by Luanne Rice
And it got to the point that even when you were gone, I felt you with me. We knew each other so well—that was part of it. You’d say a word and I could finish your thought. You’d touch me, and I’d lean in for more. When you were gone, I’d feel you in bed beside me. And I’d take a walk through the orchard, and I’d hear you egging me on, to climb a tree. I wanted you as much as at the beginning, but gradually I felt safer. You never broke a promise to me, and that counted so much.
All these thoughts swirling around—to have loved you so much, and now to be on opposite sides of the world with the divorce proceeding, and to receive these letters from you, so full of the voice of my husband Sam, yet also full of…it feels like a new life. Your description of the trip is thrilling, and I feel very far away from you.
So going back to Thanksgiving dinner and gratitude as a topic at the meeting—I was really torn, didn’t want to go. But Turner dragged me there—tall, stooped, taciturn Yankee that he is—he reminded me that the holidays are the Bermuda Triangle for alcoholics, a time a lot of us start drinking again, and forced me to sit in the front row of the church hall. And (I can truly see you cringing at the thought of this next part, “sharing” feelings with a roomful of strangers) when we went around the room, and everyone was saying what they felt thankful for—“sobriety,” “my family,” “my new boat,” “a good report from the oncologist,” and when the circle came round to me, I said “Sam’s letters.”
And it’s true. I’m thankful we’re back in touch. In fact, sitting here in the cottage with a fire crackling and fine sleet pelting the windows, I’ve just reread your last letters and can almost, almost pretend you’re right here. Remember when we were together, what a chore it was to get me to go out? I never saw the point of going to parties, or the movies, or the repertory theater when I could just be home alone with you…
So here we are. Sam and Hadley.
So much in your last letters to talk about…Martha—as wonderful as she no doubt is—is like a toothache to me; you know how when you have a cavity, and you can’t stop touching it with your tongue, to see if it’s still there and as bad as you thought? Well, that’s how I feel about her. And yes, what right do I have to even care, etc. etc. etc.?
You said she’s smart, and I know how much you like smart people, how swayed you can be by intellect. Not only that, but I read what you wrote and realize I would like her. She sounds great. The part about her saving that team of sled dogs—I love her for it, and you can tell her that. And the fact she bought a hundred acres all by herself, found a way to live on them—if you tell me she has solar panels and is trying for a zero energy footprint (and she sounds like someone who probably does) I’ll love her even more.
That might be why I’m having such a hard time imagining you in such close quarters with her. Because she’s just the kind of person you would love, too.
You tell me what she said about shedding skin. Of course that’s one part of what Paul was doing. I’m not sure we needed her to tell us that. He couldn’t grow and change anymore here at home, because we loved him too much—even being at college he knew we would have done anything for him, and he had to chafe at us, escape from us. Had to drop out of Amherst and upset us, had to rebel, had even to leave Julie, had to fly thousands of miles away. She’s right about that.
But did you tell her how thrilled he was to be accepted into Amherst in the first place? Early decision—that was a strong commitment. Do you remember those months before he applied, when the dining room table was given over entirely to his college essays? Just piles of books and applications and financial forms, and how hard he worked on them all? I’d stand in the kitchen looking at the back of his head, at his messy brown hair, seeing him hunched over writing, and my stomach would hurt because I was so afraid he’d be disappointed. That he wouldn’t get into Amherst.
But he did. I think about it now—how over the moon he was, and I’ll never understand, not really, why he didn’t go back. I know what he told us, about wanting to teach Inuits and help the village—you know I’ve never believed that was all there was to it. I’m sure he was telling the truth about why he wanted to go there—but that came after, didn’t it? Chronologically wouldn’t he have first had to decide he wasn’t returning to college? Did something go wrong that he couldn’t tell us? I know it wasn’t anything to do with Julie—she would have told me. What made him not go back to the college he’d strived to get into early decision, worked so hard for?
