We Are Water

  Chapter Two

  Orion Oh

  The sharks and I both arrive at the Cape this first Saturday in September. As I inch over the Sagamore Bridge in this god-awful Labor Day weekend traffic, they’re saying great whites are swimming the coastal waters, heading north. According to the car radio, warning signs are being posted along the oceanside beaches from Chatham to North Truro. North Truro? I reach over and turn up the volume, drowning out the annoying cell phone ring tone that’s playing inside the glove compartment. Everybody’s movin’, everybody’s groovin’, baby. Love shack, baby love shack, bay-ayy-be-ee. “What do you want for a ring tone?” Marissa had asked me that day when she was programming my phone. “Anything,” I’d said. “You pick.” And she picked that awful song I’ve always hated.

  It’s not one of the kids calling me; they text me now. Before I left this morning, I deliberated about whether to take the damned cell phone with me or leave it back in Three Rivers. But what if there was an emergency? So I threw it in the glove compartment and locked it. I thought I turned the damn thing off, but I guess not. Ahh, relief. The call has gone to voice mail.

  “It’s a little unusual to see them in these cooler Massachusetts waters at this time of year,” the shark expert tells her interviewer, a guy who, for some reason, is calling himself the Mad Hatter. “But the gray seal population’s been on the rise, and we think that’s what’s probably luring them.”

  The Mad Hatter chortles. “So you’re saying the problem is that there’s been too much seal sex? Too many pinnipeds puttin’ out?”

  “Uh, well . . .”

  The Diane Rehm interview I’d been listening to faded away somewhere between Braintree and Buzzards Bay. Conversely, the Mad Hatter is coming through so loudly and clearly that he might as well be broadcasting from the backseat. “Time now for traffic, news, and weather. And when we come back, we’ll have more with Dr. Tracy Skelly from the Division of Marine Fisheries.”

  Despite my initial resistance to the idea, I’m staying rent free at Viveca’s place in North Truro for the month, hoping that a Cape Cod retreat might allow me, after a summer’s worth of drifting and wound licking, to anchor myself. Figure out how to shed my bitterness, forgive myself and others and start over. Orchestrate a reinvention, I guess you’d say. Thirty days has September: it’s a tall order.

  My game plan, once I survive this hideous holiday traffic and get settled in, is to eat healthy, cool it on the drinking, exercise. I’ll jog and journal every morning, then bike to the beach for an afternoon swim. After dinner, I’ll read and research—Google phrases like “new professions after 50,” “change career paths.” But with sharks in the water, it doesn’t sound like I’ll be doing a whole lot of swimming. Of course, there’s always the placid bayside, but what I want is turbulence—bodysurfing along the crest of the five- or six-foot swells and getting roughed up a little by the waves I misjudge—the ones that, instead of carrying me, crack against me. I’ve been hoping the wildness of the water might somehow both cleanse me of my failings as a university psychologist and baptize me as . . . what?

  What do you want to be when you grow up? The adults were always asking me that when I was a kid, and because I liked to draw—reproduce the images in comic books and Mad magazine—I’d say I wanted to be an artist. I’d enjoyed my high school art classes, had gotten good grades for my work. And so I’d entered college with a vague plan to major in art. In my first semester, my Intro to Drawing professor, Dr. Duers, had said during my portfolio review that I had a good sense of composition and a talent worth developing. But the following semester, I’d run up against Professor Edwards, an edgy New York sculptor who was disdainful of having to teach studio art to suburban college kids—who had come out and told us he was only driving up from the city twice a week because of the paycheck. It had crushed me the morning he’d stood over my shoulder, snickered at the still life I was drawing, and walked away without a word. But that same semester, I got an A in an Intro to Psych course I really liked. And so I had put away my sketch pad and gone on to the 200-level psychology classes. And then the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I got a job as a second-shift orderly at the state hospital.

  I liked working there. Liked shooting the shit with the patients. Not the ones who were really out of it, but the ones who were in there for shorter-term stays. The “walking wounded,” as the nurses called them. Some of those patients would be admitted in pretty rough shape—straitjacketed and sputtering nonsense, or in such deep depressions that they were almost catatonic. But two or three weeks later, with their equilibrium restored by meds and talk therapy, they’d be discharged back into the world.

