her carefully-regulated life.

“It really is sweet of you to ask me,” she started carefully, “but I don’t go swimming much. I don’t even own a bathing suit, and anyway, I was just going to use this week to relax quietly. Take some walks in the park, you know, get some reading done . . .” She favored him with her most apologetic smile, but he just shook his head, face still plastered with a maddeningly confident smile.

“Oh, no, those excuses just don’t cut it. We can get you a bathing suit, and you are not spending the first vacation you’ve had since I’ve known you holed up in your apartment. If you don’t have any more convincing arguments to make, it’s settled. You’re coming.” He stood decisively, eyes twinkling. “I know you have a lot to do before your vacation, so I’ll go now. Ta!” With a swift kiss on the top of her head, he was away and out the door.

“But, Alan . . . damn.”

She sat back in her black vinyl office chair and stared off into space for a couple of minutes, fighting back the feeling of helplessness that washed over her in the wake of his exit. She hadn’t been firm enough. How was she going to convince him that she wasn’t going to spend a few days on the coast with him? Much less let him buy her a bathing suit to go swimming in. In the ocean.

She hadn’t thought about the ocean in a long time; years, even. She hadn’t been there in longer. Of course, reminders had turned up in her path from time to time: a painting; a seashell necklace; a tanned coworker just returned from the tropics. So of course it crossed her mind occasionally—and exited just as quickly. The mental image she reverted to automatically in such instances was more like the backdrop painting from an old movie than the real thing: it lacked substance. Even though the city in which she had studied, lived, and worked for years was technically a coastal city, she carefully never had any occasion to head in the direction of the harbor.

Now, a shadow of the reality behind that backdrop-ocean brushed at the edge of her mind, summoned up far more easily than she would have expected.

Alan was a very determined sort of man, and she knew it was going to be difficult to get out of this plan of his.

Making a conscious effort, she forced herself to focus. The problem could wait until lunch, at least. Tugging perfunctorily on one of her crisp, white sleeves, she settled in to do some work and, hopefully, stop worrying about it.

Zoë was an enigma to the rest of her coworkers. Since she was her own department, she didn’t have a lot of cause to interact with the rest of the office, except on a professional basis. She didn’t join them in their happy hours, didn’t come out to chat with them by the water cooler, and was completely without any visible friends or family. She never went to visit anyone over the holidays, nor did she expect visitors in return. She rarely took time off. The consequence of her polite standoffishness was that most of the people around her felt snubbed, and therefore snubbed her in return. Alan was the only real exception, since he found her aloofness alluring.

Of course, Zoë did have family, but she hadn’t been in contact with them for quite some time, aside from the occasional generic card on Christmas or her birthday. And as for friends, if you asked her, well . . . she just didn’t have a lot of time these days. She had her work, and she didn’t really need anything else.

If she had to think about it, she hated the ocean.

Leaving work a little earlier than normal, she managed to avoid Alan and any more discussion of the hypothetical trip. She left the building and headed for the nearby subway station; just another urban professional heading home for the day.

The ride was uneventful and fairly short. She got off at her stop, walked the block-and-a-half to her apartment building, and was soon toeing off her high heels and sinking into a chair with a weary sigh. She rested her arms on the clean surface of her small wooden table, and thought about absolutely nothing for as long as she could manage to keep it up.

The apartment around her was small, tidy, and tastefully furnished. There were a couple of prints of classic paintings, some candles, dried flowers, and picture frames scattered around on the walls and a couple of side tables. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, save a single coffee mug left there that morning, and no sign of mess or clutter anywhere. The fact that, aside from one rather old picture of her mother and little brother and another of her elder sister (sent all the way from Germany last Christmas), the picture frames held photographs from college only, might have aroused some interest or suspicion in an unusually observant visitor. The few people that dropped by her apartment occasionally, building neighbors and the like, weren’t interested enough for that.

Eventually, she roused herself to go see what options she had for dinner. While she was puttering around, preparing herself a salad to go with the left-over pasta that was reheating in the microwave, she considered Alan’s proposal.

How could she dissuade him? As she sipped her single glass of wine—a small indulgence—she realized that she was at a loss. What excuse could she possibly give that would convince him? Normally she could use her work, but as that wasn’t an option . . . her vacation stretched before her, empty, completely devoid of any suddenly-remembered engagements or time constraints. Agitated, she absent-mindedly rubbed her hand back-and-forth over her right sleeve.