I’m thinking of that class he took—LJST. Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought…not that he ever would have been a lawyer, but he loved Professor Dunlop, said he changed the way he thought. And I asked Paul once what was so important about that class. He told me they’d had to read Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” And I’d read it, and forgotten it, but Paul asked me if I knew what it was about. I thought I did, but he told me—and I didn’t. It was about abortion, even though it’s never mentioned, not even once.
The class had read the story, and they thought it meant one thing, but Professor Dunlop had them stop, and read that part where the girl says, “And you think then we’ll be all right and happy?” And the boy says, “I know we will. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people who have done it.” “So have I,” said the girl. “And afterwards they were all so happy.”
And Paul said they wouldn’t necessarily have realized what it was about, or that the girl was being sarcastic, if the professor hadn’t made them stop and think. The class taught him to look more deeply, that what might seem one way on the surface can be something else entirely down below. People can seem to be talking about one thing when it’s not that at all, it’s something unspoken and maybe even unknown. And he said that gave him a new and completely different way of thinking about life, the ways people interact, the subversive ways we try to persuade people of our points of view.
So does Martha think Amherst—his real and true dream, and those classes he felt were teaching him how to think about the world and justice and art and looking deeply and the green hills of Africa, not to mention Julie—was part of what he needed to shed? You can tell I’m not really resting easy with her theory.
As a matter of fact, I don’t like the snake image. You know I’ve always had a viper thing—used to make you tell me stories about the snakes you saw in Australia and Africa. Snakes and sharks, why do I love you to tell me about creatures that scare me the most? So that bothers me a little, you talking snakes with her.
Do you remember that book by Madeleine L’Engle? A Wind in the Door? It came after A Wrinkle in Time, and Paul loved it. He loved that it was about a family where the father traveled (you) and the mother stayed home (me) and the children were smart, wry, and unsentimental (him). He loved the fact Meg and Charles Wallace and their twin brothers had a pet snake—Louise. Because anyone could love a cute kitten or puppy, but most people balk at reptiles. Paul was always the champion of the unlovable, the unappreciated. I swear the reason he loved that book so much was that Louise the snake helped save the dying little boy. He had such a good heart, didn’t he? He didn’t distinguish between creatures with fur and those with scales.
Oh, I miss him. Writing about him brings him back. His spirit, his essence, a flash of memory, the sound of his voice. But it’s all so inadequate, compared with the real thing, with my living son. If I could have him with me for one more hour, what would I do? Cut off my arm, certainly. Give my life. I would do that, if I could see Paul again.
We gave our marriage. You realize that, don’t you? Losing Paul made it impossible for us to exist. He died, and we became ghosts. I can sit here and examine what happened. Daniel, my drinking, you disappearing on assignment and even when you were home. But that’s just any old long marriage. People get tired—of their lives, themselves, each other. When a child dies, though, that’s another story. That’s the sky being torn and the earth’s crust being rent, a new plague that affects only your family, and knowing that until you
yourself die, every minute will be filled with agony. I was shocked to realize this excruciating pain was made worse by looking into your eyes. Not just because you and he have/had the same eyes, although there is that—but because you gazed upon him as he came out of my womb, took him from the doctor and held him before anyone else, handed him to me. So after the plane crash, when I looked into your sad, hollow eyes, I saw the reflection of that moment and so many that followed. I saw our boy’s life, and that life is no more. And I just couldn’t stand it. It made me, forgive me, unable to look at you.
Enough. I never want to talk about this again.
I’m back. After I wrote that part about kittens and puppies, I realized I hadn’t seen Cat in a few hours. She’s so skittish and feral, and she can hide so completely, days can go by without my seeing her. But the weather is brutal right now, and I wanted to make sure she hadn’t slipped out through one of the cracks.
