This Time Last Year

1
The Project
The Gore on Queen's Gate, small and quiet, and only steps from Kensington Gardens, turned out to be better than expected. The hotel had been her sister's suggestion, a place Mary and Fitz had stayed more than once. The corner room she shared with Lynn on the third floor was almost spacious, with elaborate draperies, worn Oriental rugs, a pink love seat, and two double beds. There was a youth hostel next door and the Royal College of Art next to that. At the other end of the tree-lined street, past the mute façade of Imperial College, stood the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, two sights Elizabeth was inclined to skip for the present. In half an hour, she had showered and impatiently attempted to get her hair right with the blow-dryer, she'd done her makeup routine and pulled on the same clothes she'd worn yesterday, a relaxed all-purpose outfit by Eileen Fisher. She felt better and maybe looked better when she threw herself together. Too much fussing made her feel uptight.
"Okay, how's this?"
Lynn, practicing stretching exercises in her underwear onthe threadbare Persian carpet, didn't look up. "Are you eating breakfast?"
"Let's meet back here at five or so. We'll freshen up and go out to dinner. No, I don't want breakfast."
"Maybe you'll end up with a date," Lynn said.
"I'll see you back here." She paused at the door. "Be honest, is this too sloppy?"
"You know how you look."
"A woman on the verge?"
"An adventuress."
"Be careful crossing the streets, all right?" Lynn hadn't been to London before, and Elizabeth tended to be protective toward her, the responsible older sister, a role her own older sister had never quite assumed where she was concerned.
"I know, everyone's going the wrong way."
A blond young man chaining his bicycle to the wrought-iron fence outside the youth hostel glanced up as she came down the stairs, and again as she walked toward him, adjusting the strap of her shoulder bag, tracing the edge of the outside pocket with her fingers, yes, her pocket guide there with good reliable maps, excellent. The cool air was a tonic, her planned morning's walk all the exercise she would need today. The boy reminded her of David, his smooth serious face, sturdy shoulders, the faded knapsack, so she smiled as she walked by him.
Cutting through a corner of the gardens, skirting the Albert memorial to her right, Elizabeth entered the park, following a path along the Serpentine. Three horsemen cantered toward her on so-called Rotten Row, posting on their saddles, fresh balls of horse manure steaming on the track. There was something stirring, sexual, as they thundered past--two men and a woman--but everything was tinged that color this morning, as though she couldn't help herself. Ridiculous. Never ridden a horse, to name one thingshe'd never done, never known what all that thunderous commotion between your knees was about. The woman was actually a girl, she saw, whose pink face pouted with concentration. Two dogs raced alongside in the grass, manic and feisty, those rat-catchers, Jack Russells was what they called them. The English were a bad movie with their horses and dogs, their damn boots and black caps, a little desperate somehow, carrying on with mortifying pastimes like the bloody fox hunt, for crying out loud. They came down behind her at a gallop as she crossed the riding area, causing her to dart into damp grass, laughing, giddily alarmed. Oh not smart, Elizabeth.
Tourists armed with cameras already swarmed before Buckingham Palace, posing themselves before the Victoria memorial and the tall forbidding front gates. Striding along purposefully under an arching canopy of plane trees, Elizabeth was not one of them. In St. James's Park a stout squat man stood at the center of a circle of birds--St. Francis at the Frick, she thought--feeding them from his open palms, half a dozen sparrows perched on his balding head. Wasn't that awfully unsanitary, their dirt and feathers and bird shit? From the bridge that crossed the pond she stopped to take in the resident waterfowl and the distant view of Whitehall. She checked her watch: hours to kill. A tall man she was sure she'd noticed observing her in the pedestrian subway when she left Hyde Park now passed behind her on the bridge and stopped a few yards away. Stonewashed jeans and bulky running shoes made him American to her, although he wasn't toting a tourist's typical paraphernalia. He looked in her direction, daring himself to speak, Elizabeth imagined, and she proceeded toward the east end of the park at her aerobic pace. The inflamed outside edge of her left big toe, the cost of stupidly traipsing all day yesterday in espadrilles that pinched, had begun to throb despite the comfortable and roomy lace-up shoes she was wearing today. At the corner of thepark she surveyed the scene as though getting her bearings. Sure enough, this clown was on the path behind her. Damn it all. She wanted to force his hand, if that's what was going on here, and get it over with. Like a person who'd just remembered something important, she headed back the way she'd come. Predictably the man raised his head attempting to catch her eye as she approached. A bland handsome face with large teeth in it. Maybe fortyish. He wasn't menacing, he was one of those self-assured dopes.
"Excuse me," he said.
She stopped, heart racing.
"We've been headed in the same direction since about Hyde Park. I was wondering, are you from the States? Just a hunch."
"No," she said emphatically, mustering a British accent. "The answer is no."
He raised both hands. "That's all right."
She hadn't intended to enter Westminster Abbey until she saw the twin towers sticking up there, someone's incongruous eighteenth-century addition, she recalled, but then it seemed lazy and cavalier of her to walk right by--the shrine to Anglo-Saxon civilization, for God's sake, and when would she return to this city. Maybe never. The soaring feeling as she cast her eyes upward to the vaulted ceiling was a sensation remembered from her first visit here almost ten years before. The clamorous intention of the architecture almost seemed corny--transcendence--yet it worked. You wanted to believe there was more to man's existence than life on earth. A moment later that intimation escaped her in a sigh, a breath of resignation, as she stood over the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and read the magniloquent inscription imbedded in stone with letters made from brass bullet casings. Gave the most that man can give life itself for God for King and Country, that was a mouthful. Buried among kings because he had done good toward God ... Warrior! More like a child. Somebody's precious expendable flesh and blood.No one would want to know it was their boy whose corpse stood in for the countless nameless faceless casualties of the Great War. Unknown meant nobody, a body.
Her memory of the convoluted interior was remarkably intact, enabling her to anticipate the Abbey's grandeurs as she walked through, naming various notable details as they appeared. She had no patience for the heaps of upright statuary, while the tombs with their recumbent effigies provoked a more real sense of the dead. Elizabeth I's visage looked grim. Her sister was in there with her: buried under her. The elaborate ornamentation of Henry VII's chapel seemed overboard. In the midst of all this stone and marble the wooden bridge to St. Edward's shrine was a crude anomaly. She didn't know the first thing about Edward the Confessor, except that he was somehow at the bottom of all this history. Her ignorance, which had seemed remediable ten years ago, was now permanent. She'd never known any more about Edward the Confessor or Henry VII than she knew about the Unknown Warrior. Less really. That was just too bad.
The ancient Coronation Chair with its legendary stone made her think of her mother, who was ten when she sailed to the United States from Scotland with parents hoping to better their lot, who would pine for their beloved country the rest of their lives. One souvenir from the Old World, a miniature brass Coronation Chair with a tiny removable Stone of Scone, had made the journey with her. The souvenir had survived into Elizabeth's childhood, although she never knew what had eventually become of it. The initial sighting of the real thing ten years before had had the force of a revelation and made her laugh out loud. Now the sight of the vacant chair unexpectedly moved her, a symbol of her mother's innocence and of her own irrecoverable loss.
Her mother, Henry's father, and then, impossibly, his daughter. It was as if their marriage had been oppressed by illness and deathalmost from the beginning. Her stomach felt empty, and she steadied herself against a massive pillar, cool to the touch, until the nauseating wave of dizziness passed. She had not been with her mother at the moment of her death and her regret was a wound, a burn, that wouldn't heal. She'd left the hospital in the afternoon, promising to return that night with Mary. Regarding her with the kindest eyes in the world, her thin fragile mother had said, Oh, I'll be here, you go have a good dinner. She died an hour before the sisters returned, she'd been alone. That memory was linked to another, her last visit with Henry's daughter, two days before her death. The young woman had been entirely alert and astonishingly calm. The room was full of late afternoon light. Take care of my dad, she'd said, and the girl's smile as she said the words, affectionate, trusting, even peaceful, was like a blessing.