If she simply refused without a real reason, he would assume that it was because of him. It could be a good excuse to turn him loose, she supposed. Perhaps breaking off their relationship would be the best solution? Hardly. To do so this suddenly would be incredibly messy, dramatic, and would have a constant presence at work. She didn’t feel that she could face such an exhausting ordeal.

The devil and the deep blue sea, indeed.

She rinsed her glass out in the sink, watching the water slosh against the sides as it slowly filled. The level rose, poised on the rim for a split-second, then spilled over her hand.

Her hand began to shake, and she set the glass down, turned the water off, and walked out of the tiny kitchen. She clasped her arms across her chest as she stood in front of her hallway mirror. Her reflection was wan and sad-looking. She stared, and then made a face at it. How ridiculous, to be so frightened. She laughed at herself a little, but her voice shook.

Zoë finally picked up a book and forced herself to spend the rest of the evening attempting to read it. She refused to consider that perhaps a dilemma such as this had always been inevitable.

For the rest of the week, she tried to convince Alan that the trip was a bad idea. She claimed that she just wanted to spend her time off resting quietly, rather than putting in effort to get out and do things. She proposed fun things they could do when he came back, thoughtfully tailored towards his tastes. She alluded gently to the fact that, as they had yet to spend a single night together, two or three seemed rather excessive.

He only laughed, insisted, and finally began to give her strange, suspicious looks. Once he asked her if she knew how to swim, which she’d almost latched on to, but he seemed to know that she was going to lie before she’d even tried.

What could she do? She gave in. Perhaps, if she were extremely careful, disaster could be forestalled.

When she climbed into Alan’s car, gingerly, that Saturday morning, her very bones were ringing with tension.

He had his arm around her waist as they strode slowly through the darkened streets of the town, which was abuzz with college students. The storefronts were a funny sort of jumble of student-frequented coffee shops and supply stores, and the occasional seafood restaurant or taffy-‘n’-fudge-maker, all closed up for the off-season. Alan was even more relaxed and cheery than usual, bubbling up in a slightly alcohol-tinged rise of good cheer. He was chattering on; something about how engaging the first day of the conference had been, interspersed with exclamations of delight over the town, the food, and her company. She walked quietly by his side, her thoughts as blank as she could make them as they passed by nightspots hopping with slam poetry and dark windows filled with unseasonable beachwear. The air was subtly edged with the smell of salt, a constant reminder of the nearby presence of the seashore.

It’s really a shame we didn’t go swimming today, though,” he remarked as they turned into the door of the hotel. “It was so warm and sunny out! What do you want to bet it will start pouring or something, tomorrow? That would be just my luck.” Which was patently untrue: Alan’s luck was ridiculously good.

She smiled at this, a little thinly, thinking that she would go to bed tonight and pray for rain. “It doesn’t really make a difference, does it? I don’t have a suit, remember?”

He just smiled back at her. “Oh, babe, we’ve already been over this. I’ll get you one. I’m sure not every beach shop is closed for the season yet, and there’s no way that I’m going to pass up seeing you in one.” He winked, but her shoulders stiffened against him. The unspoken refusal pushed at the inside of her clenched teeth. They had reached the room, and he let go in order to slide the keycard and let her inside.

She crossed to the window, wrapping her arms around herself as she stared at the stripes of moonlight through the Venetian blinds. The filtered light in the darkened room was almost aquatic, shifting slightly with the movement of passing clouds, and she imagined that she was trapped in a fish tank.

She turned back to him, blinking as he switched on the overhead light, and pulled her long bones together to curl up atop the still-made bed. She hid her face until the light was turned off again. Coming to stand beside the bed, he stroked her hair with one large, gentle hand. She watched through half-lidded eyes as he stripped down to a pair of baby blue boxers, waiting for him to crawl under the covers before standing to slither out of her dress, reaching for the nightgown that was draped over a nearby chair.

She was so quick that he barely caught the flash of her pale, lean form in the shadows before she was clothed again. The nightgown reached her knees, and its sleeves hung past her elbows.

Alan wrapped his strong arms around her when she climbed into bed, and she settled against his shoulder, letting him nuzzle her ear, her neck. When one of his hands started to move as well, a little too adventurously, she laid her own on top of it, stilling it with a gentle touch.

“Sweetheart, I’m exhausted,” she murmured, kissing the corner of his mouth. “Could we just . . . ?” She trailed off and snuggled more securely into his arms, tucking her head under his chin.