She was curled up in my sweater drawer. I’ve gotten to know her favorite places, like under the quilt on my bed, so flattened against the mattress no one would ever guess she was there. And, when I’m not burning wood in the fireplace, she likes to jump up into the chimney and hide on the smoke shelf. I always have to look up into the flue with a flashlight before starting the fire to make sure she’s not there. The other day I shined the beam up into the stone chimney, and there were two yellow eyes glowing down at me.
She’s lying beside me now, curled up under the covers, just out of reach of my feet. She likes to be close, but she doesn’t like me to touch her. I’m writing this from bed, because it’s bone-chillingly cold and damp, and because I’m imagining you in Alaska where it’s probably three times colder than this. Do you remember how I used to feel what you were feeling? It was spooky, but when you were near the equator I’d get a fever, and when you went north or far south, when you were near the poles, I’d start shivering and have to put on a sweater.
Something strange is happening to me. I have your letters here, and I want to go through them point by point, answer everything you said about Daniel, lob some more defensive strikes at Martha. I’m tempted to tell you that I had coffee with John Morgan just to get a rise out of you. The truth is, I did, but all he wanted to talk about was his sculpture and the big one-man show he’s having in the spring. He’s split with his wife, and there’s someone else—a beautiful grad student he met at, of all places, Clyde Lorus’s villa in Greece. Clyde collects his work or something, and the grad student was there with a boyfriend who’s signed to whatever the hell record label Clyde Lorus is connected with, I should know but I don’t, and John stole the grad student right from the hot young rocker, and John’s wife is depressed and calls him crying and can’t talk except to whisper she wants him back, wants their marriage back, and he doesn’t know what to do, he’s stopped caring about that part of his life, he can only think about when he’s going to see Lyra—that’s the grad student’s name—again, because he’s worried she might go back to the hot young rocker, but he has to stay here and finish his work for the big spring show. I sat silently and listened and felt a little sick. How stupid we all are.
What you wrote about Daniel is haunting me, because now I see what you saw.
There’s a poem by Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese,” that goes, “You do not have to be good / You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” But I feel as if I did have to do that, repent. My knees are rubbed raw. I’ve felt so terrible and guilty. I’m not sure that I’ve come to Monhegan exactly to forgive myself—I think I’m just too tired to keep doing this.
I’m really tired. So I’m going to stop.
I think I’m beginning to really get the hang of on-by…
You’re turning me into a Buddhist, my darling. I read something by the Dalai Lama on the Diamond Cutter Sutra and seventy verses on emptiness. He speaks of the scope of suffering. I think he might have been writing about parents who’ve lost children. Is that the ultimate emptiness? I know it’s the ultimate suffering.
Hadley
December 3
Hi Sam,
It’s twenty-four hours since I stopped mid-letter, and all I can say is the sun is out. Bright, shining sunlight hitting the rocks and harbor all day long, moving across the island, making it warm enough to sketch outside, at least for brief periods. The wind is strong and steady, but I’ve been drawing in the lee of some granite boulders. I’m enclosing some of the sketches here so you can get an idea of the landscape.
Cathedral Woods is so thick with tall pines, almost no sunlight penetrates—but neither does snow nor strong gusts of wind. It’s eerie, with boughs creaking and the air whistling through the pine needles at the very tops of the trees. This morning I walked through on my way to the lee shore, and I really understood why they named it as they did. I was all alone—not another human being around; the sound of my boots walking across the soft bed of pine needles made me feel I was the only one on the entire island. But I felt a presence—a warmth inside and a sense that I was surrounded by goodness. I had to stop, try to hold on to the feeling—and I wished you were there. It reminded me of how nature was always our church, yours, mine, and Paul’s, how mystical and sacred the outdoors always felt to us.
Down a sloping hill I found a small hollow, dug out between boulders and looking over a series of rocky inlets. The coastline is jagged and treacherous, with waves crashing and churning, salt spray shooting into the sky. It’s impossible to imagine anything surviving that wave action, yet the coves are full of seals. They sunbathe on the rocks, which ice over between tides—and they curve, snout and tail upward, just like bananas. Then they dive and glide, and ride the cold frothy waves, their heads poking up to watch me draw them, their eyes so black and bright.
