The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST TIME CAMILO MENTIONED Corah to me, we were naked. “She wants me,” he said, as if we were discussing the weather. “If I slept with her, would you mind?”

  Lying against him, our skin sticking a little to the leather of his studio couch, I turned the question over and over in my mind—the betrayal of it, but also the way it had been asked so matter-of-factly. Did this mean it was not a betrayal? Was this, in fact, a reasonable conversation? He sounded reasonable. This must be reasonable.

  “Do you want to sleep with her?” I asked.

  “She’s very attractive,” Camilo said, without hesitating. He could have been talking about a tree or a horse or somebody’s painting. “Don’t you think so?” In my silence, he added: “She has sad eyes. And she has a difficult time with her mother.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She gave me her memoir, I’m reading it.”

  “Her memoir?”

  “About her mother.” Camilo shifted a little. We’d gotten off topic. “So—if I have sex with her, how do you feel about this?”

  Called upon for a sudden answer, I hesitated. Camilo was clearly a free spirit, I felt required to be just as free. And yet…“Look, if you want to be involved with somebody else, this—what we’re doing—it needs to stop. No hard feelings. But it’s just—too complicated, to sleep with you if you’re sleeping with her.”

  “Do you not like her?”

  “It’s not really about that.” A moment, and then I heard myself add, “She’s slippery.”

  “She has suffered,” Camilo defended her. “My mother, she has also made me suffer. Corah understands these things. I read her my letters to my mother yesterday, and she said—”

  I sat up. “You know, I think let’s just call this quits.”

  “No,” Camilo said, fast. “I want to be with you.”

  “Think about it,” I said. “You should probably take some time to think about that.”

  “I don’t have to think about it. If it’s a choice, I choose you.”

  “Okay,” I said, and I won’t lie, of course it felt like victory. Of course I felt like I’d won something.

  * * *

  —

  TED HUGHES SENT ASSIA A note in London: “I have come to see you, despite all marriages.” And, the story goes that she took a blade of grass, dipped it in Dior, and sent it back to him. No words. She knew how to craft an image, Assia. She knew how to stand in doorways. Sylvia was a poet, so Assia found a weapon stronger than language.

  Meanwhile the pike, well, I think it twisted and turned, golden-eyed and restless, swimming under everything, creating ripples every time it got just a little closer to the surface. Meanwhile Sylvia, sleepless in circles, suspecting everything, sparrows and ants and tree branches, sudden gusts of wind, anything that could snatch him away. I read her journal alone in my studio, one of the few times that Camilo wasn’t dozing on my twin bed, or writing to his mother on my floor. I wanted to say to her: Things come to us and then we lose them again. I wanted to say: It’s all on loan, don’t you know this? I wanted us to sit together at a long elm-planked table, drinking her Nescafé, and I’d tell her this thing: part warning, part absolution. But the truth is, I was starting to forget it myself. A strange but constant presence in my life, Camilo was becoming something I didn’t want to lose.

  * * *

  —

  WE HAD ONE REAL CONVERSATION in the time that I was there, Corah and I. I say “real” because only the two of us were there, not because I was any more or less assured of its authenticity than at any other time. It was a snowy pine-bound morning; I came in at the end of the breakfast rush and found the communal dining room empty. I’d left Camilo asleep in my bed, planning to bring back a thermos of coffee for us both, but when I found the room so empty and bright, I sat instead of hurrying back. I poured the coffee from the metal bullet of the thermos into a chipped yellow cup and wrapped my fingers around it, letting the steam rise damply to my face. I stared at myself in the bright windowpane, snow framing me and my reflection both cradling our coffee cups, our eyes meeting in a bold, direct gaze.

  Corah broke the peace with her sudden arrival, stamping snow off her fur-lined boots, hair down, cheeks flushed. She scanned the room as she entered, and her eyes lit on me. I kept my stare fixed on my coffee cup, so we could slide past each other unhindered, but she sat down at the end of my bench.

  “Late breakfast,” she said with a wry smile, and I couldn’t tell if she meant for me or for her, so I nodded and smiled. “Late night,” she added, and then I realized she meant for her, and I nodded and smiled again.

  “How’s the writing going?” she asked. I shrugged, but she waited, so I risked a neutral, “It’s okay.” Then, “How about you?”

  I expected a polite nonanswer; something to pass the time. Instead, Corah made a face. She looked out the windows, scanning the far distance for the truth, then turned back to me. Caught in the high beam of her stare, I found myself sitting very still, shoulders straight.

  “It’s hard to be alone sometimes,” she said. “It can be…urgently lonely, actually.” I lived inside the green flecks of her gray stare. I tried to brace a little against it—I could feel her searching me like an X-ray, that stare rummaging inside my pockets. “But maybe you don’t find that?”

  I didn’t know if she knew about Camilo or not. Suddenly, I didn’t know if I was supposed to be keeping it a secret or not—if Camilo was keeping it a secret—if he shouldn’t be, if he should be. I was filled with an intense unease.

  “Maybe sometimes,” I said.