Oh God, she thought. Not here, Elizabeth. Now come on. Stop it.
A dozen people obediently shuffled into the Confessor's shrine and gathered before the royal chair. In a showy British voice, intrusive and irritating enough to stop her tears, the male guide regaled them with lore about the Stone of Scone, which had surely been used at Macbeth's coronation, he said, captured by Edward I at the end of the thirteenth century, temporarily seized by Scottish nationals six hundred and fifty years later. She fled, walking quickly, and soon found herself treading on memorial plaques--Byron, Tennyson, Henry James--poets tucked into their out-of-the-way corner, a far cry from real power and glory. She continued down the south choir aisle, ignoring the cloisters, and returned to the Abbey's vast nave. She couldn't get her breath. I will, she thought, I'll take good care of him, I promise. When she tipped her head back, the arched ceiling blurred, the faraway height of it dizzying, suffocating. You can't pass out in Westminster Abbey, for God's sake, it's just nerves, you're fine. She slipped into the end seat of the nearest pew and bent her head to her knees as though in ardent prayer.Moments later, hurrying outside, the sunshine surprised her. She'd forgotten it was a beautiful day.
She stepped into the street, the Houses of Parliament just across the way, and seemed to set off a shriek of alarms. Before she understood, two black cabs were past, miraculously missing her, the tires inches, she imagined, from her forwardmost foot. She'd looked the wrong way. I'm going to get killed, she thought, that's why I'm here. Her legs were weak with fright as she walked along the river, the damn toe burning. She refused to favor it. She glanced at her map, yes, the bridge before her was Lambeth.
The Tate was welcoming, yet she had lost her desire to look at art. She drifted through the galleries, feeling unfocused and edgy. She decided the title The Cholmondeley Sisters, circa 1600, referred to the two almost identical women in the painting, not the identical infants they were holding. Gainsborough's sumptuous portrait of his daughter Mary stopped her for a minute. She went past Reynolds and Hogarth and those Stubbs horses quickly. Couldn't stand still for Constable or British landscapes in general. Blake was too much work. The Pre-Raphaelites had always repelled her. Almost the whole of the modern collection seemed familiar, movements and individual vocabularies so instantly recognizable from decades of museum-going in New York that she went through naming names without stopping to pay attention. There were three exceptions. The leering cruelty and deforming vengefulness portrayed in Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion disturbed her. If you believed people were grotesque, did it mean you viewed yourself that way? The woman in Lucian Freud's Naked Portrait was contorted at the lower end of a brass bed, her right knee drawn to her chest while the left foot seemed to clutch the corner of the bed for support, legs parted, exposing her crotch. Her cunt, she thought. The eyes of the figure stared, one hand in a fist, as if stricken by a daydream. The nakedness Freud captured, aleveling intimacy, prevented you from assessing the woman's mundane appeal. The painting didn't invite you to imagine a person or contemplate any reality beyond the painting itself. The actual person was probably pretty beautiful, Elizabeth imagined, as a woman crossing a room, for example, but the painter's truth about her, her vulnerability and sadness and discomfort, her nakedness, made any question about her looks absurd. It was the painting that was beautiful. If Elizabeth couldn't see herself in Bacon's ferocious distortions, she couldn't help identifying with the figure in Freud's portrait.
Standing before one of Rothko's black and maroon paintings, she almost started crying again, Jesus, Elizabeth, you're a freaking wreck. You disappeared into these paintings, the room went silent, and here was her mother's death again and Henry's daughter dying so young, disappearing. Everyone died, and until you died you went around anguishing, making yourself sick. A trip to England made you feel like a criminal. She didn't want to go around sentenced to misery because terrible things happened, which no one could control. Because living meant dying. What was she so anxious about? She wasn't committing a crime. Meeting someone for a drink or whatever wasn't a fucking crime. How old are you, she thought. She'd felt smarter and more together ten or twenty years ago.
She carefully dripped Visine into her eyes in the rest room, she freshened her lipstick and neatened up her hair a little. There was nothing wrong with the way she looked. She got a warm roll and a watercress salad and a glass of white wine downstairs, which took the edge off her appetite and maybe her nerves. The place was busy enough so that she felt invisible rather than conspicuous. People seemed cheerful, amiable, happy to be here. A thin elderly man wearing a coarse wool suit and red shoes made her smile. A secondglass of wine was a temptation, but risky; let's not be stupid. She still had an hour. She'd been anticipating the Turner paintings, hoping to repeat the exalted feeling they'd inspired the first time she'd seen them, saving them today, but now when she entered the Clore Gallery she realized she'd had enough, she couldn't look anymore.
They'd run into one another in May at Gourmet Garage on Wooster, of all places, near the cheeses. He was only in Manhattan overnight--he'd spent the school year at RISD--just then getting a gift for the people who were putting him up, leaving for Paris the next morning. Early in June he would be staying with a friend in London before going on to Northern Ireland to follow up a project that he'd begun the summer before. I'll call you, he said when she told him, laughing, that she planned to be in London about the same time with a friend. That coincidence, informed by the very unlikelihood of running into him on the eve of his departure, seemed like fate or something. By the following morning she made up her mind to forget about it. To her surprise, a message--Welcome to London, As ever, Gustavo--along with a number where he could be reached, awaited her arrival at the Gore two weeks later. As ever, Gustavo! Ignore it, Elizabeth. But when he phoned later that night she agreed to join him for a drink the next day. I suppose I can spare an hour, she said. She and Lynn were leaving London the following day. He suggested a pub in Chelsea, conveniently not far from Queen's Gate, three o'clock.
The sight of him alone at a table outside the pub, his hunched unmistakable profile, momentarily gave her cold feet and she told the cab driver to continue to the end of the block. It was ten past three. The smart thing would be not to show up at all. Except he knew where she was staying, he was persistent. No, the smart thing was to spend a harmless hour talking about nothing of consequence, and to leave after one drink.
Gustavo Lacaz. Flashes of the year they'd been together more than ten years before kept intruding. Sexual stuff almost embarrassing, it was so one-dimensional. They'd met at an opening, photographs he'd done as a United Nations photographer in Bangladesh in 1984. Elizabeth's friend Annabelle, the manager of the gallery, had frankly set them up. He was born in Buenos Aires, but his father, a mathematician, had moved them to Berkeley following a decade of teaching posts at European universities. Gus had graduated from Berkeley and then taken an M.F.A. at Yale. Two years younger than she was, dark with large dark eyes, he was confident, determined, and his aggression was sexually exotic to her. She was used to tamer, more deferring men. Fucking was the drug and both of them, early- to mid-thirties then, wanted to be addicted. He continued to see other, usually younger women, an irresistible philanderer, and that became the insurmountable problem. Then he was out of the country for a time. She eventually received a copy of the book Portrait of Tibet, which resulted from his stint there as a photography instructor with an outfit called Journeys International. She got hung up with him again for several months the year she was getting to know Henry--another matchmaking setup--as if testing her new romance against the Gustavo heat. Their weekly encounters ended when he went off on another project, South Africa this time, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship. The year he taught at the School of Visual Arts, he would invite her out for lunch or a drink every two or three weeks, it seemed--he'd gotten her number from Annabelle--and she almost never refused. She was married then, but she liked being a friend to whom he could confide his ambitions and frustrations, and she enjoyed the sexual innuendo between them, the slight rush. His work, an ongoing documentary of his personal odyssey through some public calamity, largely pictures of people, was gaining recognition. Granta publishedhis photographs of Bucharest, though they were more like art than photojournalism. One year he was part of a group show at MOMA, and another year three large pieces were chosen for the Whitney Biennial. Their last meeting had followed the death of Henry's daughter. She contacted him at Princeton, another of his one-year teaching posts, feeling confused and angry and shut out by her husband and his former wife, and she'd come close to a bad mistake. She wanted to be comforted, they both got tipsy, he stuffed his hand down her pants in the cab, and she practically made a scene outside her apartment building in order to get away from him. That seemed to have finished them for good. Yet bumping into him at Gourmet Garage over two years later still carried a charge, an unmistakable current arcing between them over the pyramid of goat cheese. They both seemed to acknowledge that the initial exchange all those years ago, while lasting little more than a year, had burned deep.
