by Gail Godwin
“Oh, Feron. I didn’t see anything. And I was watching you.”
“And I was watching you, too. It seemed I knew everything about you. Even things you never told me.”
“Are you still … having it now?”
“No, it stopped when I was talking to the priest after the service. He was telling me Romans eight was Blanche’s favorite reading, and she had wanted me to have it. And how well she thought of me. And he was explaining that the church was so full of flowers because they were left over from Easter. Blanche had wanted flower money to be spent on worthy causes. Somehow that conversation with the priest brought me back to earth. Frankly, I’m not sure I’m ready for that degree of perception. Have you ever felt you were getting more enlightenment than you could handle?”
Yes!
“I think I understand what you mean,” Merry answered.
They were close now. You could see the jets lining up and lifting off, less than a minute apart.
“We covered so many subjects last night, Feron, but I forgot to tell you why I thought A Singular Courtship was so good. It was as if in the simplest way you had opened a door and invited us to share the complex way you saw the world. I felt intimate with your characters, even with Tom. He was so often up there in the ether, but I felt I understood him as well as anyone else did, and I understood why someone like Nora would love him. Was your Will anything like that?”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.”
Merry did go so far as to insist on getting out of the car at Feron’s terminal and hugging her.
“Oh, Feron, I’m always afraid I’m never going to see you again.”
“You know that can’t happen. We are embedded in each other’s reference auras forever.”
Yet she was already wriggling out of Merry’s embrace.
“And besides …”
Off-key and with a complicit twinkle at Merry, she broke into the school refrain:
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.
Repeating the refrain, Feron turned away and wheeled her carry-on bag through the automatic doors.
45
Cousin Thad had booked window seats for Feron on both flights. Now she waited to see what unwelcome possibility would drop into the empty aisle seat beside her. She had changed out of her funeral clothes in the terminal restroom. Now she put on her “not at home” mask and made a point of staring intently out her tiny window.
Someone was pausing, lifting belongings into the overhead bin. She didn’t feel looked at, but she side-glimpsed the figure of a man folding himself into his narrow seat and clicking his seatbelt.
After the aircraft had reached cruising altitude, she felt it was safe to courteously acknowledge him and at the same time convey that she wanted her privacy and hoped he did, too.
He was not looking her way.
The attendant asked if she would like a beverage.
“Oh, a coke with ice and a slice of lemon if you have it.”
“Thank you, I’ll pass,” said her seatmate in a civilized voice. Still not acknowledging Feron’s presence.
After which he lapsed into some deep inner space like someone taking advantage of the empty seat beside him.
Back in the early seventies, before Cuervo entered her life, Feron had read a new Doris Lessing novel about an aging woman who suddenly realizes men no longer see her. She experiments by walking past a construction site as her gray-haired dowdy self, and the workers don’t see her. She goes away, tucks her hair up into an exotic scarf, changes into a tight skirt that shows off the sway of her hips, and walks past the site again. This time the men see her.
At the time, Feron had been close to despair. She hadn’t published anything, her marriage novel had lost its momentum, and she was already thirty-five, only ten years younger than the Doris Lessing woman.
Today she was more than ten years older than the Doris Lessing woman. Was this the beginning of her transition into a woman unseen?
On these return flights to Newark, Will always came back to her. On their first full day as a married couple, Will was in the window seat, and she saw his back more than his face. Though they had awakened in bed together in his mother’s guest room, he was now far away from her.
(What was it Merry had said? “Up there in the ether.”)
He will always be like this, she had thought as they had ascended into the clouds, but at least now he’s mine. She had known this about him, expected it, was made safe by it. Will Avery would never invade her boundaries, and she must never invade his.
If he had lived, he would be seventy-four. What condition would he be in? Deteriorating like Jack, or would he still be the Will she had known? Would they stay married? She believed they would. Unless she had done something pretty bad, Will would not have left her, just retreated deeper into the ether. She was sure that she was the only person Will would have wanted to marry. And not without his mother’s sagacious courtship on his behalf.
He liked her wary grace, as he called it. For different reasons they both had been wary people. She because she had known invasion and did not want her boundaries breached again. He because he had bound himself, faithful as a monk, to a mysterious period in history where certain elements of the population were reaching toward the highest feelings nature could achieve, and, having pledged himself, he remained with them when they fell short. (“There was something in that period that made them eager to try,” he had told them the first day of class.)
Lying side by side, faces up. Breathing in complete concordance. Or sometimes lying on their sides facing each other, but not moving or touching. Who would understand the prolonged rapture without having experienced it? They continued to practice it after they had discovered it through necessity at his mother’s house. They did the other, too. The first few times were failures. No concordance, not in sync, embarrassing, and messy. “We both get an F-minus, if there’s such a grade,” Will said. “But don’t we get points for effort?” she asked, parodying Mr. Tribby, who had transferred out of Will’s class the first day. But Will felt comfortable with her clumsiness because they shared it. At last they fell into a rampant coupling that satisfied them both. But it wasn’t prolonged, and when it was over, they felt they had missed something.
