Will North

by Water, Stone, Heart (v5)

  Andrew stopped dead in the middle of the street and stared at her.

  “Affair?”

  Phyllis blanched and clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Oh my God! You don't know, do you?” She sounded like someone being strangled.

  In a moment, she recovered and tugged him to a bench. There were tourists everywhere.

  “Look, it's a guy she met at the climbing gym,” she whispered, “a fat-cat lawyer. That's what I hear, anyway. Somebody saw them playing kissyface outside the art museum a few weeks ago.”

  She took one of his hands in both of hers. “Oh, ducks, I'm so sorry.…”

  He looked around the square. He'd always loved the old colonial part of Philadelphia—the brick, the stone, the history. But none of it gave him comfort on this day.

  Phyllis leaned across the bench and kissed him on the cheek, then pulled him to his feet. “Come on, you; I have an idea. I see you've got goodies, most notably wine, in that shopping bag. We're going to my place.”

  Andrew didn't resist. Like an automaton, he followed the rhythmic click of her heels on the bricks. He glanced behind him and was surprised he wasn't trailing blood.

  Phyllis Lieberman's elegant apartment on Spruce Street had the same sensual warmth as the woman herself. The walls in the foyer and the living room were painted the color of antique gold leaf. The plush upholstered couch and chairs were covered in thick, ivory linen and scattered with ornate pillows in black, chocolate, and leopard-skin prints. Gauzy white linen drapes pooled on the polished pine floors like trains on bridal gowns. A fan of the American Impressionists, she had a limpid Childe Hassam seascape in a thick gold frame above the black marble Victorian mantel opposite the couch. He couldn't imagine how she'd afforded it. The only primary color in the place was a huge vase of scarlet-tipped lilies on a glass-topped coffee table, so thick with fragrance you almost felt drugged. There was a zebra-skin rug beneath the coffee table.

  She led him into an all-white kitchen.

  “Sit,” Phyllis commanded, gesturing to a stool beneath a marble counter. She laid out the smoked meats, added a sliced baguette and some cheese, then pulled the cork on the first bottle of Shiraz. She filled two big balloon glasses almost to the lip, and then leaned across the counter, deliberately displaying the very generous cleavage revealed by her scoop-necked, black silk T-shirt. “Here is how we are going to spend the afternoon, mister. I am going to feed you with your own food and ply you with your own wine and you will become happy. There will be no arguing about this. You will remember this day as one filled with love, not loss.” She flashed him an utterly lascivious smile. Andrew just shook his head in disbelief and accepted the first of what were to be many glasses of wine. They clinked glasses.

  “L'chaim!” Phyllis said.

  “What's that mean?”

  “To life, you idiot; yours has just begun again.”

  But why did it feel like it had just ended?

  Andrew climbed high up the west slope of the Valency valley. A side stream cut across the footpath he'd been following as it raced downhill. He picked his way across stepping-stones and then stopped to take in the view. Over the eons, the almost infinitesimal friction of water slipping over stone had cut a winding channel deep into the surrounding plateau. At the outer edge of the sharpest curves, he could see where seasonal floods had chewed away at the friable slate bedrock, creating bluffs. Away to the east, the hills were patterned with neat, green fields. Here and there a cluster of stone farm buildings laid claim to the land. A distant single-lane macadam road with occasional wider passing places—looking a bit like an anaconda that had swallowed several pigs—wound down the opposite side of the valley, plunged right through the shallow river at the bottom, and slithered up the other side. And for as far as he could see, the fields were defined by ancient stone walls, some ramrod straight, others sinuous. It was as if the landscape had been stitched, the walls the warp and weft knitting the disparate parts into a coherent whole. There wasn't a single square foot of the world before him, he realized, that hadn't been shaped by the hand of man. But here, unlike so much of the landscape back home, that hand had brought beauty, not blight, to the land.

