Decompression

7

By the next morning, the bad weather had finally moved off. Blue sky, bright sun, a friendly little wind. Jola was sitting on the steps of the Casa Raya, wearing cutoff jeans and a top with a narrow halter holding her breasts. Something was missing from this picture, namely Theo. Jola was alone. I knew immediately that he hadn’t just gone back in to pick up some forgotten trifle, he hadn’t yet left the Casa. I could tell by looking at Jola that Theo wouldn’t be diving with us that morning. She looked back at me as if seeing me for the first time.

I stood in front of her and reflected on how we’d been greeting each other the past couple of days. Handshakes? Mutual shoulder pats? Brief waves and simple hellos? Or were we already such good friends that we had to embrace? I didn’t like this constant cheek-kissing between near strangers. When it became the fashion at the university to greet people by flinging your arms around their neck, I decided not to go to any more parties. One thing was certain: I couldn’t possibly fling my arms around Jola. Not as long as she was wearing that halter top. I realized that on the previous days I’d driven up to the Casa and simply stayed in the driver’s seat while Jola and Theo threw their bags into the backseat and got in the front with me. I couldn’t understand why I’d climbed out of the van on that particular morning.

“Is something wrong?” Jola asked.

“Where’s Theo?”

Her face clouded. She said, “I’m paying your fee.”

“Is he not in the mood today?”

“The old man’s your biggest fan. But he’s in bed with a cold.”

“Antje will bring him something that’ll put him back on his feet by tomorrow.”

“But are you ready and willing to go diving with me without Theo?”

I saluted and said in English, “Yes, ma’am.”

In the van she sat close to the passenger window, leaving an empty place between us on the front seat. When I turned my head toward her, she smiled strangely, showing the spaces between her incisors. This had the same effect on me as if she’d spread her legs. We didn’t speak. I forced myself to keep my eyes on the road.

Everything is will.

Silence on land was something different from silence underwater. It wasn’t a normal condition; it was the mute sound track of failure. After fifteen minutes, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“So how are you coming along with theory?”

“Fuck theory.”

She pronounced the word as if theo-ry had something to do with Theo. Then we fell silent again.

Finally the van was bouncing along the potholed road that led to the dive site at Mala. I considered it important that Jola’s next dive should be in the same spot where she’d had her panic attack the day before. The same principle as getting right back on a horse after a fall. There had been no discussion of this. She hadn’t asked where we were going, and I kept having trouble coming up with the first sentence of every single thing I wanted to say.

We stopped and Jola got out. She stretched her back and looked at the ocean, which shone smooth as foil all the way to the horizon. I opened the back of the van and felt gratitude at the sight of all the equipment. Scuba tanks to unload, buoyancy compensators to prepare, weight belts to find. Jola helped me spread out the tarp we were going to change our clothes on. When she crossed her arms to pull her top over her head, I turned back to the van and rummaged under the passenger seat for a mask.

“Where can you pee around here?” Jola said. It wasn’t a question, it was a warning. Not a tree or a bush within five kilometers in any direction. Just the gravel road where the van was parked. Beyond that, nothing but rocks and black sand.

Jola went to the other side of the van and squatted down beside the left front wheel. I bent low over the passenger seat, pretending to concentrate on my search, out of fear that she’d be able to see me through the half-open driver’s door if I straightened up. A stream struck the hard ground. I could practically feel it splashing on her feet and ankles. The longer the situation went on, the more impossible it became. The splatter seemed to present an increasingly detailed and shameless account of Jola’s insides. It wouldn’t stop. I stared at the dust at my feet.

Slowly, the hissing became a trickle, and under the passenger door a thin rivulet appeared. It showed no inclination to seep away into the earth. Instead, the little stream was ferrying along a certain amount of dust at its edges, so that it wallowed rather than flowed. It was getting close to my toes. I didn’t move my foot. All at once, Jola was standing next to me. Her eyes were not on me but on the ground. On the damp print of my left foot.

“Let’s do it,” I said. My upbeat tone was a rebellion against her contemptuous smile.

As we made our difficult way down the rocks, she started to stumble. I instinctively reached out my hand to catch her; she took hold of it and didn’t let go. I said to myself that when we were carrying heavy equipment and going over dangerous terrain, it was my duty to support her. Her grasp wasn’t coy, it was tight and warm, almost like a man’s. It felt completely natural to go the rest of the way hand in hand with her.