Nobody told the truth about sex. She still couldn’t imagine the bed life of Merry and Jack. Though she had never laid eyes on Jack, Feron had somehow incorporated Cousin Thad’s description of him as “a man who never sat down.” Yet they had made a child together. As for Merry and Thad, if Feron had guessed right, she couldn’t picture that, either. However, from the lectern, she had seen two people trying not to show that they were lovers.
In Durham, she and Will lived in a “medieval tower” flat in the cathedral close. On rampant nights she was the one who got out of bed and descended the curved stone staircase to remove the Dutch Cap, as Blanche called it, wash it in soap and water, and replace it in its case. Another thing about rampant nights, one had to plan ahead and put in the Dutch Cap before climbing the stairs to bed. And also feed the gas heater with a shilling so the room wouldn’t be freezing when she got out of the warm bed afterward. Funny, that you got to be “spontaneous” only on the nights of disciplined restraint.
From the beginning, dating back to when Will had more or less proposed on the drive back to campus by asking if their age difference was too much, Feron knew that he was always making an effort to appear relaxed around her. Her goal had been to get him to the place where he no longer felt the necessity to make an effort.
Paradoxical that the only man in her life she had wanted to marry had been gifted to her by the man she hated above all others for raiding her girlhood. For on that fateful Sunday she had fled to the campus coffee shop because she couldn’t stand being alone in her dorm room with her powerless rage at Swain’s lying self-acquittal during his visit the day before.
During their short marriage, Feron had practiced watchfulne
ss. Will was a rare bird, unacquainted with being in another person’s company night and day. She had watched him without seeming to watch during their flight from Raleigh to Newark (then, in those days, helicoptering across to Idlewild Airport for their transatlantic flight). For much of that journey he had been reading Aelred’s treatise on friendship in Latin, which he said was an inadequate translation and he intended to give it a deserving one. Or he had been staring at the seatback in front of him—just as Feron’s current seatmate was doing now.
Then he would snap to, as though remembering he was married, and look at her and touch her. “Are you okay?” And they would talk about the wedding the day before and how his mother hadn’t seemed quite herself (she wasn’t) and about what it would be like to live in England. Neither had set foot abroad. Or about Aelred, the abbot of Rievaulx, whose life offered Will the closest clue he had to those higher feelings that medieval people had been reaching toward.
Soon they would be walking among the grassy ruins of that abbey, Will telling stories about the great abbot who made Rievaulx into a place of spiritual welcome and prosperity. Before it was over, Feron felt she knew and appreciated Aelred as well as Will knew and appreciated Miss McCorkle.
“Why did you never marry again?” No one she could think of had actually asked her this, but if they had, she might have replied, “For one thing, nobody else asked me. For another, I guess I wasn’t exactly putting myself forward.”
Even as a young widow, she had not offered herself in the marketplace—“presented her body to the public” as the aging woman in the Doris Lessing novel had put it. She’d had an affair with only one person, a management consultant at MacFarlane whom she had helped write a better report. A soft-spoken French Canadian, who seemed to intuit what she was all about. A man of nuances, he was based in Montreal, and on weekends they met halfway in Albany. She knew he was married from the start. They had blended in mind and body. Then he was transferred to South America and after a fervid weekend in Albany they parted at the train station with a fond embrace. (Similar to hers and Merry’s farewell embrace today.)
She was not proud of “the encounters” that followed. Increasingly she recoiled from the intimacy. Getting close led to disappointment and demands and, in the worst cases, disgust. Repeat performances became fewer and farther between, until she understood the next step, if she were to take it, would be one-nighters with strangers.
“Some of us are simply not adept at maintaining the part that comes after the encounters,” Cuervo had said.
The plane taxied to its gate, and the passengers strained against their seatbelts until they heard the permission bell. The seatbelt next to hers clicked, and the man beside her came back from whatever faraway place he had been.
He was speaking to her. “Is there anything I can lift down for you from the overhead bin?”
“Oh, thank you, yes. It’s the dark green bag with leather trimmings.”
The passengers were slowly pushing toward the exit door. He had set her bag upright and pulled out its handle so she was ready to precede him down the aisle.
He was looking at her at last. A man somewhere between sixty and seventy with an interesting face and benign demeanor. He said, “I want to thank you for the most restorative airplane ride I have ever had.”
She was too surprised to have a ready answer. Perhaps it was better that she didn’t.
The beach house elevator was still out of service, so Feron began the five-story climb, bumping her carry-on behind her, step by step. Halfway up, she permitted herself to sit down on the landing and catch her breath. Was this what it was going to be like, not being young anymore? She closed her eyes and leaned against her bag, rubbing her cheek against its sturdy canvas material. For a moment she thought she was going to faint. Or that the lectern thing was returning. At last she reached the top and entered her apartment. Leaving the bag just inside the door with its handle up, as the man on the plane had presented it to her, she made it to Cuervo’s bed and lay on her side, breathing in and out. Her face tingled and she felt light-headed. If she should die, who would find her? How long would it take them? The pesticide man? Josie? Someone, Cousin Thad, would have to come and get her body and bury it. Merry would weep forthrightly. (“I said to her, ‘I’m always afraid I’m never going to see you again,’ and I was right.”)
