The Book of Marie

by Terry Kay

  You’re saying I’m not?

  He laughed easily.

  Mark wants to know if you’d like to go fishing with him this weekend, she said.

  Sure, he replied. Are you going?

  I don’t do worms, she said. She smiled, added, Not those kind.

  See? he countered. My sisters—my sweet, kind sisters—would never make such a remark. They’re clean-minded, as all Southern ladies are.

  Oh, now I understand, she said.

  Understand what?

  Why you’re here, in Vermont, she replied. By your hypothesis, if Southern ladies are clean-minded, then Northern ladies—and that would include me—must be dirty-minded. Thus, I conclude you prefer the latter.

  You’ve got me, he said.

  Fine. At least we have an understanding and that could lead to almost anything, couldn’t it?

  He smiled, drank again from his coffee, then stood. I have to go, he said.

  Where? she asked.

  To my office, he answered. I’m working on a course on Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.

  Good idea, she said. Maybe I’ll audit it. Now get out of here. I want to read.

  He stood for a moment without speaking, then said, When you read it, I want you to destroy it. I want you to destroy everything. And, Tanya, I don’t think I want to talk about what I’ve just given you.

  That’s your choice, she told him.

  I know, he said.

  She watched through the window of Arnie’s until she saw him drive away, and then she opened the envelope and began to read.

  May 20, 2005, morning

  There is, in my office, a magnificent new painting of an orange turtle. It was sent to me by Moses Elder as a gift from Littlejohn Curry. At my death, it is to be donated to the library of Overton, to hang with the display of Marie Fitzpatrick’s graduation speech.

  The painting is in my office because I want it to remind me of those gifts that may be slumbering in students who come to me for counsel, gifts that could be opened by a small tug of the bow that wraps them. I am also reminded of Marie when I look at it. And that is good, because Tanya was right in her disdain for the expression closure.

  How can anyone have closure with someone who spent her life looking only for openings?

  I realize now that I needed to write about those years and those experiences that fashioned my life, and I also needed the warm deception of writing to Marie again, as if I could put the letters into an envelope and send them to her. I do not know if the exercise of the writing was healing, but I do know it was revealing, and here is what I have learned from it: the good of living is in the sweetness of memory.

  Here, then, is my last entry in what I have now named The Book of Marie.

  Though I have been married and divorced, and was twice engaged before my marriage, and though I have a deep and joyful affection for the women who are my friends, I do not think I have ever truly loved any woman other than Marie Jean Fitzpatrick. To me, it is the great regret of my life that I never again saw her after we were graduated from Overton High School. We corresponded, yes. Years of letters, rushed off in frantic spurts of catch-up, separated by long, long gaps of time. I have never destroyed any of those letters. The last one I received was written in September of 1988. It came to me as a posthumous delivery. She had died of ovarian cancer. Among the papers left in her estate was the letter, composed in the last, narcotic-dull days of her life. It had been addressed to: Cole Bishop, Town Talker.

  The letter read:

  Dearest Cole Bishop,

  Remember when I wrote to you about my life line? It was little more than a scratch, and now it has disappeared, vanished. Or maybe the scratch has healed. Still, I was right about my reading. Because you hold this letter, you will know that is true. I was also right about something else, something I told you that last night we were together, swinging where first-graders played. I did regret not making love to you. We would have been wonderful lovers. In my fantasies, we have been. In my fantasies, you were both savage and gentle and our love sessions under quilts of dreams left my body exhausted and sore and my soul saturated with joy. Be careful without me, my dreamer, my famous friend. I love you. Whoever you were, whoever you are, whoever you will become, I love you. If I can, I will protect you from the other side. If I cannot—not knowing how willing they are to take instruction—I pray that your memory of me will ward off some pain.

  Oh, yes, Cole.

  We were wonderful. We really were.

  I am tired now. I am so tired.

