I’d steel myself for that and try to be as honest as I felt would be useful to my love’s widow, whom I cared about simply for the fact that I’d loved Emerson always, and this was the woman he’d chosen to love, to share his life with, and to bring two beautiful children into the world with, and so a part of me loved her, too. I had no feelings for her one way or another—the love I felt was a compassion for her and empathy for how bereft she must feel. I had seen how Em had clearly loved her when he showed me her photograph, how he lingered on her image with what I knew to be love and admiration and pride. I also knew what a compelling man, and father, he surely was. You saw it when he walked into a room—it was just always that way. And now he never would walk into any room at all. How does a woman live through that loss? And surely whatever difficulties they’d been having, which he’d only alluded to, were now moot because of his death, and she would reflect on only the good parts of their relationship. Perhaps regret over things said—one never knows. Perhaps they’d had a terrible fight the night he died and she felt responsible. I couldn’t know.
Nor could I linger in this home and strike up conversations, let alone tell stories about the Emerson who was eighteen and his best self, the Emerson who was kind and ambitious and smart and talented, imbued with unfulfilled but certain promise, and so beautiful. You simply wanted to stop him right there, to stop time. You are so beautiful. A lily of a day. Is it beautiful because it dies young? Can true living beauty endure or must it die to be beautiful?
I had to keep my mind from cranking like this for about twenty-four hours, try not to think about anything until I knew what Collista had to say, and hear how she might answer my questions. And why did I say what I did? Did I think the truth would help? Maybe, now that it was done. I did love him, after all. I said what I did partly because I wanted to help her. If his death was a mystery to her, perhaps knowing would help. Did I simply want to unburden myself, confess and save my own soul? What was done was done. As ever, I would play it as it lies tomorrow.
First thing I did was find a shopping mall, the Grove, it was called, to buy another dress that might obscure my form. I’d brought only this one decent outfit. Beyond that I had only comfortable traveling clothes, jeans and a clean shirt for tomorrow, and it was just large enough to button around my belly but showed that I was preggers and not fat.
I’ve never been a shopper—get in and get out is my shopping motto—but I’d never shopped with such purpose before, and having hours to kill, I took my time. The Grove was a new outdoor mall, pleasant for walking. I found a dark brown linen dress that hung smock-like over my form—it went with my hair, which had just started to gray, and my brown eyes, and generally accentuated my plainness (a description that I don’t mean in a self-deprecating way at all—once Emerson was gone for good, I’d always considered it an asset; I wasn’t one to want to be noticed). The only thing that didn’t go were the black flats; they would have to do as I wasn’t about to spend more money on shoes I didn’t need—I’d worn my old Jack Purcells on the plane, which go fine with the jeans but would look goofy beneath six inches of bare shin and a dress. I bought an inexpensive black brooch (in the form of a snake to remind me of home!) hoping to tie it all together, and I also bought a black ribbon to tie my hair back.
I returned to the hotel at 3 p.m., tired and intent on keeping my body on East Coast time. I read by the hotel’s pool beneath an umbrella.
The Kindle app of all things. For my birthday, Don had bought me an iPad. I thought it was a joke. We work with rare books and manuscripts, hard copies. More than that, he knew my love of books as physical objects. When he said, “You need to be aware of the way our world, our particular reading world, is changing. And that boy you’re carrying is more likely than not to be carrying not only his novels but his Psych 101 textbook on it as well, if not his Grey’s Anatomy and OED.”
(Well before I’d begun to show, I told Don the news. He was the only non-family member I’d told about the pregnancy and the only person I’d confided the whole story to. He’d known Emerson had been a student here, recognized the uncommon first name, from the Blackmore letters. Don is an archivist, and therefore a very discreet secret keeper; I knew I could trust him: the back story of my days at Duke with Em, the unexpected tryst on the night he, Don, had surprised me with his question. I owed him that much, I figured. It also helped me just to talk it out. He’s such a dear man, all concern for me—after the shock, followed by his confession that he’d been hanging on to the hope that I might one day reconsider his offer and how this pretty much did him in. I asked his forgiveness and he gave me a sweet, chaste hug and then took me to Magnolia Grill, long considered the best in the city, for dinner, where we continued to talk.)
