My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

KATHERINE VAZ. What the Conch Shell Sings When the Body Is Gone

IT TOOK A LONG TIME TO FILL THE ENORMOUS TANK IN THEIR LIVING room. Meredith dragged in the garden hose, and Ray adjusted the stepladder so that he could direct the water over the rim. Their rented Victorian on Divisadero featured cathedral ceilings. The tank was Plexiglas, fifteen feet tall and twelve feet wide, acquired through a phone call to his father’s company, a supplier of containers, whether to circuses, institutes of marine biology, or furniture conglomerates. Men used a gigantic dolly to convey the tank through the back garden and past the open French doors.

Meredith and Ray were water people. In their years together, they’d shared a fascination with anything aquatic. But they no longer went swimming, as they used to; they did not visit the ocean often, though it was a short drive away. She was afraid of scuba diving, and they enjoyed the fanciful notion that if they mastered the holding of their breaths, they could go lower than the snorkeling tourists and get to the stunning blue-lipped triggerfish in Hawaii, which they’d talked about visiting. And wouldn’t that be simply heaven.

But now they hardly talked at all.

She found a book by an underwater photographer, a gift from him: swimmers wearing little or nothing in pools, lakes, tanks. The pictures fleshed out her idea of happiness: eyes shut with rapture at the body being suspended, as if the people in the photos were dropped to safety from a height. Look how peaceful they were, their skin almost melting, ravishing beyond belief.

The business with the tank and timing themselves started as a joke that became a game that became a method of dealing with the silence in the house.

Their bathing suits were stale from disuse. Polite — courtly, almost — they took turns mounting the ladder. There was a five-foot clearance between the tank’s lip and the ceiling. Immersed, Meredith bubbled the water with exhalations so that she appeared to be boiling. She was tall and pale, her shade of hair was apricot; her pageboy was unchanged through a decade of marriage. Ray timed her at 22.0 seconds. She whip-kicked to the surface and climbed out, her suit sagging. She took the stopwatch. He lasted 32.33 seconds. Though they lacked any interest in training to compete, they tracked their scores on a whiteboard. They shared quite a laugh: Tom Sietas’s breath-holding world record for being in water without inhaling bottled oxygen beforehand was 10 minutes and 12 seconds. They’d never get close.

On Sundays she always cooked eggs Benedict from a recipe popular at Bridle, the restaurant near the Presidio, in Cow Hollow on Chestnut, where she was a sous chef. Ray also liked toast and marmalade, the vitreous orange of it marbled with what looked disturbingly like burst capillaries. Today a red dot marred her soft-poached egg. Ray played a recording of Handel’s Harp Concerto so loudly that Meredith could swear the vibration entered their utensils, so that they ate breakfast with tuning forks. “Do you want more?” she said, because it was easier to ask than “Are you having an affair?” “No,” he said, more sharply than necessary, not looking at her. They were childless.

Meredith blamed their hours over the years: She put in nights at Bridle; Ray worked days as the host of a cooking show filmed in the Culinary Channel’s studio at Fort Mason. Endless periods of standing caused a continual knife-like pain to shoot into her legs. The hotshot Young Chef favored creating foam on the plates. foam this, foam that! It looked like spit. She abhorred it. When she cut her hands, he ordered her to squeeze lemons, to teach her to be careful. She was old enough to be his mother. At the kitchen’s porthole window, she gazed into the dining room, where the clientele seemed like children — wait on me, feed me — in some eternal realm, while she dodged eddies of burning chaos. Lifting her fingers off the fogged-up window, she left behind the shape of a clamshell.

She struggled to find openings to speak to her husband. The agony of that; they’d been friends really for just about forever before they’d married, had moaned about their separate heartbreaks until he’d said, “Shall we save each other from this pointless waste of time?”