Disappointed, but unfailingly considerate, stroked her arm gently through the silken sleeve of her nightgown. He drifted off surprisingly fast, much to her relief. While she considered her agreement to this trip a tacit agreement to certain other activities that she had not participated in with him—or anyone, for that matter, since college—she was glad of the postponement.

His regular breathing rolled through his chest, half-beneath her: a series of gentle swells. She watched the submarine play of light over the ceiling for a long time, trying to empty herself of the tension that had held her fast throughout the day. She fancied she could still catch a whiff of brine in the sterile air of the hotel room.

She closed her eyes at last, and was carried underwater by the force of her overtaxed subconscious.

She had loved the ocean. As a child, Zoë had felt more at home by the sea than in her family’s house. Leaving her parents and siblings to sun high up on the sand, she would dash for the water and immediately stretch her mother’s boundaries to the absolute limit. The rule was not to go so far that the water was over her head, so when it reached her eyes she would stop, take her deepest breath, and dive.

She would open her eyes on a new world, murky and mysterious, the sunlight filtering straight down through the waves here and there. Peering down at her own gangly body, she would note her own sudden transformation. No longer the awkward string bean of a girl that she was on land, with her sharp limbs like knives too pointy to rest upon. She had become an alien creature, suddenly at home in her own greenish skin. She knew that to be strange was to be beautiful.

Turning graceful somersaults, and twisting to watch the brightly-colored bubbles stream from her mouth towards the surface, she would imagine that she was the daughter of a great sea king. She could almost hear the songs of sirens calling her home, and she longed to go, but she always made sure to put up a strong resistance. Her land family needed her.

When she finally emerged—usually at the sound of her mother’s “final warning” shouted from the beach—dripping and wrinkled, her hair a matted, salty mess, her swimsuit clinging to her body like a second skin, she would trail her stubborn slow way back to the beach house, tired but still unwilling to leave. Her father would already have disappeared into the parking lot, having never put on a suit in the first place.

Except . . . this time, she was standing still on the beach in full daylight. Water dripped down her arms and from her straggly bangs into her eyes. More water dripped from them, salt mixing with salt. She felt naked: pulled prematurely from the water to stand exposed on shore. The wet lump of white cotton cloth was held, crumpled, in her two fists.

Her mother was shaking, but her father’s eyes were hard.

Zoë awoke very late. Alan had already gone, and the sunlight was streaming through the open blinds on the bed. Blinking, she looked at the clock, and was shocked to find that it was nearly noontime. It was very unlike her to sleep so late.

She floated through the afternoon. Having eaten a light lunch, she wandered around the town for awhile, but as it didn’t yield anything particularly intriguing, she soon returned to the hotel room. She curled up in the chair with a novel until Alan reappeared, with a chaste kiss on her forehead and another on her mouth. They went down to dinner in the hotel restaurant, where he presented her with a cute little necklace made of a cowry shell. It was sweet, and his brown eyes were melting at her, so she smiled and put it on. He grinned.

“You know, Zoë,” he remarked over a plate of linguini, “you’ve never told me about your family before. I seem to recall that last time we had dinner, I gave you a full account of my seven siblings and all their exploits”—here he chuckled—“so now it’s your turn.”

Zoë toyed with her peas for a minute, then shrugged, her mouth quirking. “There isn’t much to say, really. My parents got divorced when I was thirteen because my father never had time for anything but his work. My older sister moved to Europe to be a musician. My younger brother is in college in California, and my mother is living with her new boyfriend back home in Maine. I haven’t been home since I started college . . . I’m just not very close to any of them, you know how it is.” As she finished her recitation, she averted her eyes to avoid his sympathetic look. Silence reigned for a few minutes.

It was still light out when they returned to their room. With a sort of cheerfully determined air, Alan turned to her.

“So . . . I was wondering if you’d like to go for a stroll along the beach tonight. You know, something straight out of a personals’ ad. And maybe, if the water isn’t too cold, we could even take an evening dip.”

With that, he reached into a plastic bag that was sitting on the desk and drew out a simple black bathing suit, with the price tag still attached.

Her whole face shuttered closed. “I’d really rather not, Alan. I’m tired; I think I might go to bed early.” She turned her head away, but he took her by the shoulders and gently backed her up until the backs of her knees hit the bed, and she buckled. Sitting down beside her, he looked her steadily in the eyes.

