True Love Ways

She set the table, disconnected the phone and lit a single candle. It was their 20th anniversary, and the day called for celebration. The day served as two anniversaries, really �" two separate occasions of significance, which happened to have occurred on the same day. She only celebrated the one. The table looked unbalanced, half-lit by the solitary place setting, legless and yet somehow upright in the dark of the dining room. She sat alone; one plate, one glass. The glass she now raised in a toast to the absence at the other end of the table.

 

She’d used to set a place there for him, but had tired of the ritual years ago. It only made her feel lonely. She wasn’t sure, then, who the toast was really for.

 

They were sleeping when it happened, both a little drunk from the champagne they’d had with dinner. They didn’t register the sound of panicked voices, the sounds of feet stomping down the hall outside their cabin. What finally woke them both was the siren.

 

The crew were already aboard the lowering lifeboat, besuited with bright orange life jackets, when they ran out onto the deck. People were milling like cattle; screaming, crying, shoving. It made her think of a fox in a henhouse. By now, the ship was leaning slightly, toward the aft. The night was interminable beyond the lights of the deck, somewhat bitter with the tang of cold salt air.

 

She caught the eyes of the captain, before his head disappeared from view. With his upper face, his eyebrows, he kind of shrugged. “Oh, well…what are you going to do?” the expression said.

 

“Some goddamn anniversary,” her husband muttered tiredly, dragging her by the arm behind him. He’d been grumpy ever since they’d left harbor two weeks ago, complaining from the outset about the cold, about the food �" about the drunks and the young people wearing jeans to dinner and his near-constant seasickness.

 

They were moving �" rather, he was moving, with her unwillingly in tow �" in a direction opposite the other passengers. Even in the dark, she could feel the deck listing, slipping beneath her bare feet. She'd only thought to grab a single, high-heeled red shoe in her groggy panic, which she now clung to mindlessly. It was cold. She pulled her nightgown closed, but it didn't help much. Though she couldn’t see her hands in front of her face, she could feel her breath steaming in the air.

 

“Where are we going?” she panted, drawing away from the painful vice-like grip on her forearm.

 

“We’re not following those goddamn sheep.” he said angrily, without slowing or turning to look at her. She felt his wedding band, ice cold and pinching the skin of her wrist. He was half-dressed, in pants and undershirt, brown penny loafers without socks. She felt naked, trembling at the chill night air.

 

“But where?” she insisted, teeth chattering as though they'd come uprooted from her head.

 

“There’s a boat…on the other end. I remember from when we boarded.”

 

“But…” She was gasping for breaths that felt like shards of icy glass, practically dragged by the heels of her feet. “We should tell someone!”

 

“I’m not fighting that mob to get off of this f*****g thing!”

 

She no longer protested. It took all her remaining energy just to keep a pace with him, to keep her arm from being ripped off. As they neared the rear deck, she swore she saw something out there, in the water �" some vague shape outlined against the deeper dark of the starless night sky. It seemed to radiate a coldness; it was a presence she could feel more than she could see.

 

And there was the sound. A kind of great sucking, gulping noise that made her imagine the drinking of an enormous milkshake. The sound was intermittent �" pausing at intervals, as if for breath �" and the frame of the ship shuddered underneath her. She knew it was crazy, but her first thought was that they were being devoured by some kind of biblical deep-sea leviathan.

 

She knew he’d found the lifeboat once he let go of her arm. He was bent, working frantically at the ropes, then at the towline mechanism. She heard the occasional muttered curse. She thought she heard her name interspersed between them.

 

“Goddamn it, help me!” he shouted over his shoulder.

 

The ship lurched suddenly, violently forward. She grasped the rail with numb hands, heard the unseen and endless ocean roiling just over the edge of the deck. It was so dark. She trembled, no longer for the cold, but for fear of that darkness. She knew immediately that she couldn’t let go of the railing; that she could not be bodily persuaded to leave the relative safety of the ship.

 

There was the sound of thundering feet approaching, which caused her husband to work all the more frantically. He’d untied one knot, so that the little boat was listing at a 45-degree angle, nose-down. He began chewing at the remaining knot with his bared teeth, making muffled animal noises. He finally seemed to realize what he was doing wrong, and pulled the switch that winched the boat down into the water.

 

“Screw it,” he said, grasping again at her arm. He had one leg half-raised over the railing, and began pulling her along with him. He glanced back when she resisted.