She was fascinated at how far people could go to defy the body’s limits. Many variations of static apnea exist: In 1993, Alejandro Ravelo held his breath in a pool for 6 minutes and 41 seconds. In 2008, David Blaine lasted 17:4.4 in a vat on The Oprah Winfrey Show but inhaled plenty of bottled oxygen ahead of time. (He was an illusionist — some people asked if he could be trusted.) Tom Sietas broke this record on Live with Regis and Kelly, 17:19. There’s free diving with and without fins, and with weights to plummet on one breath for distance. But Meredith’s heroine was Annette Kellerman, the Australian called the Million-Dollar Mermaid because she’d perform ballet in tanks filled with tables, plates, chairs, and lamps, as if to say: This is home, and I am a breathless dream inside it. Annette was selected in 1908 by a Harvard professor as “the Perfect Woman” because her contours were a virtual match for Venus de Milo’s.

Ray Locke was one year shy of forty, and Meredith Paganelli Locke was forty-five.

They’d married when he was twenty-nine and she was thirty-five. Both of them young, back then; now they’d slipped into new categories, Ray still young but Meredith middle-aged. He’d proposed at the Japanese Tea Garden, the stream gurgling below the lacquered bridge, when they were rising stars at a restaurant inspired by Alice Waters. He grew up in a wealthy clan on Russian Hill, but she was the only child of elderly Italian parents in the Sunset with a view of the cables for the N Judah streetcar, vacillating like tightropes. Different worlds, but she and Ray met at high school food competitions at the Moscone Center, and one day, in his mother’s spotless kitchen, they concocted a sourdough starter that exploded, and who could say why that tickled them with such horror and delight that it led to walks to buy joss sticks in Chinatown and her showing him how to whisper into a corner at the Neptune Society Columbarium so that his words traveled past the ashes of many pioneers and entered her ear in a far corner, and every Halloween they climbed to the Twin Towers to drink wine stolen from his father’s cellar and, gazing down at the city glittering like pearls blinking a message in a black sea, who can say why they did not think of kissing but felt instead a peace that held them fast.

At a dive in the Haight, over poisonous drinks with her girlfriends, Meredith wondered aloud about the affair. “Do you have proof?” asked Beth Ann. “It’s gone to his head, having his own show,” said Lindsay, on her third drink. Susan chimed in that groupie types do it with anybody on television and Meredith should ask her friend Eve, who was Ray’s director. “I’d stab him in the heart,” said Teresa, and during the gales of laughter, Meredith set down her martini in a panic, because the bar seemed to be filling with something that was rising and lapping at her chin. The sconces were tendrils electric with light. Beth Ann voted for it being Lola, a platinum-blond ex-girlfriend of Ray’s. “Lola’s trouble,” Teresa said. Maybe, though, it was a lot of silly groupie chef-show girls, hanging about the studio. Susan asked if she’d made a mistake to buy these spiked heels that by the way were killing her feet — and she hoisted her foot with its stylish shoe onto the table. Teresa screamed with amusement, constructing a plot for them all to lie in wait, catch Ray red-handed. Their faces looked buttery, their mouths stretched, their hair sprouted into fright wigs. In the ladies’ room, sloshed, Meredith splashed water on her brow. She couldn’t find the words to say to them, But he’s my best friend, or at least he once was.

He hugged to himself the knowledge, almost sexual in its intensity, that he could stop before any damage, while simultaneously knowing just as powerfully that there was no way to hold back; the exquisite pleasure of going past the verge, drowning in kisses and frantic stolen grasping.

Of course there came the inevitable tipping into lies. Meredith waited at the War Memorial Opera House, the cars sailing by on Van Ness. Tonight was Tristan and Isolde. Her cell phone rang; Ray said he’d be filming late. He taught audiences how to cook inexpensive, fast dinners. Leave my ticket at the will-call window, and I’ll join you after intermission, I hope. Her teal gown was backless with a fishtail. She cinched the belt of her raincoat; a summertime mist was forcing the crowd inside. She gave away for free both tickets to a young couple, Wagner devotees who were ecstatic. While treating herself to a napoleon in a pastry shop, the fellow at the counter asked if she was married, and, wanting to be invisible, not thinking, she replied, “No.” He drawled, “So what’s that on your finger?” She recalled an old joke as she held up her diamond band. “This? This is to keep the flies off.” His grin was savagely unwavering, until she squirmed, and rose up, and paid, and fled, transparent even to strangers.