  He was thinking that Phyllis would like this world, with its sensuous hills and valleys. When he'd let himself out of her apartment late that evening, months ago, she was fast asleep on the couch. There had been kissing. There had been caressing. There had been sweet words of caring and solace. But while Andrew had a prodigious ability to absorb alcohol without getting drunk, Phyllis did not; she'd passed out. He'd put a pillow under her head, covered her with a cashmere throw, and gone home. He had been sober enough to know he had no business having sex with anyone that day—maybe ever—especially a colleague from the university. He felt radioactive. He felt that in the dark, he would blink on and off—LOUSY HUSBAND—like a neon sign in the window of some disreputable corner bar.

  Andrew had had no idea, not the faintest inkling, how to respond to Katerina's attack the day she left. He should have said something, he thought—and yet it was clear she really wasn't interested in a response. It was as if she was that famous plane in World War II, the Enola Gay: Drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and fly home. Don't look back at the destruction.

  Even if she had stayed, though, he had to admit he wouldn't have known what to say. In his stiff-upper-lip New England Presbyterian family, feelings were neither expressed nor discussed—not in his presence, anyway. He couldn't remember a single display of emotion—either affection or anger—between his parents. He'd read enough as an adult to know that feeling pain was natural and that expressing emotion was only human, and yet he'd had no practice in either.

  If he hurt himself as a child, his father would check him for damage, brush him off, pat his shoulder, and shoo him away with a hearty “You're fine, lad; off you go.” His mother's perennial response to any of his personal tragedies was “Don't worry; it'll be better before you're married” or, if her Irish Catholic roots were in the ascendant that day and overcame her Presbyterian reserve, “Offer it up, son”—as in, offer up the pain to God and get on with it.

  So that's what he did after Kat left: He offered it up and got on with things.

  Except that things didn't go well. It wasn't just that he felt shell-shocked by the breakup; that would have been handicap enough. But his work seemed to have hit a brick wall as well. He had been researching what he believed would be an important contribution to his field: a book he was calling “The Anatomy of Livable Places.” One summer when he was in grad school, he'd hitchhiked across Europe and been captivated by the way hill towns in Italy or Spain, or fishing communities in Greece, or villages in rural England, seemed to possess a kind of wholeness, a certain harmony of form and material, the result of which was that they made you feel “at home,” even if you didn't live there. These places settled into him, into his bones, and years later, while he was wrestling with the problem of the increasing soullessness of American communities, the comforting livability of those places came back to him. And an idea grew.

  Andrew was convinced that if you could deconstruct that feeling of livability, of “home-ness,” if you could identify its component parts and understand how they worked together, you could design new communities with the same comforting character. The older he got and the more he observed the built environment around him, the more convinced he became. The subject had become his passion. He'd already written and published several papers on it.

  There were certain components of livability he thought were obvious. Most places that felt livable seldom had a building more than three or four stories high, so the scale wasn't dehumanizing the way it was in many American cities, where builders seemed to think bigger and higher was synonymous with better. Also, the buildings in livable communities tended to be clustered together companionably, with breathing space provided by small squares or plazas. They also tended to have what Andrew called “public living rooms”—coffee shops, outdoor cafés, o
r pubs, for example, where people gathered to chat or simply watch the world go by. He noticed that livable places had a sort of structural honesty, too. Typically, they were constructed of local materials—stucco-coated stone in Spain or Italy; granite, limestone, local brick, or slate in England; native wood in Scandinavia or New England. As a result, such places looked as if they had grown organically from the ground, rather than having been imposed upon it.

  It was characteristics such as these, Andrew believed, that created that evanescent sense of rightness, of feeling at home, of welcome, of belonging. And it was the absence of these same characteristics that made many American neighborhoods, subdivisions, and entire communities so cold and uninviting. “Placeless” was the word he used.

