Seven Letters

by J. P. Monninger

  And solitude. That didn’t surprise me, entirely, but it stopped me for a moment to consider why I hadn’t asked Ozzie to stay. He might have liked a day or two in a different setting. He was my husband, after all. But we had both tacitly understood we needed to be apart for a time. I wondered what that meant. I wondered a great deal about that.

  I went out to dinner at Cupcakes, a small restaurant that specialized in cupcake desserts. It was more of a café than a restaurant, but I had been in there twice before and I felt comfortable as a single woman dining alone. It was not the sort of restaurant Ozzie would patronize. He would have found it artificial and silly, but I enjoyed it. They had a good shrimp salad that I liked, and an excellent red curry that had no business existing in a restaurant called Cupcakes.

  A young waiter seated me at a table in the back corner of the restaurant. It wasn’t busy. I asked for another glass of wine, then simply sat for a moment experiencing the pleasure of clean hair, clean nails, clean everything. I smelled good and felt good and the bath had made me boneless and sleepy. I smiled when the waiter brought the wine and I ordered curry. Then I opened a notebook I had filled about the Blaskets, about medical care specifically, and I read over what I had recorded, pleased with the depth of my note-taking.

  When the waiter brought my curry, he brought me a second glass of wine. I looked up, puzzled, and he pushed his chin toward a man sitting at the small bar at the front of the café.

  “With his regards,” the waiter said, clearly uncomfortable carrying the message.

  Not once in my life had I been sent a glass of wine by a man, and I flushed red. I had no idea what the protocol was in these situations. Ridiculously, I picked up the first glass of wine with my left hand so that he could see my wedding ring, the one Ozzie had placed on my hand at Skellig Michael. I thought that would do the trick, but he merely smiled and raised his glass to me. I looked down at my notebook, embarrassed and confused.

  When the waiter came back to my table carrying the curry soup, I nearly asked him to remove the wineglass. But that seemed churlish and juvenile. Men bought glasses of wine for women and women bought glasses of wine for men. I knew that.

  Still, I felt mildly uncomfortable accepting the wine.

  The lovely haze I had when I entered the restaurant now grew thinner. It troubled me to have to eat my soup with someone watching. I had lost my anonymity. I kept my eyes down, but I peeked enough to know that the man remained at the bar. I saw his reflection in the mirror; he was dark and square, a block of wood chipped from an old bookcase. His hair was short on the sides, longer on top, and he wore an expensive-looking suit without a tie. His shoe, up on the bar rail, was a black loafer.

  Not that it mattered, but he was not my type at all. I tried to imagine what Milly would call him. If Ozzie was some sort of pickup truck, this man was an expensive sedan with tinted windows. I kept my head down and ate my curry, which was delicious.

  Then suddenly he stood beside my table. I detected motion, nothing more, and for an instant I thought it was the waiter. When I glanced up, I saw him. He stood respectfully, waiting for me to look up, his glass of wine in his hands.

  “Did I overstep?” he asked. “I apologize if I did.”

  “Thank you, but I’m just not interested.”

  “In wine? Or in the strangers who send the wine?”

  “Both. Each. I appreciate the gesture. But thank you, no.”

  “How do you like glass?”

  Now he was overstepping. I looked down, hoping he would back off. But he didn’t move. It made me uneasy. But it also—and I hated that it did—made me a little flushed and nervous. As if I wanted his attention. As if I wanted his glass of wine.

  “I’m here for a glass exhibit,” he said. “I’m going to leave a ticket here, on the edge of the table. My name is Jonathan. I’ll be there tomorrow. It’s quite a famous exhibit and you might enjoy it. Here, and I apologize again.”

  He slipped a ticket more solidly onto the table. He smiled when I glanced up and it was not the worst smile in the world.

  “I won’t be attending,” I said.

  “But just in case. Ask for Jonathan. Most people know me.”

  He left. I saw him stop at the bar, pay, then take off. He did not look over to me. In an instant, he was gone.

