Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

32 OLIVER

Now that I have ascertained that Jane and Rebecca are on their way to Iowa, I am much less worried by my situation. Today, in fact, I took two spare hours and called the Institute, taking messages down on a small bedside pad at the Holiday Inn.

I will not pat myself on the back yet; it is not the mark of a good scientist to congratulate himself before he comes to a conclusion, an endpoint. But nonetheless I consider this my finest work to date. Starting with next to nothing, I have beat Jane to the punch, if you will-I’ve discovered where she is headed before she even realizes she is headed there. Jane is the type who will be driving through Iowa, and then, having remembered her daughter’s plane crash, will turn off the road at the spur of the moment. Of course it no longer matters. Because when she turns off the road I will be there, and I will take her back to San Diego. It is where she belongs. If my calculations go according to plan, I will be home in time to catch the start of the humpback migration to the breeding grounds of Hawaii.

This morning I spoke to Shirley at the office and asked her to help me with some research. The poor girl was near tears when she heard my voice, for Christ’s sake, it’s only been four working days. I told her to ask a reference librarian in town to help her find microfiche files on the crash of Flight 997, Midwest Airlines, in September 1978. She was to record as much precise information about the site of the crash as possible. Then she was to take the data and call the State Department of Iowa, and using the Institute’s clout, find out the names of the owners of the surrounding farms. Presumably, in two days when I contact her again, I will know whose land I have to stake out.

And so the next challenge, having mastered their route, is to be able to read from a distance the role I have to play. I will need two speeches: one as a penitent husband, and one as a dashing savior. And I will need to assess practically on sight which of these two categories I must fill.

Have I always been this good an analyst?

It is only noon, but I feel like celebrating somehow. I am on top of the crisis. I have at least found all the pieces of the puzzle, if I am still somewhat muddled about fitting them together. I know that I must be back on the road by two in order to reach the next Holiday Inn in Lincoln by dinnertime. Checking my watch (a nervous habit, I don’t really need to see the time), I wander into the hotel lobby to find the bar.

These lobbies all look alike: blue and silver, carpets with a pattern, a de trop glass elevator and a fountain in the shape of a dolphin or cherub. The staff behind the desk even starts to clone from city to city. The lounges are always done in maroon, with round leatherette chairs that look like teacups and spotty highball glasses.

“What can I get you?” the waitress says. Are they called waitresses or barmaids these days? She is wearing a silver plate over her left breast that reads MARY LOUISE.

“Well, Mary Louise,” I say, sounding as pleasant as possible, “what do you recommend?”

“Number one, I’m not Mary Louise. I’m wearing her apron because mine got stolen last night along with my car and my house keys by my no-good motherfucker of a boyfriend. Number two,” she pauses, “this is a bar . Our specialties of the house are whiskey straight and whiskey on the rocks. So do you want to have a drink or are you just wasting my day like every other sorry asshole in this place?”

I look around, but I am the only customer. I decide she must be distressed over her misfortune of the night before. “I’ll have a gin and tonic,” I say.

“No gin.”

“Canadian Club and ginger.”

“Look mister,” the girl says. “We’ve got Jack Daniels and a faucet of Coke. Take your pick. Or come back after the truck delivers more stock today.”

“Well, I see. I’ll have Jack Daniels, straight up.”

She flashes me a smile-she is sort of pretty, actually-and walks away. Roach clip earrings swing in her ears. Roach clips. Rebecca taught me that. We had been walking on a boardwalk at the beach and I picked up this long, trailing feather-and-bead creation. I was trying to place it as an Indian artifact, or a new tourist item from over the border. “That’s a roach clip, Dad,” Rebecca had said casually, taking it from me and throwing it into a trash bin. “You use it to smoke pot.”

The waitress comes back with my drink and fairly tosses it onto the table so that it spills in a clear amber puddle. Rather than face her wrath, I mop it up with a napkin. HOLIDAY INN! the napkin says, embossed gold letters. The waitress climbs onto a bar stool and rests her cheek on her hand. She stares at me.

