“That’s ridiculous. Seriously, this all made sense to you?”
“Oh yeah. If I had come back then, I would have blown it all. Everything.”
He sat up now and turned to the side so he was leaning against the log post on the side of the porch. And he watched her where she lay, her hands folded on her chest, fingers interlaced. She closed her eyes, but she could feel him watching her.
“Over time, my shame began to fade, but then came a sense of numbness. Sort of like I described to you in the tree house, but so much more. So much deeper.” He took a deep breath, an exhale. “That’s when I met Clara.”
“Your wife.”
“My wife.”
Olivine opened her eyes and looked to him. He squared his shoulders and held her gaze. “Clara had all the emotions for me. She let me hide. She let me hide behind her and her emotions, which…” he laughed and said, “are larger than life. She made things easy because she took over. And at the time I didn’t care. She told me how I was feeling and she told other people how I was feeling. And that’s exactly what I needed then. As unhealthy as it probably was.”
“And that’s not what you need now?”
“No. Clara and I…We don’t need one another in the same way. She loves me, but she doesn’t know me. She is so full of her life that she couldn’t ever let mine in, once I began to heal. Not even enough to listen to what I want and need now.” His voice became suddenly quiet. “I have a wife who doesn’t know the real me…who doesn’t accept him. And then there is you. Who accepted me even at my worst. My most shameful.”
The wind chimes gonged, and she took a moment to take in his words. To allow them to cast new light on the things she knew to be true.
“How long have you been married, then?”
“Eight years.”
“Eight years?”
“Yes, Olivine, and now I… I have forgiven myself. I have healed. And now I find that I resent her for telling me who am I and what I feel. More than you can imagine. But she can’t change. She has proven that. We have worked on it and worked on it. And, honestly, she has moved on. She has fallen in love with another man whom she can tell where to work and what to do. Do you see? This is what I needed, once. So I could hide. But it’s not what I need now.”
“So were you ever happy with her? With Clara.” She forced herself to say his wife’s name.
“For a time I was. Or maybe just content. I was content to be numb. Clara helped me in a way that no one else could at the time. And, for that, I’ll always love her. But it was the very fact that I felt so detached from her…that’s what made it work. I never felt a sense of responsibility. She didn’t judge my emotions but she also never asked me to explain myself. She never asked me how I felt about certain things.” He put his hand to his head, rubbed his scalp, and then slid his hand down to the back of his neck. Again, his bicep exposed, white. Blue veins running up and down.
“But you,” Henry continued, “you don’t have to ask because you know. When I’m with you, I feel like I have met myself. A reflection of me. A part of me. It’s something I can’t explain and something I have spent ten years trying to tell myself I had made up. Something that naïve part of me had concocted. But I hadn’t. It’s stronger than ever. I felt it as soon as I saw you. The other night, at the house.” Henry looked her straight in the eyes. “It was my own cowardice that ruined things, Olivine. But I’m not a coward anymore.”
“So why did you marry her? Marriage is…marriage. I mean, before you said, ‘I do,’ why didn’t you come to find me?”
“I thought I had made you up. The intensity of the emotion. I had convinced myself of this. And there was this thing in front of me, which made perfect sense, logically, at least. Me, a carpenter; a builder of homes. She, an architect. She taking charge and helping me to not feel. To just go along. I was in hiding, in many ways, from myself.” He took a deep breath and continued. “When you are suffering and someone comes along and witnesses you, in this wide, wide world where you feel like you are just floating from place to place, and this person helps you to just establish a point of contact, a focal point so you don’t get so dizzy as you spin out of control. This, she taught me, is what a family can do. And, at certain times, this is all you need. And as time went on, it felt more and more unfair to come and find you.” He paused. “But that’s not all of it. That’s not the reason we married…Clara has a son. From a previous relationship. And it’s a son I love very much. And she wouldn’t allow me to spend time with her, on a serious level, without marriage. She didn’t want me to be with her and with Max as a family without committing to them. She didn’t want me to be the guy who just sleeps over.”
Olivine’s breath caught, and she swallowed hard.
And then he spoke again: “To be fair, Olivine, you never came to find me, either.”
“No, you’re right. I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Well, first, it doesn’t sound like it would have made a difference.”
“But that doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t do it. You didn’t try either, Olivine. Never in those ten years did you look for me. You could have found me. You knew my home town. My first and last name.”
“Do you know what?” she said, “I felt rejected. Tossed out. I guess I was insecure. Too insecure to chase you. Though, honestly, my sister told me, for a couple of years there, that I needed to go and find you.”
“And it was insecurity that stopped you, even after a couple of years had passed?”
“Insecurity and pride.” The word came out, without her thinking about it. “I was so devastated when you left, but you had rejected me. I vowed long ago never to be one of those pining women who throw their lives away for a man. Who sit there and watch and wait for a man to come home. So I swept you out of my mind. I went on. I decided that you were not what you said you were. I decided you had fooled me, and then I dismissed you from my thoughts.”
“Just like that?”