  But his editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press didn't get it. “If you're trying to define what ‘home’ means, why are you looking in Europe, for God's sake? You're an American!” To Andrew, the answer was personal and visceral: He'd never felt at home in America. Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, he'd known few of his family's neighbors. And to do anything—shop, go out to eat, see a movie—you had to get into a car. There weren't even sidewalks in some of the subdivisions around him, as if, in the real-estate developers' theory of evolution, they'd become as vestigial as the tails we lost when we evolved away from monkeys. The result, for Andrew at least, was a profound sense of alienation, a sense of not belonging to the place he was from.

  But there was another problem with his project, too: His department chairman didn't think the subject of his research was sufficiently “professional”—which meant it flirted with the real concerns of everyday people. In academia, that was the kiss of death. The more he argued with his editor and his chairman, the more he felt like he was banging his head against a wall. His gut told him he was onto something, but Andrew had very little experience in trusting his gut.

  Still, he had his champions, and steadfast, candid Phyllis was one of them. When Andrew hit bottom, both emotionally and intellectually, on the first anniversary of Katerina's departure, it was she who suggested he get away, do something different.

  “Go someplace where the landscape speaks to you, and just become a part of it, if only for a few weeks. Don't think; just find out how the place feels. Figure out why later.”

  The idea both intrigued and unsettled him. It had always been his nature to study the world from a distance. It was easier, and safer, to be an observer than a participant. Being a superb observer was what had made him an expert in his branch of architectural theory in the first place: He studied, he took notes, he analyzed, and then he presented theories. It was a formula that had led him to prominence in his field.

  A few weeks later, after the summer break had begun, he'd been taking a walk through the colonial part of Philadelphia. Not far from Independence Hall, two men were restoring the pavement of a plaza. The new pavement was being made with large rectangular blocks of blue-gray granite—Belgian blocks, he knew they were called. Roughly four inches wide, ten inches long, and six inches deep, they had originally been ships' ballast during the age of sail. The surplus stones had been used as street pavers back then, but in the 1950s they'd been resurfaced with asphalt. Now the whole plaza was being torn up again and the men were restoring the original stone pavers. The two men had laid down a bed of gravel and leveled sand and now were setting the granite blocks in a handsome herringbone pattern.

  Andrew sat on a bench—the same bench, he later realized, he'd sat on with Phyllis the day his wife had left—and watched the men work. It was a muggy afternoon, and both workers were stripped to the waist, their tanned backs glistening with sweat. One man, wearing rubber knee pads, laid a zigzag course of blocks, each individual stone rectangle separated from the next by a gap of perhaps a quarter inch. He gave each a tap with a rubber mallet to set the stone, and then, a few moments later, his colleague—younger, an apprentice, perhaps—followed behind with a broom, sweeping a mix of fine sand and dry mortar into the gaps to stabilize the blocks. The stonelayer's hands were raw from working with the granite, and it was obvious the stones themselves were heavy. Still, each man worked with consummate care. Every so often, the man on his knees would pause, lean back on his haunches, look at the pattern developing, and smile. The result of their work—nothing more than stone and sand—was breathtaking in its artistry and simplicity.

  So it was that Andrew Stratton decided it was time he got his hands dirty. And in that strange way events sometimes transpire, the opportunity presented itself. As part of his research, Andrew had contacted several organizations in Europe devoted to historic preservation and sustainable building techniques, and they regularly e-mailed him their electronic newsletters. The day after he'd sat watching the workmen setting the stone pavers, he heard from the Southwest Council for Sustainable Building, in England. Among other bits of news, he noticed that a course on mortarless stone-wall building was being offered by the Guild of Cornish Hedgers, in partnership with the National Trust, a land-protection organization. The weeklong course would be held in August in Boscastle, on Cornwall's wild Atlantic coast. Andrew looked at a map and discovered Boscastle was not far from the town from which his father never tired of telling him his ancestors had come: Stratton, in North Cornwall.

