Seven Letters

by J. P. Monninger

  I didn’t want to stop reading, but I sensed it would be good to take my nose out of a book for a few minutes. Besides, I liked his way. I grabbed my wallet out of my desk drawer and stood. He held out his hand.

  “We should meet properly, Kate,” he said, taking my hand. “Daijeet Agarwal. Nice to make your acquaintance.”

  “Kate Moreton. Nice to meet you, too.”

  We hardly spoke as we went downstairs to the snack bar, but it was not an uncomfortable silence. Something about his presence was soothing. At the checkout counter, he insisted on buying my tea. I let him. Then we went to sit at a tiny round table near a large window looking out on the common. It took me a moment to realize we sat directly beneath our carrels.

  “How did you come to study trout?” I asked him when we had settled.

  “Oh, it’s a funny story, really. I’m an Anglophile. Absurd, I know, for an Indian boy. We have cause to hate the British. I was raised in India by an aunt and my mother. My father died when I was young, but he left behind a remarkable library. A British Empire library, I suppose you could say. I spent my days reading all sorts of British rot about the Empire, and Queen Victoria, and goodness knows what else. I became enamored of Sir Izaak Walton, of all people. Do you know his work?”

  “Nothing except the name.”

  “Some call him the father of fly fishing. British to the core. His father died when he was a young man. He earned his living as an ironmonger, but was trained as a linen draper. He spent the last twenty years of his life traveling around and fishing with eminent clergymen. The balmy English, you could say. He published The Compleat Angler in 1653, about a half century after Hamlet. I don’t know why, but I bought into it all. Maybe the search for a father, God save me. The old clergymen and Walton wading around the streams of England. And wearing the whole British getup, tweeds and unsuitable hats. It probably didn’t even exist as I envisioned it, but I came up with my own interpretation of it. Like a boy playing Dungeons and Dragons, you could say, except I really did go out to the streams and teach myself how to fish. A kind older man named Emmet Peterson took me under his wing and taught me the finer points. He loved Walton’s writings, too, so we were well matched. He taught biology in a secondary school, so that lit a fuse with me. I saw a way to teach and fish and go along. And here I am today.”

  “That’s a wonderful story. What a different way into your field.”

  “Oh, it feels ridiculous sometimes. I often wonder why people make the choices to go into the fields they choose. But I do like the work and the field study. I’m not fishing with old clergymen, but I have a chance to wander around the British Isles and fish and take water samples. But I am talking way too much. I guess I’ve missed the company of my fellow scholars this semester without even knowing it. Tell me about your interest, Kate. I’d like to know.”

  I did as he requested. To my bewilderment, I found I had a great deal bottled up, too. I told him about my family growing up in the Springfield/Chicopee area of Massachusetts, about my father and his remembrances of his childhood, about my concentration on women’s narratives of the Blaskets. Asked ten minutes before our tea, I would have said I couldn’t possibly outline my area of interest for a virtual stranger. But I did. It had something to do with Daijeet’s kind, soft eyes. And my own loneliness, I supposed. You couldn’t live in books forever, I knew.

  “Well, aren’t we a pair?” he said when I finished. “What kind of deranged childhoods did we endure?”

  He laughed as he said it. I laughed, too. We finished our tea watching the students walk by. He said if I ever wanted to go fishing with him some day, I should feel free to ask. He promised to bring me fresh trout and salmon. I looked at him and realized it was like having a bear promise to bring you food. A friendly bear. Yes, I told him. Please do.

  SECOND LETTER

  Kate—

  Fall skies. Smoke and the pull of a fish deep in the ocean. Sometimes I climb to the top of the Ferriter to see the curve of the earth in the distance. It’s possible to fall off the ocean, I believe. Rooks are clustered near my land these days and I have been watching them dive on an orchard, their beaks red and yellow with apple pulp. Two fingers of whiskey. When the rooks look up, they have black eyes. I imagine if I could see one closely enough, see their eyes, I could see a reflection of Ireland in them. Of grass and wind and stone. Here’s what I thought when I met you: this woman is a bird you hear singing just before sunset. A hermit thrush. Maybe that’s too much. That is too much. Try again: this woman is a fire on a cold autumn day. She is a burning of branches, apple branches, and the smoke that goes to the clouds. The rooks tell me we should try again. Try once. I am not perfect and I am not whole. I am spotted. But my blood tells me we would be right together. That we could be together in bed and sleep until the sheep sing to us and the stars dive into the light. Come be with me, Kate. I won’t bite. I will meet you with honesty. Nothing needs to happen until you say it needs to happen. Until you can trust me.