  As soon as he left, I felt anxious and guilty. But why? I hadn’t done anything. I couldn’t prevent someone from sending me a glass of wine or approaching my table. Yet I wondered if there had been something in my demeanor, my posture or my glances, that had invited him to approach me. If that were the case, what was behind that? I wondered. Peculiar. I finished my curry and finished the glass of wine Jonathan had sent to the table. Counting the two glasses I had consumed in the bath, that made four. Two was my usual limit. When I stood after paying the bill, I felt slightly light-headed. I looked for a long minute at the invitation to the glass exhibit. I took a step away from the table, then stepped back and picked up the ticket and stuck it in my notebook like a bookmark. It burned my arm when I tucked the notebook against my body.

  19

  As if serving penance for picking up the ticket from the table, I spent the next day in a flurry of errands and organizing. I sat at the small kitchen table in my apartment until two in the afternoon, answering emails, arranging bills, Skyping with Milly and with my mom. It felt good to get things in order. My dissertation director happened to be beside her computer, and we wrote back and forth a number of times, catching up. I felt plugged in again. It was something I had to remember to do more often. It made me think about the summer, and how it would be to live on a boat for months at a time. But I dismissed those thoughts when they came and forced myself to concentrate on the job at hand.

  Around three, I went for a long walk. It felt strange not to have Gottfried with me, but the River Shannon had a wonderful color at this time of year, and I walked along its edge until I felt fatigued. I wasn’t going to the glass exhibit. I wasn’t. That was clear in my mind, but I still felt uneasy about the message—had it been a message?—that I had sent out into the world. What had this Jonathan character seen in me? What sort of opportunity did he think he had? It vexed me.

  When I made it back to the apartment, I found Ozzie waiting. He and Gottfried were upstairs. Ozzie had a bottle of Bushmills on the table and two small glasses beside it. He poured out a glass for me and pushed it toward me. When he looked at me, I saw his eyes had emptied of something I had always found there. I sat across from him. My heart beat too fast.

  “Are you leaving me, Kate?” he asked.

  He had been drinking, I saw. I guessed that this was not the first bottle of Bushmills.

  “I’m not leaving you, Ozzie. Why would you say such a thing?”

  “You’ve changed. Is it the trip?”

  “The boat trip?”

  “Was there another trip I should know about?”

  I squared my shoulders. I sipped the whiskey. It burned but felt good going down. Ozzie sipped his own drink.

  “What do you mean I’ve changed?”

  He shrugged.

  “You had more gladness before. I can’t put a finger on it. Do you feel you’ve made a mistake in marrying me?”

  “No, Ozzie. No, that’s not it.”

  “But there is something?”

  “I don’t want to get into all this, Ozzie. It’s true, I’ve been feeling something. But I’m unsure what it is, and I don’t want to talk about it until I know.”

  “The whiskey will loosen your tongue.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to drink enough of that to loosen anything.”

  “You know, it would be kinder to call it a mistake and end it cleanly, if that’s what you’re feeling. No blame there. Anyone can make a mistake.”

  “And what about you, Ozzie? What are you feeling?”

  “I’m more in love with you now than ever.”

  “You say that too fast.”

  “It’s true, Kate. For all my faul
ts, I love you. I always will.”

  He poured out more whiskey for both of us. It felt strange to be having such an important conversation in this tiny apartment that didn’t truly belong to either of us. It felt like having a life talk in an airport waiting room. But now that we were in it, deep into a sort of frankness we couldn’t always capture, I decided to speak plainly.

  “Are you happy, Ozzie? Are you glad you married me?”

  “I am. I think, though, the marriage signifies something different for you. I’m a wonderful figure to be in love with, but to be a wife to me as a husband, maybe that’s the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He took a deep breath. Clearly, he had given this thought.

  “Oh, to be a wife to a man like me can’t be easy. I’m not as dependable as I should be. I rattle around. I’m not on a clear path. But you are, Kate. You are. You have purpose. You’re building a career. I’m hoping to drag you off to the ocean for the summer. That’s an adventure, but it’s not building toward anything.”