  Normally, Andrew was not a superstitious man; he knew too much about probabilities and statistics for that. But he took the course announcement as a kind of sign: a chance to do something tangible and physical, to create something real and lasting from local materials, and in a place where he had ancient connections. On impulse—in itself a breakthrough for him—he e-mailed back to register for the course. A few hours of Internet searching later, he'd also found Shepherd's Cottage, and e-mailed the owners. Anne Trelissick had written back that the cottage normally would have been booked at least a year in advance, but they'd had a cancellation and he was in luck. He reserved the eighteenth-century stone cottage for two weeks.

  As Philadelphia slouched into the dog days of August, he escaped, flying first to London's Gatwick Airport, then to Newquay, in Cornwall. There, he hired a taxi for the ride down the coast to Boscastle, arriving on a clear, warm afternoon just after a brief sun shower that left the air freshly laundered and the narrow, wet streets shimmering. He was immediately entranced. He didn't believe in ancestral memory or past lives, but he could not deny that he felt as if he'd just come home.

  At the top of the Valency valley, Andrew climbed over a stile in a stone wall, walked through the cemetery of St. Juliot's church, with its lichen-encrusted headstones leaning this way and that like old men, and ducked under its fifteenth-century porch. He'd been looking forward to this moment; he wanted to see what Hardy had done during the restoration of the church in the late 1800s. But when he pushed open the church's heavy oak door, he found a small clutch of parishioners, Lee and Anne included. A female priest—the one Lee had been telling him about, he guessed—stood at a raised pulpit.

  He mumbled an apology and took a seat in a pew at the rear.

  Boscastle (SX098909) is located on the north Atlantic coast of Cornwall. Cornwall's most distinguishing feature is its long and thin peninsular character which influences the regions weather. This peninsula is one of the warmest and wettest regions in the country, and there is significant variation within the area largely influenced by proximity to the coast and topography … with the effects of altitude having a clear influence with Dartmoor, Exmoor and Bodmin Moor all receiving on average 1231–2584 mm of rain a year.

  Special Boscastle Flood Issue,

  Journal of Meteorology 29, no. 293

  four

  Heads turned to regard the stranger who had joined them. Lee grinned at him and waved. The priest looked across the tiny congregation and smiled.

  “Welcome,” she said, in a voice that was gentle as a breeze but nonetheless carried the length of the vaulted nave. “I was just about to tell one of my favorite stories.”

  The priest's informality—so unlike the sour, doctri
naire Presbyterian minister of his childhood—won him over immediately. Andrew smiled back and nodded. She began.

  “I'm sure you've all heard variations of this joke: A mountain climber loses his footing and begins to fall from a cliff—perhaps a cliff like those along the coast path here in Boscastle. He grabs the branch of a shrub growing from the cliff face—perhaps it's gorse, or heather—and it arrests his fall. But the branch is slender and brittle and he knows it will not hold him long.

  “‘Help!’ he cries. ‘Is anyone up there? Help!’

  “And a deep voice answers, ‘I am the Lord, your God. I can save you if you believe in me. Do you believe?’

  “‘Oh yes, Lord, I do—with all my heart, and especially right now!’

  “‘Good,’ says the Lord. ‘Let go of the branch.’

  “The climber hesitates.

  “‘Is there anyone else up there?’ he asks.”

  There was a faint titter of laughter in the congregation. Lee, Andrew saw, had her hand over her mouth to disguise her giggles.

  “The Bible tells a similar story,” the priest continued. “Actually,” she said, with what Andrew thought was almost a wink, “I think we get a lot of good jokes from the Bible.

  “In this case, Jesus has just performed the miracle of feeding the multitudes. Five thousand people gather to hear him preach. Afterward, he tells his disciples to feed them. They reply that they have only two fish and five small loaves of bread, and it is impossible.

  “But Jesus takes this meager larder and somehow manages not only to extend it to the entire crowd, but to have leftovers as well!

  “Now, I don't know about you, but I think that would have made me a believer for life. But apparently some of the disciples were slow learners. When the crowd disperses, Jesus tells his disciples to get into their boat and set across the sea. He stays behind to pray and reflect, and tells them he will join them soon.