I resisted the iPad for a week, leaving it on the kitchen table, and passing it the way one passes a rabid skunk. But Don had already downloaded my favorite novels, Lolita and The Great Gatsby, to ensure that I’d give the electronic reader a whirl. I reread those books on a regular basis.
Within the hour I’d finished—devoured, more like—Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. Patchett was already one of my favorites, but when I read the plot on the jacket in Duke’s Gotham bookstore, a medical story (I was obsessed with medicine now), woman doctors, and a hunt for an older doctor who’d disappeared in the Amazon searching for a drug to extend women’s fertility? Sold!
It was over all too quickly there by the pool at the Standard, and I had nothing else loaded.
I wasn’t in the mood for the Russian genius, and Gatsby … I could not bear, and doubt that I’d ever read it again, period.
How Emerson had idolized Fitzgerald. Dangerously so. I remember Blackmore and me discussing this his senior year (I was working for Duke by then and he knew of our friendship, knew Emerson always gave me first drafts before they reached his eyes). Blackmore told me, as a warning he knew I’d pass on to Emerson, that while Fitzgerald did indeed write great novels, and some prose unequaled in beauty, still, there could not be a worse model for an aspiring writer: a “sentimental, insecure drunk.” I remember the words exactly because Blackmore spoke like this, “who’d ruined the instrument of his talent by age forty and was dead on the darkest night of the year four years later.”
Remembering Blackmore’s words gave me pause, there by the blue pool and overlooking the Hollywood where Fitzgerald had died, that Emerson had died at the same age but had not published a single novel. He had written for film and television very successfully, though, I say in sad defense, something Fitzgerald had tried but failed at. It was probably Hollywood that killed him. “Poor bastard.”
I’d read The Great Gatsby in high school, but it failed to move me. It was nicely done, but I didn’t get how that slim book remained one of the great American novels and a commercial bestseller (though out of print when he died, alas). I saw not a single appealing character. Nick I picture as a flabby pale cipher, Tom an ass, Daisy a twit, Jordan a stuck-up bitch who cheats. At least Gatsby had ambition for something, but for what? For Daisy, after only one or two dates? I just didn’t buy any of it.
Until Emerson read it aloud to me, one long lovely spring morning and afternoon, near the end of his senior year.
Yes, read it aloud, the whole thing in one go, ending at dusk. He had it open on one of those lovely mornings when I woke to find him still in my bed. He would soon be lying on the Plaza fountain in Manhattan dreaming of Gatsby, stone drunk and not working, but his reading of it to me that long Sunday afternoon was one of the best literary experiences—one of the best days, period—of my life.
“How, how can you not like this?!” he said, forcing me awake.
I rolled off his chest onto my back, blinking. “I never said I didn’t like it, I like it.” Then I yawned and stretched. “I just never saw what the fuss was about.”
And then he read the first sentence—“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since”—and it
was like someone turned on the music behind the words. I said nothing. I knew Emerson would keep reading because I knew he liked the sound of his own voice, rich and clear, subtly theatrical when he desired. I just listened until he finished the last sentence of the first chapter: “When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”
He closed the book. He stared at the ceiling.
I said, “Okay.”
“O-kay?” He shook his head in disappointed wonder.
“Okay, as in, okay, I’m listening,” I said.
He brightened like a child just given permission to ride the roller coaster one more time.
“On one condition,” I said. “You let me pee, and you get us both coffee.”
