Seven Letters

by J. P. Monninger

“Our first night together,” he said. “How do you like that?”

  “Our first dinner together,” I said.

  He looked at me and smiled. I smiled back.

  Then it was all business, and I recognized, in no time, that he was more than an amateur cook. As soon as we had agreed to stay in for the night, he took over the dinner plans. Clearly, he was at home in a grocery store. He parked the cart in the vegetable section and spent ten minutes poking and prodding the produce. I had put carrots and a head of lettuce in the basket, but he lifted them out and replaced them with organic choices.

  “I know who grows these,” he said, hardly looking at me. “If you’ll allow me.”

  He had obviously gone foodie on me. He refused to buy fish from the grocery store. If it wasn’t fresh, he told me, meaning right off his boat, he didn’t eat it. He settled on beef tips and asparagus and a rice pilaf. Simple but plain, he promised. He also promised me a pear tart for dessert. Then we spent a long time in front of the wine racks. To my relief, he wasn’t a wine snob. He selected six bottles of wine, all moderately priced, plopped them in the cart, and then pushed on. I liked watching him shop. He took pleasure in the experience, sniffing basil and thyme, pinching the pears—not ideal, he said, but serviceable—and evidently imagining the tastes of each dish combining to form the whole meal. He wasn’t fussy, only forceful, and I found it an attractive trait in him.

  We had just reached the dairy section when Lollie found him.

  I didn’t know she was named Lollie, of course, until she introduced herself. She was tall and blond, with a pink bandana over her head. She wore a down vest and bright white sneakers with her socks pulled high on her calves. She had just come from yoga, she said, after she hugged him. He hugged her back. Then they both turned halfway to me and we all knew that they had once been together, had been lovers, and now I was in some sort of place where she had been. She smelled of apples.

  “Lollie is a nurse at the Limerick hospital,” Ozzie said, introducing her more fully. “And she does visiting nurse stuff, too.”

  Lollie and Ozzie, I thought. They sounded like soft drinks.

  “Nice to meet you,” I managed to say.

  “Kate is newly arrived on Ireland’s shore,” Ozzie said, suddenly sounding like a travel brochure. “Her family is from here.”

  “Welcome, then,” Lollie said, and I hated that she felt it was her place to welcome me.

  And that she was blond and tall and wore yoga pants that showed off a body that should have been licensed by the Irish government. Lollie. Ozzie smiled at both of us. Then Lollie made her getaway. She had a small basket clamped on her arm. She switched it quickly and gave the smile of leaving.

  “Nice to see you, Ozzie. And nice to meet you, Kate. Ozzie, don’t be a stranger. It’s been ages.”

  “Far too long,” Ozzie agreed.

  Not nearly long enough, I thought.

  “Still have your dogs?” Lollie asked, one step accomplished.

  “No, the last one was farmed out a while back. I’ve just got a new one in the truck if you’re interested.”

  “Well, I’m afraid not. Not the right space for a dog at this point, but I know where to come if I need one. He is so good with dogs, Kate.”

  Then she walked down the aisle, her yoga pants whisking slightly as she went. She sounded like a child’s snowsuit as she left. She stopped quickly halfway down, selected something from the shelves on her left, made a tiny wave to us, then disappeared around the endcap.

  “I can’t say I blame you,” I said to Ozzie. “She’s lovely.”

  “I’m sorry that happened. For what it’s worth, it was a long time ago.”

  “You know, Ozzie. You seem like a good guy. And you’re attractive in your own primitive way. When you kissed me at the door, well, I was fair game. But you know, I’m over here for such a short time, and the work I have to do is important to me. It is. Lollie just reminded me of that. Sorry. Not your fault, honestly. It’s just not going to work on my end.”

  “It really was a long time ago, Kate.”

  “I believe you. But there are other Lollies out there waiting. Again, that’s not anything I blame you for. I just don’t want to be a Lollie.”

  “You aren’t a Lollie. That’s unfair.”