  “I thought it would be easier to be here,” she said. “We think that all we need is to be alone, in order to work everything out. Sometimes when I’m alone, it all just comes crashing down instead.” She smiled. The smile was so adept, so skillful, that I felt my whole body leaning toward it before my mind had caught up. I stood quickly, in a strange lurch. She didn’t seem to notice—she’d turned back out to the windows again.

  I almost sat back down. And yet, the image was arranged for me cleverly—her face framed by morning light, the artful lowering of her chin. Even the phrasing—urgently lonely—was this something one just thought and blurted, or was this a phrase one turned around in one’s mind, shaped like a missile, and then delivered?

  “I should get back,” I said, clutching the thermos. “Have a good breakfast.” And something flickered over her face—was it interest? or disappointment? or neither—and then she shrugged. I realized, when I was back in the woods, that I’d been holding the now-empty thermos so tightly that my fingertips were tingling even before the cold hit them.

  * * *

  —

  WE STARTED READING CORAH’S MEMOIR together in bed. It was a strange time. Camilo liked to read out loud, in his singsong lilt—the white of the comforter and the white of the snow and the white of the moonlight, and the unfolding saga of Corah’s mother.

  When he first started this, it occurred to me to stop him. I almost asked if he was joking. And then I didn’t. I’d become fascinated with her too. I, too, wanted to know how her mother had plucked her from a rib and molded her into a voluptuous, sad-eyed woman, who sat at the dinner table pouring expensive red wine down her long throat (and she arranged the image so that you didn’t notice the folds of skin, the slight wattle, you just noticed that length of throat), saying things like: “Well we used to have an open marriage, the agreement was that I could sleep with whom I liked, and so I did, there’s nothing hotter than a new lover, there’s nothing quite like desire.” And her eyes flickered over Camilo, held, as he blinked at her, transfixed. We all were by then. We all were.

  * * *

  —

  THE NIGHT BEFORE MY RESIDENCY ended, Camilo and I watched Into the Wild, projecting the movie onto the giant white wall of hi
s studio. The colors were washed out and the sound was faraway, which intensified the feeling of being in a universe apart from all other universes. Partway through the movie, Camilo asked, “Will I see you in New York?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He smiled, then: “I have a question.” He took a breath. “I would like to continue this. Spending time with you, seeing you.” He hesitated. “Also sleeping with you. Also, being with you.”

  I laughed. Only Camilo could have made all four of those separate, equally laden things. “That’s not a question.”

  “Would you like that as well?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I would.”

  And he beamed, one of his sudden, astonishingly bright smiles. “You are very special to me.”

  I stared at him, disarmed. “I am?”

  “Yes,” he said, “you are.”

  We smoked a ball of hash after that. He’d been saving it in a tiny plastic ziplock. We couldn’t figure out exactly how to do it, so finally he just lit the thing on fire and put it under a cup, and we took turns lifting the cup edge and inhaling the rich musky smoke. When it hit, he lay down on the floor, and eventually I lay down next to him, holding his hand. I could feel wings growing under my skin, just where my shoulder blades had been. “There are wings under my skin,” I said to Camilo, my voice hushed and awed. But he was in his own haze, staring up at the vaulted studio ceiling, the raw wood beams. I stared up as well, the cold tiled floor making shapes in my bare back, great wings preparing to lift.

  Later I asked, “Where did you get that hash anyway?” and he said a woman had given it to him during Occupy: “She smuggled it out of Morocco, in her vagina.”

  * * *

  —

  TED HUGHES WENT TO LONDON for Assia. He couldn’t stay away. And Assia was luminous, people reported in their unkind memoirs of her, backlit by victory. But more than victory, I think, Assia was backlit by love. She had fallen headfirst, no shock there, falling in love was one of her great skills. But what she found at the bottom of it startled her, and her transformation startled her friends. She began to sleep badly, couldn’t eat, seemed both triumphant and frightened when she told friends that Hughes smelled like a butcher in bed, that she wouldn’t see him again, that she had to see him again, that she couldn’t live without him.

  This is the part where what once read like a romance now starts to read like the Bluebeard legend, depending on the narrator; this is the part that her friends scribbled down in their diaries with jealousy, fascination, or scorn, and this is the part that bewilders me. For someone so skilled at writing her own narrative to be utterly at the mercy of a new story? (“We don’t pick our obsessions,” said my best friend, when I told her about this turn. She was in the throes of Facebook-stalking her ex. “They pick us when we’re weakened, and then we let them in.”)

  I went back to New York. It was a wildly disconcerting reentry into a too-loud too-bright world of subways, taxis, buildings packed shoulder to shoulder, everybody yelling. I’d walked out of the snow and here it was spring; it seemed like not just another world, but also another season. I was a sleepwalker bewildered by sudden awakening. Camilo emailed at first, a few sentences here and there. I miss you. I can’t sleep. I lie awake all night. It is so strange here without you. And then radio silence. But I prided myself on understanding the kind of hermetic seal that an artist colony provides—the distance from outside life permits calm, permits art.

