by Livia Ching
(07/05/06)
A bead of sweat drips off the tip of his nose. I lean back and close my eyes. My fingers touch damp hair, skin on top of ligaments, wrinkles connected to the nooks of his body. His breath is rapidly inhaled and exhaled. Fists that were pressing into the bed are now lying limp, half-open, palms facing heaven. Moisture blossoms and then sighs into oozing pools around circular compositions of flesh and bone. Thin rivulets of DNA, salt, and water wind their way majestically around scars and ridges to collect at certain sharp angles. The motion of the room has slowed. My breath is even. I hear the splash of droplets landing.
At the bottom of the ocean, on hard surfaces, cling oysters. In the world, there are over 400 known species of the bivalve filter feeders. Of these 400 species, every female will lay 100 million eggs during any given breeding period, of which only one in a million will survive. But the ones who do survive will find homes to attach themselves to. Young oysters seem to consider with great importance these decisions regarding their foundation, for when they find an apposite surface, they land and never move again.
We are on the sand. The sun bleeds prettily into the ocean veranda, a deep blue perspective. Her slow exit creates a palette of oranges and pinks that burst brilliantly just above the horizon. Mirrored more humbly on the water's surface, the pastels imitate spilt rose water and milk. The colors float outwards like a twirling summer dress. The wind has begun to pick up. We dig ourselves into the sand ever so slightly hoping to create a temporary chrysalis to shield us from the cold but also to insulate our growing warmth. Abrasive winter skin brushes against the soft apple of a cheek. Fingers inside the woolen sleeves of a holey sweater gently grasp bare wrists. Before too long, the sand is not enough. We struggle upwards to gain footing. Tingling sensations inside our legs, inside our thighs, along our torsos, crawling up our spines, traveling from our groins to our stomachs and then up to our chests send one message to our brains. He reaches for my hand and then we are sprinting towards home.
During summer months, or whenever the waters surrounding an oyster bed are at their warmest, oysters cease to grow. They are not enjoying a respite from keeping up biological processes, like breathing in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide while making chains of plankton-laden ropes (for snacking on later) and waste ribbons on the right side of their abductor muscle (waiting to be disposed of appropriately), in cooler months. Rather, they are saving their resources for a much bigger project. Reproduction. Unlike humans, who make love for many reasons (which include revenge, despair, elation, capriciousness, experimentation, frivolity, desperation, duty, to be at one with the great velvet undulations of the Northern Lights), oysters do it, we assume, simply to propagate their species. But what a task that is. Young females have two ovaries. Young males will have two testes that later merge to form one gonad. When the timing is right, these once-undetectable parts of the oyster body become swollen with millions upon millions of eggs or sperm. These ballooning sacs become so engorged the rest of the oyster is buried underneath the weight of the sex organs. When there is no more room, the eggs and the sperm are washed out with the incoming tide from their mantles into the great expanse of the outside ocean, sea, lake, or river. There, in the warm waters, underneath the generous smile of the sun or a lazy moon, tiny bits of mollusk dreams dance towards each other and merge with their complements. Back home, withered and exhausted inside their conchiolin and crystalline calcium carbonate shells, the promulgating parents breathe shallowly. There is just enough energy left to feed on the doggy bag of food pushed to the back of their shells when more pressing matters were at the helm. Slowly, with excruciating resolve, their shells open up once again to live and gather up strength for the next warm tide.
The vodka in the peach-infused martini wends its way down from the back of my tongue, flooding lugubriously past the linings of my throat, and landing with a soft slosh into the contents of my stomach. The fruit flavorings have evaporated into giggly little molecules above our dinner plates as the conversations we are having go from one hour to the next. Delicately, like a prima ballerina rehearsing her first solo, I taste the salt and vinegar doublet hiding the true flavor of the Malpeque that, only moments ago, was on his half shell. Holding him lightly between my molars, letting my tongue languidly move side to side underneath him, I suck away the seasoning juices and wait. He will be giving me the best of him yet, if I can only warm him up and keep him in one place. Visions of evenings past on bended knees flit lazily past my lowered lids, likes scenes from a Phantascope, slowing spinning images against a translucent screen. Balmy now to the temperature of my ardent lips, he is not quite as supple as he was moments ago. The membrane has toughened. He stiffens as I gently elongate him between my teeth on the east west sides of my mouth. The contents inside begin to feel as if they are ready to pop. I have saved him for last. There had been two or three courses of much larger cooked animals and buttered vegetables before him. But, he is the only one who has lain there before me: naked, raw, chilled. Finally, I bite and he releases all that he is into my mouth.