What would she leave behind?
Not much stuff, Thad would thank her for that. (“Over thirty years in New York, and it all fit into one load, bless her heart.”)
Two modern fairy tales that had made her visible on the literary scene and a novel that almost won a prize about three peculiar people in the sixties.
To whom had she made a difference? Cuervo? Uncle Rowan? Blanche? Merry? Will? Will’s mother (although Feron had let her down, pleading her own desolation so that Uncle Rowan would make the phone calls)?
Maybe the lover from Montreal? Maybe Dale Flowers? The man on the plane?
The interesting part of this exercise was the relief, the pleasure, the “restorative” qualities that came with visualizing her completion. Done. Over. The End. Dust to Dust.
At least she hadn’t killed anyone. Or taken what wasn’t hers. Oh, wait. What about Swain’s money in the shoebox?
My admirable points were my industriousness and my fierce discipline, founded though they were on envy and competitiveness and the belief that no matter what I did, I would never be good enough.
Once she had asked Will as they walked among the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, “Did you ever consider becoming a monk?”
“Funny you should ask that. I did. I did think about it. But then I asked myself why. I’m not religious, and I would have to give up my freedom and pledge obedience to an abbot I might not even like. Besides, it would take away too much time from my work.”
Feron slept. The sound of raindrops awakened her. She went to the window, lifted the sash, and unfastened the screen so she could stick her head out and acknowledge the river that had made Cuervo call his apartment “the beach house.” He told her that some of his friends—rather, late friends—had called the Hudson River “the dump.”
Now there was a color for you. “Hudson River Blue” on top, a million pounds of GE’s toxic waste below. Toxic waste would comprise which colors? Dirty gray, slime green, a writhing, wormy white, some deadly pink?
She sat down at Cuervo’s desk and gazed at Great-Uncle Eugenio’s pastel drawing of Cervantes dreaming Don Quixote. The writer, in voluminous shirtsleeves, topped with a seventeenth-century black silk vest, was in left profile, his balding forehead lightly leaning against his left hand. He was looking down, or across, or at some invisible place, as the silent man on the plane had done. Cervantes’s mouth was pursed in an intense, abstracted way.
Behind the power of Cervantes as he dreamed his character, Feron felt the power of Great-Uncle Eugenio’s respect as his art evoked his subject.
You had to be careful with the posthumous Cuervo. Feron would continue to ration her questions to him, fearful of using them up. Cuervo didn’t speak unless she asked a question. She would not dream of “sharing” this morning’s encounter with Ritchie. She knew Cuervo’s spirit spoke through her, whereas Ritchie’s manifestation came from somewhere else.
“Maestro, what do you advise me to do next?”
“You are already in the desk chair. Forget the new laptop for now. Pull a sheet of typing paper from the drawer and roll it into the little Olivetti. Type a single-spaced page of what’s on your mind. You abandoned the woman who lied, now evoke a woman who tells the truth.”
“It has to be single-spaced?”
“Single-spaced.”
“Just one page and stop?”
“Just one page and stop. Not a word more.”
Feron’s Single-Spaced Page
My late husband was pursuing a medieval abbot who wrote a book on friendship. He had been my teacher first. When I met with him to discuss what topic to choose for my term paper, he invited me to l
ook at the books he had placed on a certain shelf and see if anything caught my attention. I paused at Peter Abelard’s History of My Calamities, but I knew my teacher had become weary of term papers about Heloïse and Abelard’s ruined sex life. Next I paused at a bound green thesis with my teacher’s name on the spine: Cicero and Aelred of Rievaulx on Friendship. I was excited more by Calamities, but at this time in my life my paramount desire was to please my teachers so I would not flunk out of school.
“What about friendship?” I asked.
“What about it?”
“I see you wrote about it, for one thing, but it’s also a subject that fascinates me.”
I was a suck-up, but I was a crafty suck-up.
“Why?” he wanted to know. He asked me to sit down.
“Well, I’ve only had one friend in my life so far. My roommate at Lovegood College. I’d like to know why it was we clicked the way we did, and why we were always at rest in each other’s company. We were completely different people from different backgrounds. For an English assignment she wrote a story about our friendship. I was the dark one, haunted by a troubled past, and she was the light ‘ordinary’ one who hadn’t had any troubles. I made her change ‘ordinary’ to ‘optimistic.’ She was the first person to arouse my competitiveness, but she also made me aware of my lack of goodness. She remains my standard for what a friend should be, though I might not ever see her again.”
“Why not?”
In those days my teacher was a pair of black-rimmed glasses reflecting me and a disembodied intelligence who had power over whether I succeeded or failed.
“She had to leave school after first semester because her parents died and she had to take over her family’s tobacco farm. She lives in North Carolina, but our lives are going in opposite directions.”
My teacher said, “Take the Cicero next to my thesis because it’s a good translation. And you may borrow my thesis if you’ll take care of it. I’ve translated much of Aelred’s treatise because there’s no dependable translation. And you know not to make this about yourself, don’t you?”