“Oh, honey.” Maggie leaned over suddenly to give Nora a hug. The car veered toward the median for an instant, which made the gesture less reassuring than she intended. “Well, fuck it. So what if grad school doesn’t work out? There are plenty of other options. You should open your own restaurant and be a celebrity chef. I mean it. That toffee soufflé you made, my God.”
Nora was silent, thinking again about her morning’s conversation with Naomi. Unofficial probation, that’s what she was on, even if Naomi hadn’t used those words. All at once she missed Adam more than ever. He had brilliant political instincts; he knew exactly how to soothe and beguile the most implacable thesis adviser. Nora wasn’t sure how she’d get by without Adam’s coaching, not to mention his protective aura. He’d been such a star in the department that some of his prestige had invisibly accrued to her, too. She wondered suddenly how far news of their breakup had spread. Did Naomi know? Yes, Nora thought, or she would have asked me about him this morning. She always did before.
“You sure you want to go to this thing?” Maggie was saying. “Weddings are no fun when you’re newly single, not by choice—that’s my experience.”
Nora shrugged. “It’s okay. How can I not go to Luca’s wedding, anyway?”
“Any chance that Adam will be there?”
“No, he’s flying back tonight. He wanted to spend the weekend with his fiancée.” Nora grimaced as she spoke the last word.
“Bastard. Well, maybe you’ll meet someone this weekend. And there’ll be lots to drink. Forget about Adam.”
“Just what I’m planning to do.”
* * *
Which made it all the more disconcerting, at the party following the rehearsal dinner, to turn and find Adam standing a few feet away. He had a beer in his hand, and he was having a desultory conversation with a couple of law students, friends of Maggie’s. He looked vaguely ill at ease even before he saw Nora.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said. “I thought you were back in Chicago.”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t change my flight. I’m going back Sunday.”
“So you decided to come to this thing after all.”
“Well, yes. I was invited. Is that a problem?”
“No, I’m just surprised to see you here.”
“You shouldn’t be. I’ve known Chris and Luca a long time. About time they got married.” He took a swig of beer.
Nora bit her lip. “They started dating a month after we did.”
“Really? I thought they’d been together longer.”
“No, I remember. We saw them at that French movie, Amélie.”
“God, that was a terrible movie.”
“I liked it.”
“Really?” Nora knew the expression on his face well: Adam enjoying the sense of his own superior judgment. Other, more benighted people had always inspired that look—never her. Then he seemed to recollect himself: “Well, good for you. How are you doing?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“Good.” For an instant, his eyes practically shone with sincerity. “I’m glad. I was a little worried, you know, after the other night.”
Nora wanted to believe him. A man may smile and smile and be a villain. “No, you weren’t. You would have called me if you were.”
“I did call you. Couple of times.”
She shook her head. “I would have seen your number.”
They went around and around, until it emerged that Adam had dialed the wrong number, manually. He had a new phone, the kind that knew everything, but he had not bothered to enter her number.
“I see,” Nora said grimly. “Well, as you can tell, I’m just fine.”
“Good.” He started to turn away, then swung back. “You know, I still care about you.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “I care about you, too.”
“You may not want to hear this right now, but I mean it in the best possible way, believe me. When Celeste and I get married this fall, I hope you can be there. I mean it. October sixteenth.”
A few days ago, waiting for Adam in the airport, Nora had been thinking about wedding dates, wondering if October would be too soon. It wasn’t as though she’d want a huge, elaborate wedding. “Thank you, Adam,” she said now, smiling, with as much dignity as she could muster. “That’s awfully”—she considered and rejected a number of words, settling for a relatively bland and obvious choice that she hoped would trouble Adam anyway—“stupid of you.”
She turned and plunged into the crowd. The party was a large, loose affair: It flowed through the house, which belonged to one of the bride’s relatives, and onto the rambling cedar decks wrapped around the outside. Plenty of room to retreat.
