The Wedding Night

When I was just a lad, my parents told me that we were going to see the ocean. I was not a clever lad. I thought they meant that the ocean is someone, whom you could pay a visit if you liked.

Just before we set off, the woman who minded me and a mix of other brats heard that I was going to see the ocean. She knew I was a sucker for a good story. Everyone is, of course. It all depends upon what you mean by “good.”

I’m a sucker for a good story because I am good at imagining the worlds made in your thoughts by stories. Some are thrilled by Eros or Thanatos. Some are seeking instruction. Some want only a sublime distraction. There are all kinds of suckers.

So, the woman who was old enough to know better knew where I was going and who I was, and took great pains to tell me a terrifyingly vivid, cautionary tale about her son. He’d gone to see the ocean. He even walked around in it a bit. Just enough to let a jellyfish get hold of him. It stung him, and he took it to heart, and he died. She described the jellyfish in a way I will never forget, as a “wet ghost that haunts the ocean and waits to kill you.”

I could not have been more afraid.

To try to snap me out of it, my mother asked around while I screamed and ran from the ocean. My father, and her father, and her uncles, are all fishermen, you see. When she makes sacrifices to Poseidon, she really means it.

She couldn’t live with the idea that her little son was a coward and a fool, because he started shrieking and squealing whenever he so much as smelled the ocean. The shame of it must have been bitter. I see why she was so angry.

She was clever about it, too. She gave me medicine that tasted like poison.

She heard of this island, not far away, that was a sort of temple for the jellyfish. Carpeted with them. Their writhing, blind, oozing bodies. Their silent, wriggling life. She was sure that if we went there, I’d be cured. That is, I’d either die of fright, or live without it. I wasn’t sure which way it would turn out, when I saw them. It was as if copies of that terrifying story the cunning hag had told with such skill were covering everything, and I had to roll around in them and saturate my senses with moist monsters forever.

Here I am, though. A fisherman, with a short spear across my knees. So, I suppose she knew what she was doing. I honor her because she is my mother, but I did not feel as if I could trust her, after that. The advice she gets, she follows like a holy book. No question. She is my mother.

I do like looking at the ocean, especially at twilight. That is when it is closest, I think, to what the blind bard called it: “The wine dark sea.” The water’s face darkens, and the light touches it fondly, and ripples through it, just like wine. The sun kisses it like a lover, and it blushes.

Only gods can allow mortals to write like the blind bard. That is why I still honor them, despite many disappointments. I will win their approval eventually.

Gutting a fish is unpleasant. Gutting enough fish to feed your family will make you wish you didn’t have one. The smell when I open the door. The looks on their faces. Their eyes, like plates of shock and anger. How could I subject them to this? What is wrong with me?

But this is my work. The ocean allows me to go on living, and to help my family do so. I owe it a debt no labor can repay, but I will try. Poseidon has blessed me many times. I owe him honor and sacrifice. I've got to mean it. Every time.

Sometimes, I study the ocean, looking for him. That’s what I was doing when I first saw her.

If you can see, you have seen beautiful women. I am sure you have seen women so beautiful that you cannot believe they are mortal.

You wonder if goddesses are real!

You see, all of them, mortals and immortals, will reveal who they are in truth, eventually. But at first, you’re not sure. That is how I felt when I saw her, moving through the water like a song moves through a room, to teach your surprised ear about what it was made to hear.

You have never seen such eyes. They are the eyes you have always looked for, until one day, you decided that they could not be found. You resigned yourself to ordinary eyes. You were wrong. Here they are. At last.

She moved to the place closest to me that was still wet. I was dangling my feet off the dock. Sometimes, when I dive deeply and no one knows, I shout the bubbling name of Poseidon at the depths, just to see if he is paying attention. He has not answered. I was thinking about what I would do if he answered when she smiled up at me from the water.

“I do not want to drown,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Her speech, her voice...sounded like a very old prayer. My father will sometimes speak the way his grandfather did, when offering sacrifice, or when some special day begins or ends. His voice quivers with sacred, serious music. Not an idle tune, though. A song for gods.

“I do not want to die, gasping and flailing for breath. That sounds terrible.”

“We will be wed before you feel any pain. You will only know pleasure until then. I know what you desire.”

“How do you know?”

“You wear it. No mortal man is a mystery to me. I was born that you might die of happiness.”

“You do not know what I desire. You are lying, that I might lose my wits and disappear into the dark water. My uncle met one of your kind, once. He said her song was so beautiful he forgot his own name, for a time. His ship almost ran aground, so bewitched was he. He had an oarsman who was deaf as the law. This grey silence stopped my uncle’s ears with wax only the skill of a bee can make rightly.

