GO FISH

Danielle Wood

Matilda and Seth have not seen each other for twenty-one years and the light in the restaurant is low. She is very far from her husband. He is not so very far from his wife.

Since the last time they were together, Matilda and Seth have written occasionally and telephoned rarely. In the earliest days, they posted letters that would lap the globe to arrive at the only fixed address either one of them had at that point in their lives – their parents’. As time passed and email took over, the nature of their correspondence changed, and in recent years it has comprised mostly impulsive, sentimental messages sent by Seth to Matilda from late-night airports or lonely hotel rooms, and Matilda’s guarded but inconclusive replies.

Now, across the white tablecloth and its silver cutlery, their conversation is fitful, moving too quickly from tell me about your children to how are your parents, via where are your brothers living now and remember the sea otters? As Seth recalls old times, Matilda remembers much more than the actual events. Coming back to her is the curious way she used to feel when listening to him talk in that Midwestern accent of his – too easily taken for stupid – and his surprise combination of slow speech and sharp wit.

All the while she is listening, she is also registering his receding hairline and the way his chin has retreated into the folding skin of his neck. But she knows exactly how much grey she has in her hair, and how wide is the spread of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. Before setting out for the restaurant, she had studied both these features of hers, leaning on the vanity unit of the hotel bathroom to peer closely into the mirror, wanting to be sure she was under no illusions.

When a small silence settles, Seth looks fondly at Matilda.

‘You haven’t changed at all,’ he says.

But Matilda returns only a doubtful smile, and not the reciprocal lie.

When a waiter comes to pour water, he is a welcome distraction with his silver flask and chinking ice-cubes, and Matilda thanks him a little more brightly than is necessary. In part, it’s being Australian that makes her do this. She feels responsible, here in America, to perform such conspicuous egalitarianisms. But it’s also because she’s nervous.

Matilda knows Seth has something to show her, something nobody else can. And she thinks it might be tucked inside his jacket. What she doesn’t know is whether he is just going to hand it over, or if she will first have to pass some kind of test.

*

Matilda orders a salad, which she knows she will eat, and an entrée, which she – feeling jittery – knows that she won’t. When the wine waiter hands the leather-bound list directly to Seth, Seth looks over at Matilda to see what she will do. Without this out-from-under-the-eyebrows glance, Matilda might not have remembered that her younger self would never have allowed this moment to pass without comment. Young Matilda would have beckoned the waiter close, and – with apparent lightness – pressed him to explain his assumption that the gentleman would choose.

‘Maybe I was wrong,’ Seth says, when the waiter has gone to get the wine. ‘Don’t say you’ve gone and mellowed on me?’

Matilda allows her eyes to glitter at him but doesn’t say anything, and when the waiter returns, she sits quietly through the whole thing – the excruciating theatre of the corkscrew, the self-conscious swilling and tasting, the subtle nod to go ahead and pour. She is interested to note that although she doesn’t drink anymore, hasn’t drunk for over ten years – having never felt the urge to get back to it after all the abstinent years of pregnancy and breastfeeding – she doesn’t stop the waiter when he fills both Seth’s glass and hers.

‘To us,’ Seth says.

‘To us,’ Matilda agrees.

When he holds his glass aloft, the movement causes his jacket to gape a little, and Matilda cannot help herself. She glances down towards the buttonhole edge, and there it is. Or at least, a hint of it. Just a glancing curve of glass. Nothing more.

He puts a hand inside his jacket, causing her small thrill of anticipation to intensify. But it turns out to be only his phone that he is reaching for. She sees that he has to draw back his head and shoulders in order to read the words on the small screen. He frowns, composes a reply, then replaces the phone.

Matilda, elbow on table, chin on palm, asks, ‘Business? Or pleasure?’

‘I can’t say it was much of either.’

‘It was your wife. Wasn’t it?’

‘It … was.’

Matilda has seen pictures. His wife is younger than he, with dark eyes, a voluptuous figure and a wardrobe that screams ‘Mom’ with an ‘o’. Matilda knows, from Seth’s emails, that his wife suffered some post-natal depression, and that she’s been finding it hard, ever since, to get off the medication merry-go-round.

