March/April 2006

FICTION
Sea of Tranquility
 

BY KATY YOCOM
 

Maybe the lobby of the Palm Springs Hyatt wasn't the best place to make a phone call on a Friday night. As I walked in, sweaty and tired from the road, a frosted-blonde lounge singer in a sequined scarlet dress was belting out "I Got Rhythm" to do Ethel Merman proud. Postwar couples sat before her in the open lounge beneath a six-story atrium, nursing cocktails and tapping their fingers to her jazzy rhythms.
 

Everything echoed, the clink of glasses, even the squeak of my red
Chuck Taylors against the white marble floor. But I'd driven five
hundred miles that day, my cell phone was dead, and I was too tired to care about the acoustics. I dialed Neil's parents' house from the bank of payphones on the wall, hoping Neil would pick up.

It was his little sister, Elizabeth, who answered, though I nearly
didn't recognize her voice. Her "Hello" sounded colorless and
infinitely tired.

"Elizabeth, it's Dorrie," I said. My heart began to thud against my
ribs. "What's wrong?"

I heard her hand cover the mouthpiece. Voices in the background, lots of them, coalesced into a low, muffled buzz. "It's Dorrie," she said.

Then the distant voice of her father, Sam: "I'll talk to her," and the
sound of the receiver being handed off. I went cold with dread.

Some unnamed disaster hovered in the space between Elizabeth's voice and Sam's. My fingers tightened on the receiver. I wanted to slam it down before Sam could utter the news and make it real.

Sam's voice came heavy on the line. "Dorrie, honey," he said.

"Oh my God," I said faintly. Tell me it's Neil's mom, I prayed. Tell
me it's his grandmother. Anything. Anyone but Neil.

"Sweetheart, I've got bad news." He sounded apologetic. Horribly calm. "Maybe you'd better sit down."

I can't sit down, I thought, irrationally angry. I was tethered to a
payphone that was attached to a wall covered with soothing neutral
wallpaper. I placed my right hand on the cold metal box of the phone.
 

Dread swelled up inside me and twined around my vocal cords. I tried to speak, but nothing would come out. Don't let it be him. Oh God, don't let it be….

"It's Neil," Sam said, and he tripped on his son's name. His voice
sounded choked. "There was an accident."

My ears started to ring. I stared at the steely metal buttons on the
phone and began to taste them in my mouth.

"—flying back from Dallas late last night in the Cessna," he was
saying. Sam was a big man, a Texan's Texan, but his voice was small and cracked as he spoke. "There was an equipment failure..."

His voice trailed off. The sound of his breathing ricocheted through
outer space and bounced off a satellite somewhere over the Southwest.
 

I pictured him standing there in his big Texas living room, surrounded by relatives, and I knew what he would say next. I knew. I knew. I knew.

"He didn't make it, Dorrie."

I watched myself receive the news of my fiancé's death. I did not fall apart.

I'm going to survive this. The words rang through my head so loudly I wondered if I had spoken them. My reaction shocked me into silence, and for a second my mind was nothingness, the empty space that Buddhist practitioners seek.

"Dorrie?"

Neil had once told me, "I'd die if anything ever happened to you." But it was Neil who was dead. I was alive, and oddly, I wasn't going to die. I wasn't even going to mourn. This fact swooped down on me with jarring certainty. I saw myself vaulting over the stages of grief like a gymnast and nailing my landing on Acceptance. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross would give me a 10 for technical merit. I imagined myself at the funeral, comforting Neil's family, graciously accepting condolences.
 

The Serenity Queen, full of grace and peace.

It occurred to me that I must have never loved Neil at all, not
really. I couldn't even picture him right. I tried to visualize his
face. The features I conjured were vague; they could have  belonged to anyone.

"Dorrie, are you there?"

Awash in my preternatural calm, I watched myself formulate a response.

"Okay," I said, though I had planned to say something better, deeper, something profound. I looked at my right hand on the phone box. This is what my right hand looked like when I learned my fiancé was dead. There were cracks around my knuckles. The heat of the car all day, the desert air, had left tiny white fissures like dry creek beds, like the surface the moon. The Sea of Tranquility. The Sea of Storms. "Okay."