Eve Robideaux invited Meredith to the Ferry Building for an afternoon of teas. She ordered hers iced, in a glass so cold it was weeping. She thanked Meredith for getting her into rehab years ago, right after they’d met as line cooks at Bridle. Meredith had urged Eve to get into television after Eve repeatedly harped about cooking being a bore, unending hard work and nothing permanent to show for it. Bloated whales came and ate up your handiwork. It had been Meredith who put Ray in her care when he voiced the same frustration with being a chef. “We’re worried, Merry,” said Eve, fiddling with her saucer. “You look down.” Tea made Meredith slightly ill, but Eve loved how it announced her being past an obsession with scotch; her parents had paid for the stay at a rehab favored by celebrities. Her childhood was like Ray’s, pony rides at birthday parties, winter intercessions in Gstaad (where the wealthy dispensed with a sensible placement of vowels); her parents shelled out the clams to get her into that culinary temple, Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and their princess could throw away what she’d learned there. Eve was a seductive example of being worry-free, of moving on. She was compact, dazzling; at thirty-two she could pass for twenty. Meredith’s shaking hand spilled some tea that painted a maple leaf onto the tablecloth. “Are you ill? Should I worry about you?” said Eve, her expression knitted in concern. “Oh, a touch of something. Flu. I’m fine,” said Meredith, clattering down her cup.

Her sheltered childhood, gladdened by visits to the tomato frogs at the Steinhart Aquarium. Wearing a bouclé suit for an interview for a cooking post at the Sea Wolf restaurant; after not getting the job, she learned to wear clogs and bring her set of knives. Her vacations with her elderly parents consisted of trips down the highway to a cabin in Santa Cruz owned by her aunt and uncle, who dived for abalone and spent the afternoons in raucous arguments while pounding the meat to tenderize it. Pried loose, abalone is a muscle, little else. The aunt and uncle lined their fence with the shells, the opalescent pans like baptismal fonts hot and gleaming from the beating of the sun.

He relished the illusion — knowing it to be that — of control. Stroking Eve’s flat stomach, her breasts riding her inhalations, he said, “That seemed. mean, somehow. To ask her out so you could study her.” “I wanted to make sure she’s fine.” “Should we tell her?” He repeated this and Eve frowned, her fingertips with their neon polish kneading his thigh. A reply would involve guessing if she and Ray would go the distance. “Come here,” she said. Eve had taught him the term “bed hair”; she twisted her dark-blond waves into a rope she tossed onto her back. Her skin was flawless, her eyes sapphire glass. She was porous, always ready to be entered. He kissed her deeply and she encircled his neck. The slats of shadow in her Market Street loft (her parents had paid for that, too, in full) plastered ripples over them as a tide refigures sand.

Meredith showed a novice pastry chef how strudel dough should be stretched: Under the sheet of it, slowly move the backs of your hands. Sudden motions will tear it; a sonorous composure is required. “Pretend you’re playing a harp that’s tipped onto its side,” Meredith said, gently, her knuckles small pink bumps under the buttered veil. A kind of quiet patience, that was what she and Ray had, and while that was not wild abandon and desperate gripping of each other and never had been, it evoked St. John to the Corinthians, those tender lines about love that vaunts not itself, does not struggle.

Back when they were just friends, Meredith taught him ballroom dancing. She was expert at it, once. She’d crossed over into better-fondness while he was dating someone else. She spent so many hours one week helping him rehearse to impress his new love that blood filled her shoes. Her womb happened to be bleeding, her fingers were bandaged from her classes at the Culinary Academy. Shy to the point of muteness, she waited and grew herbs in planters that quaked with the passing streetcar. She and her friends practiced Italian from language tapes: They fed their fixation with Rome, that grandly crumbling city doused in liquid sun.

Meredith and Ray played their breath-holding game when their schedules allowed. Alone one day, she plunged in and felt as limpid as those see-through shrimp that are visible only because of the filament of food moving in their gut. The sea: God’s bathtub, God’s bath toys. He dawdles there, puzzling out, via fish, a physical model to fix His original design of human love. Each male anglerfish bites an available female and hangs on, fusing to her forever, feeding off her wherever she goes. Bonds that made flesh seamless: Meredith’s mother had died in her sleep a few years back, and then her father followed, ten days later almost to the same hour. While floating and mulling, a bolt hit Meredith out of the lucid blue: Eve. My God, my husband is sleeping with my friend Eve. I sent him to her when he wanted more than hiding in a kitchen. Eve with that intoxicating mix of being sweet and commanding. Meredith trembled so much that night in bed that she and Ray turned to each other at some point lying in the dark, not making love, but she found his arms natural and warm and the curve of his long body as comfortable as a hammock set on its side.