‘She knows you’re here?’

‘In this city? Yes.’

Matilda doesn’t need to ask the next question.

‘Does she know you’re with me?’

Seth takes a sip of his wine. Considers. ‘I don’t think either one of us would be here if our spouses knew.’

‘Ah, you might want to think again.’

‘Your husband knows all about it, does he?’

Of course, she might say. But that could sound smug. And it might also be untrue. Had she told her husband as a matter of course? Or, had she told him out of a desire for some kind of insurance, a way of being certain that she was securely tethered to her honour?

She thinks all of this but, in the end, the reason she does not say of course is that it might close the door a little too firmly. And since she wants so very much to see the thing that Seth is carrying inside his jacket, she settles for saying, a little more coquettishly than she means to, ‘He trusts me.’

*

Back home, while folding into her suitcase the simple-but-flattering black dress that she is now wearing, Matilda had tried to remember why it was that she and Seth, in their early twenties, had never become more than they did.

There had been a distinctive pattern to their meetings, which had been few, but scattered widely across the globe. Always, their encounters would begin with flirtatious sparring, and move on to kissing and dancing. And then, somehow, before anything serious could transpire, Matilda would be on a plane home to Australia, sick with longing at the same time that she was weepy with relief.

She had wanted him and not wanted him. Always, there had been something that scared her away. But what had it been? Had she known, even then, that she was not cut out for a relationship with someone from so far away? Had she been afraid, in some subconscious way, of the lifelong consequences of a relationship that would tear one party by the roots from their home?

Seth could dance like no Australian man she’d ever met. He had some intoxicating, delirious way of making Matilda feel as if she could dance, too, even though she couldn’t. At all. But even while it was exciting, there was something star-spangled and Broadway-fake about the way she felt in his arms.

Maybe, she thought, it had been his Americanness that she couldn’t tolerate for too long? Those undertones of hysterical politics and puddles of bright orange melted cheese on French fries, hats worn too high on the head, bacon on a stick?

One time, when she and Seth had been driving through the desert states on his motorcycle, he had taken her home to meet his parents, and in their suburban home that was surrounded by cottonwood trees, Matilda had slept chastely in a spare room and been in equal parts amused and distressed at the way Seth had called his distant father sir.

In a quiet moment in the kitchen, Seth’s gentle, nervous mother had held out to Matilda a beautiful beaded necklace. ‘He’s so happy when he talks about you,’ she had said, and Matilda hadn’t known what else to do except to accept the gift, even though it made her feel inarticulately guilt-ridden to do so.

Now that she is in her forties – a wife, a mother, a daughter-in-law – she understands the actual nature of the terrifying gravitational pull that she felt in the dark cool of that kitchen. She might have been able to say, back then, that she would never be that sweet woman’s daughter-in-law, or the mother of her grandchildren, and that they would never find themselves making salad together shoulder to shoulder in that kitchen – not for all the beaded necklaces in Christendom. But, then, she wouldn’t have had any idea of the depths of the concepts she was merely paddling in.

It would be easy to believe that she was too young, back then, for what might have been on offer. But she had met the man who had become her husband only one year after the last time she had seen Seth. So it couldn’t have been only her youth. What, then, was it?

Who had she been, back then? What had she been like? What had she wanted? And what about now? Was she still herself? Or had she been lost along the way? These are her true questions, but she knows that Seth – as locked in the prison of his present self as she is within hers – cannot answer them in words. He will have to show her the thing he is carrying inside his jacket. He will have to show her the proof, because he is the only person who has one of these things, the only person who has carried one around all these years, treasured and unbroken.

*

There are two empty bottles of wine on the table when they stand to put on their coats, having already decided to find another place for dessert and coffee. Matilda, a little unsteady on her feet, wraps a scarf around her neck and slides her hands into gloves, but then – when they step out of the restaurant into the cold street – she takes off one of her gloves and offers Seth her hand.

