Whispers of Marianne

Shimmering against the railing, Marianne's ring was a match for the sun half-way arrested in a cloudless blue sky. Oliver Swenson blinked tired eyes and stirred half-thawed ice cubes in his bourbon while water lapped in iridescent strands of turquoise and sapphire before a green hill of trees and underbrush. An authentic generic Eden. Not a mile away thronged tourists clamoring for a spot of shade from the sun, but in the small lagoon, there was silence. Wall-enclosed by a citadel of jagged volcanic rock, it was untouched. Secret. A bridegroom's dream. The same as it had been all those distant years ago when they were young and foolish. Young and dumb is more like it. Still, they had done their best. Thirty-three years and three kids later the only constant was the island. Drowsy crests of waves lapped up onto the beach, washing the most delicate of shells out to sea. Seagulls cawed like Marianne's laughter overhead. No, this was then, not later. Later it was still. Too still. Heavy with the stillness of being completely alone on his platform.

In the lagoon below, a couple of star-crossed lovers ran along the uneven jetty of rocks. The man picked up his partner into his arms as she laughed and struggled to push hair away from her face. Marianne's hair had been blowing in the wind at that moment. It hung there like rolls of golden brown feathers in the orange glow of sundown. And yesterday evening, too, when he gently brushed a wisp from her face with his thumb before he bade her goodnight.

The stranded pair was still frolicking and clinging to each other like the otters that sometimes sunned themselves in the sand. The first year's love had been easy with nothing to confront but hope and a blinding future. But after the troubles arose. Marianne's increasing frustration at her body changing after the birth of the children. The clichéd seduction of his secretary. The rows when recession arrived and there was money to spare. In the end, she always forgave all his faults. Something she never allowed him to forget. Oliver sipped another mouthful of blistering sweetness. Palm trees moved in the distance. Their green-bristled brushes swept a ghostly scent of fresh cracked coconuts, hibiscus and sun lotion through the air. Another of Marianne's remnants made its presence felt on the island. It might remain there for all time, but that would not fill the emptiness of the place. The island had been changed, and he alone knew it. He and Marianne. Regardless of how many times he'd come back, if at all he came back, she wouldn't. How they'd endured the three decades with him, he'd never know.

A small, brown bird sat upon the side table. Some type of Finch he guessed. It flew to a large bowled glass containing a red residue at the bottom and a paper umbrella still resting off the rim. The bird cocked its head and looked at him with glimmering black eyes as though it was about to say something to him.

Oliver waved it aside. "Don't drink that Friend, you'd probably shut down your own heart as tiny as you are." He laughed, remembering the filling on Marianne's front tooth that constantly went a shade pink when she drank strawberry margheritas. Whenever they quarreled, and whenever she began questioning him, he would remember that pink tooth and how foolish she looked, and sneer inwardly.

He observed the goo in the glass. Privately, he had long understood they'd both arrived somewhere long ago where each could not tolerate the sight of the other. They were no longer lovers for many years now, but more akin to a slug on the bottom of a shoe; depositing slime long after it had been crushed and killed by footsteps. And yet, they'd both sustained the illusion.

His eyes returned to the beach and the green blurred haze of hillside behind it and the twosome on the rocky outcropping. They'd left their necks to shell-bead along the lapping sea. The woman stooped to retrieve a great alabaster conch shell from the water. She brought it to her ear, her face set in a smile, her dark hair wet and sleek dangling between the lamellae on one side of it. Her lover wrapped his arms around her. Oliver wished for an instant he could reverse the clock back to those balmy days of ignorance, but he could not deny he did not regret how it had turned out. It was not what he had anticipated when he had taken the journey, at least he reminded himself. They'd visited the island nearly each year since the honeymoon. Nevertheless, if he was being truthful with himself, he'd fantasized a million times about being without Marianne. But now she was gone forever and all that remained was the heavy silence. That sensation of dysfunction when waiting for his ears to pop.

Oliver reclined deeper into his recliner, stretched his arms overhead and took a deep breath. Clouds were gathering, darkening the horizon and cooling the air. The once tranquil waves crashed higher, splashing against rocks on the beach with all the instability of his marriage to Marianne. The two had vanished. He sat up and gazed at the beach from scrunched eyes. They had wandered away from the sea and were walking towards the shore, still clutching each other's hands. He remembered distinctly the moment when he fell for Marianne. The moment when they ceased to be in love was harder to recapture, harder to pinpoint, the moment when feelings had changed from mutual hatred to disgust and naked hatred. Perhaps, they had never been as well matched in the first place, only he had been too drunk on infatuation to realize it.

The green dunes behind the beach turned sickly yellow in the weird hue of the cloud-covered sun; somehow more intense and vibrant. Vibrant. That was the word most people used to describe her. Noisy and bubbly and vibrant. Teeming with the same life which had filled the hillside before him. But she had ridden on his nerves from the moment they met. Her boisterous, showy personality annoyed his somber, reserved one, and yet she had been too pretty and too kind to push away when he first met her. He thought she'd settle down as she grew up. He was wrong. With the passage of time with them, she only became more out of step with his stiff beat. Marianne carried her war scars in clothes; what girlhood guile she'd had seeped away over the years, to be replaced by a rumpled, sometimes exhausted woman who was furrowed where previously she'd been smooth, and sagging where she'd once been drawn in. His wounds he concealed, and they had served to toughen him. He'd managed to retain his appearance much the same as it had been in his youth, but the same could not be said for his temper. Years of combat with Marianne had seen to that. And yet, he was never quite able to subdue her.

The surf on the beach pounded against the sand, sweeping the trinkets the young couple had abandoned behind back out into the ocean. Pieces of driftwood and other flotsam were forced in their place. He brought the glass up again and removed the ring from the railing, encasing it in his hand. Perhaps he had been too hard on her. Perhaps they had only been two puppets destined to fight and blame and perpetuate the cycle. Too late to respond to that now.

A red and white beach ball rolled past the couple. It bounced and rolled down to the sand upon which it rested against a large piece of wreckage bobbing with the newly cleared beach. The couple pursued after it. Oliver made his way into his suite's kitchen. He would not have to see the look of shock and horror he imagined etched on their innocent faces when they found her; ghastly white, bits of seaweed and damp hair clinging to her head. He did not have to. The screaming shriek that pierced an ear issued from the lagoon. Well, at least that kept the silence from falling upon his chest. He dropped Marianne's ring into the sink drain and watched the black hole swallow it. They'd be on his doorstep soon enough, and he had the role of the grieving husband to play.