Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

“The ocean is unstill,” she says, “farther down than you think. All the way to the bottom, things move.”

“What you have to understand,” she says, “is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.”

“There are no empty places,” she says, and I imagine her glancing at cue cards, clicking through slides. “However deep you go,” she says, “however far down, you’ll find something there.”

This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.

Did you know that until very recently, more people had been to the moon than had dived beyond depths of six thousand meters? I think about this often—the inhospitableness of certain places. A footprint, once left on the surface of the moon, might in theory remain as it is almost indefinitely. Uneroded by atmosphere, by wind or by rain, any mark made up there could quite easily last for several centuries. The ocean is different, the ocean covers its tracks.

To drop below the surface is still to sink, however intentionally—a simple matter of taking on water, just as drowning only requires you to open your mouth.

Twenty minutes before we lost contact, Jelka told me she thought she smelled meat, which was strange, because I’d been thinking the same thing—a hot unsavory waft like something cooked. I remember I looked to my own fingers, half expected to find them roasting, bent to observe the skin on my shins, on my knees, on my ankles. There was nothing, of course, and no reason at all for the smell that seemed to hit us both with such force.

Ten minutes later, when the craft’s whole system went off-line, it would occur to me that the comms hadn’t faded like a wavering signal so much as been switched off, though by that time we all had more pressing things to deal with.

Now that she’s back—now I’m used to her being back—I can’t decide whether to register her presence as relief or invasion.

Every couple, I think, enjoys its own mythology, recollections like note cards to guide you around an exhibition: Fig. A. Portrait of the couple dancing at a colleague’s Catholic wedding. Fig. B. Charcoal sketch of the couple fighting over who said what at a cokey dinner with acquaintances (note fine lines beneath completed sketch, indicating places where the artist has repeatedly erased and redrawn).

What is harder is stepping back far enough to consider us in the altogether, not the series of pictures but the whole that those pictures represent. I don’t particularly like to do this. Stepping back too far makes me dizzy—my memory, like something punched, reeling about with its hands clapped over its face. It is easier, I think, to consider the fact of us in its many disparate pieces, as opposed to one vast and intractable thing. Easier, I think, to claw through the scatter of us in the hopes of retrieving something, of pulling some singular thing from the debris and holding it up to the light. So in pieces, then: a long time ago, we met.

She is silvered over, oystered at her elbow creases and around the neck. This is something I noticed when she first came back and wasn’t sure how to bring up, though she pointed it out herself before too long: Look at this, and this, they told us to expect some stuff like that.

Living with someone again, I want to say, isn’t what it feels like.

The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.

I am reading a book I found in a charity shop, flipping through in the hopes of encountering notes made by previous owners, which is one of my favorite things to do. Leah used to buy me books chosen purely on the strength of this, presenting me with copies of Das Kapital and Middlemarch with inscriptions scrawled across their title pages by people I will never meet. For Doreen, without apprehension. For Jack, on his birthday and despite his behavior.

This is something I am, for the moment, not willing to examine too closely. Sometimes in the dark, I imagine I hear Leah knocking on the wall that separates us, neat little knocks that request not entry but only conversation. Not real, of course, but something to occupy my mind when my home seems to fill with water and I find myself without the correct materials to plug the gaps.

But perhaps not this just yet, actually. I’m not sure I have the stomach for it.

I find that if I squint at the television hard enough, it’s easier to think about things other than how much I miss my wife.

It feels odd, on reflection, to consider the very little we chose to do as we fell beyond diveable depths and still farther. I know it occurred to me, in a distant fashion, that an alarm ought to have gone off to alert us to a battery failure, however many hours ago. I know it occurred to me, too, that we’d need to release weights to slow our descent once we reached thirty-five thousand feet but now had no obvious way of doing that, nor any way of telling how far we’d dropped. It occurred to me that falling too fast and landing too suddenly—wherever we did eventually land—would surely result in a catastrophic rupture of the craft’s outer shell, with upward of six miles of water on top of us. All of this occurred to me, certainly, but only at a kind of remove. It was like the dispassionate realization that one has left the house without first turning a light out—unfortunate but hardly a disaster. I don’t remember thinking we would die, so much as noting that we wouldn’t be able to come back up again. I don’t remember thinking we could fix things, only wondering what would happen next.

To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden.

I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It’s nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about their partner and not wish they’d get to the point a little faster: OK, so, you’re saying he likes long walks, you’re saying she’s a Capricorn, skip to the end.

OK, I think of saying, but that’s not the point. The problem isn’t that she went away, it’s that nothing about her going away felt normal. It isn’t that her being back is difficult, it’s that I’m not convinced she’s really back at all.

I do love her, I think for her familiarity, for the way she demands to see me where other old friendships have fallen by the wayside, the victims of mutual inattention.

I must have taken that book down from my father’s shelf more times than he considered strictly polite, because at one point I pulled it out and found he had printed his name on the inside cover: Property of Michael Henry Frayne, on long lease to his daughter Leah.

I don’t know that my endless reading and rereading of the book was what specifically instilled in me the desire to explore the ocean. More likely, I simply read it so much that it fell apart and I had to go and find something else to do, like exploring the ocean.

She says she doesn’t know what to say to me. Say anything, I want to scream, say I knew what I signed up for when you went away, say you told me the deal, that you gave me all the information. Say it was my choice, to be OK with it, that it’s not your fault you went away for so long. Say it was my choice to move into the spare room. Say it’s my choice to come into the bathroom every morning when I know what it is that I’ll find.