And there are shorebirds, too: harlequin ducks, common eiders, white-winged scoters, surf scoters, long-tailed ducks, alcids, and black-legged kittiwakes. Yesterday I saw what looked like a soccer ball washed up on the seaweed above the tide line, and it was a snowy owl. And all I could think of was, you must have them up there, too—you’re close to the tundra, and that’s their natural habitat.
You mentioned the moose and the bear, and even the polar bear and the German, and now you have me worried about you being attacked by beasts. Here on Monhegan there is no dangerous game—other than sharks in the sea, just birds and squirrels and-deer and raccoon. (I’m collecting a series of delicious shark stories for you, one involving Turner baiting his lobster pots when he heard a great breath, almost like a whale or a dolphin coming up for air, and when he turned to look, he saw a great white shark with its entire head poking up out of the calm sea, trying to get a peek over the gunwale of his lobster boat, to see what morsels he could steal…)
And islanders. There’s a camaraderie that exists here just by nature of living so far at sea in so few square miles. When I walk back toward town from the inlet, I see smoke wisping out of chimneys and feel a kind of coziness and homecoming, as if I’m somewhere I belong. The town is tiny, just a street and a general store and a post office and the ferry dock. There’s the Island Inn overlooking the harbor and un-inhabited Manana Island, and the sunsets, and there’s a tiny library.
Now that I’m officially a year-rounder (at least this year) they’ve told me the big secret—Jamie Wyeth doesn’t live here anymore! The myth of Jamie looms large over the summer art community. People really do make pilgrimages here to connect with the Wyeth mystique. I’m not sure whether they’re afraid that if tourists find out they wouldn’t come, or whether—and I think this is more like it—they enjoy the joke. But the truth is, there’s an austerity to the beauty here that reminds me so much more of Andrew Wyeth, Jamie’s father.
That subtle palette he always used, shades of wheat and gray, white and cream. Voile curtains at the window, weather-beaten barns, salt-silvered shingles. When I used to visit my aunt in Hartford, she’d take me to the Wadsworth Atheneum, and my favorite painting was by Andrew Wyeth, of a house on
the coast; it was painted from the perspective of the wood-shingled roof, looking past a lightning rod with a pale-yellow glass ball pierced by the needle, and the late-year beach and sea spreading out behind and below in the distance.
The canvas was so simple, so not showy. His brushstrokes were fine, almost invisible. He used gouache, the first time I took note of that as a medium. The painting had the sense of a photograph, very fine and precise, the view neither added onto nor subtracted from but simply rendered, not exactly black and white but delicately colored, almost as if time and memory had bleached it of any rich or strong hues. The feeling was pure November—clear light, a sort of sadness, a moment of reflection. I loved it.
That’s what Monhegan feels like to me: that painting, my favorite by Andrew Wyeth. No matter that the seasons will pass, there’s a November quality to this island. Summer is over, the prettiest part of fall has gone by—there are no bright yellows, no sugar maple reds, no flowers left. Christmas is still to come—no lights yet, or trees, or wreaths or decorations. There’s no artificial cheer. Everything is brown, gray, black, white, and dark, dark forest green. It suits the way I feel, and it’s beautiful.
I’ve rented the house through May—and I know I said I wanted to buy it, sell our house and stay here, and maybe I still will. But after all my enthusiasm in the first few letters, I’m suddenly not sure. This might sound crazy, but I feel I was meant to come here for right now, this very winter. But equally, I feel as if perhaps I’m not meant to stay. Annabelle has been silent lately, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
I feel very in-between right now.
Two nights ago I had another dream. I won’t give you all the details…I can’t understand them myself. But I know I was on the sunporch at home, and the feeling that you were there, too, in another part of the house, was very strong. I heard your footsteps coming up behind me, and closed my eyes to wait for you to hold me, and then I woke up.