When we woke up I thought for a moment that the river was all around us and we were floating down it inside the tent. And it was only when a man’s voice came from outside the car that I realised we were on dry ground and that he, the man, was impatient. Nicolas wound down the window.
It was illegal to fish for pearls, the man said. He was a salmon fisherman who had come down to the river after the storm and had seen the discarded mussels that the wind had scattered near our pitch. If we didn’t want him to report us we should pack up and go home. Nicolas said he didn’t know of that law, he hadn’t been aware. It was a new law, the fisherman said, and not a day too soon in coming; people like us were destroying the livelihood of people like him, who depended on the salmon, which depended on the mussels. We packed up our soaked things. We swept the pile of mussels into a bag and put it in the car. When we drove off, with the matchbox in the glove compartment, I said that I felt like a smuggler. Perhaps more accurately, a victor. The storm had passed and something of that bright day had come back. It was as if a great door slid closed behind us on that most lovely of lands, but that we had come away with a piece of it, a pre-formed memory. And that then we could take that memory and see if we could go and find the life to which it belonged.
* * *
Meanwhile Gene is still sleeping and it has just started raining here, pouring in fact. I can hear an owl-call, that hollow flute of the male, and then the female’s sharp reply, as if she is excited to see the rain drum the mice out of hiding; and Gene’s breath changes every time she screeches, it gathers up at the top of his chest and he looks like a puppet whose strings have been pulled. Then he relaxes, his strings fall around him. I will stop this and turn off the light.
Today at the life-class I accidentally said, out loud, ‘See me as God sees me!’
Butterfly, what on earth was I thinking? It was just that the tutor kept asking the students to measure the distance between my neck and my navel or my ear and my muzzle (yes, she calls it a muzzle), until all I could see were twenty people squinting at me with their pencils outstretched. Can my existence really be sized up in this way? When Teddy was born, did I squint at him with a plumb line? In fact I widened my eyes and devoured him in one go! And as I stood there this afternoon with my weight on one leg and my right hand on my left shoulder, gazing at the foot of an easel, I could feel the blood push suddenly through my limbs where they had been half dead and cramping, and my life moving in me—the most curious sensation, when you stop for a moment and fully realise you are alive. That your heart is beating, I mean, and your gut is processing lunch, and you are producing heat.
In the drawings my grandmother did of me I could see I was alive. She could peer at me over her glasses, take up her charcoal and strip me bare of everything I pretended to be. You are not your ego, she would say. And then, tapping my earrings with her fingernail: You are not all this nonsense, you are God’s handiwork. He made your flesh, your blood, your viscera and your soul. I see you as he sees you.
I have never seen anything like my grandmother’s drawings of me. They make me look raw and perfect like the preserved bog people dug up from the peat. So much time dead had made them urgent again. I remember an archaeologist on the radio saying how eerie they were to touch, as if they would sit up and start speaking—so ancient that they were closer to the moment of creation, more surging with life than us. When I walked around the life-room at breaktime today I didn’t see myself once. So when we were twenty minutes from the end and the tutor was telling them to finish off my hands and not to forget my hair, I only meant to say that this might be the time to try for my essence rather than my hair, to see me all at once. I had not meant to say what I said about God, and I sat for the rest of the twenty minutes seeing the distaste on their faces, and tried to suppress laughter.
On the way home from the class I called in to see Yannis and to get something quick for supper, and to my surprise Nicolas was there. He was just sitting at one of the tables with a coffee, waiting, he said, for me to come home. He and Yannis don’t know one another, so I introduced them and Yannis came from behind his counter and clasped Nicolas’ hand with both of his own. When he realised that it was me Nicolas had been waiting for, he gave me a curious look whose meaning I only discovered a few minutes later, when Nicolas and I left.
‘I have something to tell you and something else to ask you,’ Nicolas said when we were walking along the street to my building. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow for New York for ten weeks and I wondered if you would consider marrying me again sometime after I get back. What is your friend called? Yannis. He suggested I should give you until then to answer.’
Yannis is gregarious and nosy; he will talk to anybody about anything. There he was, counselling a stranger in his shop on how to go about proposing to a woman, probably offering a little oval dish of calamari while his customer chewed over the options. No wonder he was surprised to find that I was the woman in question. Later, when Nicolas and I were eating Yannis’ infamous salted sardines on toast, I told him that he had taken advice from a man whose marriage was itself in a state of crisis, and this seemed to please him, as if it made it all the more authentic. I also told him what I had blurted at the life-class and he sat back, with a piece of oily toast on his fork, staring at the table in thought for a moment. ‘And how does God see you?’ he asked finally. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘this is what I want them to show me.’
He smiled and touched my cheek briefly, and I know that this act of wry softness said: You mean, you want them to make you look noble. That touch of my cheek was supposed to convey, by way of comfort, that all hopes of nobility were past, and it didn’t matter. Between us we have nothing splendid left, it is lost in all the cowardly little offerings we have made over the years. He looked somewhat triumphant in this loss of burden. I tell you, he chewed long and peacefully on that sardine as if hunger were no longer a reason for eating.