  Winter will be here soon. The season of bowls and spoons. We should spend it together.

  Gottfried misses you. I considered tying this letter to his collar and tying him to your door, but that seemed hackneyed. Too cute. Or too something.

  “And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”

  I hope that is your answer.

  13

  I read Ozzie’s letter twice before I placed it on the small kitchen table facedown. Instinct, self-preservation, told me to burn it. A dart of headache registered between my brows. It was a good letter, if maybe a bit straining. It was a provocative letter. It was a come-hither letter. It was a see-I-am-a-soulful-wounded-man-come-mend-me letter. All of that.

  And the last line was a quote from Joyce. I looked it up on my phone. I read it slowly and admitted Ozzie had good taste. A good eye. But, of course, it could also be a pose, a trap he used to lure women closer. It was a better trap than most, I granted, but my warning bells still tinkled.

  I took a deep breath and glanced at the clock on the stove. It was 4:37. The Bicycle Society was planning to call on me at five. They had switched plans around to accommodate my newness. Instead of me joining them, they promised to swing by and pick me up. On bicycles.

  I used the bathroom, brushed my hair, then texted Milly.

  Going out with the Bicycle Society. If not back later, call police.

  Hardly a minute went by before she texted me back.

  Fun. Play nice.

  Ozzie sent a letter.

  Dreamy or drecky?

  Half and half. Romantic. Byronic. Idiotic.

  Give him credit for trying.

  Daijeet Agarwal is my study buddy. He might be a bear wearing spectacles.

  I need a study buddy.

  Here they are, I texted when I heard them knocking downstairs. Gotta go.

  “You’re wondering,” said a woman when I opened the door, “if we are prostitutes or something altogether different. I wish we were hookers, dear. Ladies of the night. They have better underwear than we do.”

  I didn’t recognize her, so I assumed the speaker was Victoria, the landscape professional.

  “We are the Bicycle Society,” Elsa said. “May we come in?”

  “You have to invite us in like vampires,” Agatha, my friendly librarian, said. “Otherwise, we have to stay outside.”

  “Certainly. Please come in, won’t you?”

  I stepped back. Agatha touched my elbow as she passed. Victoria, tall, with wide shoulders and a masculine cut to her clothes, stopped directly in front of me. She had enormous energy. Her dark eyes looked out in sharp, appraising lines. She wore a fascinator in her hair. It caught the late afternoon light and sent it in a dozen directions.

  “Victoria Willington,” she said. “God-awful name, I know. Sounds like a joke. British more than Irish. Most call me Vic, never Vicky. Nice to meet me.”

  “Nic
e to meet you, Vic,” I answered, only catching her little joke on the last bounce.

  She smiled. They came in like a well-ordered troop and went up the stairs ahead of me. Victoria, Vic, carried a bag that clanked. Wine, I imagined.

  “They did do a good job, Elsa,” Agatha said, looking around the apartment to inspect the paint job. “The painters. Nicely done. Was that Jim and his crew?”

  “I believe so. Yes, I am trying to remember. Yes, Jim. No … Bobby. I don’t remember for sure.”

  I hadn’t reached the top step of my own apartment when I heard my kitchen drawers opening. Victoria went through them rapidly, looking for a wine opener, I imagined. She had set a bottle out on the kitchen table next to Ozzie’s overturned letter. I had the odd sensation of being hosted in my own space. Elsa seemed to read the panic in my expression.

