The house was quiet last night. S sat on the couch in the dim light of one lamp listening to Beethoven's Piano Sonatas and I drew a bath, hot water swirling in the small tub. When I met S he had an enormous claw-foot tub in his bathroom and I think a portion of my initial attraction coincided with a great desire to climb in and submerge myself in the romantic old steel and porcelain beast. Better yet were the baths we shared, because we both fit in the tub, the water up to our chins, hair smoothed back from our foreheads, laughter bubbling and soap scrubbing.

I love water, love the rains, the oceans, the rivers, the lakes. Tiny rivulets skipping down a hillside like a riddle between rocks and stones, ferns and grasses can hold me entranced. I find the reflection, refraction, shadows, ripples, texture, and sounds of water fascinating.

Trips to the beach will find me above my knees in the water, the waves of the Pacific pushing and pulling rhythmically against my thin bare legs, tiny granules of sand escaping from beneath my toes. I will stand until the burning ache of the cold water recedes to something less than numbness and it feels as if all my body is infused with the ocean, all the aches and pains diminished, resolved with the flow of the tide. I love to watch the water, not because I am imagining what lies across the sea but because I love the motion of the waves, the pull of the moon, the swirl and eddy among the big submerged rocks and seastacks. I love the constant roar, the silence in the ebb, the sizzle of the sand, the rush of the flow as the water comes churning against the land. If I listen I can hear songs of dreams in the waves, like mermaids.

When we went backpacking in the high Sierra Mountians to that small pristine alpine lake that was the color of heaven and clear and cold as ice I stayed in the water until my lips and fingers turned the same blue as the water. We were alone at the lake, miles from any road, the whisper of the wind in the sugar pine trees. Around the far side of the lake reeds grew in the water and the bottom was sandy and flat. The water's depth was shoulder-high and I could see my numb feet moving through the aquatic grass, small quick trout darting from my shadow and motion. I don't remember breathing, walking slowly through liquid glass, my hair following me and twisting around my arms. It was so cold I wasn't even shivering. I remember the silence underwater, and have never heard such an absence of sound.

The quiet calls to me like water, promises a stillness. Last night as I lounged in the tub I could hear the Beethoven, and something else, too, barely there, a chorus, just perceptible. I sat up and listened hard with my eyes closed, the steam from my bath curling in tendrils around my face, hot water soaking my limbs, my whole body intensely focused on that other sound beneath the melody. I called to S, please pause the music, please let me listen, and when he came into the room I asked him to crack open the window. We held our breath and listened as the cold winter air spilled into the room. There, beneath the noisy layer of industry, beneath the low howl of the freight train whistle, beneath the occasional rush of car tires on pavement and the somewhere distant barking of a dog, there, there in the dark, after a sunny day and under an almost-full moon, there were frogs singing their early neeee-breeeee mating calls from the nearby creeks, ponds, bogs, drainage sloughs.

We smiled at each other and he left the window open a crack, kissed my lips warm and ruddy from the hot bath. He closed the door and returned to his piano sonatas, but at a lesser volume so that I might also enjoy the music of silence, sung in the small watery voices of frogs.