We spent most of the evening talking about New York, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music where he would be working on a touring production of Euripides’ Medea. He laid out his metre-square map of New York City, Manhattan on one side and Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island on the other. Turning it back and forth, he marked it up with points of interest in his guidebook. He wanted to go to Columbus Park to see elderly people playing Xiangqi, he has wanted to do that since he was a teenager and his erstwhile stepfather told him about it. Also the Public Library Reading Room, the Hunterfly Road Houses in Weeksville, the Chelsea Hotel. All of these places had been put in his mind by his stepfather, whom I have never heard him speak about before in anything but passing. When it was late he folded the map one more time than it was supposed to be folded and said he would not contact me when he was away. He forced it into his back pocket and stood; one of his typically abrupt, proud conclusions to a vulnerable topic. Then he took himself to bed.
Once again it has come to the early hours of the morning and I must get to bed too. I seem to be sleeping so little at the moment and finding myself restless or hungry at strange times of the night, especially when Nicolas stays. Then the urge to come back to this letter is stronger, or at least makes more sense, although I can’t explain how. As it is, he just came in from the next room, half asleep, to find out what I’m doing. I told him I was writing to you. He turned his back quickly. He sends his regards.
April 2002
March happened, I forgot to mention it. Forgive me.
* * *
But really, if honest, I could have seen Nicolas’ offer coming. Something firm, almost intolerant, came over him when I asked about a month ago if he knew where you might be living. The question was more hypothetical than anything, I had no doubt that he wouldn’t know. He was looking down at a newspaper or, no, dinner. I think we were eating at a cheap Italian place called Ciro’s. He raised his eyes only and said, ‘In the desert.’ Then he went back to eating.
It was the first time he had acknowledged that he knew about the p
ostcard from you to Teddy, a postcard that had dropped through my letterbox ten years before. He speared his food as if he had suddenly had enough of everything and wanted to draw a line once and for all. Enough suffering, enough separation, enough silence. Last week, when he asked me to marry him, he said, ‘I want us to just get back on with our lives’, which made me laugh before I had time to stop myself, because his tone implied that the fifteen-year break in our marriage had been just a bad fortnight that we should forget. And yet I agree, and I want to get on with life too. The question isn’t about whether or not to get on, but what constitutes getting on.
It is curious for a person to think that for a long time they might not really have been living—curious, I mean, for them to not know if they have been living. When do all the activities of living add up to a life? I can tell that Nicolas thinks my flat is an admission of defeat, my job an evasion of responsibility—that I have given up on myself. My letter to you was probably the last straw; she is stuck in the past, he thinks, and not even a wholesome bit of the past. She cannot move on. The more I think about it, the more it feels that he wants to rescue me from my sad unreconciled state and make me add up to something.
At the same time he also seems to tread very carefully around my life as though he sees it as something self-contained and sustaining; he is wary of my independence. I know this because he comments on my hair being short, where short-haired women are for him slightly dangerous creatures who might not need much from a man. When I had my hair like this in the past he always said he preferred it longer, but when he comments now it is to say, with a hint of trepidation, that he thinks it suits me. There is something in this movement from him and what he likes or prefers, to me and what is good for me, that gives me the feeling that he views me now as something separate and worthy of his respect. He said we had each grown and become much more fully ourselves, that this is the basis for a strong marriage. And so I asked him, What will happen if we get together again? Do we remain fully ourselves and, if not, will it be grounds for divorce? He said I was trying as usual to solve the future before it had become a problem. But it seems to me, Butterfly, that men have never really heard of forethought.
One of the few clear things I know about Nicolas’ life these last fifteen years is that he spent some of it in Japan living with a woman he met in the theatre. A year after he met her he moved to Kyoto to be with her, on a visa sponsored by her mother’s theatre production company. And he told me that although he had only just now asked me to marry him, he’d made the decision a couple of weeks ago, while we were walking in the Isabella Plantation. He said the idea had come to him suddenly as more of a suggestion than a proposal, and one he hadn’t planned on having. What I think is that his idea was prompted, consciously or not, by the row of azaleas and Japanese maples we were walking between at the time; he saw those early azalea petals and he thought of his lost romance, just as we are all reminded of romances and losses every day of our lives, and he sought instinctively to fight back against it with the offer of something new. What’s more, I think he either recognised it then or has recognised it since, and he knew I knew he was doing it. He has always been that way, a man whose future is an impulsive reaction to or against a past he has just remembered and cannot accept, with the hope that comes in the absence, as I said, of any forethought whatsoever.