  “Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. The point is, I’m not interested in the part. You don’t need me, Ozzie. You have plenty to keep you busy. I’m sure of that. And sex is fun and I’m not a prude, and under other circumstances, well, who knows? But I’m not here for all that. Truly, I’m not. I need a clear mind and I need to concentrate on my work.”

  “I like you, Kate. I liked you from the start.”

  “I believe you. I don’t think you’re trying to trick me, Ozzie. Nothing like that. I simply don’t have time for a distraction. I’ve got one academic year. I need to travel and absorb as much as I can. And I am going to spend as much time as possible in the library. That’s always been my dream about Ireland, Ozzie. It’s nothing personal.”

  “All this because of Lollie?”

  “And because of her yoga pants. And her telling you not to be a stranger. And your damn good looks.”

  “You think I’m good looking?”

  “Don’t be desperate, Ozzie.”

  He laughed. I gave him credit for that.

  “Well, I’ll give you a ride back anyway. I’ll empty this cart and you can grab another.”

  “Thank you, Ozzie. I hope we can be friends.”

  “Did you really just say that?”

  It was my turn to laugh.

  So that was what we did. I came out of the market with two bags of basic supplies. Ozzie carried one but handed it back to me when we arrived at the truck. He opened the door carefully and gathered Gottfried into his arms.

  “Mommy and Daddy are getting divorced,” he whispered to Gottfried.

  “It’s not your fault, Gottfried. We both love you.

  “You’ll have two homes now. And two Christmases! Think how fun that will be!”

  Then he looked at me over the dog’s soft head.

  “I’m not done trying, Kate. I like you more than you know.”

  “Do us both a favor and let it go.”

  “I’ll curse Lollie to her last days for showing up when she did.”

  “There will always be a Lollie with you, Ozzie. It’s the weather around you.”

  “Not true. You wound me, Kate.”

  I put my bags of groceries in the back of the truck and took Gottfried from him. He held the door while I climbed in, then closed it softly after me.

  12

  “We’ve reserved you a carrel. You can leave your things there. It will save you the trouble of carrying books back and forth. I hope it will be satisfactory. We have eight visiting scholars at the moment. You’ll be in good company.”

  I followed Agatha Thomond up the stairs of the University of Limerick Library. She was a short, tidy woman, with brown hair and green eyes. She wore tweed. She reminded me of a woman out walking the glens of Scotland, a shepherd dog beside her, a walking thorn in her hand, while rain pelted her and fog tried to undo her hair. I liked her immediately. She was a member of the Bicycle Society, I knew, because Elsa Bunratty had called and made the connection. Agatha had been on my list of contacts in any case, but it was good to have an introduction. Despite the tweed, she was approximately my age, perhaps a few years older.

  She escorted me to a desk overlooking the wide public square outside the library. It was not a grand desk, merely a two-shelved plain table with a laminate top, but it was clean and bright and well positioned to look out and watch the world go by. A handsome lamp took up one corner of the desk surface, and Agatha flicked it on and off to check that it was in working order.

  “The bulbs are always going on these things,” she said, glancing under the brown lamp shade to check. “But this one seems to be in order. How will this do? Can you make this work?”

  “Absolutely. It’s perfect.”
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  “Well, you’re being kind. But it should do you. We’ve had no complaints. The internet is fulsome and reliable. The carrel is yours, day and night. No one else will even sit at the desk. That’s one of our policies. People are remarkably good about it. It’s a bit of an ethical piece of local lore. Honoring scholars and all of that.”

  “Thank you, Agatha. It’s just right for me. I can look out and daydream and read to my heart’s content.”

  “And you’ll be traveling a good deal, I imagine,” she said, and motioned for me to try out the seat. I did. It was a straight-backed wooden chair, solid and heavy. She watched me as I fussed with the lamp to get the light to fall on the desktop in a way that generated a sharp moon of illumination. I had two drawers on either side of my leg area. Someone had left a pair of scissors, a pack of yellow legal pads, and a tin of tea in the top drawer on the right side.