 

“No,” she moaned. He looked at her, just briefly, with an expression of utter disbelief. His look of amazement was almost immediately swept away by a look of furious impatience, one which she was altogether more familiar with.

 

“OK, you stay here then.” he spat in disgust.

 

He lifted his other leg over the rail, lowering himself shakily over the side of the ship. She watched it happen, eyes and mouth gaping. A thought occurred to her then, which she instantly shut away. Then, in a heartbeat, she found herself scrabbling up and over the railing behind him. His cold hands fumbled under her nightdress, at her thighs and buttocks like an over-anxious virgin. She half-fell into the boat, clutching at the floor with her entire body.

 

The boat had nearly reached the water, tilting dangerously, when faces began to appear on the deck above them. Some shouted at them, some only sobbed or screamed wordless pleas. She noticed that he wasn’t looking up. He was rifling through his wallet, as though there were something in there of greater importance.

 

When the first of them fell past the boat, she didn’t realize what it was. Her immediate thought was that they were throwing garbage or laundry down on them, trying to sink the boat. She heard a second impact, as a body bounced off the hull and into the water below. She looked up, saw a mother with child in arms climbing over the side of the ship. When they jumped, she looked away again. They made a splash in the water, somewhere off to the left. 

 

One of them made a lucky jump, in all that noisy darkness, just before the boat was unmoored; he sank through the floor of the boat, up to his hips. He began yelling and thrashing as the water began to swell up around him. They left him there, like something out of a Three Stooges short, the boat swinging from side to side with his every movement, the water gurgling up into his gasping face. Others fell, into the boat and into the water surrounding it.

 

She swam after her husband. He seemed much focused on the direction in which he was slowly paddling. She saw the steamer trunk, bobbing wetly on the surface of the water some five meters from the ship. With some effort, she swam to it and pulled herself up onto the tiny islet.

 

He turned when he heard her struggling and swam back toward the sound, somewhat more tiredly now, to where she lay sopping wet and raggedly panting atop the trunk. He clutched at one of its corners, and the trunk dipped dangerously to one side under his weight.

 

“Let…let…” he was struggling to speak, hissing words between each frantic, shuddering gasp for breath. “Let…me up.”

 

She clutched to the thing like a wet cat, nails almost digging into its surface. The silk nightgown clung to her form like a second skin. She was by now too cold to speak, but her head shook furiously, eyes wide and white as saucers.

 

“It’s…so…cold.” he wheezed. He resumed pulling at the corner to keep himself above water, and again the trunk began to tilt to one side.

 

“Get off!” she screeched, and the sound of it made him wince. He didn’t entirely let go of the trunk, but shrunk slightly away from it. From her.

 

An hour passed, the two of them coughing and shivering, having reached a strange kind of accord or impasse. There was no other sound in all that dark ocean space around them. The lights of the ship had gone out some time ago, and so too had ended the voices and the noises of struggle.

 

He finally spoke, though it was with no little effort.

 

“Please…” he beseeched through clenched teeth. “I can’t…feel my…legs.”

 

She clutched to the trunk, staring down at him with far colder eyes.

 

Whether he took her silence as assent or refusal, she couldn't tell. He suddenly gripped the side of the trunk with both hands, and for a panicked moment she thought that he intended to upright the thing, to spill her into the water with him. She thrashed and jostled, to keep the small raft upright, to maneuver it away from him. He’d managed to throw a leg up over the side of the thing, and it sank almost immediately beneath their combined weight.

 

“No!” she screamed. It resounded, echoed back to her from somewhere in the endless night.

 

He continued to struggle onto the trunk, thrashing and clawing, pushing her further back toward the far edge, toward those cold and unknowable depths. He knew she wasn’t a very strong swimmer �" and her, practically naked out here. The outrage came upon her all at once. She recalled the thought she’d had before climbing after him into the lifeboat.

 

He’d meant it, what he'd said. He hadn’t been leading her on with some kind of cruel reverse psychology. You stay here then. He’d meant it. She could have stayed there and died right along with all those poor, nameless people for all he cared; he would have watched her sink with just as much staid indifference as he had the rest of them. That was all the prompting she needed. She took off her remaining shoe and began beating him on the head with it.

 

He shouted at first, waving at the air above his head as if swatting away an insect. She connected the heel with his nose; he spilled off the trunk and back into the water. His hands immediately shot up and grasped for the trunk. She began hitting them with the shoe. His head surfaced, screaming in pain and outrage.