‘Why, thank you, ma’am,’ he says.

‘You’re welcome,’ she says, mocking his accent.

It’s only a hand. And she would allow her husband this much, wouldn’t she? If he were in Europe, visiting the emotional nodes of his own youth, she’d grant him the small pleasure, wouldn’t she, of a walk from one restaurant to another, hands clasped, for old time’s sake?

Matilda had imagined that she and Seth would walk with their hands joined, their arms shaped like a V between their respectably distant bodies, but Seth pulls her closer to him so that they are linked at the elbows as well as the fingers as they walk along the avenue lit by neon signs advertising restaurants, laundrettes, liquor stores and alternate realities.

They are pressed together down the full length of their bodies as they walk, and Matilda can feel, through the fabric of his jacket, the unyielding edge of the glass globe within. The knowledge that it is really, truly there gives her a rush of pleasure that blooms like a mushroom cloud inside her skull.

*

They find a place that is part-restaurant, part-bar. Its bare tables are positioned between timber chairs and the red-cushioned seating that runs all the way around the walls. Matilda takes the chair, recalling Seth’s aversion to sitting with his back to a room.

‘You remembered,’ Seth says, reading the play perfectly.

‘Of course,’ she says.

When the waiter appears, they order tiramisu with two spoons, and this time Matilda is swift to commandeer the wine list and choose a sauterne.

‘So,’ Seth begins, when Matilda is a little drunker still and the tiramisu has been reduced to a smear of cream on the plate between them.

Matilda braces.

Seth stops.

Takes a long sip from his glass.

Begins again.

‘So, there’s something I want to tell you,’ he says.

Matilda thinks she knows what he will say, and she is right, and for all the time that he is telling her that he loves her, that he has always loved her, that although he loves his wife and his daughters and although he has no desire to create chaos in Matilda’s life or his own, there is nothing that will dislodge her from his heart. He says that his love is unconditional and this, to Matilda, is as sweet as the sauterne and the tiramisu together and she wonders if it counts as faithful if all she does is listen. How far, she wondered, did faithfulness have to penetrate? All the way through to words and thoughts and fantasies and feelings, or did it stop at the portcullis of deeds?

As he is speaking, he is opening his jacket, deliberately, so that now Matilda, for the first time, can see the globe in its entirety. It’s about the size of a grapefruit, but perfectly spherical. The water inside is cloudy, but churning, and that’s how she knows that the thing within is still alive. All she has to do is watch and wait, and she will see the thing she has come here, this night, to see.

There comes a quiet chiming from Seth’s breast pocket, and he reaches across the face of the globe to draw out his phone. He hits the red button on the screen and replaces the phone, but as he does so, his jacket swings closed again.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says to Matilda. ‘What was I saying?’

‘You were saying that …’

But she finds that she is not allowed to finish her own sentence. Because if she even so much as repeats his declaration of love then she will have played some part in making it manifest in the world.

‘Come, sit by me,’ he says, flashing open the jacket again in a way that she cannot resist. She finds herself changing seats so that she, too, is sitting on the crimson lounge, not looking out at the room, though, but at the globe.

Seth’s hand is on Matilda’s thigh, now, just above the knee and the weight and warmth of it feels nice through the fabric of her patterned tights.

‘I love you, Matilda,’ he says, and as he does so, she catches sight of a rill of movement inside the globe. Just the tail, she thinks. The briefest flicker of copper-rainbowed scales, the fluttering pleats of a lime-green fin.

Seth touches a finger to the underside of Matilda’s chin to lift her gaze from the globe to his own eyes. She thinks that he is about to kiss her, and she is right, except that before he can do so, the chiming begins again.

Seth groans, and his hand falls away from her face.

‘I’d better take this. It might be that one of the kids … just, stay here, alright?’

When he goes out into the street to call his wife, he takes the globe with him.

*

Matilda waits for what feels like a very long time. She finishes her sauterne, and Seth’s, then the inch of wine left in the bottle. She waits some more, and then, not knowing precisely what she plans to do afterwards, she goes to the cash register to pay.