  The psychiatrists were off-putting. Tooled around the wards like they walked on water. But the psychologists were different. More humane, less in a hurry. “You’re good with the patients,” one of them, Dr. Dow, told me one day. “I’ve noticed.” For him, it was nothing more than a casual observation, but for me—a kid who, up to that point, had never gotten noticed for much of anything—it was huge. On my day off, I drove up to the Placement Office at school and took one of those tests that identifies your strengths, suggests what career paths you should consider. When I got my results back, it said I had scored high on empathy and should consider the helping professions: social work, psychology. And so, at the beginning of my fifth semester, I declared psychology as my major.

  I kept my job at the hospital. Worked there on weekends. They assigned me to the adolescent unit mostly: boys who had lit fires or tortured the family pet; girls who had attempted suicide or were taking the slow route via eating disorders. And then one night—Christmas Eve it was; I was covering for another orderly who wanted to be with his family—I met a new arrival who’d been admitted because of a holiday meltdown.

  Siobhan was a pretty seventeen-year-old with auburn hair and pale skin. She’d been a competitive Irish step-dancer until a torn ACL had brought all that to a halt. She was type A all the way, and a big reader. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: the kinds of books that, back in high school, it had been torture for me to get through. Siobhan told me, straight-faced, that she was misplaced in time—that she should have been born in an earlier, more romantic era. Fashioned herself as a tragic heroine, I guess. We weren’t friends, exactly—that was against hospital policy—but we were friendly. I liked her sarcastic sense of humor and she liked mine. And believe me, humor was in short supply at that place. She nicknamed me Heathcliff—because of my “dark, swarthy looks,” she said. My “big, soulful brown eyes.” One time, she asked me what kind of a name “Oh” was, and when I told her, she wanted to know why I didn’t look Chinese. “Because I’m Italian, too,” I told her.

  She reached out and touched my face when I said that. Studied it so intently that I had to look away. I was, at the time, an insecure, blend-in-with-the-woodwork twenty-year-old, not used to such focused attention. “Now I can see it,” she finally said.

  “It?”

  “The Orient. It’s in your eyes. It makes you uniquely handsome, but I suspect you already know that.” Handsome? Me? I laughed. After that exchange, she stopped calling me Heathcliff. Now I was Marco Polo.

  Sometimes, if things were slow on the ward after I had cleared away the dinner trays, I’d play Scrabble or Monopoly with her and some of the other patients. More often than not, Siobhan would win, and after a while I figured out how. She’d cheat. I didn’t call her on it. Didn’t really give a shit who won. But she knew that I knew. “Better watch out for that one,” one of the old guard nurses warned me. “She’s got a crush on a certain someone.”

  At the nurses’ station one night, Siobhan’s chart was out on the counter and I took a peek. It read: “Manic-depressive disorder. Psychomotor agitation during manic phase that manifests itself as oral fixation.” The latter wasn’t surprising. For one thing, Siobhan smoked like a chimney. And when she was out of cigarettes and couldn’t bum them, she would put other things in her m
outh and chew on them: hard candies, pens and pencils, the cuffs of her shirts. The covers of her paperbacks were crisscrossed with teeth marks.

  One February night I was doing bed checks, and when I went into her room, no Siobhan. I walked down to the rec room to see if she was there and found her running in circles, gagging, blue in the face. We’d been trained to give the Heimlich, so I got behind her, put my fists under her diaphragm, and yanked. Out popped the plastic Checker she’d been sucking on. It had gotten lodged in her windpipe. As soon as it came out, she started crying, taking gulps of air, clawing me and hugging me so hard that, for a few seconds, it was like I’d just saved her from drowning. When she tried to kiss me, I pushed her away. After that, she started referring to me as her “knight in shining armor.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic,” I’d say. “I was just doing my job.” But secretly I was pleased. And when, at the next staff meeting, Dr. Dow presented me with a certificate of gratitude, I went down to Barker’s discount store, bought a frame, and hung it on my wall.