She clicked into his e-mail and found the erotic pleadings, the breathless anticipation. Never would she have imagined violating his privacy so furiously.

He quit wearing bathing trunks in the tank. What was he — ninety? Hey, where’s the shuffleboard? He and Meredith were never naked anymore; they had not made love for two years. God forbid they talk about it. Without his glasses, the room outside the tank seemed to dissolve and suggest that the Impressionist painters were onto something: There’s beauty in slicing through outlines, boundaries. Today he’d bought radishes, eagerly showed the camera’s eye how, with a few easy, deep cuts, anyone could convert them into flowers.

The heady danger of pretending that all would work out, “all” being deliberately vague and tragically inclusive. Eve directed him to smile and fill the airspace by chatting about himself while washing his hands to demonstrate proper hygiene after handling chicken breasts. At her loft, he showed her how to score and cube a mango off its skin. Like this? she giggled, getting it wrong on purpose. Like this, he said. Oh (her kissing him), like this? Or how about like this, like this, love this, their limbs a tangle, him behind her directing her hand with the knife. Much later, he would replay that chicken episode on YouTube, because he’d invited her to join him on camera, but she’d gestured, Oh, no, I couldn’t! But her hand had entered the filming of the scene, and he couldn’t resist hitting PAUSE again and again to look at it, that five-pointed starfish scuttling over the shoreline separating the unseen from the seen.

At a low ebb, out with the girls, Meredith reported slaving over a wedding cake only to have a drunken guest punch his fist into it. Aghast, she’d asked why he’d done it. “Because I can,” he’d barked, lurching away. Lindsay said, “Wait, wait, Merry! You spent days on it, and he ruined it in a second?” “I’d be crazed,” said Beth Ann. Susan demanded to know if Meredith had quizzed her pal Eve at the TV studio about the girls Ray was bedding in the broom closet. Insert here much gaiety. “I’d be in orbit,” said Teresa, and it was unclear if she meant over Ray or over the cake despoiler. Meredith sipped her club soda and drifted back to the days when she and Ray decided to gamble their friendship and become engaged, and how giddy they were at their daring, strolling along China Beach, the waves ribbed vertically with foam so that they looked like king-sized hair combs, churned loose from the table-tops of the vanities of whales.

It would, in the time still to come, strike him as unfathomably, mercilessly cruel to have watched Meredith sautéing onions for a nothing-fancy dinner — cod and boiled potatoes — while he yakked about Eve’s idea for a brand-new show: Grand Escapes. She’d research menus from around the globe, and instead of risking the chopping block with his show’s good but not great ratings about cooking on the cheap, he could help viewers travel far without leaving their homes — patatas bravas, pain perdu, tandoori. (“I’ll do the research, you’re the talent,” Eve had practically shouted. “It’ll be unbelievable.”) For the love of God, his regaling Meredith with this reminded him of how he sounded when he burdened her with the plot of a movie she’d missed. Look at her holding a mask of placidity. He knew her well. How to justify that hidden pleasure of carving the line of decency so close, to speak Eve’s name aloud over and over so casually, innocently, just to hear it, to wallow in the presumed safety and thrill of it right then?

They sat reading magazines in their living room. The cherrywood buffet had such ancient panes that they rattled at the softest step on the wooden floor, and so the glass chattered when Meredith decided to get a drink of sparkling water from the kitchen, and she stopped and asked if he’d like her to get one for him, too. He was overcome with such a storm of love and regret that he bit his lip, and his eyes pooled with tears that he told himself he had no right to spring. Her chest rose and fell where she stood, watching him. And then came a moment they would both remember for the rest of their lives, because who can hope for another instance of such a divine connection? “Jesus Christ,” he blurted, “and I don’t know why I’m saying this, Merry. But is Beethoven’s Ninth running through your head?” He tapped his left temple. “Your mind gets so loud sometimes I think I can hear it, too.” She was startled; her palms flew to her mouth. She walked to him and he laid his head on her chest so her arms could circle him lightly, and his glasses slipped off and they rocked like that for a short while before she whispered, “Yes. I was at the part when the chorus goes insane, chanting joy joy joy.”