Before we entered the water, I showed her once again how to protect her mask and diving regulator. I inflated her buoyancy compensator and tested every buckle on her outfit. When her fingers wandered over my suit during the safety check, I closed my eyes. Then I turned around and jumped.

All quiet. Jola lay in the water much more calmly than she’d done on the previous days. It was as though Theo’s absence relaxed her. She sank slowly, one hand on her nose for pressure equalization, while her hair floated around her like a living thing. She spread out her arms and legs and hovered in place, gently lifted and lowered by her own breathing. She turned on her back and looked up at the air bubbles rising toward the sun from her mouth like glinting jellyfish. I knelt on the sea bottom and couldn’t stop looking at her. We were together down there in the water. Two slow-motion creatures in a slow-motion world. In fourteen years and with hundreds of clients, such a feeling of solidarity, of connection, had never come over me before. Jola approached and landed on her knees directly opposite me. We remained like that for a while, as though we were worshipping each other. A little cuttlefish swam up and looked at us inquiringly. It exchanged its camouflage for a striped courtship display to determine whether we were male or female. Eventually Jola raised her thumb and forefinger to signal, Okay? I responded in kind: Yes, okay.

I don’t remember whose hands reached out first. I do remember taking her by the shoulders and pulling her into my arms, and I remember that she immediately returned my embrace. We couldn’t kiss each other, because we had to keep our breathing apparatus in our mouths. We couldn’t caress each other, because our skin was covered by a layer of neoprene, and pieces of equipment blocked the way everywhere. The only parts of Jola available to me were her hands and the back of her head. I thrust one hand into the armhole of her buoyancy compensator so that I could at least feel the flattened shape of her breast under the neoprene. Then I turned her around, bent her forward, and rubbed myself against her rubberized behind. I considered whether I dared to undress her. I thought I could grip her weight belt with one hand and carefully remove her buoyancy compensator with the other. Then I’d lay her tank on the seafloor, and she could hold the tank tight in both arms to keep from being carried away by the current. I probably could have managed to peel her diving suit half off. The mere idea of pulling down her zipper and lifting out her breasts while she lay facedown on the bottom of the sea, helpless as a newborn babe, chained by a hose to her air supply — that image alone drove me out of my mind.

Naturally, I did nothing of the kind. We were twenty meters below the surface of the water, it was her fifteenth dive, I was her trainer, and the responsibility was mine. The cuttlefish got bored and swam off. Three butterfly rays hovered close to the ocean floor in the middle distance. Theo would have been ecstatic.

All my adult life I’d considered myself a person with little capacity for love. Occasionally I’d gaze at Antje’s face and think that she was really nice-looking. At such times, I felt happy that she was with me. Those brief moments were the peaks of my emotional life. Love, on the other hand, the kind of love that ruined entire families, incited wars, or drove the lovelorn to suicide — I knew a love like that only from the movies. The very idea seemed foreign to me. It was as though I was missing the organ whose function was to engender such a love. And so for a long time I’d believed there was something wrong with me. During my university days, I’d invested a lot of effort in trying to fall in love. That led to sex. But I was too honest to mistake horniness for true romance.

One day after Antje and I had been living together for some years, I heard Don Draper, an ad executive in the television series Mad Men, say to a woman, “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.” From then on, things got better for me. From then on, I stopped feeling deficient. I considered love a mixture of social convention and psychosomatic response. I believed people like Antje felt love because they were assured on all sides that it had to be. Antje had started saying “I love you” to me the first time we slept together. Eventually I learned to reply, “Love you too.” I’d simply decided to call a longtime, functioning companionship “love.” And I was even relatively sure that Antje and I meant the same thing.

Up until the moment when I embraced the statuesque, neoprene-wrapped Jola on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Until she clung to me. Until she thrust one hand between my thighs and grasped me hard, trying to overcome the barrier of the diving suit by brute force. Nothing like Antje’s girlish shyness when, once a week, she’d start to stroke the back of my neck. She usually came up behind me when I was sitting on the couch or at the computer and rubbed my neck and tickled my ears with little begging touches until I took hold of her wrists and kissed her purely in self-defense. When we kissed, she’d stick just the tip of her tongue between her teeth and lick my lips instead of properly opening her mouth. She’d giggle and slap her flip-flops on the floor extra loud when she ran ahead of me to the bedroom. She’d always want to lie on her back, because that was the only way she could come.

