Read You Are Always Safe With Me Online

Authors: Merrill Joan Gerber

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #You Are Always Safe with Me

You Are Always Safe With Me (6 page)

BOOK: You Are Always Safe With Me
4.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“Did you go inside them?” Lilly asked.

“Yes, but of course they’re empty now. You can see where fires have been burned, the walls are all charred. The tombs may have served as shelter for shepherds who kept their goats on the mountain.”

Marianne hung onto the ladder, making no move to climb it.

“I’ll tell you something, Lilly. I buried my daughter with her oboe. I wish we had cliff tombs in the US. I would have buried her high on a mountain and not underground.”

“Oh, I didn’t know,” Lilly said. “I’m so sorry.”

“How could you know? No one on this boat knows.”

“How old was your daughter…when she died?”

“Seventeen. And let me clear it up right away, she wasn’t on drugs, and she didn’t drive her car into a tree. She had some kind of overwhelming infection. She died in three days time, and nothing could help her.”

“When did this happen?”

“It’s five years now. I know it’s going to get better someday. After all, I tell my patients that grief always gets better with time.” She stared down into the water. “Lilly, it’s a crock of shit. It doesn’t get better. The pain never goes away.”

“My father died three months ago,” Lilly offered. It seemed a paltry thing to say, a trade when no trade was required.

“I know, your mother told me. She manages to keep a very stiff upper lip.”

“That’s her nature,” Lilly said… “or her Southern upbringing.”

“She doesn’t seem unhappy,” Marianne said. “Lance is paying her a lot of attention. It’s kind of sweet.”

“I guess…”

“But Izak…” Marianne said suddenly. “Now that’s a man to look at. That’s a man who could make you forget your troubles.”

“I really hadn’t considered him in that light,” Lilly said.

“Well, you should,” Marianne said. “He’s worth considering…if anything is.”

She began to climb up the ladder. “I’m famished already. I eat like a pig here, and then I have to swim it off. It’s the only way I can allow myself to eat Morat’s cooking.”

*

For a long while, Lilly floated on her back under the canopy of cloudless sky. When she finally ascended the ladder, she came upon a scene that caused her heart to skip a beat. Marianne, still in her bathing suit, was lying prone on a foam cushion of the foredeck and Izak was straddling her, his knees on either side of her thighs. Her face was turned to the side in such a way that she could see Lilly as she came up the ladder.

“Look at me, Lilly! I learned Izak used to be a professional masseur, so I pressed him into action.”

“I see that,” Lilly said.

Izak glanced up at her, but then went back to work, pouring oil on Marianne’s back, pressing his fingers up and down the length of her spine, rolling his thumbs along the muscles of her back. His face was without expression; he looked as he looked each morning when he set out the plates for breakfast or hosed the wooden deck to keep the tar sealant moist and to prevent the wood from drying out.

“God that feels so good,” Marianne said. “This man knows his business.”

“I want to be next,” Jack Cotton called out. He and his wife had come up from below and were standing arm in arm, watching Izak perform the massage.

Lilly felt somewhat dizzy, from the swim, from the heat of the sun, from seeing Izak on his hands and knees that way, like an animal. She had a sudden image of his private parts hanging down, soft and pink, replete with the seeds of life.

“I want to be next,” Jane Cotton begged. “Please, Izak, can I be next?”

Izak looked up and his eyes landed on Lilly. “You,” he said, bending his head once toward her. “You be the next.”

*

This was a test, she knew. Others would gather round, her mother would appear and watch. Harrison and Gerta would return from their kayaking and Gerta—in her tiny bikini—would observe Lilly with her wide, substantial buttocks on display for all to see. Every humiliation in her life came back to her and instructed her to demur, to refuse, to keep her dignity and go down the five steps to the galley, another five steps to her stateroom, to dress modestly for lunch, to appear cool and collected, with her hair combed and a touch of lipstick on her mouth.

She stood rooted to the deck, smiling stupidly. “Okay,” she said softly. Then, in case he hadn’t heard her, she said, with more clarity in her voice, “Yes, I’d like to be next.”

*

Just then, they all became aware of the high cry of a child’s voice from the water at the side of the boat, something in Turkish, repeated two or three times.

