We Are Water

She’s flagging, I can see. Exhausted and upset. Should I stop quizzing her? While I’m trying to decide, a nurse enters. “Sorry to interrupt, Maria, but it’s time for your breathing treatment,” she says. Mom nods, gives her a wan smile, and opens her mouth. While Mom is puffing away on the device, I stand. Go over to the window and look out on the parking lot. But what she’s told me has opened up more questions, and when the treatment is over and the nurse leaves, I sit back down again. Take her hand in mine. I remind her about that time we went up to Boston—to Grandpa Oh’s restaurant. “How did you know where to find his father?” I ask her.

“Well, Francis was a smoker,” she says. “Always lit his Viceroys with books of matches that said HENRY OH’S CHINA PARADISE on the cover. During one of the times we were at the motel where he used to take me, I slipped one of those matchbooks in my purse as a souvenir of our love. Like I said, Orion, I was naïve back then. I thought sex and love were one and the same.”

She’d gone to Henry Oh’s China Paradise once before, she says, when she was six or seven months pregnant. “At first, he tried to deny that Francis was the father. How did I know this child was his son’s? ‘Because your son is the only man I’ve ever been with,’ I told him. I could tell he believed me, but he still wouldn’t tell me how to find Francis!” …

A look of exasperation had crossed her face when she said that—one I recognized. She had had that same look the day we’d walked up the stairs to Henry Oh’s China Paradise so that she could present me to my grandfather as proof of my existence. Proof that, since his son had not done the right thing by me, the obligation fell on him. He needed to help finance the college education of the boy who, whether my grandfather was happy about it or not, carried his family name. Henry Oh, Francis Oh, Orion Oh: we were linked. He was duty bound. And so I practically had had to run after her that day as she exited the restaurant, her head held high, her hand clutching the check that would allow me to attend Boston University. Mom had been fierce that day, victorious. And even at seventeen, when I was still so ignorant about life and love and the repercussions of sex, I somehow knew that, whatever it had just cost her to get that money, she had done it out of a ferocious, almost feral love for the son she had refused to hand over to adoptive parents. And so—

Jesus god, there it goes again. Love shack, baby, love shack … And suddenly I realize who must be calling me. Annie. It’s two days past when I was supposed to RSVP. Well, if she wants to find out if I’m going to her big gay wedding, she can go to hell because—

OH! JESUS!

Shit, that was close. If I hadn’t just pulled out of my fog and slammed on the brakes, I would have rear-ended that Subaru. That’s all I need right about now: an accident that would have been my fault. My heart’s racing, my palms have broken out in a sweat. Refocus. You want to get there in one piece, don’t you? With my eyes on the road, I feel for the radio knob and twist it counterclockwise. Return to the Mad Hatter and the shark lady.

“Okay then, Doc, so let’s say Jaws comes upon a pod of seals that are chillin’ in the waters off of Chatham. What’s his M.O.?”

“Well, first of all, ‘he’ is likely to be a she. Female great whites tend to be larger and more dominant than males. And as to the shark’s ‘M.O.,’ as you put it, great whites are ambush hunters. So what they do is identify a target and then ram it hard and fast, most likely from beneath because the underbelly is what’s most vulnerable.”

The Mad Hatter snorts. “That’s where we’re all most vulnerable. Right, guys? Under our bellies and above our knees?” An ah-ooga horn sounds, but the shark lady soldiers on.

“Once a shark takes hold, it whips its head from side to side, the better to tear open a large chunk of flesh. That exposes the organs and entrails, which will be ingested as quickly as possible. From what we’ve observed, great whites may travel in small clans, but when they’re on the hunt, they separate.”

“Every shark for himself, right?”

“That’s right. Or herself.”

Sharks. Ambush hunters. Viveca Christophoulos-Shabbas …

Annie met Viveca through her art. She’d had a piece selected for that Whitney Biennial, and at the opening Viveca approached her about exhibiting at her by-appointment-only gallery in Chelsea. But in fairness, I guess I’d started losing my wife to her art long before Lady Bountiful came into the picture …

It was strange how Annie’s career had come about. She couldn’t even say why, not long after our twins were born, she’d begun collecting odds and ends from junk stores, swap shops, and the curbside recycling boxes she passed while out for walks with Andrew and Ariane in their side-by-side stroller. She’d not understood it, that is, until she began creating those found-art shadow boxes. She had had no training as an artist. Something just compelled her to make them, she told me, but she was reluctant to explore with me the nature of that impulse. “Orion, I’m your wife, not one of your patients,” she reminded me once when I tried to tease out her motivation. She made it clear that this was her thing. No trespassing.