Annette Kellerman was born with a defect in her legs that required braces until she found that moving through water cured her. Her performances in a tank at the New York Hippodrome gave birth to synchronized swimming. Her one-piece skintight bathing suit got her arrested on a Boston beach, and though she didn’t understand the fuss, the world soon adopted her invention. She stayed married to a man she adored. Rich and famous in her lifetime and recognized as an artist, Annette reigned in a floating kingdom. Her hunger for water expanded into religion. Meredith, in the tank, told herself: If you can hold your breath for one second, you can endure a second longer. Her personal best was now 1:25.2; Ray’s was 52.7.

You wait with bated breath. You decline to accept that bated also means the violent anger and fury of a roused hawk.

She cornered Eve at the TV studio. Ray was in a corner, wearing a paper collar while a woman powdered the shine off his high forehead. Meredith lost her voice with Eve, then found it. “Is it true? What are you planning with Ray?” Eve hardly moved. That smooth veneer of the easeful childhood that alternated with a sheen of addiction. Eve showed Meredith the clipboard she was gripping and said, “We’re planning to show how to grind your own spices, Merry. You can stay and watch.” Meredith could scarcely control her limbs as she stormed out. Ray strode after her, and she broke into a run.

The lure of breath-holding is how it violates the laws of the gods. Fasting, meditation, and prior hyperbreathing can prolong submersion; uncanny how many souls risk blackout, bloody lungs, damaged tissue, burst veins. Death. Legend has it that the ama divers of Japan brought up pearls, but the truth is more workaday; mostly they brought up abalones to sell the nacre interiors.

She screamed at some apprentices at Bridle who thought it would be hilarious to use beef stock for the vegetarian special. In the middle of the night, with Ray sleeping, she drank a bottle of wine, seized his ID card, and swiped her way into the Culinary Channel’s studio. He’d told her that the subject of the next day’s filming would be lamb stew, and it took more than an hour for her to march the vats of it, and the pans filled with the breakdown of the stages of preparation, out to her car. She took the food to St. Vincent’s shelter. Ha, look at tomorrow’s neat little script, turned into nothing.

So much energy squandered on being foolish. Ray almost got fired for having no idea how to improvise. Eve saved the day by defrosting some trout, taking center stage, and showing how to fillet and grill fish, skinning and boning it with a surgical skill that won her applause. She did not have to ponder much to figure out who had sabotaged Everyday Triumphs, and she phoned Bridle and told the Young Chef. Meredith’s work had been suffering; she burned orders, she was a sleepwalker. While chiding Meredith, the Young Chef smirked and said, “If you’re going to steal hundreds of dollars’ worth of lamb, at least bring it here.” At first she was desperate to be fired, anything but his jollity at her distress. But when he wondered out loud if the kitchen’s fumes had steam-cooked her brain, she absorbed in an instant the truth that genuine adulthood comes when one does not run off because of shame, when one stays and demands a home.

She roamed among the cosmetics counters at Macy’s, seeking potions, wrinkle creams, hydrating salves. Skeletal women in tight black dresses held atomizers and spritzed her with rose and lilac mists. Their tuberous fingers waved like polypi, motioning her closer to the pots of coral paste, the shallow pans of shadows.

A trickling sound issued from their walls; they suspected brocade patches of mold and split pipes too expensive to get to. Meredith wondered if a crack had sprung in the Plexiglas. In homage to Annette, she put items in the water, a battered teakettle, a dial telephone, a broken lock from her gym bag, the shipwrecked items of ordinary existence.