When Lilly looked over the railing, she saw that a small motorboat had pulled up beside the
Ozymandias
and in it was a Turkish woman, her head covered with a kerchief. She sat cross-legged on the boat’s bottom, with a round metal pan heating over some charcoal. The boy, perhaps her son, eleven or twelve years old, controlled the outboard motor, and called out the words again.

Marianne—because now Izak was standing up and had indicated his massage was over—came over to the rails and exclaimed: “Oh, they’re making crepes. I’m absolutely starving. Does anyone have some money? I’ll pay it back, I promise.”

Jack Cotton pulled some bills out of his pants pocket. “How much do you need?” he asked.

“Four million,” the boy cried, smiling now that he had a potential customer.

“What do you have?” Marianne called down to him.

“Banana and honey, cheese and lemon, chocolate and sugar,” he recited in English, his lesson well-learned.

“Izak,” Marianne said, “is lunch soon?”

“Not so soon,” he said.

“Good, then I’ll have banana and honey,” she told the boy. He relayed this information to his mother who slapped a piece of dough on a wooden board and rolled it flat with a rolling pin. When she laid it on the pan over the coals, it browned quickly. She flipped it over, laying slices of banana in its center and pouring honey from a bottle over the fruit. A moment later she folded the crepe expertly in quarters, wrapped it in a napkin, and handed it to the boy who climbed up the ladder, fast as a monkey, and delivered it to Marianne, who paid him the four one-million lire bills.

“Oh,” Marianne said, biting into it. “This is heaven on earth.”

“I’ll have cheese,” Jack Cotton called to the boy. “Make that two.”

“And I’ll have chocolate and sugar,” said his wife.

Lance and Lilly’s mother came to inquire at the crowd at the railing, and soon they, too, were ordering crepes. The boy was beaming as he collected money, his mother was busily rolling out the flat circles of dough, filling the crepes with ingredients from jars and cans kept on a small shelf on the side of the boat. The woman looked serene, legless under her wide shirt, satisfied with her child and his business skills.

“You,” Izak said, touching Lilly on the shoulder. “You are getting crepes?”

“No, not me,” Lilly said.

“Then it’s your turn now for massage. They will eat. You will lie down.”

PRAYER

Lilly lay face down on the green canvas covering of the lounge cushion, closed her eyes, and prayed. What she prayed for she did not know. She was not a praying person. It was more as if she were begging: let me not be made fun of, let me not show what I am feeling, let him not think of me as ugly or fat or, worst of all, as a paying customer. (Because perhaps there was a fee for this service, perhaps it would be on her bill at the end of the voyage. He was a working man. Perhaps he sent money home to his mother. She knew, from Morat, that he had no wife or child.)

She felt him against her side, felt him move his body so that his knees were on either side of her thighs, felt him pour oil on the small of her back, just above the curve of her bathing suit.

No one had ever touched her body in this way. Even her two long-ago lovers, if she could call them that, had never, either one, laid such a gentle hand on her skin. How could a woman allow herself to submit to this kind of intimacy, arrange to be touched this way by a stranger, by hire and for pay? She knew friends who often sought massages for purposes of relaxation, for the cure of pulled muscles, for the sake of health or as a gift to oneself, to be pampered and attended to for a pre-arranged hour. She had never considered it a possibility for herself. Her discomfort of mind would easily cancel the comfort her body might receive.

Izak was silent, working above her. The others had all disappeared toward the attractions of the crepe boat. She could hear their voices coming from the far end of the boat where they must be eating their crepes at the dining table, exclaiming about how delicious they were, yelling down to the boy and his mother in the boat for another round of them.

Where she and Izak were, there were tiny, quiet sounds, the slide of his hand along her spine, the tiny squish of her skin between his fingers. Above her, the rolled sails of the boat squeaked as the wind played with the wooden masts that held them wrapped tightly.

Izak moved up and down her back as if it were an instrument and he were playing it. Her ribs made muted music as his fingers slid along each bone of her rib cage. She gave herself up to his fingers, to the wind, to the towering sails above them and the sound of his breath.

She floated as she had in the sea, weightless under his weight. He moved lower on her body, sitting now to the side of her, using pressure on her calves, massaging her feet, moving his fingers, one by one, between her toes.

He had turned her to liquid by the end. She could not sit up, all her strength flowed outward, like a current of electricity. When he helped her to her feet, she could barely stand and certainly not walk.

He leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Lilly. What you said—how we make family on boat. Here
you
be my family.”