‘Muchas gracias,’ says the young man at the register, beaming as he tallies up her tip.

It is past two o’clock in the morning.

‘Di nada,’ she says.

She steps outside and looks about for Seth. At first she does not see him, but then she does. He is standing in the recess of a night-time doorway, phone to his cheek and taut with fury. She almost doesn’t recognise him because of the way the blackness of his overcoat seems to have swollen up around his face. As she walks towards him, the words he is saying come into focus above the noise of the traffic and the music that seeps through the door of a late-night club.

‘Fuck you. I mean, fuck you,’ he is saying, rocking on the balls of his feet. ‘That is bullshit. You cannot say that about me. That is total bullshit.’

There are more words, angry and fast, and all of them spoken while he still doesn’t know that Matilda is watching him and wondering who on earth he is. And then he does see her, and Matilda sees him wince with regret.

‘I have to go,’ Seth tells the phone, and thumbs the call to an end.

Then, all in one instant his mouth opens, her heart closes, and the globe slips out from inside his jacket. But even before it hits the concrete and the glass smashes – even before the fish is lying gleaming in the streetlight, and the water that has been its home for twenty-one years has begun to ripple outwards in uneven peninsulas, the largest of them trickling towards the gutter over sole-stamped seals of grey chewing-gum, picking up a gold-rimmed cigarette butt as it goes; even before he puts his arm around her shoulders and says, several times, ‘I’m sorry’ – even before any of this has happened, she has seen that the fish is all wrong.

And although she believes the reassuring noises she is making to be actual sentences intended for Seth’s ears, her attention is on the fish that arches and flaps and gasps on the pavement. She could bend down and pick it up. She could carry it, squirming in her hands, into one of these restaurants or bars, and ask for a bucket or a bowl. Find a tap. But she doesn’t do any of these things. Because even though she is sorry for the fish, it isn’t hers. It’s not her fish. It’s remembered wrong. Not entirely wrong, perhaps, but wrong enough not to be right.

Its copper scales are too bright, too even, too clean. Its fins are too bright a shade of green. And, worst of all, the fish’s lips are pink and full in a way that hers never were, and it is this – more than anything else – that makes her feel sick with guilt, and to want her husband. A prickle of fear runs over the backs of her hands and up into her wrists when she thinks of all the rightness she might have risked, just to see this one wrong thing.

Seth still has his arm around her as he sends a text message, one-handed, to his wife. Matilda can read the words inside the bubble – I need a little calm-down time, I’ll call you later – but she knows that it is not his wife he immediately wants to placate. His fingers grip her tighter, while at the same time the trembling in his phone hand gives away his knowing that the damage is done, both here on the city street and in a suburban home that is not so very far away.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry you had to see that.’

Meanwhile the fish on the pavement gasps and gasps. Until it doesn’t anymore.

‘It’s alright,’ she says, but she’s feeling for the clasp of her handbag, making sure that it’s secure. ‘Look, I should go.’

‘Do you have to? We could …’ he begins, and then, seeing her face, nods his understanding. He draws her close. ‘I hope it’s not twenty-one years until I see you again,’ he says into her shoulder, and she can feel that he is shaking all over, but her impulse to soothe him is not as great as her desire to get away. From him, and from the dying fish whose tail is curving upwards away from the pavement as it muscles remember one last time what it is like to swim.

All the way back to the hotel in the taxi, Matilda holds her bag tight, imagining its contents: her purse and telephone, a tube of lipstick in a special case with inset mirror, her hotel key card and a comb. And one other thing.

When she gets back to her hotel room, she will go into the bathroom and take out of her handbag a small glass globe. Hands quivering, she will crack it against the edge of the marble vanity until she feels the glass give, like eggshell, so that she can break off a segment and pour away down the drain all the water inside, and with it the bright youthful fish that she has held for him all these twenty-one years, that might have been right and might have been wrong, and that she might, on this night – if things had been different – have shown to him. But, now, never will.