Love Begins in Winter

by Simon Van Booy

I’ve been thinking about that woman I saw behind the window in the middle of the night. Since that evening I’ve felt differently about a lot of things. I spoke to my brother about it. He thinks I’m finally coming around. He thinks I suffer from depression. But I’m just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves.

  After a good night’s sleep, it’s lunchtime and I’m eating meat loaf in the Beverly Hills Hotel. It’s actually late morning. Outside on the patio is a Brazilian spearmint tree that died years ago. The waiter said it’s now over a hundred years old—but does a thing continue to accrue years once it’s dead? If so, if so. . .I stop myself. There are stumps of baguette on the table. The baker enters my mind. He is drying his hands on an apron. I stop myself.

  Later, I will sink again.

  Later, I will row myself out to sea with my bow to Anna’s floating body. I can see her face so clearly. She died when she was twelve. I was thirteen. She hasn’t aged with me, but sometimes I imagine her as a woman.

  “A girl comes every week.” The waiter was back, still thinking about the tree outside. “She plays with the plastic ferns in the branches.”

  I look into the branches and smile.

  “Landscapers look at it and laugh,” he said. “To them it must look stupid.”

  I like waiters—but you have to win them over quickly before you become just another client, just another table 23. The meat loaf is mediocre here, but the service is fabulous. I seldom eat at home; I’m on the road so much. This hotel is like having an adoring mother who can’t cook.

  The most delicious bread in the world is made in my village. It’s something to do with salt in the water. The baker’s daughter and I used to ride our bicycles to the edge of town. Remember that Noyant is a small village. We would leave our bikes leaning against each other as we climbed the swaying gate into the soft fields of Farmer Ricard.

  He was a large man with eyes that seemed ready to fall out. His lips were very large too, and he wore green army sweaters. He once carried a baby cow on his back through waist-deep snow across several kilometers of fields. The vet in the next village was drinking chamomile tea and looking out the window. A broken leg was set and healed in a barn warmed by gaslight. Everyone in the village remembers what happened. The cow was allowed to die of old age.

  Farmer Ricard has a photograph of his father in the kitchen. He was in the Resistance and was tortured to death. Madame Ricard is in the habit of talking to the photograph while Farmer Ricard is away in the fields. Sometimes she can hear him hammering in the barn. He likes to drink his coffee with both hands. They haven’t made love for years but sleep holding hands.

  A pianist here at the hotel is playing “The Girl from Ipanema.” Lights behind the bar make the liquor glow. My napkin is pebbled at the edges. The hotel crest is faintly impressed in the center. The dining room is mostly empty. The dining room is split into many areas. Three tables over, an old man is doing magic tricks for his teenage granddaughter. It looks like she is wearing her prom dress. Her hair is pulled back. Her earrings are new. Every time the knife disappears into the napkin, she smiles.

  At another table are a young Mexican and a very old man with white hair. They are reading from the same book and eating from the same bowl of ice cream.

  This is the sort of place where pictures were snapped before the war. Glossy black-and-white prints now hanging in Beverly Hills above quiet beds in bedrooms that smell of mothballs. Women in black gloves. Smoking men with shiny hair. Palm trees in the background. Glasses, empty of gin, replenished by melting ice.

  Once we were in Farmer Ricard’s misty field, the baker’s daughter and I would fill our pockets with stones. If one of us remembered to bring a plastic bag, that was even better. When laden with more stones than we could possibly carry, we dragged our heavy bodies to the edge of the field and made a pile. Then we’d split up and the search would continue.

  We collected stones to save the plows.

  Monsieur Ricard gave us a franc for every ten stones. If we managed to find one too big for one of us to carry alone (that was the test), that particular stone was worth a franc all by itself. When we got tired, we’d sit on the dirt and watch birds. Sometimes a farm cat would find us and its tail would go up. The cat would often turn around to look at something that wasn’t there. For the past twenty-two years, I’ve been doing the same thing.

  When I finish my lunch, I’m going downstairs to the Beverly Hills Hotel gift shop. It’s opposite the hair salon. Rows of women sit with twists of silver foil in their hair. The stylists talk about celebrities, and soon the women start to feel like celebrities.

  In the hotel gift shop I’m going to buy a hatbox.

  Then I’m going to fill it with stones.

  VI

  FOR JONATHAN’S FOURTH BIRTHDAY, he was given a white hardcover book called The British Book of Birds. This was by far his favorite possession. When he was upset, he would clumsily sketch birds from the book, gripping his colored pencil in a fist.