Nora refilled her wineglass, then topped it up again and again. The alcohol began to make her feel blurry as she drifted from one group to the next, never quite finding her way into the conversation. But the recollection of her encounter with Adam remained razor-sharp. She kept looking for him—to avoid him, she told herself. Once she looked up and saw him looking at her from across the deck. He turned away without acknowledging her.
They flee from me that sometime did me seek, she told herself. Ducking away, she found herself in a room where a cluster of partygoers were watching an old episode of The Avengers. She plunked herself on a couch—grateful for its solidity, although her surroundings continued to wobble slightly—and watched John Steed and Emma Peel battle evil, he in a morning coat, she in a catsuit, exchanging arch bons mots. Why can’t real love be debonair and fun? she wondered.
After a while, she noticed that the man in the chair next to her was looking at her more than at the television. He addressed an occasional remark to her, and laughed when she did. When someone turned the lights up for a moment, she saw that his eyes were a bright green, like traffic lights. She took it as a good omen. They kept talking after someone turned the TV off. His name was Dave, he was in the history department, but he wanted to know about her life outside of grad school. She told him about being a cook after college. An organic café with locally sourced, seasonal menus; Nora made it to sous-chef. “It was fun for a while. But, God, so much work.”
“I hear you,” he said. “I waited tables in college. Whenever I get fed up with sitting in a library, I make myself remember what it was like to be on my feet carrying trays until midnight. So you decided to do something more intellectually challenging, huh?”
“For some reason I thought that would be grad school.” He laughed at that, and they started kissing soon afterward. Dave’s lips were softer than she liked, but that was okay. It was the first time she had kissed someone else besides Adam in almost four years. She hoped hazily that he would come into the room and see her with Dave. Doing just fine, thank you.
Dave’s phone rang. The ring tone was Rod Stewart: “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Dave jolted away from Nora. Putting the phone to his ear, he turned, moving toward the door, but Nora still heard more of the conversation than she wanted to.
“Your girlfriend?” she asked when he came back.
He nodded, looking uncomfortable. “Sorry, we just broke up. But she keeps calling me.”
Looking at him, Nora was fairly sure he wasn’t telling the whole truth to someone—Nora, his girlfriend, or himself. “Well, fuck,” she said, hitting the arm of the couch. “Call her back. She wants to talk to you.”
He made a face. “She’s just emotional.”
“Maybe she has a right to be.”
“Don’t be that way, Norma. It’s not that big a deal.”
“Nora, and yes, it is a big deal.”
She had to wait around for a while until she could get a ride back to the house where she and Maggie were staying. That meant having to avoid both Adam and Dave. She skulked on the deck in the darkness with a Coke, pretending to look at the invisible view over the mountains.
Back in her room, Nora undressed quickly. In the mirror,
she saw her brown roots were showing. On some women that was sexy. Nora was not one of them. She tried not to imagine what Celeste looked like.
October 16. How extraordinarily dense of Adam to invite her to the wedding. And Adam always so careful—even calculating—about everything he said. That was what really hurt. He wasn’t even trying. He had written her off.
She slid under the sheet. My life is a catastrophe, she thought, shutting her eyes.
Lately, for reassurance, Nora had taken to reminding herself of John Donne’s own checkered employment history—his unfinished legal training; the government job he was fired from; the long search for preferment—before he finally found success and security in holy orders. But even at the beginning he had been writing those intricate, intimate poems of passion and thought. Nora was almost thirty, and what did she have to show for herself?
Turning restlessly in bed, she thought: Naomi is right, I don’t fit in, I’m all wrong for this. I can’t do anything right. Well, maybe saving the life of that mouse today. And it’s probably already back in my kitchen, eating my food. I wish my life were different. I don’t care how.
* * *
She woke early, her mouth dry from all the alcohol she’d drunk the night before. In the other bed, Maggie was still asleep. Nora pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and went quietly out of the room.