Midway through their ten-year marriage, Meredith had had a fling — the word evoked a stick thrown as far as possible — that Ray, so far as she knew, was ignorant of. Marcus was a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, and she still winced to recall the final meeting, their twenty-seventh in the span of three months, the afternoon at the Fairmont segueing into a grindingly awful finish in the parking lot of Muir Woods, the breezes ripping tufts of furry bark off the red-woods and pelting Marcus’s Cadillac. He was announcing he’d found someone new. When she asked what she’d done, he said, “Nothing. It’s the end we expected.” They’d gone to concerts, and Lord, to go dancing with him. He’d clutched her once and moaned how much he needed her. “I could fall in love with you, you know.” He’d said that. She’d said it back. Could. At the Cable Car Museum, over the earassaulting whine of the gears as the frayed cables were getting soldered to a safer thickness, he’d asked if she could see herself ever living in London. His native city. She started breaking down in his car at Muir Woods, stopped mercifully short of pleading, but when she said she was shocked and ready to cry, he shouted, “Shocked?” A straight ballet dancer could have his pick of women — why, it was a fucking parade. Air refused to enter her lungs; she pushed against the passenger’s door but it was as if she were drowning in a car. The utter shame of her fantasies, the gentle but firm phrasing she’d rehearsed to tell Ray she was leaving him; her heady mirages of soaring in that stratosphere where Marcus traveled, in the ether of the talented and famous; her sharply outlined mental pictures of gadding about London; the girlish rush of seeing a star leaping onstage after he’d sidled up to her at a charity fund-raiser and invited her to spend the night. When Ray had asked her why she was so sad, she’d replied, “Because how can I feel so old without having grown up.”

At an extremity of breath-holding, a little-talked-about occurrence is a buckling of the body, a triggering of the sexual nerves, an arousal; sexual asphyxiation beckons. At 2:01.1 exactly, this frightened Meredith almost to death, and Ray jumped in to rescue her. She lay heaving and sobbing on the floor, and they called an end to everything. What was the prize? They hadn’t concocted one! What was the point? Why hadn’t they thought clear to the eventual need to drain the tank? They formed a bucket brigade, dashing the water into the garden, and the task was so laborious and ridiculous that they laughed, and when the men arrived to cart the tank away, Meredith and Ray held hands — they had not touched like this in so long that it was like an electrical prod to the tails of their spines.

With her hair tied into the topknot that they referred to as her Pebbles Flintstone, while wearing her UC Santa Cruz T-shirt with its marinara stain near the banana-slug mascot, because who cares if I look like hell, she cooked an omelet that was the most perfect he’d ever seen or smelled or tasted. It was plain. He was about to reach across the table and say, “I do so love you, and—” but he had no idea how to complete his sentence, and during that pause, she said she knew that he was leaving her, even if he didn’t. Yet. His rib cage ached. “She’ll take your show from you, Ray,” she said, her back to him, clearing the plates. “How do you know?” he managed. He should have said, I’m drowning, forgive me, come here. “It’s what pushy women do!” she screamed. She shattered a plate against a wall, in the manner of wronged vixens in movies, which had always struck him as too theatrical and deranged to occur in actual life. “They want to direct you and then eat you alive!” When he grabbed her arm, she blazed. “Go on, men think they’ll live forever,” she spat out.

Beth Ann insisted that Meredith and Lindsay join her in toasting Ray’s departure. “Good fucking riddance!” she cried. Lindsay hooted, “His show sucks anyhow. Cooking shows are porn, stuff we watch but don’t get to eat.” Meredith chomped wasabi peas so she didn’t have to speak, and when she choked, they pounded her back. How happy her friends were now that she’d joined their club of the solitary furies. While packing to move to an apartment on Green Street, she decided to prick her anguish by watching Everyday Triumphs, and what do you know, Eve was on camera with him, teamed up. She shut off the set, but walking past the silent box she couldn’t help but see her husband still bobbing behind the glass, as if in a flat aquarium, trapped in the everlasting digital dots that passed for immortality.

The tank had soaked through the floor. Her boxes of childhood things in the basement were rotted. Her Chatty Cathy doll’s hair sprouted mange. Her school papers were a smear. A plastic mermaid from an old fish bowl was corroded, her arms arrested in uplift, like the priest during the Major Elevation when he declares, “This is My Body.”