“On the surface, yes. Deep down, I thought about you every day, along with a dose of self-flagellation regarding the fact that I was, in fact, pining for a man who could allow me to make love to him, and then – the next morning – after sharing something so intimate, to the point that it shook me to my core; made me believe in love; made me understand what people mean when they say they entered into another person…The next morning, he left. That person left me.” Olivine paused. “I was too proud to pine for you. So I protected my heart a bit more. In fact, I credit you for helping me to develop this rather remarkable ability to turn off my emotions…or to shove them deep inside.”
He nodded. “And now?” he asked.
“Now I know nothing.”
“Yes, you do.” He smiled at her.
“I know.”
They sat for a moment, still, and listened to the wind in the trees.
“So you can turn off your emotions?” he said, after a time.
“I can. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I have these emotions, or little ambitions for myself, and I can go along and never tell anyone. Over time, I can convince even myself that they aren’t there.”
“Doesn’t this drive a wedge between you and other people?”
“Oh, most definitely.” She laughed.
“With Paul?”
Hearing Paul’s name coming from Henry’s mouth felt strange. “I’m not sure Paul cares. He doesn’t care enough to dig, if that makes sense.” And she knew, as soon as she said it, that this wasn’t fair. She had never expected Paul to dig. She had never wanted Paul to dig. “Paul knows what Paul wants,” Olivine explained. “And Paul knows what Paul wants for me. And that, I’m coming to understand, is the end of it.” She paused for a moment. “Sometimes I feel like I have a little garden patch, deep inside myself, which is my very own. I plant just one thing at a time in there…only things that are very, very important to me. But If I let people in there, I find that they trample things. They make fun of something
or pull something up by the roots or they walk right over the top and don’t realize what they are doing. And so I learned to put a tiny fence around it.” She laughed softly to herself. “At first, I was concerned that people would be curious about what was in there, deep inside. About what I was hiding, but I soon came to discover that no one cares that much. They don’t care that you have a little fence, or a special little garden. So you really don’t have to tell anyone what you are planting.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Henry said. “At some point, you realize that no one would listen anyway, if you were to tell them all about what was going on in there, and so you keep it inside. It becomes yours, and no one else’s, and at that point, it is safe. You become the hero, the owner of that tiny patch, that tiny garden, in that tiny fence.”
“Exactly.” Olivine sat up now, one leg bent, her arm resting on her knee.
And then Henry said, “But what if you found someone who did care? Who not only cared about what you were growing, but also understood that you didn’t care to show it off. Someone who waited patiently outside until you decided that you wanted to let him in? Someone who would listen when you said you were ready to show what you were planting. Someone who would understand if you said you would like him to stay outside that day. Someone who understood what it was like to need to keep people out from time to time. And someone who would let you in, too, when the time was right? Someone who cared, but also who didn’t barge in and trample.”
She smiled as a response, but she couldn’t look at him, because she wanted, more than anything, to move her face toward his, to feel his lips press against her own, to feel the warmth of his body against hers.
“That’s who you are to me, Olivine. In my memory. You accept me. You acknowledge and believe the goodness in me. And I want to do the same for you.”
Olivine’s heart swelled, and Henry continued: “I think these fenced-in spaces you talk about…I think they are vital to the world. In fact, I think that they just may be responsible for all the art that exists…everywhere. Someone—an artist—goes inside, really deep down in there, and they look around and it’s bleating red and pounding in there. And they emerge with something and it's a little bit of them, fleshy and round. Something that no one else could really be privy to.”
“Yes!” She startled herself with the volume of her own voice. “That's why it's always so surprising to me when people can collaborate. When people go into a room together and write a book or a play. That's a level of intimacy that I could never grant someone. It's total access. Or else the art isn't very good.”
“Maybe it’s that level of intimacy that some of us just aren’t meant to grant,” Henry replied. “There are certain private places I would never ask to see, Olivine. But, if you were to grant me a tour, I would accept you and love you, no matter what was inside.”
They looked at one another steadily for a moment. Olivine could feel her face, her mouth, her lips moving in toward him as they sat on the cedar planks. She dropped her gaze. Henry continued, softly: “When I build my doors… when I etch and carve, I go in there. I go in there where it’s fleshy and round and red. Sometimes I need to stay in there.” He paused. “Clara could never accept that. She wanted to come in with me, and it ruined the art. Or, at least,” he said, laughing, “it ruined the fun. It ruined what made the art, the art.”
“And you can’t not make the art.”
“It doesn’t make sense, but when I’m not making things out of wood, I get panicky,” Henry said. “It hasn’t always been like this, but, lately, since I’ve discovered the importance of this simple thing, the power of going inside myself in this simple way, I feel like I’m wasting my life or I’m not being productive enough when I do anything else. I felt that way when I was building houses with Clara. Huge things were getting done each day. Together, we were churning out two ten-thousand square foot luxury homes every year. We had incredible success. We worked twenty-hour days, sometimes. But I still felt panicky. Like I wasn’t doing enough. “
“Like you weren’t sucking the juice out of life.”
