“Isn’t this what we want to know about those whom we care about? What is it like, we wonder at each meeting, in shared meals and secrets and silences, with each touch and glance, to be you?” —Sy Montgomery
It’s Saturday night and the three of us are sitting in the living room at the Cape house with a fire popping and crackling behind us. We’re watching a documentary on the flatscreen TV about a man and an octopus. The lights are off and the Chatham wind outside is howling through the pine trees. Our dog doesn’t like its ghostly high-pitched sound and she curls herself tightly into a ball on the couch behind my spouse Janyce. I spent the afternoon today chopping vegetables for chili and it’s now bubbling softly on the stove while we dig in to the open bag of corn chips lying on the coffee table.
“I don’t think I could ever eat octopus again after this movie,” says my ex-husband Jim.
“I’m glad you are getting to watch it now,” I say.
Janyce and I watched My Octopus Teacher when it first came out, during the Omicron winter when we spent so many weekends wrapped in a blanket on the couch. We remembered that we liked it a lot and I suggested it for tonight.
We watch in silence, surrendering to the undertow, sinking into the breathtaking cinematography flashing across the screen while taking a sip from our glasses of rye whiskey. The firelight illuminates our drinks as we lift them up to our lips, the amber liquid sloshing from side-to-side, and the clinking ice keeping time with the film’s ocean water swells and piano crescendos.
But I’m not loving the movie as much this time. The film depicts the narrator spending mostly every waking moment romantically obsessing over the Octopus, and at one point there is a scene when his OCD is obvious as the camera pans across an entire wall of 2 x 3 inch photos of underwater flora, each held in place with a colored push pin in a perfectly spaced grid.
“His wife hates him,” I say out loud.
We all laugh and I look over at Jim. Maybe there was a time when a comment like that would have struck a nerve, but we’ve been divorced for many years now. I can’t deny that the movie is making me think about those selfish tendencies we have as human beings —driven by our ambitions and passions, forgetting that it takes care and attention to belong to each other.
I was talking in my group chat with my girlfriends the other day. “What are you doing for the holiday weekend?” said one of them.
“We’re going to the cape house and I’m thinking of inviting Jim,” I said. “I’ll cook, and we’ll take the dog for a walk on the beach.”
“Is he ok?” texted my other friend.
“Jeff Beck died and he’s a little bummed out,” I said.
Jim arrived at 9am this morning in time for coffee and omelettes and a post-breakfast dog walk on the beach. Outside it was gray and mild, and Swirly— happy to have the whole pack together— jumped into the car easily. Later when we returned, Janyce and I sat together on the couch with our laptops and Jim retired to his guest bedroom to read.
“Oh, you have Sy Montgomery’s ‘The Soul of an Octopus,’” he said.
“You can take it home with you if you want,” I said.
“I’ll just read it while I’m here,” he said.
He often texts me when the prolific science writer and naturalist Sy Montgomery is on Boston Public Radio. “Turn on GBH right now,” he will say. Last year, I left him Sy’s most recent little hardcover The Hawk’s Way in his cabin during his 70th birthday weekend.
Janyce read The Soul of an Octopus and loved it. We left it in the basket with the other paperbacks in the guest room. “What is it like to be an octopus?” Sy asks. “Isn’t this what we want to know about those whom we care about? What is it like, we wonder at each meeting, in shared meals and secrets and silences, with each touch and glance, to be you?”