The cabin that she and Maggie and four other wedding guests were renting for the weekend perched on the mountainside, at the end of a long gravel driveway lined with rhododendrons. She peered out of the living room window. It had rained during the night, but the sky was clear now. The wedding was not until five. People had talked about driving to Asheville for brunch. So far she was the only one up. Nora made herself some coffee and ate half a bagel, then stepped onto the deck outside. Chilly for May. She thought she might walk down to the road for some exercise, but then she noticed the trail leading up the mountain. She went back inside for a sweatshirt. Out of habit, she stopped by the bookshelf in the living room to see if there was a paperback that she could stuff into her pocket for emergencies—you never knew when you might need a book to entertain and comfort and distract you in the day’s empty places.
There was not much to choose from. She passed on the Robert Ludlum and a couple of the Dune books in favor of a yellowed paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice that had originally cost fifty cents. Privately Nora agreed with Charlotte Brontë that Jane Austen’s world was too manicured for sustained interest, but on the other hand you could always dip in and find something amusing on almost any page. Besides, she had to teach the novel in summer school next month.
No reason to leave a note. She would be back in half an hour. Nora went outside and started up the path. At first it tunneled through more rhododendrons, but the forest brightened when she reached a stand of hardwoods, skinny gray poles, newly leafed out. There was almost no undergrowth at this time of year, only dead leaves covering the ground as far as she could see.
After the novelty of walking somewhere that wasn’t a street or a campus path had worn off, Nora began to find the upward-sloping, dun-colored landscape monotonous. She was wondering whether to head back when suddenly the path leveled off and she stepped out of the woods onto grass.
A fragment of conversation from the party last night came back to her. So this was what Chris’s cousin meant by the Bald. The crown of the mountain was an immense green meadow. A few steps forward, and Nora had a 360-degree view of the undulating horizon, mountains rising in all directions.
She walked across the meadow, feeling her heart lift in spite of herself. Ye visions of the hills, and souls of lonely places. Nora found herself smiling. She had the absurd thought—she squelched it quickly—that she could bring Adam up here to show him this place.
Nora turned back when she reached the other side of the hilltop. It was going to rain again, she saw with regret; gray clouds were looming in the west. Otherwise, she would have been tempted to sit down and read for a while. She retraced her steps across the meadow. There was no sign of the trail where she thought it should be, but she reasoned that if she followed the edge of the woods, she was bound to come across the path, even if she had to circle the entire mountaintop.
The first raindrops hit her face as she walked along. Still no path. She walked faster. After a few minutes, she saw a gap in the trees and what looked like the beginnings of a path.
But was it the right one? There might be several paths. A disturbing thought crystallized: If she took the wrong trail down, she could wind up on the other side of the mountain, miles from where she wanted to be.
Oh, well, she thought as the rain began to pelt down, I can go a little way and see whether it looks familiar.
She started down the path. Had the trail been this slick, this steep before? Almost immediately she slipped and fell in a patch of cold mud. Her right ankle protested when she tried to get to her feet. Nora cursed herself. Accidents like this were precisely why she should have left a note at the cabin. Well, someone—Maggie, perhaps—would eventually notice if she didn’t show up for brunch or the wedding or the reception. After a minute, Nora tried again to stand, and this time she was able to pull herself upright. So far so good. The ankle was sore, but it would take her weight. Well, she thought, I wasn’t planning to do much dancing tonight anyway.
She found a stick to lean on, and began limping down the mountain. The forest here was full of spindly young trees like the ones that she had passed on the way up, but she couldn’t tell whether they were the same trees. It was darker here than on the mountaintop, and the woods were full of soft pattering noises, rain smacking leaves. After ten minutes of slow progress, Nora had to admit that she still had no clue as to whether she was on the right path or not.
She had just about decided to turn around and retreat when something ahead caught her eye. Instantly she knew that she had taken the wrong trail. I would have remembered that, she thought.
