Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. —MARILYNNE ROBINSON, HOUSEKEEPING

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. —ROBERT HASS, “MEDITATION AT LAGUNITAS”

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?

My mother also questioned my solitary habits—though they shouldn’t have surprised her. I’d been a quiet child, and a dreamy, introspective adolescent.

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.

an Anglican church on the corner with a billboard that read: Need a new life? God accepts trade-ins.

I lay on my back, floating, and my irritation dissolved. 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.

I wanted to burn, water drying off my body in the heat—once my favorite vice. It felt good in the way a minor transgression can, like taking a drag off a cigarette or kissing a stranger.

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. I knew this to be my better self, the most fully alive, my lungs filling with air, salt tangling my hair and making my eyes brighter like after sex or after crying, sunlight catching the water beading on my shins.

He looked at me the way he had in the deep—as if he could see through to the core of me, burning away all that was not essential, the way the high noon sun burns up all the water in the morning air. No man had ever looked at me that way before.

Well, you brought Duras to the beach. He gestured to the book beside me, stripped of its dust jacket. My library copy of The Lover. Blue cloth cover growing hot in the sun, gold lettering glinting in the light. Only a writer would bring Duras to the beach.

I thought of the line from my book, lying beside me on my towel. I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

THAT NIGHT, I DREAMED OF HIM. THE MAN FROM THE Deep. Dreams not of sex but of other kinds of intimacy. I was touching his face. Feeling the bump of the bridge of his nose with the soft tips of my fingers. Tracing the delicate folds of his eyelids, his lips, the corners of his mouth. Moving my hand across the plane of his brow.

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.

He seemed softer in that cool dark room, the dusty light. Creases around his eyes when he smiled, like someone who might laugh often and easily.

There was a sadness in this, that was perhaps the sadness of all grown daughters, for it forced me to admit that she was growing older too, and I did not want to reckon with the vulnerability that would come with her aging.

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? And his answer, which never quite satisfied: If I didn’t, would I still be here in bed with you? It’s not so easy, I’d tried on one occasion to explain, to tell what keeps people together, what makes them fall apart. You can leave someone and still love them. You can lie with someone and never love them at all.

You were so shy. And it had been such a long time since anyone had been like that around me. It was sweet. Brought back some old teenage feeling. Didn’t think I’d ever know that kind of thing again.

I wish you could fall in love for the first time again. Or that you’d never loved anybody else before me and neither had I. He laughed and said, Oh, trust me. I was a pretty shitty boyfriend. And anyway, every time is like the first time. That’s the beauty of love. Love erases.

I remembered the artist I’d studied who had once sat in a gallery and invited the audience to, one by one, cut a piece from her clothes. Some people took a tiny snip from somewhere inconspicuous—a hemline or a sleeve—while others sheared her suit away at the seams, snipping the straps of her underwear until she was stripped bare, exposed. Yes, I thought. Love could be something like that.

It changes things though, my mother said then. Children do. Afterward, all that stuff is different. Dating, you mean? And love? I mean, you can’t even imagine it. Sometimes it feels like my capacity for love is spent, all used up on you and Henry. See, the thing is, it seems so romantic at the time—like the most romantic thing you could do—have a baby with someone. To give that to them. But once you do, it kind of eclipses everything. You think you’re ready for it, but you’re not. That kind of love? It’s terrifying.

I looked around for my mother, but she had remained on the other side of the cliff’s rise, where I could no longer see her. Brief swell of panic—a childhood feeling—at my mother moving out of sight. As though, if I took my eyes off her, she would disappear.

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.

Wow

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.

No, he said. I’m not married. Would it have mattered if I was? I wanted to tell him yes, of course it would have mattered, that I wouldn’t be there in his bed, but I no longer knew if that was true. People acted selfishly, betrayed and abandoned one another—that was common. 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.

