Honey and Saltwater

I am sixty-three years old, I work as an analyst at a law firm, and on a Tuesday evening in Lyon I put on a dress I had not worn in eleven years and walked into a restaurant called Zyr to have dinner with my ex. There is no good explanation for any of this, so I will skip the explanation and give you the facts instead. Noah is sixty-one, a marine biologist, and I dated him for three years, from the time I was forty-nine until I took the job here and moved inland, away from every coastline he loved. The breakup was messy in the way that only quiet breakups can be messy: nobody shouted, nobody threw anything, and it still took me two years to stop flinching at the sound of certain kinds of laughter.

We had been emailing for a month. Small things at first, a link to a paper about coral bleaching, a photograph of a gull he swore looked like my mother, though my mother has been dead for a decade and looked like a hawk if she looked like anything. Then the emails got longer, and somewhere in the fourth week he wrote, would you have dinner with me, one last anniversary dinner, the one we never got to have. I read that sentence maybe forty times. I told myself it was closure. I told myself a lot of things that month.

Zyr is a Moroccan-fusion place downtown, all warm tile and copper lanterns, with a fountain in the back room that trickles mint tea into a basin at what I can only assume is enormous expense. I had booked it myself, which felt like a small act of cowardice, booking the table before I could talk myself out of the whole enterprise. I arrived at 8:33 sharp, which is the kind of punctuality that is really just nerves wearing a watch.

He was already there. Of course he was already there, he had been early to everything for the entire three years we were together, early to trains, early to conferences, early to the argument that ended us, so early to it that I never got a word in until it was over. He sat at a table near the fountain, and he looked older in the way that suits some men, silver coming into his beard like frost finding a window. His hand was resting on the table, and under his hand was a small glass jar that glowed like a trapped sun.

I want to be precise about that, because precision was my job for thirty years and I see no reason to abandon it at a restaurant. The jar was maybe five inches tall, ordinary in shape, and the honey inside it was glowing. Amber light, steady, no flicker, the kind of glow you would expect from a very good lamp with the shade taken off. Other diners were not reacting to it. The waiter setting bread on the next table was not reacting to it. Either I was having a stroke or the universe had decided that my Tuesday needed a second act.

"Yolanda." He stood, and we did the awkward dance of people who used to kiss and no longer know where their hands go. We settled on a brief hug that smelled like salt and cedar, which was new, because he used to smell like salt and coffee.

"You're glowing," I said, sitting down. "I mean the jar. The jar is glowing. Why is the jar glowing?"

He laughed, and eleven years fell off my spine and then crawled right back on, wary. "It's been doing that since I bought it. Watch." He picked the jar up and moved it toward me, and the glow brightened, actually brightened, the way a cat gets louder when it wants something. Then he set it down and slid it across the tablecloth until it stopped against my hand. "From a pawn shop," he said. "Le Coffre, over on the side street by the Rhône. The owner practically paid me to take it."

I put my palm flat on the glass, because what else do you do with a glowing jar, refuse it politely? The moment my skin touched it, heat pulsed up through my hand, a low vibration humming through my palm and into my wrist, into the bones of my arm, like pressing your hand against the hull of a large idling engine. It was not unpleasant. That was the disturbing part. It felt, and I am aware of how this sounds, glad.

"Noah." I took my hand back. My palm kept humming for a good five seconds after. "What is this?"

"Honey. Or it was honey. The man who sold it to me, Sloan, his name is Sloan, he's sixty-something and he hates me, he says the jar came in with an estate lot and it won't stop doing whatever it's doing. He kept it uncorked because corking it made it worse, if you can imagine worse." He turned his water glass a quarter turn, a habit I had forgotten and now remembered with a fresh wave of something between tenderness and irritation. "I bought it because it was glowing and I have spent my whole life around things from the sea that glow, and I thought, well, this is either a story or a mistake, and I have brought home both before."

"You brought home a mistake once that had a mortgage and a job offer attached," I said, and immediately regretted it, because that mistake was me, or the job was me, and the table between us got very small all of a sudden.

The waiter arrived, a young man named Jonas according to his pin, twenty-two if I had to guess, with the specific weariness of someone working nights to pay for community college. He took our order with the efficiency of a man who had a loud table of six behind us arguing about politics, and I heard him murmur something to himself as he left that I chose not to hear. I ordered the lamb. Noah ordered the sea bass, because of course he did, the man could not be within a hundred kilometers of a menu and order anything that had not recently been swimming.

We made the small talk that exes make. His sister was fine. My knees were fine, mostly. He had a new grant, studying the warming currents off the Atlantic coast, and he talked about it with his hands, and I watched his hands and hated myself a little for watching his hands. This was the problem with Noah, always. Not the leaving. The wanting came first and the leaving was just what wanting did when you put a stable salary between it and the water.

"So the honey," I said, when the bass had been dispatched and the lamb was en route. "Glowing honey from a shop that sells rusted compasses and glass fishing floats. And you brought it to our anniversary dinner. As a gift."