She would come to associate his new marriage with pumpkins, because his wedding was in the autumn following their divorce. Squash soup was on the menu at Bridle; a blade slipped and she needed stitches. Pumpkin lattes and candle smoke seeping out of the den-tiled smile of jack-o’-lanterns: She pretended she could inhale his wedding as an aroma of fall. Meredith, what were you thinking? scolded Beth Ann. You snuck into his reception? At the Palace of Fine Arts, the wind threatened to overturn the tables under the sand-colored dome. Meredith hid behind a colonnade, unnerved to be in a pose like the female statues at the top of the dome, looking mournfully down, grieving at the thought of a world without art. Guzzling champagne until she drooled froth, Meredith pitied a tipsy bridesmaid wading into the lagoon. Ray gave a speech about his new bride, thanked her for saving him from loneliness. Eve gazed straight into his eyes, in a way Meredith was pretty sure she herself had never managed. Even at a distance, anyone could see that the welded vision of Ray to Eve was carrying them already to their wedding bed. She could picture them entwined.

The bed is soaked, the rest of the world drops away.

Meredith staggered to the wharf, let the spray hit her. A sailor was dropping stones to send widening circles into the Bay. At the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum, she stared at a grain of rice on which a miniaturist had written the Lord’s Prayer, the placard stating that each stroke of a letter was made between breaths, and fast fast light, between heartbeats, which the artist had spent years training himself to feel.

The fate of the lobster is famous. Consider also the primitive practice of pouring boiling water on eels in boxes rough enough for their writhing to scale them into a delicacy. Behind the facade, behind the counter, within the tiled place, is the steady drip caused by the kosher butcher. Consider the common blow that strikes a cow in an abattoir; for a fraction of a second, the cow stands with a shocked, full register, equally alive and dead, knowing itself to be both living and gone. People realizing their mortal limits drift about in a condition too profound to bellow, one foot in this world and one in another.

She looked for God in her work. Her palate craved vegetables, tonic water, and crème brûlée; she swam in Aquatic Cove with the Dolphin Club. She traveled and found new menus that she convinced Bridle to offer; a few pleasant men dated her until one or the other of them lost interest. Either the passion was extreme and quick to explode, or nothing scaled past friendship. Without giddiness or rancor, she designed a fine farewell party when the Young Chef moved on to Dallas and the owner promoted her to head chef. She copied out her favorite quote from Annette Kellerman, which extolled the powers nigh onto eternity for those who can swim their “solitary course night or day and forget a black earth full of people that push.”

She was neither gleeful nor sad when the news reached her that Eve was hosting a popular program called Grand Escapes on her own, while Ray’s show was canceled. She was neither gleeful nor sad to hear of their divorce. Whenever she picked up the phone to reach him, stuck in neutral, there was no completing the call.

He sent a single word, MARVELOUS, in block letters on a stiff card when, in her third year as head chef of Bridle, the Chronicle featured her for having won one Michelin star.

He buried his father. He inherited very little. He watched a TV program that surprised him by mentioning that the ama divers could walk around for years seeming to be fine, but suddenly, toward old age, their eyes might flare up bright red, their organs rupture.

Meredith at long last took her moldy Chatty Cathy to a doll hospital at Hyde and Pine. A man who looked like a tailor in a children’s fairy tale set aside a bisque torso he’d been gluing together to greet Meredith, who blurted, “Why do girls love pulling the heads off Barbies?” The doll doctor laughed and said, “Wow, I’ve often wondered.” They bantered suggestions: Because the necks are so skinny! Because it makes it easier to play hammer throw, twirling the head by the ponytail! None of this was monumental; there was nothing vital or even cosmically comic, and therefore she treasured the episode as truer to life as it’s lived.

God is everywhere, but more in the center of everywhere. God lies within a step altered out of the ordinary, but more within the center of that new radius of a step.

At the Museum of Modern Art, staring up below the glass bridge, she saw the outline of a child’s feet stopped. It can be frightening to walk that suspension. Larger feet waited next to the child’s. All motionless. Meredith had a distinct sensation of sprouting cuts that were like gills; she could breathe nearly forever at the bottom of this sea. Go on, go on, it’s fine, you’ll see: She sent that heavenward, toward the child. And then the feet crossed the glass bridge together. Meredith left the museum feeling rinsed and cooled.