He was a senior, I worked at the East Campus library and lived a block away at the corner of Onslow and Green, in a house I rented with my forever pals Sterly and Amanda. It was a ramshackle bungalow with a lovely front porch. I slept in a downstairs room right off the porch, so when Emerson came calling, as he often did, it was less hazardous than it had been four years earlier. He really did come in through the window on this occasion. He was most welcome. I hadn’t seen him in a few months, and maybe that’s why he stayed rather than bolt like the backdoor man he often was—he missed me, I’m guessing all these years later.
One of the best literary experiences of my life, honestly. I lay propped in bed with coffee, and he alternately paced or sat at my desk. During longer prose sections, he paced, waving his right index finger like a wand conducting the orchestra of Fitzgerald’s prose. During dialogue, he sat, and gave just enough tonal change in the voices that I could distinguish between Nick and Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan, but not so much that he sounded affected. Listening to him read this way, conveying his own personal love of the language directly to me, that was what was thrilling. Like I was mainlining his love for the language.
After concluding chapter three, he closed the book.
I said, “No.”
He grinned wide. “What are you doing today?”
“Listening to you finish this story, I hope.”
“Really?”
“Are you kidding me? This is a pleasure.”
“Fix us some eggs, would you?”
I had a can of corned beef hash, which he loved with an egg on top and tons of pepper and hot sauce.
After breakfast, he read chapters four through seven on our porch with more hot coffee, me on the swing, him perched on the rail, leaning against a post (he was always perching, he liked to perch in odd places—in stairwells, on stone walls, thinking, pondering, often crouched as if ready to spring). He occasionally stood to pace the porch and keep the orchestra on its toes as it were. The occasional dog walker lingered to listen, but no one whom we knew came or went, and so we were undisturbed through chapter seven, the day and night of the car accident.
By then we needed a break. He took a quick shower and, hair unbrushed and dripping, he was out the door, promising to be back before I was out of the shower (he knew I liked to take my time).
When I appeared, towel wrapped around me, combing out my hair, he showed me what he’d got. Biscuits and mustard and ham and some good cheese and two bottles of cold wine. “We’re having a picnic, on the lawn behind the art building. I’ll finish there.”
I found a quilt and we strolled the block to the back edge of East Campus, and there he finished. So go read that book now, if you haven’t already, so you know what I’m trying to convey. Some of the most beautiful sentences ever composed, uttered by the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen. Also know now how desperately I long to be borne back into that past, that singular day.
Light was fading by the time he finished—“borne back ceaselessly into the past”—one bottle of wine gone, and we sat and ate the biscuits and ham and cheese in the dusk, having brought some votive candles in the wrinkled paper bag, and we finished the wine. I don’t recall what we talked about—story, writing, craft, he liked to talk about craft and other writers’ lives. I do remember a few things that followed. We returned and he actually stayed. I think it was the only time we spent two consecutive nights together after he broke up with me his freshman year. I remember that we fell asleep watching Casablanca in my bed. And I remember, oh how I remember, that only when he was asleep, well before the usual suspects could be rounded up, how only then did it dawn on me that, for the past four years, I’d found a bunch of daisies on my bed every Valentine’s Day. That first rainy February when we were actually dating, and every year that he was in Durham since, and one year after that. I should have known then, that day, what they meant, but I didn’t, and so I wasn’t sad when they stopped coming, because by then he was gone. Maybe I should’ve been, maybe I should’ve realized it for the death that it actually was. I didn’t know at the time what I know now, what I realized only in thinking about that day he read The Great Gatsby to me—why the daisies! He did love me.
When I woke the next morning, after that long Sunday reading The Great Gatsby, and most of Casablanca, he was gone, and I didn’t see him for three weeks, a week before graduation.
*
Anyway. That’s the reason, seated at the pool at the Standard, twenty-two years later, I could not reread The Great Gatsby. Even though there it was on my iPad.
Now, here’s the other cool part about these new devices. I had just been in the Amazon jungle—in the Patchett novel, no pun intended—and had liked being there, so I thought of the best jungle story there was, one of my favorites, Heart of Darkness. When I searched for it, I was able to download it for free and start reading in seconds, without even leaving my chair. I took a moment to be properly amazed and page through it a little ways, then dug in.