  I beg of you one thing: Do not think of me in sorrow. Do not mourn. We had a grand, beautiful friendship, a friendship more wonderful than I ever expected or could ever imagine.

  These are the last words I will ever put on paper.

  I love you.

  I wept for hours after reading the letter. I took the photograph of our night at the Junior-Senior Prom and propped it against a desk lamp and surrendered to my memory of us, and then I sat at my desk and tediously replied to her. It was the writing of a child laboring to find the right words to say the right thing, and now, when I read it, I see the excesses of it—the spilling-over of grief, words uncaged to fly about like freed canaries. Still, it is what I wrote and I will never edit it. When I finished it, I folded it into an envelope and put it away in a lining of my briefcase, where it has always remained.

  These are the words of that letter:

  Dear Marie,

  You love me, you said. Whoever I was, whoever I am, whoever I am to become, you love me.

  I should have written this years ago. Maybe you would not have worried so much. Maybe you would have understood me. Or maybe I would have understood myself.

  I am a runaway, Marie. Child and man, I have always been a runaway.

  I have run away to places you know nothing about—to Pilgrim’s Ridge, to the Split Creek bottomlands, to the hay barn on the Grill place. I ran away to you, to college, to graduate school, to classrooms in South Carolina and Vermont. I ran away through inviting doors of books, traveled to lands as exotic as the names of their cities and their people. I have followed obediently—eagerly—the sweet, Circean song of words, surrendering myself to the sorcery of language welling up from alphabet-letter voices heard only by men and women who know the succor, and the torment, of isolating themselves in dreams.

  I am a runaway, Marie.

  But it is what I have always wanted to be.

  When I was a child, I practiced transformations. I became what I read, what I heard from radio, what I saw at the movie theater. It was an easy trick. You saw me do it, ridiculed me for it. But it was easy. So easy. Strike the pose, speak the word, imagine, become.

  I liked becoming, Marie. I still do.

  I think it is why I teach. As a teacher, with a captive audience, I tell stories that other people—the men and women who isolate themselves in dreams—have created, and I become, by the power of wishing it, those intriguing adventurers—some bold, some fragile—who rise up from turning pages like resurrected bodies. I’m sure you will understand this, Marie: My students tell me I often assume the personalities of those resurrected bodies, that my face changes in mimicry, that my voice plays a scale of off-key accents. I am not aware of any of this. I am aware only of the faces of my students. I know by their faces if they are hearing and wondering.

  Forgive the above. I should remember it’s you to whom I’m writing. You would rip me to shreds for being so dreamy.

  I just heard your ghost-laugh from that good world, that Out There place.

  This is so hard to do, Marie, the writing of this letter. I ache from the touch of each word.

  I am a runaway, Marie. Teaching helps me to be a runaway. You wrote to me of your fantasies about us—the lovers we never became. I am glad we were such lovers in your dreaming of us. Those dreams perfectly matched mine, so perfectly I wonder if we were lost in the same dreams on the same nights.

  To me, teaching is an act of fantasizing, as
well as an act of becoming.

  Yes, I like that word: fantasizing.

  You know better than anyone about my fantasizing.

  I fantasize in bits and pieces, in dots and dashes, in all fragments of my life. I am as muscular as an athlete, graceful as a dancer, brilliant as a philosopher, wise as a god. I am an assassin. I touch the blind and heal them. I make love to the world’s most beautiful women. I write poetry that will be quoted a thousand years from now. I soar above the earth in spaceships sailing on butterfly wings, discover lost cities of purest gold beneath pearl beds in the oceans. I speak the languages of the world with the voice of the lute. I can read the ballooning thoughts of people around me, gaze into their souls.

  Runaways are always fantasizing.

  But, Marie, my strange, dear friend, my almost-mate, you have never let me forget what I could not escape: reality is a story hard-earned, while dreamers always lose themselves in following after dreams.

  Wait for me in that good world, that Out There place.

  We will end the regrets.

  And I will never again run away. I promise.