  “We’ve terrified you, haven’t we?” she said. “You must wonder what in the world…”

  “You really should supply people with wine openers,” Victoria said, closing the last drawer in frustration. “It’s uncivilized not to, Elsa.”

  “I have a Swiss Army knife,” Agatha said, digging into a pocket in her skirt. “We’ve used it before. Quit being such a bulldog, Vic.”

  “Oh, hand it here. I’ll have the corks out in an hour or two. Bloody desperate corkscrews on these knives,” Vic said.

  “And we have tandem bike for you to ride, if you’re still game,” Elsa said. “You’ll ride with Agatha. We’ve decided to amend the program today. We’re just riding to Vic’s house.”

  “Call her Aggie, for god’s sakes,” Vic said. “No one calls her Agatha.”

  “You and Aggie, then,” Elsa finished and then glanced at Vic. “Are you quite through antagonizing everyone, Vic?”

  “Not yet,” Vic said, snatching the closest bottle off the table. “Not until I have a drink.”

  “She does calm down later,” Aggie said, sitting at the kitchen table. “She’s like a horse who has to run around the track a couple times before she’s sensible.”

  I felt the tiniest bit overwhelmed, but happy, too, to have people in my apartment. To have friends or at least acquaintances. I had been terribly deep into my books. Before Vic could finally get the cork out, though, we decided to bike over to her house and drink the wine there. It wasn’t far. They were all coming from work and I sensed they wanted to get to a familiar place. It didn’t make sense to settle twice around a glass of wine.

  I locked up and followed them downstairs. I tried to remember the last time I had ridden a tandem bicycle. It had been years. Aggie took the front and I took the rear. She looked back at me over her shoulder.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “It’s only a mile or so. We’ll be there in a jiff. We stay right next to the river, so no worries about traffic.”

  “I’m game.”

  It was beautiful. Vic zoomed in and out, laughing and taunting us, complaining that she needed a drink, and Elsa rode responsibly, in keeping with her nature. It was Thursday, almost the end of the work week, and I felt the pleasure of the day ending, the small lights coming on in the houses we passed. I was in Ireland, I reminded myself, biking along the Shannon River with some new Irish friends. White herons stood in the gentle current, scanning the river bottom for worms or shrimp or whatever it was they ate. The autumn air chilled me, but it felt good to have the breeze on my skin. I matched my pedaling to Aggie’s pace and we sprinted along, doing better than any of them, ahead of the pack but part of it, too. The moon rose above the eastern horizon and sent a yellow light onto the water, the beams fracturing like fire the moment they touched the dark current.

  * * *

  We sat in Vic’s country house. That’s what she called it, although we remained in the Limerick city limits. It was a dream Irish cottage: dull gray stone covered in ivy, with multipaned windows and a mossy brick walkway to the front door. Milly would have called it a calendar house, one of those remarkable homes photographed to mark October or March, the kind of place that filled you with envy and a hope that life really could be like the cottage suggested. But Vic’s nonchalance around it made it comfortable and welcoming. Near the front door she had a box full of walking sticks and boots. The fireplace was not enormous, but it burned nimbly. She had cat andirons, tall and thin, whose eyes glowed when the flames caught them in the right way. We sat under one lamp while the fire provided the rest of the illumination. If someone had told me I would land in such a cottage after a week in Ireland, I would have told the person she was crazy. But here I was. Life had moved quickly.

  “Kate, you now know all the inner secrets of the Bicycle Society,” Elsa said. “It isn’t much, I’m afraid. It’s Vic’s fault, the whole thing. She made us exercise to feel good about drinking wine, so we combined the two at her suggestion.”

  “And no one has to drive,” Aggie added. “That’s key. Ireland is unbelievably tough on drink-driving.”

  “It’s a good society,” I said, settling more deeply into the loveseat that directly faced Vic’s lovely fire. “Just the proper amount of secrecy. All societies should have a little secrecy baked into them.”

  “Lord, I like hearing an American voice. All that twang,” Vic said, her backside to the fire. “We sometimes forget. I remember when I first moved to Colorado I couldn’t get enough of the American accent.”

  “Is yours a Boston accent?” Agatha asked me.

