4 minute read
Seasick
FICTION
Cameron Hughes Chapel Hill, N.C. Graphic Design major
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It is night and the boat is soaked through with the heat of a Virginia summer. The air conditioner is broken despite the condition of the boat, a proper yacht with teak and stainless steel. The two of you move to hold clammy, sore hands, letting them rest between you on the couch that is too shallow and props you upright with rigid posture, the kind that looks exaggerated and uncomfortable, the kind that embodies the moment. You’re sick of watching American Beauty, but you know it makes him happy and you know his happiness, the easy sag of his shoulders and the crooked smile, they’re more important than the movie. You know he’d hold your hand forever and that in these moments, after she corners him and berates him in that cold, sadistic, spidery way that she does everyday, he needs your sticky too-hot palm in his. This is all he’ll ever have the courage for. They never are happy together. Both of them are good people, but you can’t help knowing he needs something better. He’s bursting with talent and he’s bright and he lives in this boat, still a skipper at 30. The bickering is incessant, those uncomfortable moments at dinner, when she’ll interrupt him to have a word. It seems to you that marriage is voluntary. Why would he stay? Does the incessant berating get tiresome? The seat beneath you creaks unnervingly and it makes his hand constrict around yours. You’re a good friend, he says. Your midsection feels inverted in the most uncomfortable of anxious ways. “A good friend.” You know. You do it because you love him.
He offers tea and looks at your hands as if to ask them, too, would they like some tea? And he stands and shuffles to the galley and you watch him in his rhythmic tea production, the comfort of knowing how he takes his tea in the hope that it will overwhelm the discomfort of physical distance. He knows how you take your tea, too, and for the moment you forgive
him because you know his position is stickier than your own. You want his to point where it’s infiltrated your dreams, but you’ll be OK. His motivation is different; a need to get out of what he’s become stuck inside. At least you’re floating alone with no tethers. There are other men out there. You compare them all to him in the end but Jesus; at least you have an empty bed at night. His is filled with contempt and loathing and bitterness in blonde, and besides, you’ve walked into the salon 100 times to see him sleeping on this rigid foldout couch.
He looks at your shoulder or somewhere near while the tea steeps and he wordlessly mixes honey and lemon and sugar for the two of you, and he speaks without much filter at all. “Do you know how nice it would be to do this for you in the morning?” It’s unfair when he talks like that, obtusely honest, like the tension it creates doesn’t affect him. He’s painfully attractive now. He got sunburned today. “You make my coffee really well, too.” He hands you your tea, which he cooled with an ice cube. Ten sugars and an inch of milk. That’s how he takes it. Making coffee for him is one of the times where it gets clichéd and painful, where the heartache consumes. He stands against the galley counter like he just learned of a relative’s death. He looks sick. You sit in silence. American Beauty plays on, trapped inside the television, and his eyes wander to it. This is the second week in a row you’ve watched it. “Don’t you ever think of buying a new movie?” He doesn’t even look at you when he says no. “It would be a hassle to dock, and to get to Best Buy.” There isn’t much else to be said, so you turn away, sipping your tea together, watching Kevin Spacey, your hands still clammy with sweat. The cabin smells like seawater: the boat needs to be cleaned. You ought to dock at some point soon, to scrub it well, and to buy more groceries, to take a cab to Best Buy. What an uncomfortable euphemism that had been for you, making you shift in your uncomfortable seat on that shallow couch. And yet, it was nice to get a euphemism at all, some recognition that he was in pain, too, because you want that recognition, acknowledgement that there is a problem beyond his marriage. You tell yourself that if this is your worst problem, that if being in love is making you miserable, you’re well off. Six months of this, the three of you living on 1,000 square feet of boat, and six more to go.