I take a sip of my drink and try to put this woman out of my mind. I do not normally look at women, they tend to confuse me. But this one is different. Not only is she wearing those feather-type earrings; she also sports a red leather skirt that barely covers her buttocks, and a studded bustier. Her stockings, which are white, are covered with fat black polka dots that stretch over the muscles of her thighs. She is wearing far too much makeup, but there is an art involved; one eye is done in violet, the other in green.

I try to think of Jane in such a get-up and I laugh out loud.

The waitress gets off her stool and walks up to me. She points a red fingernail at my throat. “You listen to me, pervert. You get your eyes back in your head and your dick back in your shorts.”

She says this with such hatred, with such conviction, although she does not know me, that I feel obliged to reply. She has already turned on her heel when I say, “I’m not a pervert.”

“Oh yeah? Then what are you?” She does not turn around.

“Well, I’m a scientist.”

The waitress spins and sizes me up. “Funny. You’re better looking than those polyester pants types.”

I look down at my trousers. They are wool, summerweight. The waitress snorts, a laugh. “I’m just yanking your chain.” She pulls a compact mirror out of-I don’t know where exactly, it looks like her pantyhose-and bares her teeth. When she finds a spot of lipstick she rubs it vigorously with her thumb.

“I’m sorry to hear about your car,” I say. “And your boyfriend.”

The waitress snaps the mirror shut and stuffs it, this time, into the crevice of her bustier. The pink plastic edge juts out a bit from between her breasts. “He was a louse. Thanks.” She looks in the direction of the front desk, and when she decides that nobody is paying attention, she swings her leg over one of the leatherette chairs nearby and sits down. “Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all. I have always wondered about women like her, the kind you find superimposed on X-rated videocassettes or packages for sexual aid devices. There have been several women for me other than Jane-two before and one during the marriage, for a brief stint-a diver on one of my marine excursions. None of them, however, acted or looked like this. This waitress is more than a woman, she is a specimen. “Have you worked here long?” I care nothing about the answer. I just want to watch the way her lips move, fluid, like coagulating rubber.

“Two years,” she says. “Just during the day. At night I work in a twenty-four-hour mini-mart. I’m saving to move to New York City.”

“I’ve been there. You’ll like it.”

The waitress squints at me. “You think I’m some Nebraska field girl,” she says. “I was born in New York. That’s why I ‘m going back.”

“I see.” I pick up my drink, and swirl it around. Then I dip my finger-in and run it lightly around the edge of the glass. When my fingertip-reaches a certain level of dryness the friction causes a sound to moan out of the glass. A sound that, frankly, reminds me of my whales.

“That’s cool,” the girl says. “Teach me.”

I show her; it isn’t difficult. When she gets the hang of it her face lights up. She gets three or four more glasses and fills them to varying levels with Jack Daniels. (Why tell her it works with water, if I can get a free drink?) Together we create a melancholy, screeching symphony.

The waitress laughs and grabs my hands. “Stop! Stop, I can’t take it anymore. It hurts my ears.” She holds my hands for a second, looking down at my fingers. “You’re married.” A statement- not an accusation.

“Yes,” I say. “She’s not here, though.”

I do not mean anything by that; I am just stating the facts. But this girl (who I imagine is closer to Rebecca’s age than mine) leans forward and says, “Oh, really .” She is so near that I can smell her breath, sweet, like Certs. She lifts herself out of the chair and creeps forward on the table, led by her hands, which reach over the boundary of decorum and grab the collar of my shirt. “What else can you teach me?”

I have to admit that I have a vision of this waitress naked, with a tattoo somewhere unspeakable, telling me in her rough and husky voice to do it to her again, and again. I see her in my safe aqua suite in this Holiday Inn, reclining in her leather bra and her polka-dot hose, just like a cheap movie. It would be so incredibly easy. I have not told her my name, or my profession: it would be an opportunity to be somebody else for just a little while.

“You can’t leave here,” I say. “You’re the only one working.”

The waitress wraps her arms around my neck. She smells of musk and perspiration. “Just watch me.”

I have been given two room keys. I slip one out of my pocket, along with a five dollar bill for my drink. She deserves a hell of a tip. The key hits the rim of the whiskey glass, and rings. Then I stand up, like I imagine very suave men in Hollywood do, and without turning back or saying a word I walk to the bank of elevators in the lobby.