I’m a Catholic, I said at one point, so I believe in punishment but not reward.

I push the door, take in the room that used to belong to both of us. Leah is there, and the bed is soaking, and it takes me longer than it should, even in darkness, to realize the water is coming from her. As I stand in the doorway, she screams and keeps on screaming, apparently unaware of my presence, and the sound is only interrupted when her body contorts, convulses, and she vomits a shower of water across the bed.

There are big things down here, old things, and certainly more of them than we know about. Almost every piloted dive to these depths has uncovered something new.

What I remember, then, becomes what happened: Leah leaving like the summer from the ocean, not by degrees but all at once.

Sometimes I think you prefer it down there, I had said to her, holding her face in my hands and wondering whether I meant it to sound like a joke or reproach, you go so deep you forget you’re supposed to come back.

I thought about the day it first occurred to me that, should she die, there would be no one in the world I truly loved. You can, I think, love someone a very long time before you realize this, notice it in the way you note a facial flaw, a speech impediment, some imperfection which, once recognized, can never again be unseen. Are you just now realizing that people die, Leah had said to me when I voiced this thought, tucked up beside her on the sofa with my knees pressed tight into the backs of hers. Not people, I had said, just you.

Why, I write, did you go if they’d told you to expect all this. What, I write, was so fascinating down there that you didn’t come back.

When I asked her once (with a glibness that really should have been embarrassing) if the appeal of the ocean lay, to her, in some sense of religious universality, of God being everywhere, she had shaken her head and told me, No—what it is is that I’m fucking furious I can’t do the thing that I wanted to do, and I feel better in places where there aren’t any churches.

The therapist is tall and straight, both in the sense of her sexuality and in the sense of her everything else. When she makes notes during the session, her handwriting rises and falls without listing; her talk is long and thin; she stirs her coffee with the flat of a knife.

I’m not sure a ship like that can take the whole of the ocean on top of it, I’m not sure they can all go down that deep and not be crushed.

Does anyone else find the possibility of the comeback kind of worse than the idea of death, someone posted. Not that you don’t want them to return but rather that that’s the tormenting thing: the thought that they might do.

The grief process is also the coping process and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope.

There was no proof that anything bad had happened, the woman typed, no proof of anything at all. They told us hope wasn’t lost so often that it became impossible to live with it. It’s too hard, trying to exist between these poles of hope and death. You just find yourself imagining all these possibilities, all these possible sisters wandering around half-unseen like people with sheets over their head, except that somewhere among them, you know that one of them’s real—one of them’s dead, one of them’s the ghost.

Something I find incredibly boring, Sam said, is everyone’s conviction that love is different for them. Somehow harder. Do you know what I mean? I just don’t think it’s that complicated, honestly—if you’re with the wrong person, it’s hard. It’s just another way of thinking you’re special, the way everyone does when they’re a teenager. You think you aren’t able to love, except that of course you are. You think you aren’t able to love correctly or the same as everyone else, except that of course you are, you just haven’t had a chance to do it yet. You’re not special, you’re just waiting.

That’s true, Toby said, suddenly narrowing his eyes at Sam, when are you going to buy us a forever place? Sam snorted, leaned back on her elbows, and surveyed me upside down. Haven’t I got a bitch of a wife? she said, and laughed.

The afternoon was strange-colored, inconsistent, the way the sky goes dark before a thunderstorm but the grass is still lit up and you can’t figure out where the light is coming from.

I suppose I think about this sometimes; the reason for booking a test and the reason for missing it. It is easier, I guess, to believe that life is inexhaustible. Not so much that its opportunities are vast or that one’s personal dreams can be reached at any age or season, but rather to believe that every dull or daily thing you do will happen again any number of times over. To stamp a limit on even the most tedious of things—the number of times you have left to buy a coffee, the number of times you will defrost the fridge—is to acknowledge reality in a way that amounts to torture.

“Who are you again?” Matteo said, when I came to join him at the table. “Only kidding,” he said, but then asked me why it was we were here.

It has taught us that life exists everywhere, even in the greatest depths; that most of life is in the oceans; and that oceans govern climate. Perhaps because we’re so terrestrialy biased, air-breathing creatures that we are, it has taken us until now to realize that everything we care about is anchored in the ocean.

Where are you all, I wanted to scream, overcome with a sudden vivid grief at the thought of this nothing—no strange deep-ocean creatures, no bioluminescence, no life. Come on, I found myself thinking, give.

“I don’t think they told us the truth,” he said when I didn’t answer him, and I shrugged and looked toward the windows, the way I often did, listening to the sound as it whaled itself around the craft and trying to imagine what it was Jelka could hear speaking in its place. “I mean,” Matteo said, “we both know this, don’t we? They shipped us off with so much food onboard. The comms went out before the system died, like they switched us off externally. We know all this, we know this.”

but didn’t mean that so much as that there were other things, more important things, that I felt in danger of forgetting.

You know when two people are fifty, she said, and not at all interesting but somehow their open marriage has consumed the lives of everyone around them? I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this story. I think I’m just trying to make noise.

I am thinking about all of this when the sound machine abruptly shuts off in the next room and Leah makes a sound halfway between a cry and loud exhalation and I realize she is standing in the doorway to the hall, naked and still wet, and that one of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semisolid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made up of pure water. When it bursts, it falls down her face like a yolk escaping a white and I put a hand over my mouth and nose as though anticipating a smell.