He stood up as she approached his table and now, unlike their chance meeting in New York, he leaned toward her mouth with his big face, half smiling. She turned her cheek to him. They were the same height, so their face-to-face encounters fluctuated, so to speak, with what each of them had on their feet. Today she seemed to have the edge on him, thanks to her thick-soled walking shoes.
She began recounting highlights of her day so far--horses in the park, the coveted miniature Coronation Chair of her childhood--too eagerly. The way he listened, observing her, made her tense. She didn't want to perform. When their pints of bitter arrived, she took a long swallow--"God, I'm thirsty"--and went on about her scare crossing Millbank--"I should be dead"--and the way a Lucian Freud painting had made her feel stripped bare. How he was making her feel at the moment, letting her babble on as though he had no obligation to contribute to the conversation here. He wasthick, bearish. His large square hands were paws spread out palm down on the wood table on either side of his beer mug as though she was meant to draw their outline on the table with a pencil. He could almost encircle her upper arm with one of those hands and he could easily encircle her upper thigh with both of them. He sat back, his palms pressed together as in prayer, the beer before him still untouched, while she talked about how exhausting museums were. He was enormously vain about his hands, he was a vain man.
"I seldom go to museums in foreign cities," he said. "I want to be out on the street."
She wanted to know what he would be doing in Ireland and he told her he'd discovered a neighborhood in Belfast, "visually dynamite," faces like you rarely saw anymore. He was eager to return to Bosnia--he'd been there once, only to Sarajevo--but that was impossible for the time being. In the fall he would be part of a group exhibit at the Corcoran--stuff he'd shot in New York's Chinatown a while ago. He was wearing a black T-shirt under his linen jacket, and she thought she'd like him to take off the jacket. His facial tics as he talked about his work, his pouting seriousness, an almost glowering frown, the dark mobile eyebrows, were remarkably familiar to her, as if little time had passed since they'd last talked. His hair, which stood off his skull in a dense uncombable shock, was grayer, she thought, and she could see signs of aging around the eyes, although his skin was very good, firm and smooth. He unbuckled his watchband, rubbing the top of his wrist with his thumb before rebuckling it. His natural bulk and his bright health were part of his beauty. The way an ape was beautiful. Or an inflamed penis in the palm of your hand, against your cheek, was beautiful. She touched the pendant that hung against her chest, a piece of amber in silver, rotating its dense smoothness between her fingers. Her focus alternated between his eyes and his mouth. She was aware of that. She looked toward the street: white buildings,wrought-iron gates, flower boxes. She didn't know a soul in this city, she was anonymous, she might be anyone.
Every year was a struggle, he was saying, hustling jobs, shows, funding, while trying to get the work done and make it good. The implicit plea for sympathy or admiration, the implicit boasting and self-regard, disappointed her.
"Poor you," she said.
When she brought up the photographic work she'd seen at a recent Whitney Biennial, he let her talk without offering his opinion, bound to be unimpressed by the heralded stars of his generation, and then simply changed the subject--"What's happening with you these days?"--which was like a slap. Unlike Henry, who was always at pains to explain and persuade, unwilling to let a difference of opinion pass, Gustavo didn't care what you thought about Nan Goldin or Cindy Sherman, and he didn't have the patience to argue or enlighten. You could think what you pleased. She tipped up the last of her beer. She didn't want to feel irritated, she wanted to enjoy herself for five minutes.
"Are you still doing the same work?" he asked.
She stood up. "I'll be right back." Her anger was visible to her in the bathroom mirror; he had surely seen it. She slipped her hand down the front of her skirt into her underpants, touching herself precisely. Viscous. His presence and her nutty daydreaming, following all the anticipation, had aroused her. Where is your head, Elizabeth? She rinsed her hands and reapplied her lipstick. What's happening with you these days? Oh fuck off, Gus.
There were two fresh pints on the table when she returned. "I can't drink another beer, I'll be drunk."
"Drink what you want. You never answered my question."
Her own artistic aspirations, pathetically encouraged for four deluded years as a painting student at Parsons (a phrase that had become rote as a summary of her youth), had found their practicaloutcome, following a decade of frustration and disappointment, in designing window displays for retailers like Bloomingdale's, Saks, Bergdorf Goodman. A temporary job taken to see her through one Christmas season had stumbled her into a so-called career. She had persevered through most of her twenties as a pauper on the Lower East Side. A regular paycheck, which increased substantially as she assumed greater responsibilities, proved irresistible. By the time she began to feel like a bona fide grownup--car, decent apartment, furniture, clothes, travel--there was no going backwards. She preferred working with people, playing her part, to working alone. She liked appointed tasks, clear goals, getting the job done, and getting paid for it. She wasn't an artist was the conclusion she'd come to. Letting go of the illusion was a relief.
"I'm still doing windows, but I'm between jobs right now. It was time to make a move. Up, I hope. I want to be the boss now, I'm old enough."
"You look well, Iz." He added, "You don't age, do you?"
"Oh never. Wouldn't dream of it." His old name for her surprised her. She sipped from the stout glass. No, she was not going to drink it all. She wanted to change the subject. "I saw a sort of Serrano retrospective at the New Museum. His morgue pictures are something, aren't they?"
Gustavo grunted skeptically.
"What's your problem with his work? I thought it was strong stuff."
He reached into his jacket pocket and handed her a small faded blue box. "My Paris aunt, my mother's sister, gave it to me the other day. She was cleaning out her drawers, she thinks she's dying."
The box contained a graduated necklace of brilliant deep blue beads, only sparingly gold-flecked, with a gold clasp.
"A gift to my mother when she was a teenager. My aunt claimsthey'd belonged to their mother. I don't think I believe her. You must have it, she said, you must have it, Gustavo."
She knew that his mother had died in Paris when he was a boy, the only child, and his father had never remarried. "How nice of her," she said. "Lapis lazuli, don't you love that name. It's beautiful." She placed the necklace in the box and handed it back to him.
"That's for you," he said. "Keep it."
She set the box down on his side of the table. "It was your mother's, you should keep it."
"What am I going to do with a necklace? I want you to have it."
"I can't accept it, Gus." She lightly touched the top of his hand. "But I'm touched. Thanks."
He turned his hand, snaring hers, and leaned toward her across the table. "Let's go to your hotel and fuck like we used to." He said this matter-of-factly "It would be awfully good, wouldn't it, a present to us from London."
She was already ahead of him, waiting, and she didn't flinch. Smiling rather sadly she said, "I'm enjoying this. Don't spoil it."
He sat back. They drank. The silence was full, pleasant to her, not awkward or uncomfortable. It was more interesting to have the proposal out on the table, the unmistakable point of their get-together.
In a moment he said, "You're here with a friend, you said. Henry permits you to go off on your own?"
"We decided a little distance would do us good. He's holed up in an inspiring pastoral setting, working."
"That sounds deadly." He added, "Was it his daughter who died? Has he gotten over it?"
This was a wrong turn. "That's not something you get over, Gus."
"I've seen my share of corpses."