“I’d say that I’m worried about how much you’re sleeping, but somehow I don’t think that’s really the problem. What’s wrong?” He took her hand and squeezed. “It’s all right, I have you. You can tell me. Are you afraid of water, are you . . .” He trailed off expectantly.

Her head dropped slightly. His well-meant concern was only making the situation worse: he wouldn’t let her deflect. She’d been wound ever tighter for over a week now, and having been consistently unable to release any of that pressure, she could feel the breaking point coming on.

Though terrified by the thought of allowing her long-held control to slip, a part of her shrugged. Why not, after all? His reaction didn’t matter all that much, in the end, and she was tired of the constant strain of evasion.

Rather than speaking, she freed her hand in order to reach down and pull off her blouse, tossing it to the floor in one dramatic motion. Then she looked at him, gauging his reaction.

Her simple white bra did little to conceal the rows upon neatly-laid rows that decorated her skin, all carefully placed so as not to be visible under a regular short-sleeved shirt. A record of suffering, of days and months of fighting to wrest control from the grip of circumstance: here on her right shoulder-blade was her father’s disinterest in an all-A report card. Here, just beneath her collarbone, was her sister’s refusal to come home for Christmas during her second year of college. Just above her belly-button, the man who had breathed in her face and groped her thigh on the bus home alone after nobody had picked her up from school. There, scoring deeply into the flesh of one breast, was her father’s announcement that he would depart at the end of the summer. She could have named them all. Her skin was a map of pale-pink trauma, too many years young to have faded.

Just a middle-class white girl, covered in scars.

He stared for a moment, and then reached out. She allowed herself to fall into him. Her head cradled against his chest, she told him with dry eyes and a mostly even voice about the trip to the beach when she was twelve years old, and how her mother had made her take off the t-shirt she was swimming in because it was wet and cold. How in all the panic that had followed, all the doctors and shrinks and the hospital with the pills and white nightgowns, her father’s expression had still never changed. Alan held her, and hummed reassurance in her ear, and stroked her hair after she’d fallen silent. She stared at the opposite wall.

After long minutes had passed, the quality of his caresses changed. Slowly, he turned her in his arms, and brought her up to kiss her unresisting lips. His hands stroked her pain-embossed shoulders. Then he kissed her scars, murmuring incoherently about how beautiful she was.

It was long, slow, and certainly sweet. After it was over, they crawled under the covers, and he curled up around her. He murmured something that sounded like “I’m here” into her shoulder, and was asleep an instant later, an expression of intense contentment spread across his features.

Zoë lay there, looking down at her hands, which were curled like starfish on the bedspread in front of her. A confused sort of prayer.

Alan’s breath brushed her ear. She could still feel his kisses on her scars.

He thought he’d healed her, she realized. As though touch, even after so long, could save her from something that lived in her own head. Something that, unlike the scars, she could not explain or reveal: the cold, emotionless specter of her own father inhabiting her mind. The invisible presence everywhere she went: a person who worked, and froze, and was forever and always out of reach. She hadn’t spoken to her father since her twelfth year, but he was embodied in her every action, her every aloof silence.

She shivered, and moved in closer to Alan’s bodily warmth. At last, she drifted away into sleep.

Zoë awoke very early. The sun was barely over the horizon. Alan had rolled away from her during the night, and lay sprawling and open, his sleeping face boyishly angelic. She slid her naked legs off the bed and stood. In the half-light, she noticed the bathing suit, crumpled where it had fallen to the floor the night before.

The waves were not so much crashing as lapping softly against the cool sands of the beach, which was completely deserted. She wound her way slowly to the very edge, breathing in the brine until a frothy swell gently brushed over her toes. It was ice-cold.

She stepped into the water, not quickly, but with purpose. Shivering and covered in goose bumps, which she ignored, she waded out. The water touched the crotch of the bathing suit and soaked upwards, plastering it against her skin as she went deeper.

When the water was up to the bridge of her nose, her body surrounded by the numbing chill of the mid-September ocean, she silently slid under and opened her eyes.

It was too early for the shafts of sunlight, so that all she could see under the water was the pale flash of her body as she wriggled, eel-like, to touch the dark bottom. She looked down at herself, the undeniable strangeness of her skin . . . patterned once by the long-ago knife and again by the shadows and reflections of the waves above.

She pushed up gently, her face breaking the surface first. Sheathed in the chill water, she floated on her back and watched the clouds moving across the sky.