  “Oh, that reminds me. You can have tea down in the cafeteria. It’s quite good and reasonably priced. You could nearly live in this library. We even have a shower room down in the basement if it comes to that.”

  “I hope I won’t need that.”

  She smiled. She had a kind, good face. I liked her enormously.

  “Elsa asked me to invite you to our next Bicycle Society meeting. Can you ride a bike? We simply bicycle to a pub and drink wine. It’s nothing fancy.”

  “Yes. I’m pretty good on a bike.”

  “It’s a funny little group. Just we three, really. You haven’t met Victoria, have you?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “She works in grounds. Plants. She’s in charge of the landscaping around here. You’ll like her. She lived for a long time in Colorado with her mad boyfriend. Then they broke apart and she came back here. She’s more American in her outlook than Elsa or I.”

  She smiled the type of smile that said she had delivered all the information she had and now, if I needed anything, it was my turn to talk. I didn’t need anything. She nodded her head.

  “Then I’ll leave you to it. Some of the scholars write down their area of interest and tape it to the desk. It’s a little tradition. You don’t have to do it if you won’t want to, but sometimes areas of research overlap and you’d never know you’re sitting near someone doing work that influences your own. It’s a good idea usually.”

  “Thank you. I’ll do that.”

  “It’s good to have you here, Kate. Welcome to the university library.”

  “Thank you. It’s been wonderful already.”

  After she left, I sat for a long time and looked out at the common below. Students went back and forth, and a few boys rode by on long boards. It looked about the same as any college campus in the States. A small group of four played hacky-sack, a game I hadn’t seen in a long time. The girls wore clothes you could see on any college campus: leggings and fleeces, sometimes with a scarf, sometimes with Ugg boots anchoring their feet. I realized, watching them, that I missed teaching. I missed the energy I gathered from young college students spilling into my classroom.

  Later, when the sun had moved to cast long shadows into my window, I flicked on the lamp again and pulled out one of the yellow sheets from the legal pad. I wrote on it: Kate Moreton, American, studying narratives of the Blasket Islands. I taped it to my desk and turned off the lamp, then smoothed the note several times with my hands.

  * * *

  For two days I read. I read nonstop. I read deeply. I fell asleep in bed, a book suspended in my hand, the pages fluffing like a kind bird floating above me. I read in my carrel, concentrating and taking notes, and I read as I ate bowls of good soup in the campus pub. I read the account, haphazard as it was, of Maura O’Hailey, the woman from Massachusetts who, in her bouts with Alzheimer’s, had suddenly returned to her mother tongue, Old Irish, the language of the Blaskets. I read about seals and cod and thatched roofs, and about men falling into the sea and disappearing forever, about the trawlers from the Isle of Man who came for the herring harvest, of nurses who visited the islands and found the inhabitants nearly starved and malnourished. I read about Robin Flower, a British researcher, who had spent his summers studying the language and customs of the Blasket Islanders, about the French who discovered bountiful lobster caches around the stony islands and traded rope and linens, beeswax and sugar, for the blue-green creatures who ended their lives in Parisian pots. I read until the world of the Blaskets felt more familiar to me than the world I inhabited, until the Blaskets became a dream I entered as easily as opening a door. I learned the family names, the names of deceased children, of women who had perished in childbirth. It was a pleasure—this consumption of prose—that I had only experienced in brief moments before. It was a scholar’s compensation, the joy one could get only by living in books, the taste of pages on one’s tongue.

  I had the study-carrel area to myself. I wasn’t sure why. I had gone quietly around the room, reading the names and concentrations of the other scholars. I told myself I did so to discover if my research interest overlapped with the interest of any other attending scholar, but the truth was more pedestrian than that. I was simply nosy. Three of the scholars, it turned out, had posted notes below their name plates to say they were away and would return on such and such a date. One scholar wrote that she was having a baby. Another scholar wrote that he had left on a drinking binge and didn’t expect to be back until Christmas. I liked him for his honesty.