"That's not the same thing." She didn't want him to be stupid.
"Isn't it?"
She was exasperated that he was blowing it. "Of course not. It wasn't your child."
"I've seen a lot of suffering children, Iz."
"And their parents feel the same way Henry feels. In Bosnia or Rwanda or anywhere else. You've never had a child, Gus. Please don't call me that. I'm not Iz."
"Not Romania." He had photographed hundreds of dark-eyed children who had essentially become prisoners of the state-run orphanages of Romania--abandoned children whose brains had been destroyed by deprivation. "What do you know about how parents feel?" he asked her.
"I've seen what Henry's been through." A moment before, she'd wanted to touch him. He was ignorant, his arrogance was cruel. "You have no idea," she said. "What time is it? I told Lynn I'd meet her at four-thirty."
"I've made a dinner reservation for us at a very nice place nearby. You have plenty of time to freshen up at the hotel. I'll get you around seven. What's your friend's name?"
"Lynn."
"Lynn can come. I'd rather she didn't, of course."
She didn't want her anger to show. "It's not possible, Gus. We have tickets for the theater."
"This is better than the theater, believe me. What show is it?"
"Lynn's arranged it. I'm not sure where we're going."
He knew she was lying. "Don't leave." He placed his hand on her shoulder as he stood. "Time to drain the monster," a quip that may have gone back to the first time they'd met.
She picked up a yellow piece of folded paper from the floor by his chair. It was a receipt from a Chelsea antique shop for a necklace of lapis lazuli, which had cost, she calculated, about three hundred dollars. It must have fallen from his jacket pocket when he removed the piece of jewelry. She placed the slip of paper on the top of thepale blue box, which still sat in the middle of the table. Gustavo Lacaz. They used to screw their brains out, but that's all there was to it. Drain the monster, she thought.
She made a point of not looking at him as he returned to their table.
"Do you mean you would have let me think that was your mother's necklace if I'd taken it from you?" She wanted to give him an out.
He smiled, noticing the yellow receipt. "Of course not. I wanted to get you something. The embellishment was an afterthought. My confession would have been the punch line."
"When was I due to get the punch line?"
"I didn't have it precisely planned." He placed the box directly before her. "Anyway, it really is for you."
She came to her feet. "I don't want it." Smiling, she added, "You must have it, Gustavo."
He caught her wrist. "What about dinner?"
"I told you that's impossible." She waited until he released her. "This was fun. Let's make it Sarajevo next time."
"I'll call you when I'm back in New York."
She knew where she was and decided the walk back to Queen's Gate would wake her up after the beer. She was both disappointed and relieved that he'd made it so easy for her to walk away from him. I've seen lots of corpses. He had nerve, but lacked curiosity and sympathy. He had never pestered her with questions, wanting to know her. Unlike Henry, she thought. Gustavo's work suddenly irritated her. His compassionate portraits could look like revelations, souls laid bare, but he was concerned with the surface, the effect, he looked no further than the camera did. Half the work was random accident. He was pathetic, she decided, walking briskly toward the Gore, with his be-all career. Mere tragic loss could never hold him up. Did Henry grasp something the likes of Gus failedto grasp, or was it just the other way around? She didn't know the answer, and she would never know it. But who did know the answer to such questions? How to live was like asking what life meant. The pain in her toe had mysteriously subsided just then, which was a considerable improvement for the moment.
A medium-sized, well-dressed couple in their forties--fellow countrymen, she thought--stood at the top of the stairs leading into the Gore. The man was fair with flushed coloring and a mottled reddish beard trimmed close. Elizabeth recognized the inflamed patches on the woman's cheeks as acne rosacea because Henry's ex-wife, Sally, coped with the same condition. But what made the woman's face look painfully sore was emotion, not a skin problem, and her husband's face likewise looked grim. Yes, it had to be her husband. They appeared removed from their surroundings, oblivious to the woman ascending the stairs. As Elizabeth excused herself, edging between them, the woman said, "I can't bear it," and the man replied, "We have to bear it."
The small cheerful lobby was quiet the blond girl at the desk didn't look up as Elizabeth passed. She'd done plenty of hiking for one day, and decided to forgo the stairs. She anticipated having the room to herself for an hour, hoping Lynn wasn't back yet. A bath would be heaven. She stepped into the elevator. The person who rushed in behind her from the bar, where he'd evidently been lurking, was Gustavo.
"Oh Christ, Gus." The instant she pressed the button for her floor she realized her mistake.
He wasn't talking. She recognized the solemn, agog expression on his face. His heavy hot-blooded mode had often amused her--until she let herself be swept up in his self-dramatization. At the moment, standing there like he'd been struck dumb, his large eyes doomed-looking, he was a nutcase. Don't start, she thought. When they reached the third floor, she hit Lobby again.
"What are you doing, Gustavo? I don't want you here. Come on, out," she said as the doors switched open.
An elderly woman with a dog stepped into the elevator. Gustavo punched three again.
"Kindly press five please," the woman said. Oh so British.
Elizabeth didn't move when the elevator stopped at her floor. After the lady with the dog stepped out at five--"Come along, little man"--Gustavo hit three again and she thought, no, she wasn't taking his bullshit. She marched down the corridor, ignoring him, although he was right behind her. At the door to her room, she turned to get the nonsense over with.
"I'm tired, I'm not inviting you in. You have to go." She rapped on the door. "Lynn, it's me."
His hands were at her, flattening her breasts, clutching her ass, shoving her skirt up. He slumped against her, his mouth burrowing at her neck, inhaling her smell. "Elizabeth," he said. He was ridiculous.
"No. Don't do this. What's the matter with you?" His force and weight made her feel flimsy, ineffectual. His hands were under her skirt, plowing over her skin, and as he reached for her crotch from behind, her feet momentarily left the floor. "You're hurting me. Stop it."
"I want you," he said. "Don't fight me."
She hammered his shoulders with narrow fists, a flurry of harmless blows. "You're scaring me," she pleaded, and he let go. "I've never seen you like this," she said. That wasn't true. But for a second there she didn't know what he was capable of. She could lose her power to control him, was the feeling; he could lose himself.
"I know what you want," he told her. "I smell it."
"I want you to go. The beer was fun. Now you're really fucking it up."
"I know you," he said. "I know you inside out. You're greedy."
"Oh please. For God's sake." She was rummaging in her pocketbook for the key and it dawned on her that opening the door to her room would be asking for it. Come on, Elizabeth. Think.
He was on her again, coercing her balled hand--he had her by the wrist--to press against his penis, for God's sake. "Feel it," he said. "Do you feel that?"
As if relenting she closed her hand around him, thick, enormous, and he seemed to relax. When she pulled away this time, she sidestepped him and slipped through the door opposite, which led to the staircase. In a moment she was back in the lobby. She entered the large front room where breakfast and afternoon tea were served and went to a table by the window. No one else was present. Her chest was constricted, breath cut off at the top of her windpipe, maybe more frightened, she thought, than she should have been. The girl from the front desk approached the table to say teatime had ended for the day, but she could certainly get whatever she might like at the bar.
"I'm waiting for a friend," she said. "I thought I'd watch for her coming down Queen's Gate."
She continued staring out the window when Gustavo sat down across from her. Outside, an older man in tank top, shorts, and running shoes walked by at a brisk pace with a spunky Scottish terrier on a leash.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I assumed we wanted the same thing. I thought you understood that when you agreed to see me."
"That's not what I understood."
"I thought we were playing upstairs--hide and seek. I didn't really frighten you, did I?"
She turned from the window. "You dope." She added, "Yes, you frightened me."
"I apologize." He put the pale blue box on the table between them, a replay of that gesture at the pub.
"I told you I don't want that damn thing." His sentimentality repelled her. "You're ridiculous. Good-bye. Go."