When I am inside the elevator, with the doors closing, I lean back and breathe quickly. What am I doing? What am I doing? Is it infidelity, I wonder, if you are pretending to be someone that you aren’t?

I let myself into the hotel room and I am relieved by its overwhelming familiarity. There is the bed on the left, and the bathroom behind the door, and the thin sanitary strip around the toilet that the maid leaves every morning. There is the folding stand for luggage, and the room service menu, and the wavy patterned curtains made of some flammable substance. Everything is just as I have left it, and there is some solace in this.

I lie on the bed, my hands at my sides, completely naked. The air conditioner, making the obligatory hum that all hotel cooling units do, stirs the hair on my chest. I picture the face of this waitress, her lips moving down the length of my body like water.

Although we had been dating, I did not have intercourse with Jane for four and a half years There were two women on the side, women who meant nothing. You know the phrase: there are certain women you sleep with, and others you marry. It was quite clear which category Jane fit into. Jane, who smelled of lemon soap, and who matched her headbands to her handbags. I had been working for a while at Woods Hole by the time Jane entered her senior year at Wellesley, and I got into a routine. I’d see her every weekend (the commute was too draining for anything more) and we’d go out. I’d feel her under her bra and then take her back to her dormitory.

That last year, though, something happened. Jane stopped fightingmy hands as they groped through layers of clothes in the dark. She started to move my hands herself, so that they would touch certain places and slide with certain rhythms. I did everything I could to stop her. I believed that I knew the consequences better than she.

We had sex for the first time in the balcony of an old movie theater. She had been provoking me to distraction downstairs, where we were surrounded by other people. I pulled her to the balcony, which was roped off for renovation at the time. When I took off her clothes, and she was standing in front of me haloed in the light from the projector, I realized I wasn’t going to fight her any longer. She rubbed herself against me until I was certain I would explode and then I grabbed her hips and pushed myself into her. I started to lose control, the warm sponginess like a closing throat, and then I realized that Jane had stopped breathing. She had never had intercourse before.

I know now I must have scared her to death, but I wasn’t thinking rationally back then. Once I had tasted honey, I was not about to go back to bread and water. I began to call Jane daily and make the commute from the Cape two or three times a week. I was working with tide pools then, and I spent the day staring at them, at the hard-shelled invertebrates and the kelp, entire societies that were devastated in the ruthless blast of a wave. I turned over the horseshoe crabs and unraveled the tentacles of the starfish without interest. I took no notes. And when a mentor at Woods Hole confronted me about my attitude: I did the only thing I could: I stopped seeing Jane.

I was not going to make a name for myself if I spent the day thinking about being in the throes of passion. I told Jane many things: that I had the flu; that I had switched to a project on jellyfish and had to do background research. I spent more time devoted to my job and I called Jane occasionally, with distance keeping us safe.

About this time I witnessed a miracle: the birth of a pilot whale in captivity. We had been studying the mother’s gestation and I happened to be in the building when she started labor. We had her in a huge underwater tank for easy visibility, and naturally when such a marvel occurs everyone stops what they are doing and comes to see. The baby spit out of its mother in a stream of entrails and blood. The mother swam in circles until the baby had become oriented to the water, and then she swam beneath it in order to buoy it to the surface for air. “Tough break,” said a scientist beside me. “Being born underwater to breathe oxygen.”

That day I went into town and bought an engagement ring. It had not occurred to me before: the only thing that could be better than becoming famous in my field was to do it with Jane by my side. There was no reason I could not have my cake and eat it too. She possessed all the qualities I knew I would never grow to espouse. By having Jane, I had hope. I understood sacrifice.

Jane. Lovely, quirky Jane.

Would she believe in second chances?

Suddenly mortified by my behavior, I cross my hands in front of my groin. I pull on my clothes as quickly as possible and zip up my suitcase. I have to get out of here before this waitress comes. What have I been thinking? I drag the suitcase down the long hallway and into an elevator, hiding behind balustrades to make sure she isn’t coming. Then, calmed by Muzak, I take deep breaths and plummet to ground level, thinking of Jane. Jane, only of Jane.