At a conference in Chattanooga about new American cuisine, she went to the Living Art Gallery, where bedding was set up for people who wanted to sleep surrounded by jellyfish. Pulsating moon jellies, transparent pink tissue like parasols. Living water. Oh, Annette! Didn’t you suggest that power is born from piloting through the sea? Didn’t you write that despite being a mermaid in the movies, you still devoutly desired to see a real one perched on a rock, combing her long green hair?

She ran into him at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, near Rodin’s The Thinker. His hairline had receded. He was back to cooking, he said, at a fusion place in the Mission District. Eve was a network star, living with a high-powered lawyer. “Ah,” Meredith said. He didn’t degrade her by asking for forgiveness. His fists were jammed into the pockets of his jacket. She gripped his elbows. He looked at her eyes in a manner they had never fully managed. She did not know how to mention her own affair without sounding as if she were either evening the score or letting him off the hook. So they did not speak much. But their look conveyed an entirety, without any fairy-tale ending: She was dating someone at the time; he was, too. But now it could happen that from time to time he could call her up and speak, and she could talk to him gladly.

In her youth, her tastes ran Baroque. French tapestries. Layered tortes. Now she craved simplicity. Consommé. Distillations.

Meredith Locke passed from middle-aged to older-but-still-relatively-young. Her legs were marbled with varicose veins from a career on her feet, but she kept her Michelin star and her post as head chef until she turned fifty-eight; without anxiety, without bitterness, she accepted the news one day that despite her faithful screenings, she was discovered to have breast cancer that had spread. Her time had simply arrived; that was all.

Ray Locke moved to a new restaurant, a Latin spot with cobalt walls. It would be his fate to jump from place to place. But for now he was living with a schoolteacher who was friendly with Meredith and understood how life twists about, trying to grab its tail and form circles. She told Ray to go care for Meredith, and then she’d welcome him back.

And so they were together again, for a short while. Her pain by then was extreme.

He brought her a gift he’d bought in Springfield, Illinois, ages ago but never used: a cookbook from the Civil War. In her apartment on Green Street, he prepared a carrageen blancmange. “You’re the only person currently on the planet who’d like this,” he said. “I love you. I adore you, you know.” Her smile, the dark circles framing her eyes, the turquoise head scarf. Once upon a time, seaweed could travel to a druggist’s in the Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century and cost little. It was prized as salubrious for those of a delicate constitution. The carrageen had to be washed thoroughly and boiled, and he added the barest handful to the milk, bitter almonds, sugar, cinnamon, and mace. He fed it to her in spoonfuls. “My dearest,” she said.

In the end, one dissolves into atoms. Her affair with the ballet dancer: How was that so different from Ray with Eve? That desire for grandeur, release, an upper world. God peering down might see it all as some balanced math equation. Finally, wasn’t it the strangest thing that passion should ebb with long-knowing, and yet people are born to want to find The One? Wasn’t that the great human dilemma? What if a person aimed to find God within physicality, to have bodily desire increase? What idiocy to separate God’s love from tactile human love.

At the shoreline at Lands End, Ray and Meredith stood bundled up. Bless Annette Kellerman, who said that water taught modesty of the soul: She remarked cheerily that “after leaving the shore behind, I seemed to shrink and shrink till I was nothing but a flecky bubble and feared that the bubble would burst.”

But they were beyond words now.

His arm was around her, and hers were around him. He leaned down to kiss her at the exact second that she lifted her face to meet his in a lingering kiss.

It is the kiss of their lives.

The salted air. The sea rushes in to cover their bare feet with a spume of lace. The hermit crabs rest below the wet sand, their breathing holes like straws to drink in the tide. The tide ceaseless in its approach and retreat, its coming toward and going away, its brimming with peril even as it fully possesses the kind of rhythm loved since the dawn of time for how it sings a body to sleep.

I am madly in love with Annette Kellerman. I always have been. Known as the Million-Dollar Mermaid, she performed self-styled ballet inside water-filled tanks, which in turn played a role in the birth of synchronized swimming. Fame and riches (and longtime love — that, too) were by-products. Gorgeous, shocking, inventive, artistic — she’s a dream, breathless and suspended, overjoyed with how her immersion arrests the purity of a single moment. The earth with people who push was what she yearned to escape. She was very much in this world and very much in another.