He has told me virtually nothing else about that relationship, though I know it lasted three years and that he spent a lot of time alone in her family’s holiday home at Cape Ashizuri while she toured Japan with her productions. I have no concept of what Cape Ashizuri is like, though I gather he found it beautiful. To my mind Japan is made up of impossible intricacies and subtleties and isn’t capable of any kind of epic cape, but I kept this facile observation to myself. He said that while living there he would come back to England once in a while to work on a show for a few weeks, or he might do the lighting for some of her productions, as was the plan, but his lack of good Japanese made the process too slow and confused, and he gradually stopped asking and being asked.
He said she became tired of being his translator. I get the impression that it was a relationship that promised a lot and offered a little, in the way exotic things do; I think he misses all that it never was, the possibilities. And I have tried so hard myself to live in a way that doesn’t deal in possibilities so much as realities, but I understand how easy it is to come under the power of an obstinate dream, and in a funny way perhaps it is this that makes me want to say yes to his suggestion, not because I think I can fulfil any of his dreams but simply because of that flicker of empathy, which for a moment lays itself down like a bridge between us.
I do at least know that her name was Chihiro Mori, because it was written in the back of his passport as an emergency contact, and for whatever reason his passport had once been lying open at that page on his kitchen sideboard. He might have left it like that on purpose to save me asking the question. Such a peculiar relationship we have now, made up of things that aren’t said and dodging anything that might come from the other’s heart. We have been carrying on like this since Boxing Day, because that, of course (maybe you knew it from the beginning), is the real reason I started writing this then. He came round late on Christmas Day after Teddy had gone, to pay nothing but a friendly call with a bottle of brandy and some monkfish to cook, on the off-chance that we might escape the dry tasteless curse of turkey, and it was when he left on Boxing Day night that you appeared like that in my mind, so intrusively, perhaps jealously. Looking at the bed where some curious love of old had been invoked from nowhere, like spirits summoned by witch doctors. Looking at my face left irritated by his stubble, and the glasses of sparkling water by the bed, because as we know, where Nicolas goes, so goes sparkling water. Seeing, and shaking your head sadly, saying, My friend, do not—only the weak slip back.
It has been four months now of new quiet routines, trying out recipes on one another, making love with a certain defensive intensity, bickering where we used to argue, but bickering harmlessly, and remaining, both of us, completely unwilling to talk about the past. We simply deflect all matters of importance. Even when he asked me to marry him I just told him, with a small break in stride, that I didn’t know what to say. He said I should not answer yet, even if I could. When he came back from America in mid-June he would expect an answer, but before then he was actively uninterested.
When we were in the Isabella Plantation a fortnight ago I said something like, ‘Look at this tupelo tree, we should come back in autumn when it’s bright red.’ And again, that mention of us being together in autumn might have been casual or weighted, even I don’t know. It was simply evasive. Perhaps he has got tired of the evasion and decided it would be better if we just owned one another again, rather than dancing strangely in and out of one another’s vision. I also believe, based on his muted response when he found me writing this letter, that he had known of its existence for a while.
I used to feel there was comfort in remaining Nicolas’ wife even in our complete estrangement, and he must have felt the same about being my husband, because neither of us ever pursued a divorce. And the truth is that there is comfort in being somebody’s anything, and in a person even saying that of you: my wife, my husband, that little word of possession.
But possession, Butterfly. A word that didn’t impress you. Husband, wife, also words that failed to impress. You once threw a fork at Nicolas when he suggested that a husband owns his wife and a wife her husband. He ducked out of the way and then held your gaze as he laughed.
There is a sound I associate with the country rather than the city—the humming of electricity lines. In the city you can’t isolate this sound from all the others, but in the country, where the wind throttles along the lines across open fields, you can hear and feel the vibrating song, and it seems to me that the grass in the fields stands on its tiptoes.
I have in mind this sound and an autumn dawn, which is when the hum is amplified by wet air and
by billions of droplets of dew on blades of grass and spiderwebs and on the cables themselves. There is Teddy running ahead and Nicolas’ strong back and the bits of leaves in his hair. This must have been the September or October of 1984, before the January you left, and we had all got up for a dawn walk. You were nocturnal by then, and night after night you upset the calm of the house with your silent restless skulking. The morning I am thinking of, Teddy woke up and there was no more sleep to be had for anyone, so we went out into some golden God-flung humming vibrating mist that had appeared as if to show humans they knew nothing about the Earth.
Along the lane you tried to part the mist with your hand. There was Teddy running ahead with Nicolas, bits of leaves in Nicolas’ hair, though why I can’t say. Had he lain down somewhere, had one of us stuck them there? Teddy perhaps, when piggybacking. You were talking about the deities of the morning, eulogising the breaking of the day; why did people get up after the day was already broken when they could stay up at night, watch the transformation of darkness into light rather than always light into darkness? There is Aušrinė, Lithuanian goddess of the morning star. Aurora in Roman, the rosy Titaness Eos in Greek. In Vedic philosophy the goddess of the morning, Ushas, is a kind of portal for awakening, we pass through her into enlightenment. Why do people not want to be enlightened, why do they only want to be endarkened?
Dear Thief: A Novel Page 11