Thanks to Jola, it suddenly seemed obvious that my lack of belief in love had been the only reason I’d never left Antje. Antje was like the practical, convenient wardrobe we’d bought when we moved into the Residencia, a provisional solution that was still standing in the same place years later because it had proved itself useful and provided no immediate reasons for being discarded. When it came to not providing reasons, Antje was an artist.

By contrast, I wanted Jola so badly I almost lost consciousness. Even in the chilly waters of the Atlantic, I thought I could feel the warmth she was putting out. As if her body was filled with hot liquid. She pulled my head to her and gestured upward with one thumb. I nodded, even though I really didn’t want to ascend to the surface. In this underwater world, which wasn’t made for mankind, we belonged together.

As a conservative diver, I prescribed a slow ascent. When eight minutes were up, I was helping Jola clamber out of the water. I insisted on our carrying the equipment to the van at once. One behind the other, we climbed up the steep path to the top of the cliff. The offshore wind had freshened a little. Jola’s face showed the red imprint of her diving mask. When we reached the van, she pressed me against it, simultaneously trying to pull open the zipper on my back. I pushed her away from me; it was impossible to get out of a diving suit that way. We stood facing each other and peeled the neoprene off our skins. In her haste, Jola wound up hopping on one foot and nearly fell. Then she was naked. She braced both hands on the side of the van and turned her backside to me. I seized her hips. Her breasts swung free, and her wet hair stuck to her back.

It was good. It would have been good. But something was wrong. It was the way Jola had turned her back to me. Her questioning look, sexy and provocative. What are you waiting for? When she did that, she looked like an actress. I rubbed my cock between her thighs. She wasn’t particularly wet, but she nevertheless threw her head back immediately and forcefully. She groaned in time with my movements. As if we were playing the leads in some vacation porn movie. I could have penetrated her and gone at it hot and heavy, and we could have finished in a minute. But what would have been the point of that?

Maybe the problem was that out of the water, we were humans. Deep inside me was a dead silence. The intense feelings of a short while ago were hushed. I saw the two of us as though from the outside. The Volkswagen van, the equipment strewn on the ground. A female student and her male diving instructor, on the verge of forgetting his principles. Sex represented a powerful form of involvement. The error of thinking he could enjoy a quickie and emerge from it scot-free had undone many a man before me.

I drew back, patted Jola’s ass, and murmured an apology. Then I slipped into my jeans and set about loading the equipment. I’d have to write off the dive site at Mala as currently jinxed. When I settled in behind the steering wheel, Jola was already in the passenger seat. She didn’t seem angry. Rather a little absent. She stared straight ahead, as if an important idea had just occurred to her. I briefly put my hand on her knee. Then I needed that hand to shift.

In the course of a man’s life, he grows used to the fact that women, with few exceptions, do not wish to go to bed with him. A woman, on the other hand, can take it for granted that theoretically every man wants to go to bed with her. Today I wonder what it must have meant to a woman like Jola to be rejected. Can it really be that fate had required me, at that moment, to bring matters to an end? Unanswerable questions are those best suited to being asked over and over.

JOLA’S DIARY, FOURTH DAY

[pages torn out and pasted back in]

Tuesday, November 15. Afternoon.

Algae produce 80 percent of our oxygen. According to my iPhone. It also says that whole mountains of limestone were formed from marine organisms. Humans use it to make concrete. We build cities out of snail shells and conches. The image appeals to the old man. Maybe he can use it in one of his stories.

A happy mood works just the way a bad one does. You have to take it out on someone. Since there’s no one else here, the old man gets to enjoy himself. He lies on the sofa and uses up tissues. I make him some tea, plump his pillows, and acknowledge his suffering as the most tragic in the universe. I read him pearls of wisdom from the Internet. So a good time with one turns into tenderness for the other. Note: a good time, not a guilty conscience.