 

She hammered at his knuckles, blue and white from the cold, and from the strain of clutching at her tiny raft. Blood began to seep from the wounds, and he kept flailing one injured hand while gripping the corner of the trunk with the other. There was a strange, methodical cadence to her attack. She’d go after one hand, and once he took it away she’d attack the other. He was shouting now, though it was nothing that she could understand.

 

He was trying feebly to hug onto the trunk in a last-ditch effort, having given up on climbing aboard. She clawed at his face, kicked at his neck and torso with her heels. The trunk had begun bobbing and swaying violently with this renewed effort, and she lay sprawled against it to keep from being thrown off.

 

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she raised the shoe in one fist, lashing out at his wide, terrified eyes. He sank backward, howling, clutching at one eye with both hands. He rolled off the side of the trunk with a splash, and the thing bobbed upright out of the water. He began screaming something that sounded like her name, but his voice slowly faded to silence. She peered over the edge of the trunk, somewhat curious.

 

She watched him sink beneath the water �" saw his remaining, undamaged eye staring at her in mute accusation. The fingers of his hands trailed through the surface of the water, grasping, tracing lines like the fins of little white fish. Then it was quiet again.

 

The rescue boat found her late that morning, shivering, curled into a pale, fetal shape aboard her peculiar makeshift life raft. She was still tenaciously clutching a shoe in one hand, as if to fend off a hungry shark. By this time, the pale tan-line on her ring finger had brightened to a mottled blue, the color of marble.

 

 

 

She emptied the last of the champagne bottle, not bothering to pour the wine into the fluted crystal glass first. As she raised her empty glass in a kind of afterthought, she caught her reflection in it �" drawn pale and haggard, pallid and ghostlike in the faint candle glow.

 

“I love you,” she said, and the words seemed to shock her. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but she appeared even to blush a little.

 

She toasted, wishing herself a long and lonely life. 

Reviews

[Mary Beecroft]

You've shocked me again with your story telling. Right away this grabbed my attention, framing the story with their 20th anniversary was brilliant. I just reread the first paragraph, it's beautiful, the idea of the day serving as two anniversaries and I love the ship analogy with the table. It's a completely engrossing and suspenseful story without ever feeling too melodramatic. Your handle and manipulation of words sounds really professional. I'm not sure how much you have published, but I think your stories (at least the two I've read) are easily publishable. To give some constructive criticism: there was one part I had to go back and reread in order to understand fully what was happening. The part where they were lowering down into the water on the lifeboat, when the people were jumping off the edge trying to get inside it. Some actions could be clarified a little further: 'When the first of them fell past the boat' for example, I found that initially confusing, until I read the following sentences. Also, I think there could be more transition between the three of them swaying in the life boat like three stooges to the husband and wife swimming away, it seemed like one second they were in the boat the next they were swimming. But these are very small points that hardly detract from the story. I will also say that I agree with the review before mine. I didn't find the woman very likable, at most I pitied her. But when I read it, I didn't think I needed to like her, it was only seeing your comment that you feel her actions were justified that I realized maybe I should. However, I think the character works as she is. It just depends on how you want her portrayed.

[tworeeler]

Thank you sincerely for the comments. I was still not completely sure this one was finished -- it's hard to stay objective when it's your own writing. I might take another pass before I try submitting (this is more or less a first draft).

[I Am Svetlana]

Wow, I really loved this and it reminded me a lot of the movie Titanic. Not sure if you were aiming for that, but this was a beautifully crafted piece. It's not easy to be out in a situation like and have to make quick decisions on who's going to live through it or not. Obviously she wanted to live, but of course, it was probably best that she did what she had to do that particular night to save herself. He was threatening to take her down with him and she couldn't bear the thought of it, so she had to leave him behind. Such a telling and emotional tale, but it unveils the truth about life itself and how we must do what is best for ourselves in spur of the moment things like this and not worry about others.

[Jack Cassidy]

This was a very intense story! I feel that your writing skills are superb and the set up was nice. I can definitely imagine all of the things that were described in the story, it seemed so realistic. I really hope this story gets published, I can't rave enough about how much I enjoyed reading it. Great work!

[sirenribbon@thehptshirt..]

Ah this is so messed up. I'm probably not the only one that becomes severely uncomfortable when a woman is shown reeling with misguided instinct. I really don't like her. It works cause I don't have to.

[tworeeler]

I feel like she was more than a little justified. I might revise this to make it a little bit clearer.