My calm was appalling.

"Dorrie, where are you right now?"

"I'm in Palm Springs. I was hoping to hit L.A. tonight," I added, "but I didn't make it." Didn't make it. Ha ha. God, I was a freak.

"Services are Tuesday," Neil's father said, and his voice shook. He's burying his son. I should be sad for him. Act sad.

"Tuesday," I repeated. My car was waiting outside the hotel, but
somehow driving back to Austin didn't sound right. I remembered dimlythat it had taken me three days to drive this far. "I'll book a
flight," my voice said, sounding vague. My eyes fixed on some
distorted reflection, reds and blues swimming in the silvery surface
of the payphone. "I'll be home tomorrow."

Neil's dad said something, but I couldn't make myself concentrate
enough to catch what he said. His words wandered past my ear and out into the lobby and melded with the voice of the lounge singer, the jazzy piano chords. They twisted together and floated skyward through the atrium. I slowly placed the receiver on its cradle. Only then did I realize Sam had still been talking. I felt a faint regret for having hung up on him, but really, what did it matter? The old rules of politeness hardly seemed to apply. Neil had died and exposed them for a sham. He'd exposed everything, in fact. Including me. I was a sham.
 

Calm, unfeeling. Inhuman as I could be.

My left hand felt hot from clutching the receiver. I looked at my
reddened palm. Deliberately I began to walk toward the revolving door.
 

My car was outside, packed with clothes, my computer, my portfolio full of drawings and paintings. Soap dispensers. Hand towels. The meaningless stuff you take with you when you're planning to set up housekeeping with your fiancé in a new city. Jesus. I was smacked with the stupidity of those things, their utter irrelevance. How could there be a soap dispenser in my car when Neil was dead? And what the hell was wrong with me? Why was my heart refusing to break?

Equipment failure. I had been in that plane with Neil less than a week ago. I pictured Neil in the pilot's seat, desperately flipping
switches, fighting the yoke, pumping the rudder pedals as the plane
hurtled toward the ground. The lounge singer's swingy alto rose and fell, professionally modulated. She was bending those notes, snapping her fingers, snatching quick breaths between musical phrases. I got rhythm — breath — I got music — breath —
I turned to look at her, swinging and swaying in her hot-tomato dress.
 

I could not think of anything more bizarre than a lounge singer in a
hotel lobby, singing for a crowd of couples who had been together so long they'd begun to look alike. Neil and I used to watch couples like that and speculate about how we'd look in forty years' time. Will you love me when I'm fat and bald? Will you love me when my neck sags?
 

Equipment failure. The Cessna smashed into the ground.

Without warning my body recalled Neil. I could see him in vivid
detail—not his face full-on, but his jawline, the shape of his neck
where I liked to kiss him. I inhaled the warmth of his skin, saw the
long diagonal muscle beneath his ear, felt it yield to the pressure of
my mouth. A pulse point rose and fell beneath my lips.

Oh God.

Something thumped at my feet. I looked down to find I'd dropped my purse. A lipstick rolled out onto the lobby floor, and as I bent down to retrieve it, my knees went out from under me and banged hard onto the marble. I discovered that my lips were tingling cold. The lounge singer's voice abruptly stopped. In its place a strange electric noise began to swell, a low burr at first, then rising, filling my ears with a sound like a shrill alarm. There's a fire, I thought, but then I saw feet hurrying up to me, men's feet in leather topsiders with no socks, women's silver and gold sandals, pedicured toenails, suntanned insteps. All of them seemed to be swimming in some sort of liquid. I was embarrassed by the feet, by what they revealed about their owners, and turned my face from the shoes and bare ankles. I couldn't hear anything over the wailing of the alarm, but I had the feeling the feet were conferring over me, trying to decide what to do. Several pairs in the distance slowed in front of me, then sped up again and walked away.

"Is she all right?" someone asked through the thickening shrill. An
elderly woman's voice, far in the distance. Another woman answered, "I think she hurt herself. I saw her fall."
 

"I think she's having some sort of fit," a man's voice said. "That
noise. Awful."