Her first pieces were humorous, or so I thought: The Dancing Scissors, The Jell-O Chronicles. One Saturday, I remember, she requested a “mental health” afternoon. The twins had been sick, and except for trips to the pediatrician’s and the pharmacy, Annie had been stuck in the house all week with cranky kids. Could I stay with them for a few hours while she went to a movie, maybe, or down to the mall? I got her coat, gave her a little swat on the rear, and said, “Go.” But by the time she got back home, it was after 8:00 P.M. This was the mid-1980s, before cell phones became ubiquitous; if someone didn’t bother to call in, you stared at the phone, waiting and worrying. “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded when she came through the door that night. But she was so jubilant, so energized, that she hardly noticed my day’s worth of aggravation and worry. She had driven to Waterford, she said, intending to go to the Crystal Mall. Instead, spur of the moment, she’d hopped onto I-95 South. En route to no place in particular, she decided to get off at random exits and hunt for whatever awaited her at the dumps and secondhand shops of different shoreline towns. And it had been so worth it! She’d picked up treasures at each: a bolt of lace, a bundle of 1940s movie magazines, some wooden soda crates, a canvas bag brimming with hand puppets. Passing a billboard advertising a going-out-of-business sale at a job lot store in New Rochelle, she’d made a snap decision, signaled, and exited.

“New Rochelle?” I said. “You drove all the way into New York?”

Thank God she had, she said, because she’d struck pay dirt at that Dollar Days. Her purchases included two large bags of deeply discounted miscellany, including a twenty-four-piece box of plastic British Royal Family figurines.

I began complaining about my day with the twins—how Andrew had kept making spit bubbles with his amoxicillin instead of just swallowing it. How Ariane had toddled over to the dirty diaper pail, climbed on, and tipped it over while I was at the door with a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses—and how mopping up the mess, wet-vacing and disinfecting their bedroom carpet, had taken me the better part of an hour. From now on, we were buying Pampers, I told her. I didn’t care how much they cost. I was hoping to generate a little … what? Sympathy? Remorse, maybe? But Annie just sat there, sifting through her stuff, barely listening. And when I stopped talking, she went into the twins’ room, kissed their foreheads, and then, grabbing her new “treasures,” raced down to the studio I’d fixed up for her in the space between the washer and dryer and the furnace. She was down there for the rest of that night.

What had come over her? Was it OCD—some kind of hoarding disorder, maybe? Some sort of anxiety related to motherhood? If so, she could be treated. We could get her an antidepressant or a tranquilizer to take the edge off a little. But Annie wasn’t accumulating stuff solely for the sake of accumulating it. She was making art out of it, so maybe I should back off. Give her the benefit of the doubt … But could you even call it art? Like I said, it wasn’t like she’d had any formal training. To the best of my knowledge, she’d never even taken an art course in high school. Had never even finished high school. Maybe it was some sort of delayed reaction to the tough childhood she’d had. Annie’s childhood: that’s always been another “no trespassing” zone. I know the basics. She lost her mother when she was five years old. Her father had gone off the rails as a result and she’d bounced around in foster care. But Annie’s always skirted the details of her early life. Waiting here in stalled traffic, I can’t help but wonder: has she been more forthcoming with Viveca about her childhood? What does Viveca know?

