by Laura Smith
The irrational love brain doesn’t want to move on. The “last” meeting is always another opportunity to catapult yourself back into the love frenzy that you now need in order to eat, sleep, work—live. Because if you really want to be released from love, the only surefire way that I’ve ever seen is total banishment. There are no more coffees, no late-night texting. It requires blocking all social media accounts. Sometimes it involves moving to the other side of the world so that you don’t hang out at that bar she likes, hoping for a chance encounter. That’s how you make your love vanish.
My irrational love brain argued in favor of a “new” kind of relationship in which Michael and I would continue to love each other even though we weren’t together. I convinced myself that this arrangement would hurt no one, but be a kind of uberfriendship that defied conventional labels. Michael’s irrational love brain told him that if he waited, I would come.
As the wine arrived, a friend walked through the door. I felt a flash of dread when she sat down and joined me. I could not let this happen. My last meeting with Michael could not turn into a small-talk triangle. I felt the old vinelike powerlessness creeping over me, the inability to say no, the fear that if I told someone what I truly wanted, they wouldn’t like me anymore. But now I saw that I had wandered through my life acting terribly put-upon. People made me do things, I claimed. Sitting at the bar, I saw with clarity that I had blamed not achieving the things I wanted on the intrusions of others, because that was easier than blaming myself. If I didn’t write books, if I didn’t have private conversations when I wanted them, I had no one to blame but myself.
“I’m meeting Michael,” I said after greeting my friend. “And I need to talk to him alone about something sort of sensitive.” I was surprised and pleased by the strength I heard in my own voice. She said of course she understood. It had been that easy. I had spent the last month enjoying the power of saying yes, but now I realized that saying no was revolutionary. I had the power to be disappointing, and with that power I could craft a life.
Michael seemed disappointed when he saw the woman, but she quickly got up.
“I told her she couldn’t stay,” I said proudly. “I told her I needed to talk to you alone.” Did he realize that I hadn’t always been this way? I imagined myself as some kind of Aztec queen standing on top of a volcano, commanding these other me’s, paltry me’s in plain white tunics, to jump into the fire. Let them burn! I thought.
“Let’s sit over there,” I said, gesturing to a more private corner of the bar. I led him to the other table and when we sat down, he started to cry.
—
P.J. and I stayed in Banff for three days after everyone left. We had planned to camp in the Canadian Rockies for two weeks, but a viscous lethargy had settled in on us. Packing our bags, grocery shopping, and finding a campsite seemed to require Herculean effort, so we delayed.
But staying was a terrible idea. A particular street corner, a stairwell, or even just passing by the grocery store conjured memories of Michael. As P.J. and I walked around downtown Banff, I avoided the little white cottage with the hydrangea and rain boots by the front door. When we passed by the Mexican restaurant where Michael had touched my foot under the table, I felt a pang of longing, quickly followed by guilt. P.J. was unwittingly taking a tour of my other life.
P.J. and I had had a special language and nicknames, but now we didn’t use them and I hardly noticed. It was Michael’s movements, his manner of talking, that pressed on me with more urgency, even though he wasn’t there. He was a ghost haunting my marriage and P.J. wasn’t even trying to banish him or to win me back. Our marriage felt as though someone had walked into a room, opened all the windows, and let something essential flutter out.
In our hotel room, when P.J. put on a song I didn’t recognize I wondered if Kristin had introduced him to it. Their relationship hadn’t been as involved. They hadn’t had very much time together. She seemed to accept the rules of the arrangement, never pressuring P.J. for more than he was willing to give. She had even sent me a note asking if everything was all right.
Still, I worried that P.J. and I had allowed ourselves a touch of something that might bloom into something dangerous. He wouldn’t have to smell her morning breath, or see her in a truly foul mood. I would never have to navigate filing joint taxes with Michael. Not knowing how these relationships would bear out over time, we risked idealizing them.
When we finally left Banff to go camping, it was raining. We stopped in a coffee shop near the highway. I watched the downpour transform everything around me into gray dullness. The Icefields Parkway is a 140-mile road that threads through mountainous wilderness. It begins at the Trans-Canada Highway going over the Saskatchewan River Crossing, following the Continental Divide to Jasper, which lies on the eastern edge of Alberta, near British Columbia. It is flanked on either side by vast stretches of evergreen trees, striking glacier-melt lakes, and rugged rock faces.
We had a campsite map and decided to make our way up the parkway until it stopped raining. P.J. drove and I sat next to him in the passenger’s seat, fiddling with the radio until we lost reception. Outside the car window, the clouds broke and afternoon sunlight filtered through the trees. Enjoy this, I instructed myself. One day you will not be here and you’ll wish you had appreciated it more. But I felt a deadening malaise.
It occurred to me that maybe it was a bad time to be on an intensely isolated vacation. There would be no phones or televisions to distract us, no friends to meet for coffee, just the sounds of cicadas, trickling creeks, and whatever we said to each other. I wanted to drown out the chatter in my head. I told myself that this was better. We will have to face our problems directly, I thought. We will emerge from the wilderness in two weeks either stronger or irrevocably broken.
