The Dancer from Atlantis

I

“Full moon tonight,” he said. “Come up on deck with me. It should be. beautiful.”

“No, I’m tired,” she answered. “You go. I’d rather stay here.”

Duncan Reid made himself look squarely at his wife and say, “I thought this was our trip.”

Pamela sighed. “Of course. Later, dear, please. I’m sorry to be such a rotten sailor, but I am. All the bad weather we’ve been having till now. Oh, the pills kept me from getting actually sick, but I never felt quite good either.”

He continued to regard her. A dozen years ago. when they married, she was well endowed. Later a waxing plumpness became her despair, dieting her anguish. He had tried to say, “Don’t weep over it. Take more exercise. Mainly, remember you’re still a damned attractive woman.” And she was, fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, with soft brown hair and regular features and gentle-looking mouth. But he was less and less often able to say it successfully.

“Seems I made a mistake, booking us onto a ship.” He heard how bitterness tinged his voice, and saw that she did too.

“Well, you knew I can’t go on your sailboat,” she retorted. “Or backpacking or—” Her head drooped, as did her tone. “Let’s not start that quarrel again.”

His glance went past her, across the impersonal coziness of their cabin, to the picture of their children on the dresser. “Maybe we should,” he replied slowly. “We don’t have to worry about them for a while, what they might overhear. Maybe we should bring things out into the open at last?’

“What things?” She sounded almost frightened. For an instant he saw her immaculate gown and grooming as armor. “What are you talking about’?”

He retreated. “I ... I can’t find words. Nothing obvious. Spats over ridiculous issues, irritations we learned to live with very early in the game, or imagined we had—I’d, uh, I’d hoped this could be, well, I told you, a second honeymoon—” His tongue knotted up on him.

He wanted to cry something like: Have we simply been losing interest in each other? Then how? Nothing physical, surely; not to such a degree; why, I’m a mere forty, you thirty-nine, and we still have enough good times to know how many more we might have. But they’ve been getting steadily more rare. I’ve been busy and you, perhaps, have been bored in spite of your assorted bustling, around; after dinner I’ll, read a book in my study while you watch television in the living room, till the first who grows sleepy says a polite good night and goes to bed.

Why won’t you come on deck with me, Pam? What a night it must be for love! Not that I feel hot especially, but I want to feel hot, for you. I could, if you’d let me.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, and patted his head. He wished he could tell how real the gesture was. “I am tired, though.”

“Of me?” came out before he could stop it.

“No, no, no. Never.” She came to him, laid arms around his waist. He patted her back. To him both motions felt automatic.

“We used to have adventures,” he said. “Remember? Newly wed and poor and making do.”

“I didn’t think scrimping along in that horrible cramped apartment was an adventure.” She broke off her words, but also from him. “L,et me get my coat, darling.”

“Not as a, uh, duty,” he protested, knowing that was the wrong thing to say but not sure what would have been right.

“I’ve changed my mind. .I could use a stroll.” Her smile was extremely bright. “It’s stuffy in here. And the ventilator’s noisy.”

“No, please. I understand. You do need rest.” He stepped to the closet and fetched his own topcoat in one hurried motion. “And I’ll be kind of galloping. Want to stretch my legs. You don’t enjoy that.” He avoided seeing her face as he departed.

Topside he did in fact stride himself breathless around and around the main deck. Once he went up to the fore-peak, but left it after he came upon a young couple neck-ing there. Presently he felt somewhat less churned and stopped by the rail for a smoke.

The wind, rain, fog, and heavy, hacking waves of spring-time in the North Pacific had died down. The air was cool, alive with unnamed sea odors and a low breeze, and it was clear; despite the moon, he had seldom seen as many stars as glittered in that lucent blackness. The light lay in a shivering road across waters whose crests it made sparkle and whose troughs it made sheen like molten obsidian. They murmured, those waters, and rushed and hissed and lapped, most softly in their immensity, and took to themselves the throb of engines and gave back the slight trembling of hull and deck.

His pipe started, Reid cradled the bowl in his hand for a bit of warmth and hearthglow. He had always found peace on the sea. Lovely and inhuman. Lovely because inhuman? He’d attempted to make Pam see that, but she didn’t care for Robinson Jeffers either.

He stared at the moon, low to, aft. Does it make any difference to you that four men’s footprints have marked you? he wondered. Recognizing the thought as childish, he looked outward and ahead. But yonder lay the seemingly endless war. And behind, at home, was the seemingly endless upward ratcheting of hate and fear; and Mark, and Tom (as he, a proud nine years of age, now insisted on being called), and little, little Bitsy, whom there was so short a time to cherish before they must walk forth into a world breaking apart beneath them. When you considered those things, what importance had two people, middle-class, slipping into middle age, other than what was conferred on them by the inverse square law?

Reid’s mouth quirked wryly around the pipestem. He thought: Too bad you can’t qualify the statics and dynamics of being human in neat vectors, or develop a tensor calculus for the stresses in a marriage.—The smoke rolled pungent over his tongue and palate.

“Good evening, sir.”

Turning, Reid identified the moon-whitened shape: Mike Stockton, third engineer. Abdard a passenger-carrying freighter, acquaintanceships developed fast. However, he hadn’t chanced to see much of this particular officer.