Midway through—it’s a novella, a one-sitting read—I ate another burger in the diner, followed by a vanilla malt, then I headed to my room, finished it, and turned out my light.
It was only when I woke, 4:30 again, that I realized a maybe meaningful coincidence. Heart of Darkness is a tale-within-a-tale deal: Marlow, the narrator telling the story of the corruption of Kurtz, the darkness at the heart of men’s souls and all, a little gimmicky now but it works in the time Conrad was writing. The account ends with Marlow traveling back to Europe, the civilized world, to tell the Intended, the woman who was to be Kurtz’s wife, of Kurtz’s death. And he tells this colossal lie. Kurtz’s last words, famously (especially after Coppola’s Apocalypse Now), were “The horror, the horror.” But instead, Marlow lies and tells the elegant white European woman in her well-appointed apartment, far from the jungle, he tells her that the last word Kurtz uttered was her name. Otherwise, he reasons, it would have been too dark altogether. Appropriate for the time Conrad was writing in, as I said, but now? I don’t think so. It dawned on me, lying awake that morning in the actual, not symbolic, darkness, that I was on a similar errand. I had no idea what Collista was going to ask me or what she wanted to discuss regarding her dead husband, but I told myself that whatever she threw at me, I was going to tell the truth. Not about the baby. That would be too much, but rather the affair, and why, and maybe try to understand or convince her of the rightness of it, rather than the wrongness, how it had confirmed his love for her, as it surely had, since he had not contacted me, our connection severed, both of us keeping our word. Maybe I was just deluded. Could my own thoughts even be trusted?
Two
Dressed as described, uncommonly nervous, I lifted the tarnished brass knocker and gave three solid raps. I waited at least a minute, maybe longer because I was starting to think it rude since I’d arrived at just two minutes after eleven. Collista opened the door, wearing a blue Oxford cloth shirt hanging untucked over skinny-girl jeans, bare feet, hair brushed but not done up. I saw in her eyes the reason for the delay: she’d been crying and hadn’t completely composed herself.
“Hi, Grimsley, come in, please forgive me.”
I remember following her into the kitchen where she got me ice water
—my mouth was so dry from nerves, my tongue had to peel away from the palate when I spoke—poured herself black coffee, and led us to the living room. We did not remain in the easy kitchen or sit outside, though the day was warm and perfect. This was to be a formal conversation.
She led me to an upholstered chair, waved palm up to it, for me to sit. She sat at the edge of the couch, directly across from me, set her coffee on the coffee table that separated us. She set a coaster at the far edge from her, beside an orchid, for my water, but I hung on to the glass like a buoy.
She didn’t look at me, exhaled brusquely. “This has all happened so quickly. I’m still not myself.”
“I’m not sure you ever will be.”
She looked at me, startled.
“What I mean to say is that I know that Emerson loved you. When I saw him last spring he showed me your picture and it was clear from the way he looked at it. I can see from your grief you loved him, deeply. He was the father of your beautiful children. The old you went with him. It’s a life-changing loss and you need to work your way to who you’re going to be next, find your next best self, for your children and for yourself.”
I said this partly because I knew it to be true when you lose a partner of those many years—my mom had been that close to me—but I was also, selfishly, trying to circumvent any direct questions about his May visit.
“Wow,” she said. “I’m going to have to think about that one.” She took a sip of coffee, set it back down, then looked dead hard into my eyes and said, “Why I’ve asked you here.”
“I do admit to being anxious about this. What do you need to know from me?” Well, there it was, hadn’t thought, just spoke and opened myself right up, and she fired truly.
“What happened last spring? What happened at Duke?”
I felt completely paralyzed in a way I’ve never felt before. Don’t play dumb, my instincts told me, and don’t delay, out with it. “What do you mean?” I asked. Okay, dumb, delay.
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