A cruiser passes me on the shoulder, its lights flashing, its siren not wailing but making loud little belches. There must be an accident up ahead, which would explain why we’ve now almost come to a complete stop. Oh man, I haven’t even gotten as far as Sandwich yet. I’ll be lucky if I get to that rental place before they close for the day—or maybe even for the weekend. And what do I do if I can’t pick up the key to Viveca’s cottage? Break into the place? Start looking for motel “vacancy” signs? And now, adding insult to injury, this little jerk in the Ford Focus has his blinker on and he’s trying to squeeze in between me and the Subaru. Smart move, buddy. Nothing like lane-changing when both lanes are crawling along at about half a mile an hour. Atta boy. Nose right in. Be my guest, you little shit. When did you get your driver’s license? Yesterday? He’s talking a blue streak to his girlfriend, oblivious that his directional signal’s still blinking. To my right is one of those big-ass campers that must get about five or six miles to the gallon. A warning sprawls across the RV’s left side: MAKE WAY FOR MEAN DARLENE! A plump white-haired couple sits up front, eating a snack out of a paper bag. Microwave popcorn, maybe? Their jaws are moving in synch. When I was stuck behind them a quarter of a mile ago, I read their back bumper stickers: LET FREEDOM RING! and DON’T BLAME ME! I VOTED FOR THE HERO AND THE HOTTIE.

I honk at the kid in the Ford, and when he looks in his rearview mirror, I point down at his blinker. I can tell he doesn’t get it. Now the girlfriend turns around and looks at me, too. They both shake their heads as if I’ve offended them. On, off, on, off … Should I? Hey, why not? We’ve come to a stop. We’re all just sitting here. I put my Prius in park and get out, go up to his window and tap on it with my wedding ring. I hear the soft clunk of his car door locks. Jesus, what does he think I am? The traffic jam ax murderer?

“Yeah?”

“Your blinker’s on.”

“Is it?” He gives me this look like it’s his inalienable right to drive me crazy. But hey, I’m not about to get into a dustup about it with Junior here. I turn and head back to my car.

He’s a ballbuster, this kid. Lets about a minute go by before he finally turns it off. And when he does, it’s like the relief you feel when one of those ice cream headaches finally begins to subside. The radio’s playing that ominous music from Jaws. “Okay, but let’s separate fact from Hollywood fiction,” the shark lady’s saying. “These animals are carnivores, yes. But they’re not evil manhunters. They hunt and eat to survive, not to kill gratuitously. That better describes our species than theirs.”

“Natural Born Killers,” the Mad Hatter says. “Now there’s a great movie! Woody Harrelson and … Who was the girl? Natalie Portman, right?”

It was Juliette Lewis. One of the students I was seeing at the time—when had that movie come out? 1994? 95?—she kept mentioning how Juliette Lewis and she were half-sisters, and how they looked so much alike, and if I didn’t believe her, I should go see her sister’s new movie, Natural Born Killers. She’d seen it several times herself, she said—had been invited to attend the premiere but couldn’t afford the trip to California. Petra, her name was. She was a nice enough kid, high-strung but high functioning. In the honors program, if I remember correctly. But she was a sad kid who, I began to realize, had no friends. And when I did make a point of going to see the movie, I didn’t observe the slightest resemblance between the two. I eventually diagnosed her with Delusional Disorder, Mixed Type …

“No, seriously, Tracy. You should Netflix it this weekend,” the Mad Hatter advises. Not likely, Tracy says. Tomorrow, she’ll be part of an expedition that’s hoping to locate and tag one or more of the great whites for the purpose of tracking their migratory patterns …

Whatever it was that was compelling Annie to turn her landfill and secondhand shop finds into art, over the next years she created a series of assemblages she called Buckingham Palace Confidential. In Elizabeth Burns the Rice-A-Roni! Prince Philip and the rest of the royal family sit stiffly at a doll house dinette set while, standing at a toy stove on which sits a blackened toy frying pan, the Queen, wearing a coronet and a polka dot apron, throws up her jointed arms in domestic defeat. In Lady Di Reconsiders, the Princess of Wales, in her famously familiar wedding gown, marries Magic Johnson instead of Charles. Johnson’s in his uniform, as are his ushers, the other members of the 1992 Olympic “dream team.” Diana’s attendants are female superheroes: Wonder Woman, Supergirl. The royal family is in attendance, too, but they’ve turned their backs to the ceremony. So it was art that was driving her, I decided—comic art at that, laced with a little feminist protest. But not dysfunction … And yet, those weird scavenger hunts she was doing on the Saturdays when I was home with the kids? Whenever she came back with a good haul, she’d be wide-eyed, jazzed up, talking a blue streak and fast. What was that? Creative passion? Some kind of mania? I remember worrying that she might be starting to manifest bipolar disorder. But whatever Annie’s behavior did or didn’t indicate, I tried hard to play by her rules, encouraging her without engaging her as to why she was hunting down all this stuff, or what these 3-D collages she was making meant. But not engaging her didn’t mean I wasn’t watching her—trying to understand what was going on with her. Look, she was right: she was my wife, not my patient. I tried not to analyze her, but hey. Bottom line: I was worried about her. I’m a psychologist. I observe, make hypotheses. It’s what we do.

