Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

Briefly, it seemed like I had stumbled across an image from another life. That what I had seen was none other than the unrealized possibility of our long-ago love.

It was like time collapsed along with distance,

How could I not be hung up on the past, I wanted to say to my mother, when so many things I’d loved had been left behind there?

For so long I have lived like the woman in the parable, looking back to see whatever ruins lay behind me.

there was something about the way the tree branches scraped at the windows in the hot breeze. The smell of paint, the heat—it played tricks on her mind.

The strength it takes to bring an old house back from the brink of ruin, bringing in the light, the air. Water and seeds out for the birds. That kind of work, she said, it makes you believe that change is possible. You can see the difference you made, and all for the better too.

so my parents made love in sawdust, a blue tarpaulin slapping against the empty frame in the winter wind that blew in sharp off the Tasman Sea, moon shining through the crossbeams. Brushing sawdust from their hair.

You tend to your loneliness like a garden,

I was on the edge of something, I felt sure. I could sense it, as one catches the scent of salt on the wind when the ocean draws near, before it comes into view.

The year ahead stretched out before me like a lacuna in my still-young life, and it was this space that Jude would walk right into.

I was looking out at the horizon. At a certain time down south, sea and sky seem to merge, to kiss. Mirroring each other, like lovers do. Above and below, one expanse of silver blue. I’d never known that kind of love—where all boundaries disappeared.

I was high and free and lonely. I closed my eyes, felt the tug of the water beneath me. Imagining the movement was the earth in motion and I could feel it turning.

I suppose I’d been playing, the way I did sometimes when I was out there alone—making arcs, pointing my feet like a dancer— because in the water I could love my body the way I never did on land. In the water, I was graceful, a light and buoyant thing.

My young face had an openness that tended to reveal too much, and this, I knew, could be strangely intimidating in the way vulnerability sometimes is. I was not casual, especially with men, raised as I was in a world of women—all girls’ schooling and a single mother—and even throughout university, it showed.

The tide goes on, throwing itself again and again at the shore.

In the waves I could lie back and trust that they would hold me. I could let myself be held.

As sleep dragged me back again, I felt the heat press against me like a second skin, heard the ocean outside my window like a lover’s breath. Everything suddenly unbearably erotic, alive.

TO RECALL THE PAST IS TO UNRAVEL THE TENDRILS OF A bluebottle jellyfish, map the welts left on my back and throat that summer, now long healed, though my body remembers them still.

Just another girl from the city, hapless in the natural world. Sharkbait, like he’d said. I wanted to belong at Sailors Beach the way he did, calling trees, clouds, birds by name. From the beginning, I wanted us to be equals, I wanted to know all the things he knew—an impossible wish, but a true one.

Always the beggar for his love. I was like the desperate ocean, wearing away at him. The ceaseless questioning of the tide to the shore that I heard from our bedroom window all winter long. Asking, Do you love me? Do you love me?

I wanted so badly for it to be true. That we might be like two virgins.

What I wanted to know from my mother was how to reconcile the fact that some people never find love. I am sure I said it that way, find, like a miraculous, unintentional discovery, as if love were a stone in the sand. But to be found also implies that something lost has been returned to its place of belonging, and what did I know about love and stones? I was still holding out for a kind of love that felt like homecoming.

It’s a lie that swans always mate for life, you know, my mother said. They’re not as monogamous as they’re famed to be. I watched a documentary about it on the ABC one night, The Truth about Swans.

but made me promise not to tell my brother because he didn’t need to think of his mother like that. His mother, I often thought, had become a woman so different from the one who had raised me.

Desire, I was only beginning to understand that day at the ruins, comes in many forms, and some of them are violent. We learn this in the stories we are told about love. Struck by an angel’s arrow or drugged by a loveflower, desire wounds, and I had felt its blue sting. The thought of him all day, like pushing on a bruise.

We wanted to believe, my mother and I, that love could restore what was beyond repair, and if not, at least let us walk around in the wreckage.

But no father can protect his daughters from growing up and becoming the kinds of women who are bold enough to enter the houses of strange and solitary men. There is nothing that can protect them from the high wild loneliness of such a life or the desires that come with it. What you might do for a way out.