“Why, hello,” he said reflexively. “Nice night, isn’t it?”

“Sure is. Mind if I join you? I’m due on watch in a few minutes.”

Am I lonely for everyone to see? wondered Reid. And then: Cut that out. You’re at the point of sniveling. A bit of talk may well be precisely what you need. “Do stay. Think the weather will hold?”

“The forecasters do. The whole way to Yokohama, if we’re lucky. Will you and your wife be in Japan long?”

“A couple of months. We’ll fly back:’ The kids will be okay at Jack and Barbara’s, Reid thought; but still, when we walk in that door and Bitsy sees her daddy and comes running on her stumpy legs, arms out and laughing

“I know the country just enough to envy you!’ Stockton scanned Reid as if. in an amiable fashion, he meant it.

He saw a lanky, rawboned, wide-shouldered six-footer, a long craggy head, jutting nose and chin, heavy black brows over gray eyes, sandy hair, no-longer-fashionable turtle-neck sweater beneath the coat. Even in the tuxedos he must sometimes wear, and after Pamela’s most careful valeting, Reid managed to appear rumpled.

“Well, a business trip for me. I’m an architect, you may remember. Quit my job recently to form a partnership.” Pamela didn’t like the risk. But she’d liked less the drabness of semi-poverty in their first years, when he refused to accept a subsidy from her parents; and she’d stuck that out, and now they were in the 20-K bracket and if his try at independence failed (though he was bloody well resolved it wouldn’t) he could always find another position somewhere. “Considering the strong Japanese influence in homebuilding nowadays,” Reid went on, “I figured I’d sniff around after, well, all right, inspiration at the source. In provincial villages especially?’

Pam might holler. She wanted her comfort.. .. No! He’d fallen into an ugly habit of doing her injustice. She’d joined his outings, and apologized afterward for spoiling them with a humbleness that came near breaking his heart, and finally stayed behind when he went. Had he tried as hard to interest himself in her bridge games, her volunteer work at the youth center and the hospital, even her favorite TV programs?

“You’re from Seattle, aren’t you, Mr. Reid?” Stockton asked. “I’m a native myself.”

“I’m a mere immigrant, as of five years ago. Chicago previously, since getting out of the Army. Before then, Wisconsin, et cetera, back to dear old Boston. The American story.”

Reid realized he was babbling of matters that could not imaginably interest the other man. It wasn’t his usual behavior. If anything, he was too withdrawn unless a few beers or a couple of Scotches had relaxed him. Tonight he was seeking to escape his thoughts. And why not? If he’d shaken off the Presbyterian theology of his boyhood, did he have to carry around the associated conscience?

“Uh, I’d visited Seattle before and liked the place,” he continued almost helplessly, “but at first the only halfway decent job offer I got was in Chicago. A concrete monstrosity, that town. They said there you’d better wear glasses, whether or not you needed them, or somebody would unscrew your eyeballs.”

He’d kept remembering people who were relaxed and friendly, and boats white-winged on Puget Sound, and Mount Rainier’s snowpeak floating high and pure above, and virgin forest a couple of hours’ drive from downtown. To Pam, of course, Chicago was home. Well, Evanston was, which made a difference. When he finally landed a position in Seattle and they moved, she found the city a backwater, where the weather seemed to be mostly leaden skies, or rain, or fog, or rain, or snow, or rain.... Had he, waiting happily for the next cataract of sunshine, failed to notice how the rain gnawed at her?

“Yeah, we’re lucky, I guess, living where we do,” Stockton said. “Apart from those medieval liquor laws.”

Reid chuckled. “Come, now. No medieval king would have dared pass liquor laws that barbaric.”

Then, as his mood was lifting a trifle, Stockton told him, “I’d better go on to the engine room. Nice talking,” and was quickly out of sight.

Reid sighed, leaned elbows on rail, and drew on his pipe. The night sea went hush-hush-hush. Tomorrow Pam might feel happier. He could hope for that, and hope Japan would turn out to be a fairytale as advertised, and beyond

Beyond? His mind, free-associating, conjured up a globe. Besides excellent spatial perception, which he’d better have in his profession, he was gifted with an uncommon memory. He could draw the course if the ship continued past Yokohama. It wouldn’t. The owners knew better. Reach Southeast Asia, or pretty close. Hard to understand that at this moment human beings were maiming and killing human beings whose names they would never know. Damn the ideologies! When would the torment be over? Or had every year always been tragic, would every year always be? Reid remembered another young man who died in another war, a lifetime ago, and certain lines he had written.

Rupert Brooke could say it, though. Thanks for that, Dad. An English professor in a tiny Midwestern college hadn’t had a lot of money for his children—wherefore Reid, earning his own, needed an extra year to graduate—but he gave them stubbornness about what was right, wide-ranging curiosity, the friendship of books—maybe too close a friendship, stealing time that was really Pam’s.... No more brooding, Reid decided. A few final turns around the deck, and probably by then she’d have fallen asleep and he could do likewise.

He clamped the pipe between his teeth and straightened.

And the vortex seized, him, the black thunders, he had no moment to cry in before he was snatched from the world.