"You're leaving tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"I plan to call you when I'm back in the city."
She shook her head, discouraged. "I wish you wouldn't."
She watched him walk down the sidewalk toward Cromwell. He was a pretty sad case. Deluded. The artist and world traveler. His work was a cynical fraud. Pain and suffering represented his opportunity to make his mark. She would have felt sorry for him if she wasn't so furious.
For a low moment in the bathtub she was lonely and regretted driving him away. A girl could do worse than get ravished in the Gore on a sunny afternoon. The stupid bastard, she thought, regulating the hot water with her left foot, the sore toe so slightly swollen and reddened you wondered how it could hurt so much. She was no girl. Her days of Gustavos were numbered, if not kaput.
Lynn stuck her head into the humid room. "Pregnant?"
A bad joke. She said, "Just nauseated."




I came to Speedwell, population about fifteen hundred, not a soul in sight, because I believed that a period of self-imposed isolation would provoke me to become productive again, to embark on some new project that would ferry me to the rest of my life. The property in southern Vermont belonged to my wife Elizabeth's older sister, Mary, who had only been back to it once since her husband had suffered a fatal heart attack there the year before, age fifty-five. He'd been picking string beans in the garden, I think it was, when he keeled over. Mary had acquired the property back in the halcyon days of her first marriage and while she had no intention of revisiting Vermont in the foreseeable future, she insisted, her sentimentalattachment to the place prevented her from doing anything hasty. She viewed the land, over a hundred largely wooded acres, as something substantial to pass on to her children one day, although for the time being her two grown children were too taken up with their various agendas, Mary said, to be bothered with an isolated and distant summerhouse surrounded by nothing but woods. A local dairy farmer inspected the premises every so often and maintained the adjacent mowing, manuring the field each fall and cutting it twice during the summer. When Elizabeth mentioned my proposal to her sister, Mary was enthusiastic, grateful to have someone temporarily remove the stigma of abandonment, she said, from the small house that had been a beloved getaway for many years.
Stigma of abandonment!
The third week in May, the same day I wrapped up my duties at the New School, I made the over-four-hour drive from the city, pulling into Mary's long private road just in time to send a dozen startled turkeys scuttling across the green field west of the house like a flock of indignant old ladies, I thought, racing to their tour bus. I was in a good mood, intoxicated by my drive through all that new green of Vermont, and it was a cheerful thought. The clapboard house was a small center-chimney cape with a one-story ell. There was a fireplace in the living room, and a wood-burning stove, a Vermont Castings Vigilant, in the kitchen; two bedrooms and bath upstairs. Mary's second husband, Fitz, had been handy--Fitz the straightedge, Fitz the hammer, Fitz the table saw--and had built the addition off the living room to be his study. The perfectly square room contained a bookcase, an old rocker with a caned back and seat, a built-in workstation for his computer, and an antique refectory table of dark oak piled with books and journals and newspapers. I moved the table and the adjustable desk chair into the larger living room, set them in the middle of the pine floor, and shutthe study door. I decided to sleep in the smaller bedroom on one of the twin beds, rather than use their bed.
I hadn't anticipated the edginess I felt as I first walked through the house, the excitement almost of trespassing. Mary had only returned here that once following her husband's death--Elizabeth had accompanied her--to collect her most personal and valuable belongings and close the house up, and to me, as I passed through the low-ceilinged rooms, it seemed like a place people had very recently left and were bound to return to soon. I'd only been here twice before--a spontaneous visit soon after Elizabeth and I were married, a get-acquainted occasion for me, plus an October weekend a few years later. We'd planned to reciprocate by putting them up when they traveled from Boston to New York, but Fitz preferred staying in his hotel. My hotel, he called the Westbury on Madison and Sixty-sixth Street. Fitz's hotel! We tried halfheartedly to catch up with them for an evening during the holiday season each year, although even that became iffy once Elizabeth's mother died. If I put my mind to it I could probably name each and every time I'd been with the Underhills in the last seven years. On the one hand Fitz could be irresistible, a tall man with a beautiful smile, and yet even while he was charming the pants off you, you weren't sure you believed a word he said. I thought of the country house as Mary's, and even before I arrived I knew I wouldn't be working in Fitz's study and I wasn't going to sleep in his bed, no, absolutely not.
Lilacs and narcissus, apple blossoms and viburnum, birds, silence, the air--all that was plenty for the first few days. Hanging out in the yard each morning with a cup of coffee and my pal the song sparrow, sniffing blossoms like an intoxicated, overly appreciative halfwit, a walk in the afternoon, a drink in the evening with the unseeable wood thrush before I prepared my solo pasta and salad,bread and wine meal, that was all I needed for the first few days, relax, go with it. Nightfall. I could get two stations on the small television I moved downstairs from their bedroom, and I'd sit there after dark watching whatever was on those stations, flicking back and forth--from Frontline to Day One, from Nature to Funniest Home Videos--like a senseless animal mesmerized by the play of light until finally, a week after my arrival, and just as Charlie Rose was becoming infatuated with an awful author of popular novels, I pulled the plug on the tube and stashed it upstairs in Mary's closet. The radio was enough: Fresh Air, All Things Considered, Jazz A La Mode.
My new project was to be a freewheeling meditation on the three great loners of American literature, as they've been called: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson. A meditation on the staggering originality of nineteenth-century American genius sprung from obscurity and appetite, isolation and repression, eccentricity and reclusiveness. The darkness and light of that genius, Melville contrasted to Whitman, with Dickinson achieving the all-encompassing vision. A meditation on three inspired misfits who sat down in modest rooms in the midst of busy households (if you were Dickinson or Melville) and took it upon themselves, driven by a mysterious and wonderful compulsion--a kind of disorder--and with almost no encouragement (excepting Melville's early success), to create the heart and soul of American literature. I was returning to three heroes of my youth, I imagined, hoping to experience as much as possible the heat and glow of my first literary passion, the fire that had persuaded me, age twenty, that I knew what was important in life.
I sat at Fitz's table in the center of the living room, leafing through the books that surrounded me, shuffling my mounting stack of index cards, or staring at the small blank screen of my computer, every morning for some interval of time, contemplating my project, before I decisively came to my feet and fled to the outdoors.With bow saw, pruning shears, and ax, reluctant to fiddle with Fitz's chain saw, I cut back brush encroaching upon the yard from the encircling woods, I mowed the small lawn, mostly clover, dandelions, ground ivy, and moss, with Fitz's manual reel-type lawn mower, I cleared brush from the perimeter of the hay field as well--unwanted birch and poplar saplings, sumac, grapevine, assorted briars--a regular pioneer, and spent a solid five days picking up a section of stone wall that bordered the field on one side, walking out to marvel at my work each evening with two or three fingers of scotch until the blackflies drove me inside, in bed by nine or so, exhausted but wide-awake, absorbed as ever with my daughter, assailed by thoughts and images that automatically came up the moment I wanted my mind to shut down, like the screen saver on my Mac.
"I don't think this is working," I'd told Elizabeth during our last phone call, "this change of scene idea. I feel like the caretaker. Fitz's ghost is all over the place. I keep the door to his study closed, and it's like he's in there with his computer. Not Mary, but Fitz. I haven't spoken to a human being since I got here. I go into town for milk and the Sunday Times, and they look up at me, silent dour faces propped over cups of coffee, like a doomed man has just walked through the door."
"Come home then," she said. "You don't sound good."
"No, the isolation takes adjusting to, that's all." She was bound for over a month in the old British Isles with her sidekick Lynn, a holiday drummed up as her consolation prize while I was cooped up in Speedwell with my project. I'd called to say good-bye. "I expect you to call once a week. Agreed?"
"I'm not going to call unless I have to. I'll send postcards."
