“It’s a lot of school,” he said with a wry smile.
“You must be pretty smart.”
It was a lame compliment to give him, and he played it exactly right. Took a swig of beer and said, “Smart enough to be sitting in this bar with you.”
Eventually, Paul had been assigned to the U.S.S.Sand Lance, a fast-attack sub based in Charleston, but it sounded like he hadn’t seen much of the city in the three years he’d been here. The schedule was brutal. Six months at sea, six months on shore, and even when Paul was off duty, he was expected to be studying for these big exams he had to take if he wanted to stay in subs. I can’t even remember all of them now, but it seemed like a whole lot of work just to earn the privilege of floating around in a sardine can. I might have said something along those lines, except I could tell Paul felt like he was doing something important, and considering I sold men’s clothing for a living, I was in no position to judge.
“How deep do you go in a sub?” I asked.
“Eight hundred, nine hundred feet. Sometimes more.”
“Is it scary?” I asked. “Being surrounded by that much water?”
He laughed. “Guys who find it scary don’t earn their dolphins.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “You know what I mean.”
He got serious. “The weirdest part is how quiet it is,” he said, looking at me, and I thought of my parents’ house and how, ever since Lenny had died, the place had felt like a tomb. I swore, some days my mom and dad said so little to each other or to me that I could hear my own heartbeat.
I didn’t say anything about Lenny that night, didn’t want to ruin the mood, but I was thinking about him and how, if he had joined the navy—instead of waiting on the army to come knocking—he’d probably still be here. That maybe he’d have liked sitting in all that silence, listening for whale songs or Russian submarines or whatever it was that made sounds in the deep.
All the time Paul and I talked, we kept inching closer to each other. Two drinks in, we’d swiveled in our seats so that we were staring into each other’s eyes, and three drinks in, I was up off my barstool and standing in that vacant piece of real estate between his legs.
“How come you’re not married?” I asked at one point.
“Who says I’m not?” he said, and the way my eyes went big in my head, he must have realized it wasn’t a very funny joke. He reached for me then. Just one hand, on my hip. “I was kidding,” he said, but even after I’d forgiven him, his hand stayed right where it was. Through my clothes, my skin burned. “It’s pretty hard to get serious with someone when you spend half the year in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”
I couldn’t get a good read on whether he liked it that way or not, so I just said, “I guess so.”
“What about you?” he asked.
“Are you asking if I’m married?” I said, playing dumb.
He smiled and took another sip of beer. “You know what I mean. Are you with anyone?”
I looked at him long and hard. “If I were, do you think I’d be standing here talking to you?”
Another hand on my hip. This time he pulled me toward him, then used his thumbs to push aside my blouse and find the soft flesh of my stomach. He moved his thumbs in these small concentric circles that made me want to take off every stitch of clothing I had on.
Around us, the bar thrummed. People talked and laughed and shouted drink orders at the bartender, who was running to keep up. I had that feeling you get sometimes, in a crowded place, like you’re both highly visible and completely invisible at the same time. Which is probably why, when Paul kissed me, right there in the middle of Big John’s, it didn’t even occur to me to mind.
5.
PAUL DIDN’T TELL ME ABOUThis orders until we’d been seeing each other for about a month. We were in the backseat of his Chevelle, and I was groping around in the dark for my underwear, which had been dispatched to some far-flung corner of the car a quarter of an hour earlier, when he just said it, all of a sudden, like he’d been trying to keep the words inside but couldn’t do it anymore. “I got orders to go to Italy.”
I froze, then repeated what he’d said very slowly. “Italy?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“There’s a submarine tender in the Med, and they want me to head up RADCON.”
I didn’t know what a single word coming out of his mouth meant, and it felt like maybe that was what he’d been counting on. “Do you want to tell me what that means, in English?” I said, unable to keep the hurt out of my voice.
“A tender’s just a big boat that repairs and resupplies subs.”
“And RADCON stands for…”