What I’d most like to do is to tell the old man a completely different story. To give him a detailed account of how Sven, who usually talks the whole time we’re in the van — describes the upcoming dive, points out the few sights the island offers, relates anecdotes from his underwater life — suddenly found himself speechless. Instead of talking, he kept turning his head every twenty seconds to look at me. Why don’t I tell Theo that? Because he’d go berserk, that’s why. Because he’d beat the daylights out of me, maybe even kill me. Inadvertently. He doesn’t deserve to hear a good-time story. And holding my tongue is at least as much fun. So I sit on the bed in the bedroom and laugh to myself every now and then.

What’s so funny? The old man calls out from the sofa.

Did you know cuttlefish change color when they’re courting? I call back.

On land I find it difficult to take Sven seriously. Those thick arms, that innocent look. A failed lawyer, escaped to an eternal kindergarten, with 100 percent sun and 0 percent real life. But underwater, he’s another person. No, wrong: another being. The innocence becomes self-confidence, the eagerness turns into deepest concentration. So much assurance is never really found in people; only animals have it. I look at him and feel his calmness pervading me, too. I stop struggling. I want only to be close to him.

Today I wasn’t afraid at all. The water carried me, it was like slow flying. Sven was waiting for me on the bottom. We knelt before each other like a priest and a priestess. Nature knows only one kind of divine service.

In 1996 the Neoselachii, a group that includes modern sharks and rays, were subdivided according to morphological characteristics into two monophyletic taxa, the Galeomorphii and the Squalea. According to this proposal, sharks are paraphyletic and hence a form taxon, while rays are assigned to a mere subgroup of squalomorphic sharks.

When Theo asks me again what I’m laughing at, I read him that paragraph off my iPhone.

I say, We saw some rays today.

He says, Lucky you, you had a good time.

He could hardly have given me a funnier answer. To tell the truth, we had a very fine time indeed! I have to pull myself together or he’ll get suspicious.

The rays glided through the water like slow-motion birds and paid not the slightest attention to us. It was as if we weren’t there. Sven’s hands on my breasts under the buoyancy compensator. I could feel how hard he was through his diving suit. Our slow ascent was time-release torture. With every meter closer to the surface, our tension grew. Falling for the diving instructor. And so what? Other women who get treated like shit at home fuck the ski teacher or the tennis pro. Lotte Hass married her expedition leader. We practically ran the distance to the car. In spite of all the equipment. If I’d had any idea of refusing him, he would have taken me by force. Never have two people stripped off their diving suits faster. The metal side of Sven’s van was hot under my hands. He stood behind me, bending his knees a little in order to penetrate me. There was nothing coarse about it. He was very warm. He thrust into me almost questioningly. Impatience had nearly driven us crazy; now we had all the time in the world. And though all mankind, in order to spare men’s feelings, may go on saying that size doesn’t matter, I will simply note that Sven has the ability to fill me up. It was sweet to feel my will steadily vanishing. The sound of the surf, the light breeze, the black landscape. Except for us, not a living thing in sight, far and wide. As though life existed only in the sea we’d just climbed out of. Two aquatic animals, coming on shore to mate. When I sleep with the old man, even when it’s good, I think about something else. Sven found the rhythm. My knees got weak, and he had to hold me up. He couldn’t get enough of my breasts. Whenever I started to think it couldn’t become more intense, it moved to another level. I heard myself stammering foolish words. Sven began to cry out my name. When it was over, he literally collapsed on top of me. It was the first time I’ve ever come standing up.

He dropped to the ground on his back and pulled me onto him. We lay together in the dirt. He twisted my hair into braids and stroked the back of my neck. He said, I love you, Jola. I didn’t take it amiss — I knew what he meant. It was a moment of perfect peace.

Theo asks, How come you two went on only one dive?

I say, Oh, you know, without you it’s only half as much fun.

He laughs: Little hypocrite.

While we drove up the gravel track from Mala, Sven kept one arm around me. He feels good even when he’s dressed. Shortly before we reached the main road, he had me move away and sit at a decent distance. Everybody on the island knows everybody else. Our silence now had another quality. We smiled a lot. When he let me out, he said, See you tomorrow. I said, Give my best to Antje. He said, I will. That meant, Everything, really everything, is all right.