  That still left two scholars. I formed the eighth. They had left no notes to explain their absences, and so each day as I sat in my carrel, I waited for one of them to appear. I knew their names: Carol Markman and Daijeet Agarwal. Carol Markman’s research interest was Irish nutrition around the time of the potato famine. Daijeet Agarwal’s interest was trout. While I found Carol Markman’s area interesting, I found the simple declaration by Daijeet Agarwal more compelling: trout. Perhaps it was my fatigue, or my focus on the Blaskets, but I turned the phrase over and over in my head, playing with it, trying to make it make sense. Trout. Say any word long enough and it can become humorous, but trout was better than most. Trout. Truite in French. Forelle in German. I couldn’t help conjuring an image of a man sitting at a table talking to a fish. Interviewing the fish. Shaking fins with the fish. I wanted Daijeet Agarwal to appear and explain his trout to me. But for my first two days, he was nowhere to be seen.

  On the third day, on the Thursday when I was scheduled to attend my first Bicycle Society meeting, Daijeet Agarwal arrived. He was tall and round, a bear-man with feet that splayed slightly outward. He could dribble a soccer ball by merely walking to the window. He was dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, and he carried a well-worn backpack over his right shoulder. He smiled at me when he saw me, but he did not say a word. He sat down loudly at his desk and began pulling things out of his backpack. I tried to ignore him, but of course that was impossible. The space compelled us to be aware of each other. I looked out the window. Rain had come up early and stayed around, although the weather report called for clear skies later in the day. I wondered, absently, if the rain had chased Daijeet off a stream somewhere, derailed his trout studies, but I pushed that thought from my head and tried to concentrate on the Blaskets. My ears, however, picked up the steady thump of him emptying his backpack. Whatever he did with trout, it seemed to require a fair amount of equipment.

  “You are the new scholar,” he said when the thumping stopped. “The Blasket Islands scholar. We heard you were coming.”

  I turned in my chair.

  “Yes. Hello. I’m Kate.”

  “And I am Daijeet. An Irishman of the first order.”

  He smiled. He had a wonderful smile. And I was fairly certain he was not an Irishman in the sense that he meant it.

  “Nice to meet you. You study trout?”

  “Yes. Well, water, too. Oxygen and the carrying capacity of waters for rainbow trout. I work with the Irish government to increase fish production. At least that’s our mission. It’s not always successful.”

  “That�
�s fascinating.”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m an angler, mostly. I like to fish, so I thought this would keep me near a stream. So far it has. I’m not here very often. I usually only stop in to check messages and whatnot.”

  “How about Carol Markman? Is she around?”

  “No, she dropped out of her doctoral program. She came to hate it. She took off to Bali or somewhere in the east. She liked to travel more than study. A little bit of a party girl, I guess. I think it’s just you and me this semester. And you needn’t worry. I won’t be here often.”

  “I don’t require a priestly silence.”

  “I didn’t mean that you did. My mother always said boys make noise to confirm they’re alive. I think she was right about that. I have a station at a water lab in the north, up by Donegal. I spend most of my time there.”

  “Do you live in Limerick?”

  “I have an apartment here. A tiny place. I’m officially part of the University of Limerick visiting faculty. I spend a good deal of time sleeping in my truck. I have a government pass to fish wherever I like. All in the name of research. I guess I am what Americans call a trout bum.”

  I liked him. I suspected his research was a good deal more complicated, and more valuable, than he let on. I envied him what I imagined to be the straightforward nature of his research. Water and trout. That seemed sensible. It raised the question of my own research. The narratives were unquestionably worthwhile. What I was less certain about was my own approach to the narratives, how I would turn them into a readable volume that would shed light on the women’s experiences on the islands. That was a large part of what I had come to Ireland to understand.

  But that was a concern for another day. When Daijeet finished rumbling around in his desk, he appeared at my elbow and asked me to tea.

  “I’d love to have tea,” I said, not entirely clear on his invitation. “Anytime.”

  “I meant now. Let me treat you to a cup of tea. It’s the least I can do to welcome you. We can get to know each other a little bit.”