"What if I have to get hold of you?"
"You'll be out of luck." Their plan was to seek out B-and-Bs on a daily basis, nothing prearranged, all options open. "You won't needto get hold of me, especially if you get into something. Four weeks go by in no time."
"Fitz died picking beans, isn't that what Mary said?"
"Something like that. She found him in the garden, anyway."
"Maybe I'll plant a garden, so by the time you get here we'll have kale or something. Swiss chard."
"I told you, I'm not going up there, it's too lonely for me."
"I'll be here."
"You're going to be working, which makes it even lonelier. I want to try the original plan. I'll have my big escape with Lynn and you can come home when you've accomplished something. Just get busy."
"Take care of yourself. Some of those roads are scary. The rotaries ..."
"We'll be fine. Lynn is a great driver."
"You have the number here, of course. Just in case."
"Of course."
"I'll be thinking of you."
"Don't worry about Fitz. He's no longer with us."
The next morning, awakening to the realization that you could not be reached caused me to bolt from the bed, as though I'd just learned you'd been involved in a terrible accident.
Index card #57:
Elizabeth Melville to Catherine Lansing (M's cousin), 1876 (Clarel):
The fact is, that Herman, poor fellow, is in such a frightfully nervous state, and particularly now with such an added strain on his mind, that I am actually afraid to have any one here for fear that he will be upset entirely, and not be able to go on with the printing ... If ever this dreadful incubus of a book (I call it so because it has undermined all our happiness) gets off Herman's shoulders I dohope he may be in better mental health--but at present I have reason to feel the gravest concern and anxiety about it--to put it in a mild phrase--please do not speak of it--you know how such things are exaggerated--and I will tell you more when I see you.
Did the author of Moby Dick throw Lizzie down the stairs? I asked myself, pushing back from Fitz's oak table and coming to my feet. I hoped not.


For three fair days the first week of June, Graves, whose desperate farm was a mile away, the nearest neighbor, mowed and tethered and raked and baled the hay on Mary's field. When I walked out to have a word with him, possibly grinning and waving a bit too eagerly, he gave me a nod--a sturdy, handsome man in his sixties, green hat and blue denim overalls, whose severe mouth and strong straight nose made him seem the direct descendant of Saint-Gaudens's The Puritan--but he didn't stop the tractor.
The vegetable garden, twenty feet square, was enclosed by a crude, unpainted picket fence. Johnny-jump-ups had ecstatically self-seeded, along with various unnameable grasses and weeds, and I allowed patches of them to survive when I turned over the soil with the long-handled shovel, warm sun on my back. Andrews's nursery in the neighboring town had everything you could want in the way of plants: kale, yes, collards, Swiss chard, onions, tomatoes, spinach, mustard greens, squash. Everything! I planted seeds for arugula, carrots, bush beans. I watered with Miracle-Gro, I top-dressed my mounded beds with black-brown processed cow manure, and for the next few days I could hardly take my eyes off the garden, repeatedly walking out to see it, a welcome addition to the Vermont scene, inherently worthwhile.
I entered Fitz's study thinking there might be books on gardening, possibly a garden journal, for Fitz had been fastidious andorderly in everything he undertook. Mary had left his study exactly as it was at the time of his death. The study door had been closed when she and Elizabeth had come here last September to collect Mary's stuff, and Mary had left it closed. Elizabeth assumed her sister couldn't bear to look at his things, the lost private world of Fitz, she assumed it was a sentimental revulsion, although if it had been her, Elizabeth said, she would have taken everything from her husband's study, hoarded every suddenly precious and irreplaceable scrap of his personal life. Mary said, I never went into that room while he was alive, and I'm not going into it now, maybe someday, she said, not now. Except for the table and chair that I'd already removed, everything was as it had been the year before, the computer, laser printer, fax machine, the books and photographs, stacks of stapled articles, his pocketknife, for example, a pair of binoculars, sunglasses, his geological specimens, his computerized chess game. Mary had left all this just as it was the day she found him sitting up in the garden, slumped against the fence with one hand inside his shirt and the other holding a fistful of string beans. The poor guy! There were books on birds and trees, wildflowers and butterflies, edible wild plants; there were books of popular nonfiction that Fitz would have called his summer reading. No books on gardening. Mary had told me to use the house as I wished, including Fitz's study, but as I glanced around the room, I decided, no, I'm not coming in here again. I knew all I wished to know about Fitz.
I knew he'd taught biology for many years, first at BU and eventually at Harvard, a lifetime goal of his, all the while ambitiously cranking out his esoteric research papers. That general job description--research--was all I knew about the presumably unfathomable investigations Fitz pursued. We had never discussed work, his or mine. The one and only time I mentioned my daughter's ongoing ordeal to him, he raised his eyebrows, he nodded gravely, pouting, and said nothing, a silence that was enormously discouraging andoffensive to me. I had been seeking reassurance. I knew he delivered papers at professional meetings here and even in Europe once or twice a year and was highly regarded in those circles. Fitz is in Paris, Elizabeth would report after getting off the phone with her sister, Fitz is in San Francisco, Fitz is in Hawaii. I knew he had been a bachelor until, forty-something, he married Mary, his Cambridge neighbor, which was puzzling. Why would you marry the likes of Mary, who had come with two teenage children at the time, at that advanced stage of your blazing career and diehard bachelorhood? Money was the best reason Elizabeth could think of and Mary had come into plenty of money with Ted's death. Ted: Mary's first husband, father of their two children, a botanist of independent means, thanks to an enterprising grandfather; he had died in a climbing accident on a plant-finding expedition in Ecuador while still in his thirties. According to Elizabeth, Fitz and Mary had been involved with one another for years, beginning some time after Ted's accident, and they'd finally decided to make their arrangement legal for the most practical reasons. Elizabeth had loved Ted, she said, and had never liked Fitz the unreadable, Fitz the aloof, Fitz the unfriendly.
I hadn't foreseen that marrying a second time would embroil me with another entire family, its dead as well as its living. I'd imagined it would just be Elizabeth and me. My divorce from my first wife, Sally, was motivated by a desire to free myself from her long-lived parents, her constant brothers, her complaining aunt, as much as it was motivated by the unhappy state of our marriage. And yet I didn't quite realize that marrying Elizabeth would mean marrying her mother, marrying her sister, marrying Fitz to some extent. I knew he ate oatmeal for breakfast, I knew he dosed himself with vitamins, cod-liver oil, and ginseng every day of the week. I knew he was a quasi-vegetarian, who enjoyed preparing quasi-vegetarian meals with his chef's knife. I knew he exercised on his NordicTrackwith the same fanatic discipline that governed most aspects of his affluent, productive, and orderly life. I knew he liked to take himself off to weekend retreats, despite his ordinarily busy schedule, where he'd meditate for hours at a stretch, tortuously cultivating his spiritual side. That was how Mary had first introduced Fitz: a brilliant scientist with a spiritual side. There had been over three hundred people at the memorial service in Wellesley, people from everywhere presumably. I knew that Fitz had never read one of my books, or expressed the slightest curiosity about my work. I knew he had a nifty BMW to dart about the city and a Land Rover to take him safely to the country. I knew he liked good cigars and expensive wines. I had only entered the study in search of a book on gardening. This room is exactly as he left it the day he died, I thought. There had been no opportunity for Fitz to set his affairs in order, to sort through his papers and what-have-you for the last time, to save or discard. No, I would not set foot in the study again, I decided as I left the room and shut the door behind me. I knew all I wished to know about Fitz.
Index card # 36:
George Whitman on his brother's 1st self-published edition of Leaves of Grass, 1855:
I saw the book--didn't read it at all--didn't think it worth reading--fingered it a little.