  After Siobhan was released, she started contacting me. I hadn’t given her the name and number of my dorm, but she had gotten it somehow. “Hey, Orion! Phone call!” some guy would shout from down the hall, and I would walk toward the phone, hoping it wasn’t her. She kept asking me to meet her for coffee. Begging me. The one time I agreed—met her at the Dunkin’ Donuts just off campus—I was nervous as hell. This was the kind of thing I could lose my job over if anyone from the hospital saw us together. That didn’t happen, but something else did. She was acting manic for the hour or so we sat and talked. Chewing on her coffee cup, talking a blue streak, lighting one cigarette after another. After my second cup of coffee, I told her I had a test to study for and got up to leave. That’s when, out of the blue, she asked me if I was still a virgin. It wasn’t until later that I thought of what I should have said: that her question was inappropriate, out of bounds. But what I did say was, “Me? Pfft. Not hardly.” It was a bluff. The sum total of my sexual experience up to that point had been a drunken encounter with a so-so looking girl I’d danced and made out with at a dorm mixer and then taken upstairs to my room. Groping her in the dark, I’d kept trying to figure out how to undo her complicated underwear until she had finally done it herself, put me inside of her, and said, “Go. Move.” I was done in under a minute, so technically I was not still a virgin. But Mr. Experience I wasn’t.

  When we were out in the parking lot, standing at our cars, Siobhan announced that she had made a big decision about us. “About us?” I laughed. She didn’t. She had given it a lot of thought, she said. She was ready to be “deflowered” and wanted her “knight in shining armor” to be “the one.” I stood there, shaking my head and telling her that was not going to happen. And when she didn’t seem to want to take no for an answer—started getting a little belligerent, in fact—I climbed into my rusted-out ’68 Volkswagen with the bad muffler, started it, and rumbled the hell away from her. Too bad I hadn’t acted as professionally the night Jasmine Negron invited me in and fixed me that drink. I could have spared myself a whole lot of trouble and shame.

  That was the last I ever saw of Siobhan, although for the remainder of my semesters as an undergraduate and well into grad school and my widening sexual experience, she occasionally starred in my masturbatory fantasies. But years later, after I had become a licensed clinical psychologist and landed the counselor’s job at the university, I thought I had run into her again—at the dry cleaner’s of all places.

  Not long before that, I had extricated myself from my three-year relationship with Thea and was still licking my wounds from that debacle of codependency. She and I had been living together for two years at that point. She was midway through her doctoral studies in Feminist Theory. The beginning of the end had come the night when, postcoitally—after a go-around that I had assumed we were both enjoying—she’d informed me that, in a way, Andrea Dworkin was right. About what? I’d asked. That heterosexual sex was a form of rape, she’d said, and then had drifted off to sleep while I lay there listening to her snore. It had taken me three weeks and a couple of sessions with my shrink before I mustered up the resolve to tell her I wanted her to move out. “Good riddance and fuck you!” the note she had left me said. She had placed it on top of the pile of my LPs she’d taken out of the jackets and snapped in half: Tom Rush, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Highway 61 Revisited. . . .

  That late afternoon when I hurried into the dry cleaner’s with my armful of dirty shirts and thought it was Siobhan stepping up to the counter, I stopped cold. Same red hair and pale complexion, same petite frame. But up close, I could see that I’d been mistaken. “We’re closed,” she said—with attitude. So I copped an attitude, too. “Really? Because the door isn’t locked and your clock up there says three minutes of six.”

  “Name?” she said, huffily.

  “Orion Oh. Doctor Orion Oh.”

  She was unimpressed. “Starch or no starch?”

  And that was how I met Annie, my second red-haired damsel in distress. When I left the dry cleaner’s that day, our hostile little exchange might have been the sum total of our interaction had I not noticed that the only other car out front, a beat-up yellow El Camino, had a front tire that was pancake flat. I waited until the lights went out and she emerged, purposely not looking at me. I pointed. “Shit!” she said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” She burst into tears.

  I offered to change it for her. “Spare in the trunk?” I asked. She said the flat tire was the spare. And so I had jacked up the car and driven her and her wheel with the punctured tire over to the Sears at the mall. They said they were behind—couldn’t get to it until an hour or so—and so I’d taken her to Bonanza Steakhouse while we waited. You’d have thought that rib eye and Texas toast she got when we went through the line was fine dining. Which, relatively speaking, I guess it was. In the weeks that followed, I found out that she was mostly subsisting on Oodles of Noodles and SpaghettiOs, heated on the hot plate in her tiny rented room. That was the first meal Annie ever “cooked” for me: SpaghettiOs with these tiny little monkey’s gonad meatballs. “No, no, it’s delicious,” I assured her when she apologized, even as I pictured my Nonna and Nonno Valerio rolling around in their graves.