We stopped first at Mosquito Creek, tired and hungry, hoping that it had been inaccurately named. As we unloaded the car, we saw families camping nearby. This seemed a good sign. Parents wouldn’t take their children to a mosquito-infested campsite. We pitched our tent, opened a can of sardines and ate them on sliced bread, and quickly discovered that Mosquito Creek is aptly named. Its mosquitoes were capable of biting through material as thick as jeans. All evening I heard their high-pitched, devilish whine around my ears. I wore my hoodie cinched up around my face, leaving only a small hole for my eyes and nose, and still I constantly discovered new bites. “Let’s get out of here,” I said the next morning when we woke up. “This place is miserable.”
The next campground was no better. We pitched our tent as far from the river as possible, hoping to steer clear of mosquitoes. But on the way to a hike, with my feet on the car’s dashboard, I counted sixty-seven bites. That night we ate peanut butter sandwiches and drank whiskey straight from the bottle by the campfire. This is the low point, I told myself. From here, it will get better.
I missed the feeling of missing P.J. and found I couldn’t conjure my former affection for him. Sometimes as he packed his backpack or hammered the stakes of the tent into the ground I would be struck by how handsome he was. I noticed the thoughtful expression he made when he focused on something, his dark angular features, his sensitive eyes. But the feelings attached to these observations were locked away somewhere. Something dark was moving through the empty space in our marriage, and I was scared this state would last forever.
Whereas previously P.J. was always circling back on what he’d said, interrupting himself with a new thought, now he chose his words carefully, occasionally freezing in midsentence. The more I tried to lure warmth and feeling back to our relationship, the more elusive those things became. I worried that love was like a body, that once those nerves are dead, there is no reviving them.
“Be warm to me!” I said as we gathered firewood by the river near our campsite.
“I’m trying,” he said.
At other times, I would notice the freckle on his upper lip, or the way
his hair matted when he took off his baseball cap, and feel a surge of affection—followed by relief. Oh good, it—whatever it was—was not gone. He would apologize for his coldness and kiss the top of my head and pull me into his arms. But just as soon as I had acknowledged the flicker of feeling, it vanished, leaving me to wonder if it had been a mirage conjured in my desperation.
At night, I lied to myself in my journal. I acknowledged the indifference, but I also wrote lines like, “I feel peaceful about everything that has happened,” and “All is good here.” Not true. My new baseline was frenzied despair. I had no idea what was going on, wasn’t sure how I felt, what I wanted, or what P.J. wanted. I thought I could write myself into a better state of mind, that I could will myself out of indifference. I recalled the postcard Barbara had sent from the bus stop in Kansas. “Am really feeling O.K. and well under control!” Only then did I understand what a total load of bullshit that was, how much a major life upheaval can turn you into a self-deception machine, and how essential this was to making the hours bearable. The pin that had anchored me to my life had slipped away. Or had I deliberately yanked it out?
SEVENTEEN
Nick never told anyone what they discussed the night Barbara vanished. That final conversation—or was it a fight?—was the last time anyone who knew Barbara interacted with her, as far as I knew. Perhaps he told her that the relationship with Anne was serious—or even that he intended to leave her to be with Anne.
What was abundantly clear was that there was much more at stake than a marriage. Barbara’s whole identity was unraveling—though perhaps this is always the case at the end of a marriage. She had become the kind of person she had always despised, pleading with her husband to stay, trying to win him back with housekeeping. She had always seen herself as the elusive one, the adventurous one, the one being chased—not the one doing the chasing. But here she was for the second time in her life advocating for the opposite of running away: preserving a home. She must have noticed the inconsistency of her position, the person she wanted to be clashing uncomfortably with the person she was becoming. Leaving rather than being left was a way to reclaim her bolder, more adventurous identity.
I wondered if, rather than striking out entirely on her own, she might have gone to someone for affirmation—someone who would see her as she wanted to be seen. Barbara’s friends and family kept mentioning one such person. Alice had tried to track him down with no success.
Before Nick, Barbara had been in love with another man. His name was Ed Anderson, though everyone called him Anderson, and in most of her letters, Barbara referred to him simply as A. He was the sailor she had broken up with to be with Nick. She had met him while traveling from Honolulu to Washington aboard the Vigilant, where he was working as the ship’s second mate. An account of their meeting can be found in Helen’s book Stars to Steer By. When Barbara first saw Anderson he was sitting at the boat’s stern at dusk, just beginning his night watch. He seemed to be a part of the ship, distinct from the dusk only by the orange glow of his cigarette. As Barbara and her mother approached, they had the sense they were intruding, that he was a man who preferred to be alone.
“Don’t go away on my account,” he said, sensing their retreat.
He told Barbara that he liked the night watch because it was quiet. “Not so much talk going on.”