I'd brought the answering machine from my office at the New School and hooked it up to the phone in the kitchen. My rudimentary Phone Mate. Please leave a message, that was my succinct recorded greeting, so unlike Elizabeth's eager, aggressively friendly version at home. Although I didn't really expect to hear from anyone--my son, for one, was also out of the country--I left the machine on in order to screen unwanted calls, I was in the habit ofscreening phone calls, and I didn't want to miss Elizabeth if she tried to reach me while I was out of the house. I rarely entered my office at the New School without being greeted, more like accosted, by the small red blinking light, letting me know I had a message, so here in the sticks the unblinking red light became a bit of a downer, rather emphatically announcing each time I passed it that there had been no call, no message. No, no one has tried to reach you in the last hour, the last day, the last week. Being alone in a pastoral setting, a serene isolated sylvan setting, you noticed the silence was filled with sounds. A little paranoia was natural in the sticks, I told myself. Easy does it. But the constant unblinking red light exerted a pressure, it began to feel personal. Harmless electronic convenience! The first thing I did when I came downstairs in the morning was check the Phone Mate for messages. I couldn't help irrationally glancing toward the old oak icebox that now served as a telephone table to see if the red light was flashing or not, as though the phone could have rung in the middle of the night without my hearing it. I rarely entered the kitchen from the other room, for that matter, without checking out the Phone Mate to see what was up with the light. When I came in from outdoors, my glance fell on the small machine with even more eagerness. And if I left the premises, went off in the car for groceries or beer or my Times, I returned convinced that I'd find the light earnestly blinking, certain someone must have called while I was away from the phone.
One afternoon quite spontaneously I called the house from the pay phone outside Baker's store in town and listened to my recorded answer--Please leave a message--and then actually left a message for myself. And it was a relief, momentarily, to walk into Mary's kitchen and find the little red light blinking, a satisfaction that evaporated as soon as I pressed the button, beep, and listened to my message. Hello, testing, this is to verify that the answering machine is operating properly. I warned myself not to do that again, ifyou aren't careful you'll find yourself stumbling into some desperate habit like the middle-aged wretch in the local paper who evidently practiced semiasphyxiation to heighten orgasm and was found hanging by the neck from a tree in the woods with a baggy condom dangling from his lifeless penis. In Speedwell? The desperate soul was trying to feel alive. I considered unplugging the answering machine, except the more disappointed I became about the absence of phone calls and phone messages--worthless shit, the red light accused, miserable last son of a bitch on earth!--the more reluctant I was to throw in the towel. My main concern was Elizabeth. I left the machine on, the constant red light on, in case Elizabeth called from old England needing to talk about something or other, needing me, or just wanting to say hi. Gatsby had his green light, I thought, standing in the kitchen at midnight, and I've got my ridiculous red light. No, the urban dweller was bound to freak out during his first weeks of solitary confinement in Speedwell. That seemed fairly predictable.
For years the ring of the phone meant my daughter calling from San Francisco, where she had been living since college, to let me know what was going on. A doctor's appointment, an emergency hospitalization, the results of blood tests, CAT scans, her flight schedule, a cash crisis. Calls of immense celebration--the MRI was clear!--fluctuated with news of overwhelming sadness, innumerable wrenching messages of life-and-death significance, although we didn't always realize the stakes were ultimate. There were also her everyday calls about friends, the weather, a weekend outing, her love life, calls on birthdays, or on holidays when she hadn't managed to get home. Her voice on the phone! The ring of the phone could still give me pause, thinking her name, and two and a half years later I remained unable to believe or accept that I would never hear her voice again. Hi, Dad, it's me. Those words, never again.The light on the answering machine in Mary's country house, the unblinking red light, simply meant no messages, but then it got mixed up with my daughter one night during a thunderstorm after too much red wine. I imagined her calling here, listening with amusement or impatience to my voice on the machine, and leaving her message, some response that would be couched in wit, if she was in a good mood, and that would almost certainly make me smile because the thing said would be so her, no one else. Staring at that little unblinking rat's eye on the gray machine, half drunk, but resisting tears, I knew that my daughter would never call and leave a message, that she would never have the pleasure of recording some wonderful observation on the answering machine, if it had been a good day, and I would never experience the joy of listening to her message, whether good news or bad. For the moment the unblinking red light seemed another painfully literal sign of my daughter's absolute, ever-after absence. Thunder tumbled and rolled to the west, followed by lightning that made the dark green outdoors flash against the multipaned window like a looming intruder's vast face. She had loved thunderstorms, a booming storm inspired giddy awe. My father would never turn up on the answering machine either, dead the year before my daughter died. A message from the legendary Ted, whose house this once was, would never make the light blink. He had also died young. It would never be Fitz calling in, for that matter, the scientist with the spiritual side.
Rain drummed on the small house like something willful, I poured another scotch and raised my glass to the weather, my big boisterous companion for the night. Beside me on the antique icebox, the phone rang, causing me to lurch forward, jostling a dollop of booze onto the oak surface. I didn't trust myself to answer it, reluctant to appear the reclusive drunk to whoever this might be, I had that much presence of mind. I waited through four shrill rings,followed by my reserved deadpan voice. Please leave a message. There was no response. The person hung up, which left me terribly agitated, a man on a slippery hunk of driftwood still frantically waving--Hey! Help!--as the distant ship passed from view.
There was no response, but the caller had not hung up immediately. Seconds of silence followed my message as though whoever it was had considered speaking before deciding against it. You observe this sort of detail when you're alone in the country, you become a little messed up with this hyperacuity, let's face it. I pressed the Play button on the machine, and listened to those seconds of silence that followed my message, but there was no clue, no discernible background noise at all--like the hubbub of an English pub, the sound of traffic in Trafalgar Square. That phone call had been made in an awfully quiet room. "I've got to settle down, Elizabeth."
Index card #32:
Melville's mother to her brother, following publication of Pierre, 1853:
In my opinion, 7 must again repeat it Herman would be greatly bene-fitted by a sojourn abroad, he would then be compelled to more intercourse with his fellow creatures. It would very materially renew, and strengthen both his body and his mind.
The constant in-door confinement with little intermission to which Herman's occupation as author compells him, does not agree with him. This constant working of the brain, and excitement of the imagination, is wearing Herman out, and you will my dear Peter be doing him a lasting benefit if by your added exertions you can procure him a foreign consulship.
Out of the blue: a deep blue night scene looking across the shining Seine to Notre Dame.
Dear Dad, staying Hotel de Seine on Left Bank near Latin Quarter. Cafe food is fine. Lots of baguettes. Walk 100 mi/day exploring magical city. Louvre too crowded. Mona Lisa a yawn. d'Orsay better. Trees in Tuileries are butchered. Rip-off artists beaucoup. Almost lost my pack in the Metro. Loved a bare-breasted girl upstairs in Shakespeare & Co. giving herself sponge bath in the sink! Eiffel Tower: too weird. Didn't talk for two days. Paris not really my scene, but digging it to the max. Met some smart students one night. Everybody smokes. Right now on a bench in Place des Vosges. Mom would love it. Miss you.
Love, David.