When I told my mother I was going for an evening swim or had spent the afternoon reading, she didn’t question me, though if she’d looked she would have seen I’d made hardly any progress with The Lover. For more than a week, my bookmark had remained firmly in place. I read the same lines over and over at the end of the day, too tired from sun, from sex, from swimming. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in the photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me. And maybe I recognized myself in those lines, thinking of my own childhood, the raised-by-wolves look I had in certain pictures from the years after my mother left my father. 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 wanted to keep it close inside, this feeling, to be turned over and examined only in private, at least until—until what? What was I waiting for, perched on the edge of his bed? Some confirmation that it might be something more.

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.

THERE WAS ONLY ONE PUB IN TOWN AND THAT NIGHT IT was crowded with damp bodies. Smell of hops and beer spilled on old carpet, wet leather and flannel. It smelled like men, like my father. He had learned to drink in a dry country, during the droughts of the late sixties, the year he turned thirteen, and he never really stopped. There’s always a drought somewhere, was his reasoning.

The way she moved through men like she was parting water.

Caught the whiff of abandonment like salt on the breeze.

love with a loose leash.

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.

Well, you’ve always seemed old for your age, even when you were little. And I get it, you know, from his perspective. Younger girls demand less—or at least, they demand different sorts of things. It’s like how you might get a puppy, to keep an old dog young.

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 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 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 love? Love, we say, and expect the word to hold so many things.

he kneeled before my body as if in supplication. I was a greedy lover, he teased, and I was, I was, this desire, this pleasure, unknown and new.

When the wine landed full on my palate, it seemed that he’d brought depth to my world. A single glass of white could recall oysters and brine and lovers’ spit and citrus fruits and sunburn, a glass of red grass and dirt and blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. Like the line from the poem Jude read aloud to me that afternoon in my concrete backyard, the pavement cracked with weeds, while we sat on the chipped garden furniture eating prosciutto with pearls of melon, smoked salmon with crème fraiche, cheese layered on thick crusts of bread, truffle honey, strong black coffee. How elegant he looked, long legs crossed, one elbow leaning on the table, those flashes of poise in the way he held his body—an actor’s training. I want to do everything right this time, he said. His strange mood from the night before had passed. And although I’d never been in a serious relationship, I felt like I knew how to do this too. Yes, I nodded. I’d been waiting my whole life to love and be loved like that.

So much of the man I loved had been shaped and influenced by her tastes,

My effect

I can see it all over your face, he said. Such naked wanting.

I like you as you are, he said. Even if you’re going to wear me out. Are other women not like this? No, he said, but then seemed to change his mind. Well, yes—but it fades. That openness, eagerness.

How I wished I could reach back in time when he told me that and pluck him out of that bedroom, that lonely childhood. Longing to have known him as a boy, that somehow I could have taken care of him like a mother and also grown up to be his lover—a strange but true feeling—and maybe that’s when it started, the desire to have a baby that would be ours together. It seemed as close as I could come to meeting him as a child.

It’s not too much, I said. Nothing, I wanted to say, nothing you could give me would ever be too much.

And my own bad habits: writing in bed, ink stains on the sheets. Water rings on his wooden table from my cups and glasses, Jude wiping them off with the edge of his sleeve. Plucking my half-smoked cigarettes from the ashtrays still burning, stubbing them out with a sigh. Picking up the teabags I left on the side of the sink and tossing them into the bin.

Details

Maeve confessed to me later: You two always seemed like you’d just finished fucking or were just about to, and I hated you for that. How obnoxious we must have seemed back then, parading our early love.

The point is, she said, I didn’t want you to have to live that way. For you, I wanted better. You’re not very forgiving of the people you love, you know that? My little girl with her heart of leather. Who taught you to be so tough? I thought to myself, You did.

My father let us both go then, and in that way, he was like Jude—he believed that if you loved something, you should never hold on to it too tightly, loving with a loose grip.

Sitting at my mother’s kitchen table that weekend all those years later, I recognized what I had always known—that my parents had loved each other. How much easier, I’ve often thought, to understand their separation if they hadn’t. Whatever story I wrote for myself must always begin with the story of their love, and in comparison, no love of mine could ever be as terrible or as true. Across time, my father and mother still touching through telephone wires, letters in the mail, the bones in my face, the blood that moved in me. Love could endure more than I had allowed for, I realized. Some things last a long time, and maybe there’s hope in that.