"As a conversation piece." He pushed the jar back toward me, and again the glow leaned toward my hand as a plant leans toward a window. "Also as a gift. It seemed like you. Warm and strange and liable to hum at people."

"That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me and I resent it completely."

The vibration had not stopped. That is what I have not told you yet, the part I have been circling since 8:33. When I took my hand off the glass, the humming did not leave. It settled into my palm and stayed, faint, patient, like a phone buzzing in another room. And while Noah told me about currents, I realized the hum had a rhythm to it, and the rhythm was getting organized, and I am an analyst, I notice patterns, it is the whole of my miserable profession, and the pattern forming in my left hand was starting to look like attention. Like something in the jar had noticed me specifically and was now, with the unhurried confidence of honey, working up to saying something.

Noah stopped talking. He was looking past my shoulder, toward the front of the restaurant, and his face had gone careful in a way I remembered from hospital waiting rooms and other bad nights.

"My phone," he said slowly, "is ringing. And it's Sloan."

The jar's glow pulsed once, hard, like a heartbeat that had been waiting for its cue.

The jar sat between our plates, glowing, and I made the mistake of looking directly at it while Noah fumbled for his phone. It wobbled. Not much. Not the way a jar wobbles when someone bumps the table, which the table was not doing, because neither of us was touching it and Jonas was ten meters away dealing with the loud table of six. It wobbled the way a jar would wobble if the honey inside it had decided, all on its own, to lean. The amber light inside it swayed with it, slow, like kelp in a current, and I watched it sway and did not say anything because what was there to say. Noah answered the phone on the third ring and I heard Sloan's voice from across the table, tinny and alarmed, a small angry animal in a small angry box.

Jonas came back at exactly the wrong moment with the bread basket and a smile he had assembled from spare parts. "So, still waiting on the mains, but can I get you anything while you..."

The jar wobbled again. Harder this time. Jonas stopped. I stopped. The loud table of six, by some miracle of acoustics, had paused between arguments, and in that pause I heard it, a low resonant voice coming from the jar itself, female and ageless and unhurried, the voice of someone who had been waiting so long that waiting had become her whole personality.

"The warm-blooded one tastes of salt and sorrow. I like it."

Jonas put the bread basket down on the next table, which belonged to strangers, and said, "I'm going to go stand by the fountain for a minute," and went and stood by the fountain. I want to be fair to Jonas here. He was twenty-two and had never left the region and was being paid, modestly, to seat people and recite specials. He assessed the situation with the cold pragmatism of the very young and simply opted out. I have thought about that since. There is a lesson in it.

Noah was still holding the phone. Sloan was still talking. I could hear both of them now, the voice from the jar and the voice from the phone, and I noticed, because noticing patterns is the whole of my miserable profession, that they were talking at the same rhythm. Sloan's frantic patter and the honey's slow hum were nested inside each other like two broadcasts on adjacent frequencies, and I felt the hum in my palm climb from my hand into my wrist and sit there, patient, proprietary.

"Say that again," Noah said into the phone. "Slower."

"I said," Sloan's voice carried, the way furious voices do, "that jar has been humming for six hours, lady, it's not honey, I don't know what it is, I poked it with a broom handle and the broom handle came out warm, and if you don't take it to the ocean tonight I'm shutting the whole block down. That is not a figure of speech. I am calling the sanitation people and then I am calling my cousin and then the block is shut down and your name is going to be in my ledger next to the incident."

"I'm not lady," Noah said. "I'm the man who bought the jar."

"Then you're the man who's taking the jar back or I'm taking the jar and dropping it in the Rhône myself, and believe me, friend, I have dropped things in the Rhône before."

He hung up, or Sloan hung up, it was that kind of call, and then it was just the three of us, Noah and me and the jar, plus Jonas at the fountain pretending to polish a glass that he had been polishing for some time and that was, by now, surely the cleanest glass in the city of Lyon. The copper lanterns did their lantern thing. The fountain trickled its mint tea. The honey glowed. Somewhere behind us the table of six resumed arguing about a man none of them had met.

"Yolanda." Noah leaned across the table and took my wrist, not the hand with the hum in it, the other one, and his grip was firm and his eyes had gone dark in a way I remembered from three years of dark-eyed evenings, and when he spoke it was low and fast, the register of a man who had decided that the strange thing was real and had skipped the entire reasonable portion of the evening. "It's a creature. A deep-sea something I saw once, miles down, off a trench survey in the Atlantic, years ago. We never got a sample. It glowed and it moved like nothing moves and the whole crew pretended it hadn't happened, and I have spent years telling myself I imagined it, and now it's in a pawn shop jar on a side street by the Rhône and it found me. It found me and I brought it to you." His thumb moved once over the inside of my wrist, an old habit, an old map. "We have to take it to the water. Right now. Tonight. The Rhône is eight minutes from here."