His handwriting was uncannily similar to his sister's. He was hardly the compulsive letter writer she had been, however, and I'd prepared myself not to hear from him. I read the card three or four times and taped it to the refrigerator. Miss you? When had he last missed me? Paris can be lonely, I thought. Didn't talk for two days! He was traveling alone on his meager life savings (plus a little help from his parents), his first trip to Europe, with two main objectives in mind. He intended to spend two weeks climbing in the French Alps, assuming he'd hook up with other climbers there, and then he'd continue into Italy to retrace the journey his sister had taken through that country when she was his age, twenty-four. David had dropped out of college following his sister's death. Since then he'd worked various jobs in California, Wyoming, and Colorado (housepainter, carpenter, trail-builder, backpacking guide) to support his passion for the mountains and to save for the present adventure, which he hoped, I knew, would somehow bring his future into clearer focus. I'd driven him to the airport only days before I left the city myself. Once we'd checked his large blue backpack at the luggage counter, we had time for a beer. He would join me in Vermont after he returned to the States, shooting for thefirst week in August, we agreed, provided I was still up there. We finished our beers in silence. David kept his thoughts to himself, you seldom knew what was on his mind, that was his way. When we embraced, his strong arms squeezed tight and he pressed his lips to my cheek. Don't worry about me, he said, I'll be fine. I watched him walk down the concourse wearing his favorite shirt, a bittersweet checked cotton shirt, and faded denims. His solo trip represented a personal mission. Where are you now? I wondered. Here we were in the middle of June and he'd been in Paris weeks ago, so he must have carried the card around for a while before mailing it. The postmark was indecipherable. He was resourceful, sturdy, self-reliant. I'm not worried, I thought, staring at the vivid postcard on the refrigerator. "I'm not worried about you."


A bear appeared outside the kitchen window at about six the following morning while I was filling the kettle at the sink. I gawked, amazed by the glossy pitch-blackness of his shimmering one-hundred-percent-natural fur coat. I guessed male because he was alone and seemed too large to be female, but I couldn't discern any clear evidence of gender. Maybe he was a young bear recently cast into the world by his mother, which would have accounted for his remarkably unguarded manner as he sauntered, pigeon-toed, across the narrow lawn, his tawny snout only inches above the grass. You hot shit, I thought, following him from window to window as he ambled around the perimeter of the house. "Oh, Elizabeth, he's beautiful." In the living room I tapped gently on the glass, but he didn't seem to notice. Outside Fitz's study he stood up, his hind legs planted firmly in the bed of budding daylilies, and seemed to peer into the room. Then I felt he was looking directly at me, through the glass, and I froze until, like a massively bored pet he continued around the garden fence and ambled off into thewoods south of the house. I remained staring out the small window in Fitz's study for another minute, as unnerved as a girl who had just been ravished by a stranger's hot gaze. Eye contact with a black bear, Elizabeth, was that for real?
I had an inspired morning, a long-overdo-breakthrough morning, I took a long fern-scented walk in the afternoon, I treated myself to dinner in Brattleboro forty minutes away, the restaurant's laid-back charm spoiled this night by a noisy party of women. When I returned, the red light on the answering machine was blinking.
"Hello ... remember me? That's an awfully succinct message you've got there. You know, it doesn't really sound like you, but then I've never heard you on tape. What made you break down and get one of these things? I just got here a couple of days ago, during that scary storm, actually. I'll be here for a month as usual. I'm glad I didn't miss the lilacs completely. Hi, Mary, if you're here too. Give me a call."
I liked the voice, clear, direct, relaxed, warm, although I was disappointed, naturally, that the call was not for me. And the message, conveying what the caller clearly didn't know, disturbed me.
The phone rang again two days later while I was in the backyard, and I didn't run to answer it.
"Helen again. I assume you're there, one of you or both of you, or the answering machine wouldn't be on, would it? It's Friday, so I'm looking for a little company. Hate to drink alone, even though I know how. Did you lose my wonderful number? It's 9-6-6-9. Talk to you soon."
I replayed the tape, getting down the number in ink before some unforeseen electronic mishap erased it. My concentration was shot for the rest of the day, rehearsing my succinct speech to this Helen. By the time I'd eaten my supper of beans and greens andsourdough bread, however, I was no longer in the mood to be the black bearer of sad tidings, Friday night or not. Instead I called Mary at her home in Cambridge.
"Some Helen has left messages," I explained. "Obviously she doesn't know about Fitz. Do you want to call her, or what?"
"She comes up from New York each summer, and that's the only time we see her. She'd left last year before it happened. Isn't that bizarre?"
"She sounds pretty familiar with you guys on the Phone Mate."
"That's Helen. Fitz knew her better than I did. She's a Buddhist or something. She meditates. Would you do me an awfully big favor?"
"No, no favors for you."
"You could pretend you don't know me. Just tell her you heard the husband died and that the house came up for rent through a realtor. Maybe she'll have her answering machine on and you won't even have to talk to her. Then she won't bother you again."
"But I phoned you, Mary, because I don't want to call her. It's not my call."
"I just can't go through the whole business with her. She'll have to talk about it. You could play ignorant, and just hang up. I know it's a big favor. Do you think you could do it this once?"
"I can't pretend I don't know you, I'm a miserable liar."
"Thanks, Henry. How is it up there anyway? Is the place working out all right for you?"
"I'm adjusting. I saw a bear the other day."
"How nice for you. I miss it, but I know I shouldn't be there."
"I've planted a garden ... . Was that the wrong thing to say?"
"He loved that precious garden. His arugula. His broccoli rabe. His Swiss chard was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. Have you heard from Elizabeth yet?"
"No, damn it."
"I bet she's having the time of her life. I've got to get off, there goes my call waiting."
I dialed the local number, resolved not to carry the unwanted chore into another day. Chances were good that a woman on her own would have an answering machine fielding phone calls. She picked up on the second ring.
I gave my name. "I'm renting the Underhill house here in town, so I've received your recent ..."
"Oh? You mean Fitz and Mary aren't there?"
"I'm not sure how well you know the Underhills ... ."
"I know them very well." An edge of indignation in her tone. "It's a summer thing. This is the third year I've taken this place. I come up from New York for a month. They're practically the only people I see around here, as a matter of fact. You mean they aren't coming to Vermont this year?"
"That's why I called ... . I thought you should know that Fitz died of a heart attack last summer. You must have left by the time it happened."
A pause. "Who are you? What's your name?"
"Ash, Henry."
"A heart attack? Fitz?"
"Yes. Out in the garden, that's what I heard."
"But ... that's ridiculous. Fitz? Do you know when?"
"Sometime in August."
"I was here in July. Having drinks in their backyard."
"I'm sure Mary was in a state of shock. She didn't contact everyone Fitz knew. The memorial service was in Wellesley."
"You sound like you know them pretty well."
"I'm Mary's brother-in-law. She didn't think she could handle being here this summer, so she offered the place to me."
"Have I ever seen you around here?"
"I haven't been here in years."
"Fitz?" she said. "Oh my God! Fitz?" and her voice cracked higher. "I can't talk now."
It seemed odd to me, as I thought about it, that Mary hadn't contacted the woman they'd recently been socializing with that summer, one of the last people Fitz had spent time with, presumably. On the other hand, it was plausible that this Helen, whoever she was, had never entered Mary's mind following the death of her husband. Beyond the superficial summer-in-Vermont happenstance, this Helen evidently had no part in their lives.
Saturday: a postcard of the Tower of London addressed c/o Mary Underhill:
London seemed oppressive so we hightailed it to Canterbury with its lovely flinty Infirmary in ruins and roses everywhere. Chilham, the first half-timber village, has a little brick castle with hysterical topiaries in a row overlooking Kent countryside, and an alley of ancient lime trees. Beautiful Sissinghurst with its phallic tower and its white garden and hedges made me fall in love with Vita. I missed you to the quick in our frumpy B & B, so came I here alone. Lynn is fun, flirts in pubs with red-faced men, drives like a demon on the left side. Hope Vermont is working.
Love, Elizabeth.
I taped the card to Mary's refrigerator right next to Notre Dame. Two cards in one week! Devil, I thought, teasing me to imagine you raising pints of Courage in a boisterous dark-timbered pub, jerking off in your frumpy B-and-B, turned on by a luxurious tour of gardens in bloom, rubbing it in. Kent countryside!
Copyright © 1997 by Douglas Hobbie All rights reserved.