The electric howling abruptly ceased. In its ringing absence, I
understood it had come from my own throat. I was crouched on my hands and knees on the echoing marble floor.
 

"She's not having a fit," a woman said. The voices were clearer now. The singer's alto swelled in the background. It had never stopped, I realized. "She's just upset. I saw her. She was talking on the phone."

"Somebody should get management," the elderly woman said. There was a murmur of voices. A woman leaned down and patted me on the shoulder.
 

For a second I saw her face, wrinkled and leathery, her ears and nose fleshy with age. "It'll be all right, dear." She stood upright and her face disappeared. Her sandals clacked against the marble as she walked away.

"Leave me alone," I said. My voice was a low moan, like a cat who spies a rival in her territory. I'd never heard myself sound this way.
 

The feet surrounded me, hemming me in. I reached for my purse, tried to pick myself up and run away, but my legs wouldn't cooperate. I began to crawl for the door.

"We should at least get her off the floor," the man said, sounding as
if he'd had enough of this nonsense. His large hands grasped me by the armpits. Other people must have reached out to help; they tugged and pulled at my clothes, my arms, my waist. Once upright, I tried to twist away from the pawing hands, but I was too weak to break free. I was surrounded. I hated those people.

"Go away," I cried helplessly at the feet. I refused to lift my face,
to look at their faces. My chest had tightened, and my voice sounded strangled. My breath came in panting waves. By ones and twos the pairs of feet started to step back, and a few of them turned uncertainly and walked away.

A pair of female feet in white Keds stepped directly in front of me
and stopped. "I've got her," I heard the owner's voice say
authoritatively. The other hands fell away as she gripped me by the
shoulders. She ducked down to place her face in my line of vision and smiled up at me encouragingly. Short red hair, green eyes with smile lines in the corners. Not hotel management. A tourist, a tourist in white Keds and powder-blue capris. "Can you hear me?" she asked in a clear, firm voice. I nodded, no longer sobbing, but breathing in ragged gasps. "We're going to take you somewhere where you can sit down. Do you understand?" I nodded again and tried to wipe the tears and mucus from my face. "Okay," she said encouragingly. "Here we go."
 

Then, lower, "Allen, help me get her out of here."

A second pair of hands grasped my waist, and as a unit we made our way toward the elevators. I watched our feet: her Keds on my left, my scuffed Chuck Taylors, Allen's well-worn sports sandals on my right.
 

We shuffled together like contestants in some strange variation of a
three-legged race. As we passed through the crowd I brought my hands to my face, blinders to hide myself. Someone pushed the elevator button. Thank God for the elevator. I couldn't tolerate the weight of the stares. The brass doors slid open and we shuffled through.

But the elevator was glass, bowed out like a bay window behind the stage. The lounge singer's red-spangled buttocks bobbed and swayed barely ten feet in front of me. She was a pro, singing Gershwin through the chaos. No death, no disaster was going to stop her show. One hand on the microphone, the other waving through the air in time with the lyrics — Somebody loves me, I wonder who — her fingernails acrylic beacons flashing red. The lyrics followed us into the elevator, audible even after the doors slid shut.

But she'd lost her crowd. They were still there, the silver-haired
couples in their comfortable chairs, half-drained drinks in hand. But
they were no longer tapping their fingers. They'd grown restless,
distracted somehow, and the elevator began to rise and they were
looking at me.

Their eyes followed the glass cage as it floated up and up. I was on
display, ascending. I twisted to my right, to my left, the fingers of
two strangers tight on my biceps. If I turned my body just the right
way I could slip out of this elevator, disappear into the world before this one. But I couldn't find the angle, and everything real was receding, receding. Any moment now it would be too late. Below, the faces grew smaller and there was starlight in their midst, one single point of illumination reflecting off a man's spectacles like the light that flashes off a plane just after sunset, and that random flare of brilliance was my chance, my doorway back. I strained toward it, but the glass cage wouldn't stop taking me away, and the blaze became a blur and then it was gone.

Katy Yocom recently traveled to India to research her current project, a novel set on a tiger reserve. She holds master of fine arts in writing from Spalding University and has received grants for her fiction from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Arts Council.