He asked if Barbara was disappointed by life at sea.
She said no, quite the opposite. “This is what I’ve wanted for three years,” she said. “A ship can’t disappoint, the way people can.”
“Strange,” Anderson replied, “to find someone who says the things I think myself. . . . Yes, here you’re safe from people and disappointment.”
They fell in love. He was much older—around twenty-five to her fifteen. They talked about literature, quoting John Masefield’s poem “Sea-Fever” to each other. He was tall with a broad frame, prone to moody ruminations about the failings of civilization and the futility of life. Barbara was drawn to his darkness. His gritty, working-class life was romantic to her, in part no doubt because she had never had to live it. Anderson knew better, reminding her that such harshness could wear you away. He had hacked his way through Arctic ice sheets and sailed all over the Pacific, and though he complained about it, it seemed the only life for him.
They sailed together for a month before they arrived in Washington State. By then it was July. Barbara and Helen stayed with him for a week aboard the empty ship docked at Gray’s Harbor. The three of them would have cherry and ice cream parties on the empty deck and then walk in the forest to eat wild berries. The young lovers separated at the end of the week when Helen sent Barbara to guardians in California. Shortly thereafter Barbara ran away. Could Anderson have been the “we” that Barbara referenced in her runaway letter to her mother?
The relationship continued when Barbara and her mother moved to New York. She and Anderson exchanged letters religiously. Anderson comforted her during those dreadful days when she worked the office job and felt everything she had dreamed of—the sea, an adventurous life—slipping from her grasp.
“One could starve to death on an enviable job—for mountain wind, for stars among pine trees, or the call of a wood-thrush to his mate,” she wrote. The typewriter that had once set her imagination free now became an instrument of menial labor. Going from being the darling child genius novelist to a secretary must have been a blow. “Oh, oh,” she wrote to Alice, “in N.Y. the moths feed on the wings of your soul.”
“Anderson is marvellous,” she wrote. “Honestly, I don’t see how I could possibly get along without his twice—and sometimes thrice—weekly communications: all done in the best Andersonian manner, and never less than two pages in length. He is—a rock.” He was loyal and supportive, everything she felt her father was not. His letters reminded her that their life at sea was not so far off.
When she came home from the office, she worked on Lost Island. The love interest in Lost Island, Davidson, was based on Anderson. In the book, Davidson represents an escape from a humdrum office job, the promise of a life of adventure. Barbara’s dread about her life in New York, her desire for something that would make her heart thump in her chest, was steadily building. At night, she tossed and turned for hours. She had been at the job for nearly two years when she met Nick and began hatching her Appalachian Trail plan.
Anderson’s role in her life was mostly symbolic. Over those two years, they hardly saw each other and one of his letters reveals they never had sex. To Barbara, Anderson was more of an idea than an actual person.
In time, the long distance began to wear on them. Barbara wondered about his constantly roving, seafaring life. She wrote to Alice, “His life is odd and stern—verging on tragic, at times.” In July, she began her hike on the Appalachian Trail with Nick. She broke it off with Anderson in a letter soon after. Anderson wrote back calling Nick “Dartmouth,” a slur perhaps meant to remind her that Ivy boys are not true adventurers. “You are life and adventure itself,” he wrote, “and you’re completely wasted on anything else.”
“You see Bar, I knew ever so long ago that you wanted more than just one life; the ‘restlessly sampling’ you speak of was too obvious, even for a man in love to avoid seeing.” He went on to advise her: “All of us wish more than one life and the great art of it is in blending the many lives into one.” A life with Nick, a well-educated man, offered more security, but Anderson knew security wasn’t really what she was after. She needed a roving life, like the one she would have with him. She wouldn’t have to pick an island if she stayed with him. She could have all the islands. He signed his letter, “I want you, A.”
Barbara continued to think of Anderson after her marriage to Nick, dedicating her novel Lost Island to him even though she finished it the year she got married. In 1935, a year after she got married, she wrote to him. They had not exchanged words in over two years, since she hiked the Appalachian Trail with Nick. Now sett
led in Brookline, trapped in another office job with a long married life before her, she was feeling a little restless, though it’s not clear she told him this. Anderson wrote a long letter back. “I think I’m the biggest fool in creation. Whatever it was went wrong, I know I was almost entirely to blame.” He wasn’t married and was still working the same job. “As for escape, I’ve learned a lot about that too. There is no escape for those who think they need it.” Then in the middle of the letter, without warning, he wrote, “I’m still in love with you.”
Anderson’s devotion may have been appealing in the face of Nick’s infidelity. He had made a prediction about Nick when Barbara wrote to him from the trail to say she was choosing Nick over him: “I do not say you may tire, but what of him, may he not. With me it might be harder, but more lasting, I know.” From the beginning, Anderson had set up a dichotomy between himself and Nick. Anderson was offering a life of adventure. Nick was offering a life of stability. Anderson had implored her, “Put on your cap and coat and come West.”