Swimmer in the Secret Sea Read Free

the good work.' She smiled at them and left the room.
    'Would you wet a washcloth and put it on my fore-head?'
    Laski got a washcloth out of her bag and wet it in the bathroom sink. He wiped her brow, her cheeks, her neck. 'Where's the doctor?'
    'He's sleeping in a room down the hall. They'll wake him up when it's time.'
    'How do you feel?'
    'I'm glad to be pushing.'
    The contraction came and he lifted her again, his face close to hers. The wrinkled brow and tight-closed eyes formed a face he'd never dreamed of. All her beauty was gone, and she seemed like a sexless creature struggling for all it was worth, laboring greatly with the beginning of the world. Their laughter, their little joys, their plans, everything they'd known was swallowed by this labor, a work he suddenly wished they'd never begun, so contorted was she, so unlike the woman he knew. Her face was red, her temples pounding, and she looked now like a middle-aged man taking a shit that was killing him. This is humanity, thought Laski, and he questioned the purpose of a race that seeks to perpetuate itself in agony, but before he had his answer, the contraction had passed and he was lowering her back to the pillow.
    He took the washcloth, wet it again and wiped her perspiring face. 'Relax deeply now. Get your energy back. Spread your legs—relax your arms.' He talked softly, smoothing out her still-trembling limbs until she finally lay quiet, eyes closed.
    The wave came again and carried them out onto the sea of pain, where he wondered again why life ever came into the world. The loveliness of the highway night, when all the stars seemed watching, was now drowned in sweat. The most beautiful face he'd ever seen was looking bulbous, red, and homely.
    The tide that drew them out into the troubled waters once again spent itself and they floated slowly back, resting for a minute or so, only to be dragged out again. He held her up while she contracted and pushed inside herself, trying to open the petals of her flowering body. He'd thought that such a miraculous opening would somehow be performed in a more splendid fashion. But she was sweating like a lumberjack's horse after a summer morning of hauling logs.
    He lifted her, trying to free the load she was struggling with, but she was straining against the traces, getting nowhere, her eyes like those of a draft horse—puzzled, frustrated, and enslaved. He could see the strain pulsing in her reddened temples, just as he'd seen it in the workhorses when he thought they would surely die of a heart attack, racing as they did through the woods with huge logs behind them, jamming suddenly on a stump, the reins almost snapping and their mighty muscles knotting against the obstacle. Who would choose this, thought Laski, this work, this woe? Life enslaves us, makes us want children, gives us a thousand illusions about love, and all so that it can go forward.
    He felt the supremacy of life, its power greater than his will. I just wanted to be with you, Diane, the two of us living easily together and here we are, with your life on the line.
    She was coming down the staircase of a brownstone building. She wore a long purple cape with a high collar turned up around her neck. The cape flared out as she touched the sidewalk and he stood rooted and stupid, struggling to speak. She must have felt it, for she turned and looked his way.
    Her face contracted again, her eyes closing tightly and her mouth bending into a mask formed by the pain that came on her again. He held her up, feeling the strain in her muscles and the fever in her skin. The short ringlets of hair at her neck were soaked and glistening. A wet spot was spreading across her back.
     
    The intern and the nurse returned while they, were out upon the waves, struggling together, pushing together, sweating together to bring the thing to completion, and when the contraction ended the intern did not ask Laski to leave while he made his examination. 'You're showing some