No. Correction: I was a psychologist. When my license came up for renewal last month, I let the date go by. I go back and forth about whether I should have. But what’s done is done …

It was hard for Annie back then, I know. As the house-bound wife of a busy professional, she carried most of the burden of child care, cleaning, budgeting. She had to grab a little time here and there to work on her art. When I was down there in Pennsylvania with my mother, she hired some older woman to babysit a couple hours a day, and I applauded her for that. Told her it was a good idea. But that turned out to be a fiasco when the sitter forgot to lock the basement door and Andrew tumbled halfway down the stairs. Annie’d had to take him to the emergency room for stitches in his forehead and be grilled by the ER doc as if she were a child abuse suspect. She decided it wasn’t worth it. Told the sitter not to come back. And when I got back, mentioned casually that Thea had come to the funeral, Annie’d reacted like a crazy woman. Like some spark between my ex-girlfriend and me had been reignited when the opposite was true. Seeing Thea again had been like a refresher course in why I’d ended it with her.

I’d have liked to help her out more, but the domestic imbalance was unavoidable. Counseling Services was understaffed, we clinicians seriously overworked. Students who wanted to see one of us had to put their names on a list and then wait for an appointment, sometimes as long as two or three weeks. Besides our caseloads, we counselors supervised the clinical practicums of the predoctoral students, got saddled with committee work, ran groups. In addition to all that, it fell on us to plan and implement Suicide Awareness Week, HIV Prevention Week, Alcohol Awareness Week, and so on. Most weekdays, I left for work before 7:00 A.M.—early morning was the best time to catch up on paperwork—and didn’t get home most nights until six or after. On the weekends, I could help out more. Take the twins to the park, fix a cabinet door or rake leaves, make a Saturday night supper while she went off to scavenge. Saturday was our night for sex, too—a standing appointment unless one or both of the twins was up, or one of us was too exhausted for intimacy. Sometimes an extra hour of sleep seemed sexier than having sex. But weekdays? Forget it. I’d get home and my dinner would be sitting Saran-wrapped on top of the microwave, the twins would be asleep in their cribs, and Annie would be down there, creating her 3-D collages amid the basement noises, one ear cocked toward the baby monitor upstairs …

Okay, here we go. The traffic’s finally started to move again. Passing that camper, I put on my directional signal and jockey myself in front of them. Let Mr. and Mrs. Big-Ass Camper stare at my bumper stickers: DISSENT IS PATRIOTIC, TOO and OBAMA/BIDEN ’08 …

Annie had been creating in basement obscurity for three or four years when I urged her to take a risk and exhibit her Buckingham Palace Confidential assemblages at the annual outdoor art show in Mystic. At first she resisted the idea, arguing that her kind of work wasn’t what those big summertime crowds would be interested in. But I kept nudging her until, reluctantly, she changed her mind and reserved herself a space. All that weekend, people paused, smiled, and snickered at Annie’s creations and then moved on to the “real” art: fruit in a bowl, seascapes. She had priced her pieces modestly—fifty dollars for the smaller assemblages, a hundred for the larger and more elaborate ones. She sold nothing. But to the surprise of many—and to the disgruntlement of the Mystic Art Association’s watercolorists and lighthouse painters—the judge awarded the Best in Show ribbon to Elizabeth Burns the Rice-A-Roni! What was that guy’s name? The judge? He’d been something of a big-deal artist himself back in the day, I remember Annie telling me. Italian guy, little pencil-thin mustache. He and Annie stayed in touch after she got that Best in Show. He must be dead by now—he was already up there back then—but I bet he’d be pleased to know where Annie’s art has taken her.