What did he mean? She could only nod as he supported her jelly-limbs down the steps to her cabin, opened the door for her, guided her inside, sat her on the foam mattress of the lower bunk. “You rest,” he said. “I prepare the table now for lunch—though I tell Morat, not too much food for this meal after so many crepes.”

*

Lilly slept through lunch and through the afternoon till dinner, a sleep so deep she could hardly be roused by her mother whom she felt shaking her shoulders and saying, over and over, “Lilly, are you sick?”

“I think it’s jet-lag, it’s nothing—some kind of exhaustion came over me. Maybe too much sun.”

She struggled to her feet. There was hardly room for the two of them in the cabin. Her mother had named their stateroom “the big cupboard”—an upper and lower bunk, a tiny porthole near the ceiling (which was just inches over their heads), a small motor-driven machine under the bunk which was supposed to (but didn’t really) air-condition the room, and a tiny cabinet where Lilly and her mother had stuffed whatever could fit in it. All the rest of their belongings, their suitcases, their clothes, were strewn on the upper bunk.

“Let me shower, Mother. You go up to the deck. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

*

The entire bathroom
was
the shower. A hand-held sprayer, which served as the sink-faucet, could be pulled up on a coil and held over one’s head. When Lilly turned on the faucet, water flooded the tiny cubicle, making the floor dangerous and slippery. Unless she kept the spray pointing downward, the towels hanging on two hooks on the wall were also drenched.

She tried not to look into the toilet which had proven itself unreliable in its flushing capabilities. Waste water sometimes flowed between cabins.

Better not to be too fastidious here. Better to look out the small oval porthole above the sink and see what could be a watercolor of astounding beauty framed there—a view of the cliffs, of craggy rocks, of goats on the slopes, of trees stretching toward a sky purple with sunset.

Lilly pulled off her bathing suit and tossed it into the sink. As she sprayed her hair and felt it cling to her face, she recalled seeing Izak on deck yesterday, showering with a hose. She had just fastened some damp towels with clothespins to the coiled wires used for drying small items when he had come up from the little trap door in the deck that led to the crews’ quarters. With his back toward her, he planted his bare feet on the wooden planks and sprayed himself full in the face, taking water into his mouth, then spouting it out as if through a whale’s blow-hole. His bathing trunks clung to his body, the hairs on his upper body and legs flattened and darkened. She moved away and went below quickly before he could see her there.

But the memory of his image was burned into her mind. Every simple scene here was imbued with momentous portent. Perhaps this was the meaning of travel: everything new, everything significant. Mystery and majesty everywhere, in a goat on a hill, in a tomato carved like a rose, in a crepe cooking on a tin pan over burning coals, in the view of her own body in the mirror in the bathroom of the gulet, a woman naked in a wooden boat floating like a cork in the midst of the Mediterranean Sea.

*

At dinner, as Morat passed the platters of lamb stew, rice, and spinach baked in pastry triangles, and while Barish brought the tray with a teapot, tea bags, sugar and cups, Fiona O’Hara clapped her hands and called for attention.

“Harrison and Gerta have a special announcement to make to us.”

Harrison, tall, thin, slickly handsome in his crisp white shirt, perfectly trimmed mustache, and wearing a heavy gold chain around his neck, stood and pulled Gerta to her feet. She blushed, she bent her head down. As usual, she had her waist-length hair braided to perfection and pinned up like a crown upon her head. Her full breasts, tiny waist, delicate hips were a reproach to every woman on board. But her shyness seemed to apologize for her beauty, and even for the way Harrison displayed her and paraded her before them.

“Well, this is our news,” Harrison said. “We’re going to have a baby!”

Lance yelled “Hurrah!!” and began to applaud, and the rest of them joined in.

“When is the blessed event to be?” asked Jane Cotton.

“In four weeks!” said Harrison. “Our little girl will be born in four weeks.”

They all stared at Gerta. Fiona O’Hara laughed, apparently pleased by everyone’s confusion.

BOOK: You Are Always Safe With Me
4.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Little Man, What Now? by Fallada, Hans
Double Negative by Ivan Vladislavic
The Splintered Gods by Stephen Deas
FullDisclosure by Soarde, Nikki
Just Desserts by J. M. Gregson
The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt
The Secrets of Casanova by Greg Michaels