  “Does anything build toward anything?”

  “Don’t do that, Kate. You’re not the cynical type. We’ve only talked a little bit about children. About starting a family. For all our talking, we haven’t been plain with one another, have we?”

  “I suppose not. Not as you mean it.”

  “We better start being plain, or we will end up hurting each other.”

  “What about you, Ozzie? Am I the wife you wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  “You answer too quickly. You’re sure about that?”

  He nodded. He put his hand on Gottfried. The whiskey continued to burn, but not as much as it had before.

  “Kate, I didn’t expect to find you. In some ways, maybe, I wasn’t ready for you. But I love you, yes. I have no doubt about that. And, yes, you’re the wife I wanted. You’re the woman I’ve searched for.”

  “How is it that we haven’t talked about all this before?”

  “We have talked about some of it. But we are still courting each other and showing our good sides. Maybe the boat trip made us both realize we need to understand each other better. It put some pressure on us both that we didn’t anticipate.”

  I nodded. He wasn’t wrong. Maybe that had been the sand in our gears. I sipped more whiskey. I studied him, then asked what I had wanted to ask since I first met him.

  “Tell me about the war. If you mean what you say, tell me. You’ve always held it back. What happened there? What wounds are you carrying?”

  “I can’t talk about that, Kate. I made a promise to myself that I would never talk about it.”

  “But you should be able to talk to me. I’m your wife.”

  “You’re the last person I want to tell. The last. I want your good opinion.”

  “I’d love you no matter what.”

  “Would you? How do you know that, Kate? How do you know I didn’t do something monstrous? Something unforgiveable? There are acts that don’t deserve forgiveness.”

  “Is that why you drink?”

  He looked at me. Carefully. He lifted his glass and sipped it. Despite the crazed, nervous feeling I had in my gut, I wanted to hear everything. I wanted to know everything at last. I wanted everything on the table, to be organized, to fit together in a way that made sense. It was foolish, but that’s how I felt.

  “It’s too easy to point to one thing and say that’s the reason I drink. Or why anyone does anything. Life doesn’t have many straight lines, Kate.”

  “Fair enough. But how much do you drink? How much when you’re away from me?”

  He squinted. I knew the question hurt him.

  “More than I should.”

  “That’s too vague.”

  “Do you want a number? A bottle count? I don’t have one.”

  “To the point of…”

  “Foolish drunkenness? Is that what you are wondering? Yes, sometimes. Sometimes I am the worst cliché of a drunken, maudlin Irishman.”

  “Do you really fish?”

  He laughed.

  “I do,” he said. “I do fish, Kate. I like to fish, only it doesn’t pay much. You know that. I sell most of it off the books, so I do better than some. Some months are quite good. Restaurants know me.”

  “Where is the money? You don’t put it in a bank, do you? You’d be taxed on it if you did.”

  “Do you know the red stone?”

  He had pointed out the red stone to me at least three times. It was a dark, ruby-colored stone halfway on the walk to the sea from our cottage. Except for its distinctive color, there was nothing exceptional about the stone. It was easy to miss.

  “You keep it there?”

  He nodded. We didn’t say anything else for a moment. I wondered how I had been so blind. So gullible. So willing to put everything aside and believe that love, this madness I had felt since I met him, covered all, removed all, formed its own island protected us from the world.

  “So the long and the short of it is, Kate, that you’ve married a drunken fisherman.”

  “That’s not who you are, Ozzie.”

  “Yes, it is, Kate. That’s a large part of me. Don’t turn away from it. I apologize that I didn’t make it clearer to you sooner. I do. It was unfair. I didn’t hide it, but I didn’t parade it before you, either. I won’t apologize for my life as it, but I apologize for not telling you. You made a decision on slanted information.”

  “I made my decision on love. On my loving you.”