Along with the five-hundred-dollar prize money Annie got from the Mystic show, she was offered a one-woman show at the Hygienic Restaurant in New London. The Hygienic had long since stopped serving food, but it had become a kind of retro coffee house—a haven for poets, interpretive dancers, klezmer bands—alternative artists of all kinds, and their equally alternative admirers. Until Annie’s opening, I had never seen such a convergence of pierced, tattooed, and purple-haired people. Annie looked adorable that night in her floral dress and purple leggings, that big bow in her hair. “Oh, thank you so much … You do? Really? Oh, my God,” she’d respond to those who approached her to say that they loved her work or wanted to buy it. I was so proud of her that night—so happy to see her on the receiving end of some artistic appreciation, and almost four hundred dollars in sales. I knew more about psychology than I did about art, but I was becoming convinced that Annie was more talented than she or I had realized.

Her modesty about her accomplishments and her natural shyness were a big part of her charm that night at the Hygienic. Annie’s brother Donald and his wife Mimsy had taken the twins for the night—their first sleepover. I’d snuck a bottle of champagne and a half-dozen chocolate-covered strawberries in the fridge before Annie and I left for the opening, and when we got home, we got into bed, drank, ate, and made love. “Good god, I’m crazy about you,” I declared after we were both spent and sweaty. “Love you, too,” she murmured back. If you had told me that night that, two decades later, Annie would leave me for a woman, I would have thought you were crazy … Agnello: that was that judge’s name. Mr. Agnello … Had there been signs all along that she might be bisexual? Cues that I’d missed right from the beginning? …

Annie’s Hygienic show caught the interest of a Connecticut magazine features writer who drove out to our house and interviewed Annie about her work. She’d brought along a photographer, so there was a photo shoot, too. I was happy for Annie. One door kept opening onto another door, and she deserved that. And I guess this was crass of me, but the fact that people had actually begun paying her for her work somehow, in my mind, legitimized her efforts. This was a career, not an emotional disorder. I should stop playing psych detective and just relax. Celebrate her accomplishments instead of stewing about her creative process. She worked so hard and with such dedication down there in our basement, to the soundtrack of the furnace’s drone and the washing machine’s agitation. Good for her!

But until that Connecticut magazine article came out, I hadn’t realized the extent to which agitation fueled Annie’s art. Eventually it dawned on me that her “no trespassing” rule had been my escape hatch, too. I’d been allowed the luxury of assuming that The Dancing Scissors, The Cowgirls’ Revolt, and Buckingham Palace Confidential were playful. Satirical. Proof that my intense and sometimes morose wife had a lighter side, too. But in “Annie Oh’s Angry Art,” the writer said that my wife’s compositions emerged from “the blast furnace of her pent-up rage.” That they were “howls of protest against a suffocating middle-class domesticity” and the many ways in which society “tethers women to the mundane.” The mundane? Had Annie been referring to Rice-A-Roni or me? Was Diana’s rejection of Charles in favor of Magic Johnson metaphorical? The UPS driver who made deliveries to our house was a good-looking young black guy. Reggie, his name was. Someone she knew from way back, she said. Twice I’d gotten home from work a little early and found the two of them chatting at the front door. I couldn’t quite imagine that she’d cheat on me, but was I being naïve? The scientist in me advised objectivity, but the husband in me had just been put on alert.

“Good article, don’t you think?” I said, when I looked up from Connecticut magazine to her. I was hoping she’d say she’d been misquoted. Misunderstood. Instead, she said, “Pretty good. It’s weird to see yourself in a magazine, though. I feel … exposed, I guess.”

“Well, isn’t that what artists want? Exposure?”

She shrugged.

“Good picture of you.”

She made a face. “I wish my hair didn’t look so flat,” she said. “I can’t believe that, on the one day I was having my picture taken for a magazine, our hair dryer died.”

“Yeah, well … It’s interesting what it says about your work.”

No response.

“I mean, who knew you were so angry?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Orion. Maybe someone who was bothering to pay attention.” She walked out of the room.

I tossed the magazine onto the coffee table, got up, and followed her down the stairs to the basement. For a minute or more, I watched her yank towels out of the washing machine and slam them into the dryer. “You know something?” I said. “I don’t exactly appreciate you projecting your own marital shortcomings onto me.”

She turned and faced me, furious. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Speak English, not psychology.”

“Okay. Sure. Somebody in this marriage hasn’t been paying much attention to the other person, but it sure as hell isn’t me.”