“Exactly. And then when I stopped all that and I slowed way down and I started doing carpentry again. Real carpentry with old fashioned tools…Not the ones you can plug in, not the ones that whine and buzz, but the ones that make curls of wood on the floor and release the scent of cedar as I work…”
“The ones you pull from an old black tin…” Olivine said, thinking of her grandfather.
“Exactly! And when I get into a rhythm of my own, then I never think about it. I never worry that I have wasted an afternoon, though my productivity is a fraction of what it was. A tiny, tiny fraction.”
She sat cross-legged and leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “I’ve been feeling like that lately, Henry. It’s throat-clutching. It wakes me in the night. It’s a worry that I’m wasting my life. And I try to fill every moment with something. Still, I worry that life is passing me by, that I’m wasting the little bit of time that I have on this earth. I’m too young for a mid-life crisis—I know that, but it’s very real—and I think I solved this by deciding I needed to get married. That maybe it was this instinctual urge to have babies. To procreate.”
“That’s one way,” he said, “But it’s not the only way. I think you have to start by writing again. When was the last time you wrote?”
“Up until I started my nursing classes, I was writing every day.”
“Really?”
“I was a ghostwriter. Which I loved, but it didn’t pay a lot of bills, and Paul and I agreed it wasn’t very important. Though I always looked at it as practice. I would tell other people’s stories the best I could until I was practiced enough to write my own.”
“Okay. So you were typing up other people’s words and stories every day. But when was the last time you wrote something that only you could write? Something that required you to go deep inside, into your private garden patch, to enter your tiny gate at your tiny fence, and to pull something out? When was the last time you did that thing you do? Your art?”
“I’m not sure you could call it art. And you’ve never even read any of my writing. Not that kind of writing. The stuff that comes from deep inside.”
“I know. But I know you used to love it. And I know that it comes from you. And if it comes from you, then I know that it is real and it is honest and it is lovely.”
Tears came to her eyes, and she allowed them. She allowed them to rise up and to cloud her vision. “I haven’t written like that in a while,” she said. “But some of it can be...dark.”
“Good. Then you know it’s honest and real. Besides, I like the dark you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. From what I remember the entire package tasted like raspberries. Light. Dark. The center in between.”
She was silent for a moment. “So you think I should write again,” she said, after a beat.
“I’ve learned to never start a sentence with ‘you should,’” he replied. “But I think art is the only thing that truly gives you a break from this life.”
She nodded. “I remember that, when I was writing, when I was spending an afternoon just sitting there and recording the actions and the conversations of people who have never existed outside of my own imagination, I completely entered a zone, and, when I was finished, I emerged as though I had been to Mars. I would spin around and act all happy. I remember that.”
“It’s the ultimate refreshment. Better than tea. Better than booze. Better than everything. Well, nearly everything.”
Olivine began talking, quickly now: “When I was a kid and I created stories, I used to believe I was actually being transported to a different place, a realm where these things actually happened to me. And when I wanted to go home again, I imagined that I could snap my fingers, and this simple action would bookmark me in that place, so I could return precisely to where I left off. And in that place, I could be on a trapeze, or in a canoe, or standing up on bike pedals
, with the wind whistling in my face. And I didn’t ever know what I was going to do next. But I could do anything.”
She remembered, then, what it felt like to just relax and to start talking. To talk about things that were important to her, without a fear of judgment or reproach. To talk to someone she could trust. Someone with whom she could enjoy even the gaps between words.
In the early days with Paul, he would leave for work and she knew he would be gone for at least ten hours and so she would just sit, maybe listening to the tumble of the dryer and the click of her fingertips on the keyboard. That soft and gentle rhythm. It was difficult, at times, to shift out of the quiet mind, to return to the real world, but she needed that time alone with her writing like she needed water or food.
One day, Paul had come home and, before she could close out the window on her computer, he had stood behind her and he had read aloud what she had written. He read it in a high voice, sing-songy and mocking. He had read what come straight out of her soul—the unedited part, the product of her red and bleating center—before it was meant to be read, and he had ridiculed it. First she was shocked that someone who so closely guarded his own privacy would do this, and then the hurt came. It took her breath away for a moment, and when she turned to look at him, he understood what he had done. He had tried to take it back. He had said he just wanted to know what she had done all day while he was at work. And she had nodded toward him and said it was okay. But she knew, with certainty, that she would never trust him with the deepest part of her. Sometime after that, she had stopped writing.
And then a shard of memory from she and Henry, ten years before. They had been standing in an art gallery, and she was feeling kind and funny and desirable, the way Henry always made her feel. Loose and real. And she had made a joke about something, off the cuff. She couldn’t even remember what it was, but she had said it to the gallery owner, who had been standing there in pressed white cotton with his arms crossed, and the gallery owner chuckled, and she heard Henry laugh behind her, and she turned to Henry, and he was looking at her in his way: with deep admiration, his eyes luminous and bright. No man had ever looked at her like that, besides, perhaps, her own father when she was very young. And she decided then that this should be every young woman’s goal when it came to love: To find a man who would look at her like that. It had created a tickling sensation deep in her belly, and it had made her stomach lurch like she was going up, up, up and over something steep and splashy.
The One Who Got Away: A Novel Page 16