  “I believe you love me, Kate. I know that. What I don’t know is whether I can be the husband you want and need. That’s the part that is unclear to me.”

  “It takes time to know things, Ozzie.”

  “We have time if we want it, Kate. But if it seems a bad bargain, then we’d be better to end it quickly than stretch it out.”

  “How did we start talking about this?”

  “We’ve always been talking about it, Kate. Just not in words. There are no villains here. Just humans trying to be good at a difficult thing.”

  He came around the table then and knelt before me. He kissed me. The kiss continued, and maybe it was the whiskey, or maybe it was the level of feeling that we had admitted to, but in a minute, we were in bed, clawing at each other. It was afternoon and the light came in quietly and the wind carried the scent of the River Shannon on its skirts. We kissed over and over until nothing mattered but that. We did not manage to remove all our clothes. Twice I began to wonder what this meant, how it fit into the words we had just spoken, but then he took me in a new way, kissed me more deeply, and I clung to him and began to cry.

  20

  We left May first. It was a bright, brilliant spring day. The sun cracked into a thousand pieces of sparkling glass on the soft waters of Dingle Bay. Gran and Seamus came to see us off. I knelt for a long time before Gottfried and whispered my love to him. Then I hugged Gran and Seamus, kissed Gottfried one last time, and stepped on board. Ozzie had already thrown off most of the lines.

  “Your hair is red as fire, Kate,” Seamus called to me as the Ferriter moved slowly away from the pier. “You’re as Irish as you’ll ever be. They’ll sing odes to your parting.”

  “Thank you, Seamus. It’s an honor to be told that by a Tylwyth Teg like you.”

  A Tylwyth Teg was a Welsh fairy. His eyes widened and he laughed.

  “Travel safely,” Gran said. “Go n-éirí an bóthar leat.”

  She took something from her pocket and tossed into the water behind us. She had cast bread crumbs on the water. I knew the Bible verse by heart: Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. She nodded to me when our eyes met. She trusted her grandson to me.

  Then we were launched, alone on the ocean except for the shipping that passed this and that way on the day’s labor. We had set out at first light and we watched the sun climb above the ocean rim and spread itself wider and wider. The scent of the land came to us in small, fragrant pants. I stepped close to Ozzie and
realized that whatever became of us I would always remember this moment, this exact moment, when we left Ireland on a journey for no other purpose but to be together in love and adventure.

  “How do you like it so far, my love?” he whispered into my ear as he told me to stand with him at the wheel. “The world can’t catch us here.”

  “Thank you, Ozzie. Thank you for this. I never want the world to catch us.”

  “You dream of a thing and you hope one day to see it. To live it.”

  “It’s a mad, mad plan,” I said, quoting a movie line we had been saying to each other over the last couple weeks as we readied the Ferriter.

  He nuzzled my neck.

  “You’re my mad, mad plan,” he whispered. “You’re all of it.”

  I took the wheel for a time while he fixed breakfast. He went below and I steered the Ferriter into St. Finian’s Bay. Our GPS system was top-notch, but Ozzie had also taped a large navigational map to the back of the cuddy so that we could see where we traveled, what landmarks reached from the island to us. I glanced to see how far it was to Dursey Head. We planned to spend our first night in Bantry Bay, well guarded by the glove of land around us.

  “Hope you’re hungry,” Ozzie said, carrying up our breakfast. “I made coffee black as the inside of a cabbage. Seamus was correct, you know? Your hair is on fire this close to the ocean. You look like a fairy woman at the helm.”

  “I feel like a fairy woman right now.”

  He looked to check our bearing. Then he handed me a small plate full of olives and cheese and sliced tomato. He had scrambled eggs with chives.

  “A little chop coming up. We might get a blow later. But we’re right on course.”

  “Did you always love the sea, Ozzie?”

  “No, but I’ve always felt the sea loved me. Isn’t that a strange thing?”

  “Not strange at all. It’s a marvelous thing.”

  “We should make an entry in the log after we eat.”

  “I’ll write it, if you like.”