I’d never done anything truly bad or transgressive, but I worried this was not because of a strong moral foundation or sense of virtue. I was no better than anyone else, I feared. It was not that I lacked those kinds of desires, but I was afraid that if I acted on them, they would undo me. In a world without boundaries, I could lose myself.

I searched his palms, trying to tell our future, but they only told stories about his past.

Now I was the one leading her by the hand into the water. Keeping an eye on her if she drifted out too far, calling her back down the beach away from where the waves dragged and ripped. Although maybe this, too, was the natural way of things. From child to mother to child again.

But it was summer, and I did not want to read any more about pain, about sadness. I was occupied, for the first time in my life, by pleasure.

Our afternoons were stolen time, precious to me, and I maintained my old superstition that if I spoke about what I loved, it would somehow be taken from me.

I could feel the words forming in my mind—I love you, I love you—though in the winter, I’d come to see this as foolish. To think I could have loved him then, when I was only playing in the shallows. But I had never acted out of desire alone, and I had no other words to hold my longing.

Who is to say what love is or what it wants to be, the shape it takes, or how quickly it comes on? Love has always made a fool of time.

I wanted to stain him, like pollen. Wanted to press into his skin, Remember me here.

Waited, water rolling down the sleeves of my mother’s windbreaker.

This is suchh good writing

Scratches on my shins from stray twigs, wet leaves sticking to my boots.

Describes her commitment, how much she wants.

In his absence, the room seemed full with all the other hours he must have stood at the window, looking out from the kitchen at those same old trees, another woman’s warmth against his back.

You look like a picture of the Virgin I saw once in a basilica when I lived in Spain, he’d told me one afternoon in his room when I was sitting astride him. Afternoon light and hair in my face. Golden brown, he said, like molasses. Lifting a strand and letting it fall.

If Jude was a house, I sensed that he held many hidden rooms. He had turned the light on in only one of them, and he’d made me feel so welcome, so warm, that I’d forgotten about all those other places left in the dark.

Even my father, a tall man, had been known to stoop.

Passing the lake, its full lip quivering, spilling over.

You’ve always been your mother’s daughter, it read. But with the looping g’s and sloped s’s, it could have been written in my own hand.

There was a power in walking down the street with him, the way he carried himself like the world’s beloved son, whereas I had always felt like its illegitimate daughter.

Driving back to the beach, I thought of our first meeting in the water, the way he’d warned me about going out too deep, swimming at dusk and dawn. The thing about sharks, he’d said, is that at heart they’re ambivalent. Put yourself in their way and they’ll bite, but it’s not about hunger, or need. What we might be tempted to call fate is really just a matter of convenience.

Ugly after, I now knew. Not dew-skinned, like girls in the movies. Dry-mouthed, drinking from the tap, spilling water down my chin, wetting the ends of my hair: it seemed impossible to believe that anyone could want me the way that he wanted me. I looked down at my thighs, blue veins and broken capillaries and pale skin, and felt an old fear that my body was transparent, making a map of every pleasure, pain, and injury for anyone to see.

Jude thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I longed to be essential. That was love, I decided, as our intimacy changed and deepened over the course of the year. Not being able to do without. Wanting—that was just desire, fluid and changeable as the tide. Need was real love, the truest kind I’d known, born as it is out of what we lack, and that was how I felt about Jude back then—that he completed me, we completed each other, as in the old myth about the origin of love. And if I was essential, the other half of whatever he was, then he could never abandon me.

I’ve got you. Wrapping my arms around Jude’s waist. In that moment, I felt so lucky I thought I might die. The only way I can understand this now is that what I was feeling, standing in his kitchen all those years ago, was a presentiment of loss.

I loved best in gestures, in metaphors, and I wanted to build a life out of what I loved. Metaphors are lies, one of my professors had said in a lecture during my first year of university. How then, I might argue with her now, in the absence of figurative language, are we supposed to talk about

The books Jude brought me had been handled, covers worn, spines showing through the threadbare binding like a skinned knee. I liked the way they felt haunted by other hands, the feeling that time didn’t really keep us apart, wasn’t an unbreachable gap. That I could touch the same objects as the ghosts of other times. I felt their presence in the parsed-over pages, the pencil marks, obscure annotations. You like things that are old and broken, Jude often teased, and so did he. But where he wanted to fix things up, repair and repurpose them, I liked to watch them wear down, go to ruin.