The Secret Lives of People in Love Read Free Page A

she reads.

AS MUCH BELOW AS UP ABOVE
    I am sitting on a beach, half on my bodyboard and half on the sand. I am surrounded by people who have made little camps with towels and rainbow-colored umbrellas.
    It is quite hot, but a cool wind blows from the north. I am in my bathing suit, sitting on a foam bodyboard I bought at the concession stand in the parking lot. My fat hangs down as though it is trying to escape my body. I should exercise, if not to reduce the size of my belly, then for my heart.
    The sea looks different in America, but I am still unable to brave the blind laugh of white foam.
    All seas are one sea. Every ocean holds hands with another. Although I have a job in Brooklyn, and I even have a girlfriend called Mina, part of my soul is in Russia. If I can brave the sea one last time—just up to my chest—I know that I may be reunited with myself.
    I came out to the beach alone today. Mina thinks I am at work. She only knows half the story of what happened so long ago. I suppose Ionly know half the story, too, as I am alive today and not in that metal case on the seabed. I can honestly tell you that I haven’t had a solid night of sleep since the accident. I dream they are all still alive down there, and my brain begins to conjure fantastic ways of rescuing them.
    A young couple sit down not far from where I am sitting. The young man is carrying a surfboard. He looks over and nods.
     
    “A little cold with that wind, huh,” he says—or asks, because my English is not perfect. I smile broadly and wave as a way of having nothing to say without offending his gesture. You have to do this with Americans because they are friendly, sometimes too much, but this is a noble failing in the culture. I love the summers here and am so white that people must look at me. Mina says I should apply a cream that protects you from the sun, from burning and from the cancer, but I cannot fear something that is not immediately dangerous. Mina calls me a stubborn pig and sometimes she is right, but I am trying to adjust. Sometimes I think my dreams are real memories and my life with Mina must be heaven. Maybe I am in heaven and don’t know it.
    The young couple next to me have set out some chairs, and some of their friends have arrived. They all look different and are very kind to one another. They seem very happy to be here. A girl with the tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulder has just run down to the sea. She is diving into the waves, which wall up and then crash down upon her submerged body. Some of the young people have smiled at me and I have smiled back. I wonder if they think I am crazy, sitting on a foam bodyboard alone on such a beautiful day. I wonder if they are disgusted by how fat and white I am. I am glad they are close. They distract me frommy friends’ hands, which poke out from the waves—not calling me back, but waving me off.
    If you can imagine bare mountains and a crisp blue sky, then you can see the view from the bedroom I was born in back in Russia. My father worked in a factory that made doors, and our house had the mountains to the back while the front overlooked the leaf-green sea, which was calm and deep. When my father and I used to row out to sea on bright summer mornings, after a mile or so, he would say, “There is as much below as there is above—so don’t fall in, my little son.”
    The farther out we went, the darker the sea became. My father explained how the fish we hauled up from the deep broke the surface like lightning because they had never seen the light. Imagine living in total darkness, until one day you are torn from your world into a beautiful and cold landscape you never imagined existed.
    Russia was different when I was a child, and I thought I would work in the same factory as my father. You may not believe me, but to a child, the factory was a beautiful place because there were always thousands of different kinds of doors sitting out in the sun, waiting for the trucks from