Page 29 of Kill Your Darlings

Wendy walked out along one of these rocks, found an outcropping on which she could perch, and stared out at the water, so still that it might as well be glass.

There was no sign of Alex Deighton.

She wasn’t particularly surprised. Despite his claim that from April through November he swam at Blood Stone every morning at dawn, she had doubted that was completely true. He was a known exaggerator, the subject of the hyperbole usually himself. He liked to tell stories about the varying literary figures he’d rubbed shoulders with over the years, about his stint in Hollywood (“I could have made a lot of money there, but I missed my blue-collar roots too much”), and about the massive popularity of his one novel in France (“they revere authors there, you know”). But lately he’d been spewing tales of his early-morning cold-water swims at the quarry, cornering Wendy at Marcia’s annual Easter party to tell her all about how the solitary, bracing dips had changed his life.

“You go alone?” Wendy said.

“Most of the time. It’s why I go so early, to avoid the amateurs. You should come join me sometime. I know your husband wouldn’t get much from it, but you might see the magic.”

“Maybe I will,” Wendy said.

“Just a warning that if you do come, you should know that I occasionally swimau naturel.”

Anyone else, Wendy thought, would make that statement as a joke, or a genuine warning that nudity was involved, but somehow Alex’s intonation implied that his seventy-year-old body in the ice-cold water might be a selling point.

“I can ensure you, Alex, that if I come and join you in a swim, I will be wearing my suit.”

That night, back at home with Thom, she told him about her conversation with Alex.

“God, that’s disgusting. I wish he’d drown there.” They were sitting in the living room, Wendy sipping mineral water, Thom with a tall scotch.

“You’re not the only one who wishes he’d drown,” Wendy said.

“No, I don’t think I am. It infuriates me that someone so unliked goes through life full of the belief that people idolize him. It seems fundamentally wrong. Meanwhile, I go through life believing that every person I interact with walks away hoping to never see me again.” After a pause, Thom said, “That’s your cue, dear, to tell me how well liked I am.”

“Sorry, I was daydreaming.”

It was during his second nightcap that Thom monologued about whether anyone in the world would be sad to see Alex die. “No one in the English department, that’s for sure. Tammy hates him. He has no kids. His parents are dead. Maybe Midge at the Hare would miss him, but, seriously, who else? Lives would improve. Mine would, for sure.”

He finished his drink but stayed seated for a moment, staring into the middle distance as though seeing the life that could be his if Alex weren’t in it.

Ever since then, Wendy had been imagining an Alex-free world as well. The thought kept expanding in her mind the way that poems used to, beginning their lives as tiny sparks then blossoming into fully-formed works of art, for better or for worse. Her coming to the quarry was the first step. She needed to find out certain things. First of all, did Alex really swim at dawn? Second, was he truly alone? Third, could she rise early in the morning, go swimming herself, and get back without Thom knowing anything about it?

About that third part, she was fairly sure. Thom, she knew, had difficulties falling asleep, in spite of, or because of, the increasingnumber of scotches he drank immediately before bedtime, but in the morning hours, he was a deep sleeper. He’d been known to sleep right through piercing alarms and Samsa’s howling meows at feeding time, twisted up into a sarcophagus of sheets from a night of trying to get comfortable, his face pressed into a pillow. Most mornings when he’d finally emerge from the bedroom Wendy had been up for hours, bundling Jason off to school, taking a two-mile walk, sometimes grocery shopping. There was no reason to suspect that Thom, or Jason, either, out of school now and beginning to sleep in himself, would notice, or care, that she left the house in the early-morning hours.

She waited twenty minutes on the quarry’s edge, the sun rising above the tree line and illuminating the sheet of mist that lay just on top of the water. No sign of Alex. She was fine with that because she’d told herself already that if Alex were actually here, she would need to quickly establish some form of intimacy, at the very least tell him that he should not tell other people that she’d decided to join him on his swims. Despite his big mouth, she thought that the prospect of a sexual union would mean he’d abide by her words. Besides, he already had something to hold over her head, that time less than a year ago when he’d spotted her coming out of the Shoreview Motel.

Before leaving, Wendy told herself that she needed to get into the water. It was the supposed reason she’d come here, after all. For a swim. And if Alex had been there, then she’d have had to get in anyway. She shucked off her shorts and removed her hooded Rice sweatshirt. Underneath she was in her black one-piece, cut high on the sides to show off what she felt was her best feature, her still-youthful-looking legs and hips. She considered wading into the water down the sloping flat rock but decided instead to climb up onto a nearby boulder that jutted three feet out above the water’s surface. She stood there for a moment, legs bent at the knee, staring into the deep water below her. Steeling herself, she dove. The water was bracingly cold,but not bone-numbing, and she swam out to the middle and floated a while, staring up at what looked like a pair of crested flycatchers darting in the morning air. She remembered someone telling her, maybe it was Alex, that the quarry was over a hundred feet deep, and an emptiness opened up inside her chest at the thought. She breast-stroked to the edge and climbed out of the water.

ii

She returned the next morning, at six thirty this time. When she’d gotten back home the day before, she hadn’t been surprised to find her husband deeply asleep, Jason still in his bedroom. She’d showered off the lake water, wrung out her suit, and hung it in the laundry room, which Thom never went into, then she’d gotten dressed and gone downstairs to make coffee.

He’d never suspected she’d left the house at all.

Returning to the same ledge she’d swum from the day before, she spotted a swimmer on the far side performing what looked like a sidestroke, leaving behind a small wake in the otherwise still water. She sat down on the rock and watched as he got closer. Somehow she could tell it was a man—maybe it was the lack of a swim cap—and as he got closer she decided it was definitely Alex; she could make out his close-cropped hair and the slack features of his face.

She stripped down to her suit and dove from the boulder she’d used the day before, coming up in a straight line toward Alex, who was now in the middle of the quarry. He’d heard her splash into the water and now was paddling in place, having moved his goggles up onto his forehead.

“Hello, stranger,” he said as she approached.

“Is that Alex?”

“It is. Kelly?” he said.

“No, it’s Wendy Graves. You invite all the ladies out here to swim with you?”

“Well, hello, Wendy. Kelly is ninety years old and the only other regular swimmer this early in the year. I’m pleased it’s you and not her.”

---