  Well, you sure can’t call Annie a damsel in distress these days, now that her work sells in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s something I never could have imagined back after the twins were born when she started making her shadow box collages. The last time I talked to Marissa, she told me that one of her mother’s pieces, Angel Wings #17, had just sold for fifty-five thou to Fergie. “Wow,” I said. “Did she pay her in dollars or British pounds?”

  “Not her,” Marissa said. “Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. When I got off the phone, I had to Google this other Fergie to find out who she was. . . .

  Well, maybe now I can finally explore my creative side for a change. Do I even still have a creative side after all these years of tamping it down? Providing a service for others? To be determined, I guess. And though there’s probably not much of a demand for a middle-aged ex-psychologist who can probably still reproduce the likenesses of Smokey the Bear and Alfred E. Neuman from muscle memory, there might be other artistic avenues for me to explore. Maybe I could buy myself a nice digital camera and get into photography. Or try my hand at sculpting. My Italian grandfather was a machinist, but he’d done a little sculpting on the side. Miniatures, mostly. I still have the little soapstone dolphin he made for me. To this day, I’ll sometimes pick up that smiling figurine and hold it in the palm of my hand. Smile back at it. . . . I like to cook and I’m good at it. My immigrant Chinese grandfather was a hardworking, unsmiling restaurateur in Boston. And Nonna Valerio would sometimes let me help her make the sheet pizzas she used to peddle in the neighborhood. (Speaking of muscle memory, now that the traffic’s come to a complete stop, I’ve just caught myself, hands off the steering wheel, pushing pizza dough to the ed
ges of Nonna’s scorched, warped baking sheets.) Maybe I could work up a concept, create a menu that combined Mediterranean and Asian cuisine. Open up a little bistro someplace. Call it . . . Marco Polo. But no, once the concept was figured out and the menu was fixed, running a restaurant would be full-immersion service work. Not unlike being a psychologist in that respect. People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them—to feed them or fix them. What are you going to be when you grow up, Orion? What are you going to be, Dr. Oh, now that they’ve booted your ass out the door?

  God, it’s been a brutal year. In January, Annie’s and my three-year separation ended in divorce. That same month, I learned that I was not, after all, going to be named coordinator of Clinical Services. It was a position I’d been ambivalent about at first, but one I’d been assured would be mine if I went after it. That was what Allen Javitz, the dean of student affairs, had said as we stood in line at the bar at some university social function. And after he said that, I did want it. Felt not only that I’d earned the appointment after twenty-one years in Psych Services but also that I’d be damn good at it. I’m an empathetic listener, an out-of-the-box problem solver. But when my director, Muriel Clapp, bypassed me in favor of the far more flashy Marwan Chankar, an addictions counselor newly arrived from Syracuse University, Dean Javitz reneged and gave Chankar the nod. When the announcement was made, I felt as if I’d been sucker punched. Still, I shook Marwan’s hand and tried my best to be philosophical about it. I reminded myself that not having to supervise sixteen clinicians was going to save me a whole lot of meetings, evaluations, and headaches.

  I began to look at my endgame. Made appointments with reps from Human Resources and my pension fund. Sat down with my calculator and crunched some numbers. If I stuck it out for another four years, I figured, I’d be able to retire at 80 percent of my salary. At which point, I could sell the house, move into a smaller place, do some traveling. Maybe by then I’d have met someone I wanted to travel with. Every time Marissa bugged me about trying one of those match-making Web sites, I’d assure her that she’d be the first to know when I was ready to start dating, which I wasn’t yet. And that, anyway, I was “old school.” I’d much rather meet someone in person than online. But truth be told, I was still holding out hope that Annie would come to her senses. Break it off with her flashy New York girlfriend and come back home. I’d even dreamt it once—had woken up laughing, relieved. Then I’d sat up in our empty bed. Even my dreams were sucker punching me.