My uncle got his wits back, and mine are still my own. Go and lie to the fish. Tell them I mean them no harm.”

There is a color only water can coax out of gold. Her long tresses were that color. I had never seen anything so valuable. I coveted that color.

She splashed about a bit. Then she fixed me with her impossible gaze again. “The song, yes. Everything you want, dressed in beautiful sounds. It is a promise that the lamp of bliss will never run short of oil. It is true. That is what all of you want, more or less. To forget enough to believe you are happy, while you die.” She smiled. I wanted to be angry with her cruel mouth. Instead, I wondered how it would taste. So many fish.

“People are waiting for me.” I scratched my knee and leaned over to get a better look at her. There were silvery fish parts, where some of her should have been. My uncle didn’t mention that. Nor did he warn me that her eyes would look like silver from the same mine that made the moon.

Time has no respect for my father’s eyes. Prayer and sacrifice and bad advice from many a priest or lunatic notwithstanding, he can hardly recognize my face, half the time. I alone can fish for them. My mother would starve, and my sister, and my sister's idiot son, and my poor, blind father.

I cannot drown. Not while their hunger looks at me. Not while that girl who spends so much time with my cousins keeps smiling at me. She smiles as if we've caught each other doing bad things we enjoy.

"Ah," said the siren, slyly, "it is to she of the vague blue eyes that your mind is anchored. Don't you understand that you will disappoint her, too? You will never disappoint a soul, with me. You will never rise before you are rested. Everything will be made by love's gentle hand. You must hear the song to understand." Her wet hair, colored by the waning light the green of things that grow in Poseidon's fields, and do not know how to be dry, shines.

"Wait for me. I am not yet worthy of your song. I will not be long." While she'd been giving me a list of reasons to drown, I'd been scanning the handful of docks around me. I'd spotted my sister's surly, simple son. I'd seen a length of stout rope, dangling in the water like a man who does not want to die but is not sure he wants to live, on the neighbors' dock. I'd remembered a voice, singing of how the man of anger was bound to a mast.

The simple son saw me coming and didn't decide what to do about it until it was too late.

"Listen. You will bind me to the mooring post at the end of yonder dock, yes? We are going to collect the rope. You will do this because I know what you have done, and if you do not do as I say, I will tell your mother." He was lurching toward the rope before I could say anything more. I'd frightened him. Pity surprised me.

I was afraid he would see her when we reach the dock and do or say something foolish, and get us both drowned. She wasn't there, though. Poseidon smiled. My nephew couldn't tie a proper knot. The gods give some mortals ten thumbs.

I talked him through it. Thrice. Very slowly, and with words as clear as signs of stupidity. It grew too tight, if you want the truth. He's strong. He can learn.

"If you are there, I would hear your song," I said, for had I shouted, some fool with a tambourine might have appeared. Her silver eyes shone at me as she swam close, sure of things.

When she opened her mouth, a song did not begin. A night of music in the great hall of my head began. A band of musicians, some playing instruments I could not name but wish I could hear again, played. And then, a comedy was performed, on my mind's stage, just for me. My heart wrote it.

In the play, I build a small, sunny fortress, impervious to want and misery, where my family lives. My father sees me for the first time with clear eyes and recognizes his friend. I tell my mother that I understand now: the jellyfish were trying to tell me the secrets of the sea, and I was too young and afraid to know their tongue. She looks at me with eyes I used to know, that were glad I had been born, and had neither plans nor expectations.

The night of my wedding to the girl with the vague blue eyes, whose name had to be Thalia, I tell her the whole truth. I tell her that I cannot believe my luck. I tell her that sometimes, just watching the sun bid farewell to her face is worth all of the pain I have known and all that I will know. I tell her that I want her to teach me to make her glad that we are married.

She does.

I did not want to marry, idiot that I was. I see now that, when you say yes to forever, you ought to mean it, and act like it. Especially when there is nothing on your wife's back and yours but cares you lift, together.

Our children have silver eyes. I will do anything to see them smile with round cheeks, smeared with the fat of good, abundant meat. Joy wakes me and sings me to sleep.

If this is the sea, I want to drown.

The bard did not tell the siren's secret. The song does not lure men to their doom. The song teaches them to love it.

The song is over. The simple son of my sister is struggling to untie the knots. He's saved me, the simple hero. He's clearly been at it for a while.

"What happened?" I ask him, waiting for him to decide which of my hands to free first. The moon is counting his mistakes. I lied. I have no idea what he's done, and I forgive him for everything.

"She scared me, so I threw your spear at her. She stopped making that terrible racket and swam away. Where did I stop tying this?" There is sweat on his face.

When I'm older, and he has untied me, I am going to look for those vague, blue eyes.