Chapter 2
It was a graveyard, a small one. Through the trees she could make out the white glimmer of tombstones; a rusted iron fence surrounded the graves like a border of tattered lace. The path led to an arched entrance, also iron, with a gate that was not so much hung from the fence posts as propped up against them. With some effort, Nora wrenched it open and stepped inside.
Nora had a weakness for country cemeteries. She and Adam had spent one summer crouching on overgrown graves and risking Lyme disease as they copied down Victorian funerary verses for one of Nora’s papers, “Voices in the Grass: Strategies of Faith and Subversion in the Post-Romantic Epitaph.” Here, the most recent graves were just over a hundred years old. The oldest dated back to the 1830s. About half of the tilting, lichen-spotted stones bore the same surname, Clement. A family burying ground, filled over a few generations and then abandoned. Out of habit, Nora stooped to read one of the inscriptions, a few lines of verse written in the slanting pothooks of the time.
Read this, take heed, and gain from my sad fate.
For you the way is open. I must wait,
Condemned for centuries long to guard this gate.
Make haste, pass through, the hour is growing late.
Strange, rather creepy. What was this about watching and guarding? The usual Protestant dogma of the period taught that the dead would sleep quietly until called for, when the Last Trump blew. The meek members of the resurrection, Dickinson said. Yet the speaker in this poem spoke as a restless ghost, spying on the living, guarding the gates of death. Of course, Nora thought, the nineteenth century was the heyday of the ghost story, but it was strange to find this view of the unquiet dead expressed on a tombstone.
She looked at the name on the stone: Emmeline Anne Clement. Died May 11, 1833, AE 18 years, 3 months.
May 11, today’s date. The coincidence wasn’t spooky as much as sad, that Emmeline Anne had died so young on a spring day that was the match to this one. “Poor Emmeline,” Nora said aloud. “I’m sorry you had such a short life. I hope it was a h
appy one.” Happier than mine, she thought morosely.
She decided that she might as well make a note of the inscription, in case she ever got around to revising her tombstone paper. She put her hand on her back pocket, intending to sacrifice the flyleaf of Pride and Prejudice—but she had nothing to write with. Well, she could memorize the verses and write them down later.
Nora read the poem aloud, then again to make sure that she had memorized it—she was secretly proud of how easily she could learn poetry by heart; none of the other grad students seemed to bother—and then straightened. The rain had stopped. The forest looked lighter.
“Emmeline, I have to leave now,” Nora said. Having spoken to the dead woman already, she felt a dim obligation to say good-bye. She wondered what had happened to Emmeline Anne Clement on that other May 11. Fever, consumption, childbirth? There was no shortage of ways for young women to die in 1833. “I’m sorry that you had such a short life,” she added, “and that you’ve been waiting here for so long. I wish—”
But, she reflected, what could you wish for the dead? Wasn’t that really the essence of death, to be beyond the power of hopes and wishes? Still, Nora had the urge to leave this lonely grave with some sort of blessing.
“I wish that you were free of guarding that gate, if that’s what you want, Emmeline,” she said haltingly. “I wish you could move on to the next thing, or stage, or place, and be happy.”
Edging among the stones back to the gate, Nora was a little surprised at herself. She remembered trying to talk aloud to EJ in the months after his death, telling him she missed him, but the one-sided conversations had never been much comfort. It wasn’t as though he could hear her.
Nora closed the gate behind her as best she could, then set off back along the path. Thankfully, she noticed, her ankle felt better. The rain seemed to have stopped for good, and she caught glimpses of blue sky between the thick leaves overhead. It was warmer, too—almost hot—despite the shade in the forest. The ground had already dried. After a few minutes, the trees in front of her thinned out, giving way to an expanse of sunlit grass. She must be coming back to the mountaintop. All she had to do now was circle around the Bald until she found the path back to the cabin.
The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic Page 2