  “I guess so. New England, really.”

  “I get such a kick out of southern American accents. They sound as if they’re chewing each word. I like the word gumbo,” Elsa said.

  Evening had fallen around us. Vic ordered Chinese food. It came in minutes, much to my surprise, until Vic explained the restaurant was only a block away. I got up to wash my hands and came back in time to hear Ozzie’s name mentioned. It surprised me to hear it.

  “You went to the Blaskets with him, didn’t you? On his boat?” Elsa asked as we leaned forward to make selections from the white cardboard containers of Chinese food. “Ozzie Ferriter?”

  “I did,” I said, careful of what I said. Ireland was a small country. Ozzie was right about that.

  “He’s Nora Crean’s grandson,” Elsa explained to Aggie and Vic. “Great looking and a fisherman of some sort. He was soldier in Afghanistan, wasn’t he, Kate?”

  “He was, I gather. I don’t know him well.”

  “Nora Crean is rich as Midas,” Vic said. “She supports a dozen Irish charities single-handedly. She has New York money.”

  “And he runs a dog camp of some sort. I remember hearing that,” Aggie said, passing out the chopsticks that accompanied the order.

  “Rescue dogs, I heard,” I said. “But he gave that up, I think.”

  “He is a good-looking bastard,” Vic said. “I know who you’re talking about now. I’ve seen him beside Nora Crean at openings and such.”

  “He’s good to his grandmother,” I said, taking an egg roll. “To Nora or Gran. That’s what Ozzie calls her.”

  “Did he ask you out?” Vic asked, then she shook her head and laughed. “Of course he did! You’re both beautiful! The question is, did you go with him?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  And that brought a small roar of laughter.

  “Don’t let them bully you,” Elsa said. “You go out with whomever you like.”

  “But to come all this way and end up on a date with an American,” Aggie said, “is just too rich.”

  “He’s half Irish, too,” Elsa said, a beard of noodles cascading down from her chopsticks. “With a name like Ferriter? Do you know, they once had a castle on the Blaskets?”

  “I did know that,” I said. “It came up in my research.”

  “Oh, give him a tumble,” Vic said. “Why not? He might prove to be a nicer guy than we’re making him out to be.”

  “I’ll put out feelers and see if any women friends have a line on him,” Aggie said.

  “Please d
on’t,” I said. “Whatever you find out I’ll either like too much or too little, and neither position helps me.”

  “She’s right!” Vic said, grabbing a bottle of wine and filling all of our glasses. “Good mental health, Kate. Not always easy to achieve in this group.”

  The fire chose that moment to send a spark onto the floor near Vic’s boot. She smashed it down and twisted on it until she could be certain it was extinguished. I watched her, eating slowly, my mind drifting to a lecture I had heard in an anthropology class years before. The professor, Dr. Conahue, had been a marvelous teacher who had spent years in Africa observing village and tribal life. She said that in Africa women engage in lamentation sessions. It could take place around a river while they washed clothing, or in the process of pounding millet for their evening meals. In fact, Dr. Conahue said, wherever women congregated, they invariably created a lamentation session, where each individual could have a turn at airing her heartache or disappointment. I hadn’t thought of that concept since I had been an undergraduate, but it seemed true to me in this moment. We were village women gone to the river to haul water back on our heads. Meanwhile, we passed the time by complaining or speculating about men. It didn’t change much the world over.

  That thought flashed through my mind in an instant. But it left me wondering what to do about Ozzie. I wanted to ask their opinions, but I was too uncertain of the reactions. What did I want them to say? How did I want to see Ozzie? The entire matter was still upside down in my mind.

  But I remembered him kissing me. I remembered kissing him back.

  We talked about the university after that. They filled me in on people I should know, who could fix a computer, who might process travel money associated with my fellowship. They also gave me a thousand destinations to consider. Vic pulled out three well-thumbed Lonely Planet travel guides from the bookshelves beside the fireplace. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the day ended.

  The fire went lower, and Aggie said she should be getting back, was I ready? I said yes and that cued Elsa to stand.