He places his right hand on my belly. The half dozen Hog Island Sweetwaters are gurgling inside. I can still taste the eggy-ness of them. They broke like three-minute yolks after the first chew into their supplicant, round shapes. The smallish mollusks are soft, like uncooked tofu but not bland like tofu. Unblemished by any vinegar and scallions, or lemon and lime juice, Sweetwaters especially, will carry a slighty salty twist to them. They have a tang that makes it hard to keep them in your mouth for very long. But I like to nibble on their sinewy muscles before I swallow them down. Full, heavy, and reminding me of sea scent, they glide into my bloodstream as easily as ocean water filtered plankton into their gills.
Light can be reflected rather beautifully from the nacreous layer on the inside of an oyster shell. And only oysters with a nacreous layer can produce pearls that have commercial value. If you look closely enough, you will see a tiny rainbow, with its colors melting together, in any one spot against the nacreous, or mother-of-pearl background. Ancient peoples have contemplated the melting colors and hoarded these parts of the shell inside their hiding places for long periods of time or shown them off on rings and belts and clothing. Or if they saw a puppy they liked and had an abundance of "wampum," they traded their tiny rainbows for the puppy in order to increase their happiness.
Our sneakers are hitting pavement with an evenness that matches the pulse of our hearts. The day was caught up in the intricacies of filing, stapling, typing, and nodding "yes" to all managerial demands. We work the corporate shift. Deadlines loomed above our heads from the morning on. "Productivity" was supposed to be stamped invisibly into every task performed. But when the clock hit 5:00, we raced each other to the happy hour bar for dollar oysters and large pints of local suds. I had to be somewhere at a quarter to six. We waited impatiently in line for seats. With whatever time was left, after the waiting was over, we slurped down 12 St. Simons and 12 Kumamotos. They did not live in vain. When coupled with our Hefewiezens, they created a soporific gaze I exchanged with my similarly happy bivalve lover. All of a sudden, eyes ablaze, I look at my watch. I take his hand and pull him towards the door. He, who says "yes" to all my adventures, shares all my gastronomic loves, jumps up to go. With a small puff of air from the closing door of the restaurant that propels us forward onto wooden beams connecting us to the street, our feet begin to run. But I am only noticing the sunset glazing over the pier and the synchronism of our legs moving, one leap after another.
A pearl, as many know, begins as an irritant. An irritant can be a microscopic slough off of an ancient continental shelf born of the very hot and then cooled center of our Earth star. It can also be a shattered bit of glass of a vase made by the skilled orifice of a Murano glass blower off the greenish pileons of Venice. Or it can be a very small preserved brine shrimp, not quite digested but no longer alive either, coughed up from the maws of a thrashing Sheepshead fish caught on the line of lonely fisherman. Whatever it is, inside the oyster it will become, time after time, the rainbow-hued pearl. How this happens is when the irritant is caught between the nacreous layer and the soft body of the oyster, nacre is secreted over and over again until all sharp edges or unloving surfaces have been covered. With time, pearls will grow by layers of these secretions. The longer oysters hold onto an irritant, the larger and more round the pearl. But when the pearl is finished, it is let go of entirely. And when another irritant comes floating their way, they diligently begin the process anew.
I am lying next to him, propped up on one elbow. His finger starts at the top of my earlobe and traces my form down my neck, gently along my shoulder, making a curlicue around my hip, until it reaches the outside of my thigh. I turn over and close my eyes. He begins to move his fingers in concentric circles on my back. He brushes my hair away so that my shoulders are equally attended to.
I am thinking we are not so different from our shell-clasped friends. The sea of our lives brings in old messages in bottles, shipwrecks, and pirates who pillage our landscape. Irritants all. We make what we can of them and forge ahead fingering the experiences like long strands of pearls we do not forget or stop making. After we've made love, we also breathe shallowly, spent like a mollusk cousin in the summer tide. At the end of one of our seasons, I feel how softly he covers me with a silken sheet. My belly is full and relaxed. My exertions are over. I imagine myself between two nacre-producing shells, attached to the bottom edge of a sea cliff waiting for waves to wash over and leave me. The seawater is seeping in at regular intervals bringing in salt, sand, and small brine shrimp. There is nothing left to do in the world except lie in a luxuriant pool of my own juices, making a contented bubble now and again. The kelp forests around us begin to rise with the high tide and the coming of the moon. Before I drift off into sleep, I hear the drip of a faucet. Darkness spreads in blurred and even lines across our bodies as the sun sets behind the blinds of the room.
