Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

I had enjoyed the rituals of research, sitting in air-conditioned reading rooms in companionable scholarly silence with the other young women who frequented the art library, though it was possible to go a whole day without speaking to anyone.

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.

Thinking of what Petra said about the way that touch contours a body by making its boundaries known, and maybe what I wanted, what I longed for, lying there with the ocean outlining mine, was to be held in the way you’re supposed to be when you’re no longer a child.

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

I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

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.

I had always loved to swim in summer rain. The silent sound of it hitting the ocean, small drops lost against the swell. Water above and below.

A bit of wear adds character, shows you your habits, the pressure you put on things. You can tell a lot about a person from a chair, or their kitchen table.

It could have been the venom. It could have been desire. The fierce blue sting of it.

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?

You can leave someone and still love them. You can lie with someone and never love them at all.

And anyway, every time is like the first time. That’s the beauty of love. Love erases. I didn’t know the violence of it then—that erasure.

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.

Time does more damage to men, in the end—at least the single ones. They just seem to go to ruin, unless someone’s looking after them.

There were some things she would never do for money: sex stuff, nursing, waitressing. Too gory, she said, to all of that.

Wrecking waters. Something violent, I always thought, about the edge of a cliff. All that rock hacked away by salt and water and time.

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.

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.

No man is an island, but every woman is, I replied. I said that.

Or maybe it just was, right from the start. 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.

Early memories of scuffing my shoes at the bar, kicking my feet from the high stool, drinking pink lemonade and watching the races on TV Picking out the winners for my father by their names.

Maybe it started back then, the belief that she could outrun any feeling if she moved fast enough, and I imagined it came back to her in certain moods.

My father, for his part, looked at my mother with her ripped stockings, her secondhand clothes and mess of wild black hair, and saw her as something like a charming street urchin from an old-fashioned movie, Audrey Hepburn as a Covent Garden flower girl in My Fair Lady.

So, in the way of lonely people, we let each other go.

I could see for the first time how it might feel good to make mistakes with someone, sway together, embrace the drift. And maybe I sensed it, wanted it then. The ways we might either break each other in or burn each other up.

Love had a way of doing that, I would learn. It could collapse or rearrange time the way I’d thought only art or memory could.

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.

I ONCE ASKED MY MOTHER WHY SHE D LOVED MY FATHER and, if she’d truly loved him, why she had left. He was my twin, she said. As if that were all the explanation needed to answer both questions.

I do miss you, I thought, though he was right there with me, standing in the morning light, and I was holding him.

There is no end to grief, because there is no end to love.

THERE MUST BE PEOPLE out there who are not drawn to the shadow of what could have been, who feel no pull toward the other lives they could be living, but I certainly have never been one of them.

As all lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past.

My body like an hourglass, moving time in blood instead of sand.

What continues to surprise me, and what I still don’t understand, is not the reasons that love ends but the way that it endures.