  Hughes and Assia took up in London, less and less discreet, and then not at all. Crowded bars and pubs and poets’ parties, the backroom intellectual chaos of the early 1960s, smoke and alcohol and Assia like a gem, fixed to him like a gem, glittering out at everyone from the back of the darkest room. The images of her, recorded in gossip and diary, are a little breathtaking—she’s flushed and mysterious and even as she holds his arm, she’s afraid he’s slipping away, and the fear makes her feverish, and the fever makes her glow brighter than an insect or a lamp or a star, and every poet who confessed on record confesses to desiring her.

  Camilo returned out of the blue, out of the silence, landed on my doorstep like an asteroid. He’d biked from Brooklyn, his hair longer now. Seeing him in the unforgiving glare of a New York afternoon, he looked like a complete stranger: bike helmet in hand, ill-fitting Little Red Riding Hood jacket, nervous and blinking. We hugged and it was awkward, I invited him up the narrow flight of stairs, I made coffee in my tiny kitchen while he fiddled with his helmet, a cup, loose pens on the tabletop. Finally we sat across from each other, staring at each other, and I kept waiting to feel that great magical connection. He’d gained some weight. He’d shaved. His voice was higher and more nasal than I remembered. As I poured our coffee, he said, “I have to tell you something.”

  I handed him a cup. “What?”

  “I have slept with Corah.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And two other artists.”

  “Oh.”

  “You see, all four of us slept together.”

  “Oh…”

  “You see,” he said, in his entirely reasonable way, “Corah suggested that we all go back to my studio, since there were four of us. You know how large my bed is, so it made the most sense.”

  I heard my voice from faraway saying “Yes.”

  “So, the four of us were sexually engaged. This happened a few times. I thought perhaps I should tell you that. Honesty is very important to me, you know my mother has always been dishonest and I’ve found this very harmful.” A silence, while I sipped my coffee. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “Did you also sleep with Corah alone?”

  He hesitated, but only briefly. Then he said, “Yes.”

  “You did.”

  “Yes.”

  “More than once?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  The silence stretched. I was thinking: Is this a betrayal? If it sounds so reasonable, perhaps it’s reasonable. I was thinking: But there were wings under my skin, there was light pouring in from everything, off everything, and you were part of that. I was thinking: I don’t want to lose that just because you fucked it up.

  “Are you angry with me?” He sounded childlike.

  “I guess I don’t understand.”

  “Oh!” He brightened. He could explain. “Well, we were sitting on the couches, it was after dinner, we had all been drinking, and Corah put her hand—”

  “I thought I was clear that if you wanted something real with me, it meant not fucking everybody else minutes after I left.”

  “It wasn’t everybody,” Camilo said, “it was just Corah, and Gina, and they were engaged with Ivan, who had joined us at some point, but I…” He trailed off. Then: “I don’t think this should come between us. It meant nothing to me.”

  “If you’re telling me, though, clearly you knew it would mean something to me.” That silenced him. Into the hush, I had to ask: “Was that how you felt about us? That it meant nothing?”

  “No,” he said, stricken. I’d never seen his eyes so wide or so dark. “You matter to me. I told you so that we could begin from a place of honesty.” More silence. “I want you to trust me.”

  “Trust you.”

  “Yes,” Camilo said, radiating sincerity from his tiny body, and I could have sworn he was quoting Corah when he said, “Trust is the lifeblood of every relationship.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER PLATH’S DEATH, THE SCANDAL machine turned and pulsed. Suicide, the gas oven turned high, bread and milk laid out for her children when they awoke. This image has become a Polaroid, even for people who know nothing about Plath or Hughes or their work. Plath engraved herself into history as “that poet who killed herself,” Hughes was forever cast as “the man who made her do it,” and Assia was erased from the image entirely.

  By mid-Fe
bruary of 1963, only days after Plath’s death, Assia was spending most of her time in Sylvia’s flat. As the long dark days passed, Assia was free to roam through Sylvia’s things, reading the Ariel manuscript and her diaries, which Assia called “most incredible.” She slept in Sylvia’s bed, leaving books, papers, even knickknacks as Sylvia had left them. By the time that Ted invited her to move in and help care for the children, Assia was accustomed to living willingly, even hungrily, among the shards of Sylvia’s life, and Hughes noticed but couldn’t understand her growing fascination with his dead wife. He later wrote to Assia’s sister: “I knew Assia had some odd bits and pieces of Sylvia’s. I don’t know why she bothered to do that sort of thing—I know it used to help to depress her.”

  There are some records, snippets of conversation that friends diligently recorded. Teas with Assia in which she talked of Sylvia obsessively—her books, what she had once underlined in gentle, ghostly pencil, how Assia was now reading those same books. One supposed friend, Anne Alvarez, told biographers Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev well after the fact: “She was so beautiful, and kept on talking about Sylvia….For her own good, she would have been much better off not to sleep in Sylvia’s bed.”

  Hughes didn’t understand, or he didn’t want to. But obsession is like a foreign country. People back home can’t quite comprehend what it is you’re seeing day after day, the words that you’re using. There’s no way to describe what it’s like to dig yourself down into soil they’ve never touched. And so Assia dug, and Hughes tried to reach her, he said—long-distance calls over wavery wires—but she wouldn’t be reached.