  About this time we had some lovely family vacations together.

  Watching my father lift the caravan onto the hitch of our family sedan was like watching Atlas take up the world on his back. Then, on the motorway, my brother and I nesting in the back as my mother’s hand appeared behind the seat with a smile of orange for each of us, my father quietly navigating our fortress to a field on a hillside at a distance from our Welsh village unfathomable to us.

  By the evening, my mother, father, Jonathan, and I would be sitting in plastic chairs under a Cinzano umbrella somewhere on the Welsh coast. The smell of my father’s cold lager beer, my mother’s wine, cigarette smoke from another table. The sound of cars in the town, the smell of fish and chips, women in heels clopping along the narrow roads to the town nightclub. Then back at the caravan, Jonathan and I in bunk beds. We communicated by gently knocking on the thin wall against which our beds were built. The blankets were always musty, and the smell of dinner sometimes lingered until morning.

  As an adult, I’ve realized where Jonathan found his gentleness. Our father was a shy, good-natured boy—a handsome man from South Wales, strong enough to lift a caravan by the throat but wise enough to cup a moth as it slid its body against the flickering black-and-white TV. I remember the release from our caravan through a cracked door into the dark field, as though on its powdery back balanced the weight of his children’s dreams.

  The day was spent exploring the village and the countryside. My favorite memory is cooking sausages beside a river. We hiked through shallow woods and didn’t see anyone. My mother grew up afraid because of what people did to her. And then afraid of what they might do to us. To her family she was shy, loving, secretive, and fiercely loyal, but in the world she stood poised, cunning, and glamorous. The perfect saleswoman.

  I remember holding her slender hand as we crossed a river somewhere close to the sea, our caravan back through the forest on a concrete slab with other caravans. Little Jonathan held my hand. One of his shoes was wet. He had misjudged his steps. We all thought it was funny.

  I wish I’d kept his shoes—that’s one thing I regret getting rid of. I loved those shoes, and I loved the socks too.

  And then my father with sausages wrapped in newspaper, who had not yet reached the bank. I remember our faces changing before us as we crossed the cold, blind, rushing river. I led Jonathan, carefully picking out stones whose heads poked out from the water, as though they wished to say something.

  I remember looking back for my father, slowed by the weight of his joy from knowing that we were somewhere but he could not see us. I remember my mother’s trembling voice as we neared the other bank and Jonathan’s laughter like a tablecloth spread over his fear. Then my father tilted across on the stones, and we cooked sausages beside the water.

  Jonathan disappeared that winter. It was a few days before Christmas. I remember asking my mother where he was. She told me
to look under his bed. Potatoes boiled. The kitchen was full of steam. I wiped the window with my sleeve.

  “He won’t be outside, dear—look at the snow.”

  I will never forget that moment. Because he was outside.

  My father had left a ladder propped against a conifer tree.

  He was cutting branches with a chain saw before the snow came.

  Jonathan had climbed the ladder. Nobody knew.

  Once in the tree, he climbed and climbed. We don’t know why. Perhaps he knew he had come to the end of his life and wanted to become a bird.

  I hope he did become a bird.

  I hear him call every morning from the tree outside my apartment.

  By late afternoon we were all worried. My mother telephoned the police. My father searched the village, then young men showed up at our doorstep with flashlights and heavy walking sticks.

  I fell asleep in the early hours of the morning without wanting to. I’ve felt guilty about that for most of my life. Perhaps if I’d stayed awake, I would have heard him call out.

  The next morning several old Land Rovers with canvas backs were parked outside. The men at the kitchen table drank strong tea. Eggs spat in the frying pan. The farmers’ waxed jackets dripped water on the stone floor.

  They had found nothing and were half-frozen.

  Dogs on the floor at their feet.

  The dogs refused the bacon scraps offered them. The men said the dogs were sad because they couldn’t find the boy. The scent of him lingered in their noses.

  On Christmas Day, we sat and looked at the presents. My mother cried and threw her shoe through a window. I prayed by reading Jonathan’s British Book of Birds aloud to the heavens. It responded in a scatter of soft white tongues that told us nothing.

  In January, two weeks later, my father was shaving when he noticed a speck in the garden outside.

  A smudge of color broke the white monotony.

  Without wiping the shaving cream that smeared his cheeks, he rushed outside into the thick snow. Jonathan’s body lay completely still. The branch onto which he had climbed and become trapped had broken that night in a storm. He lay in the snow faceup. His body was hard and his mouth was open. In one of his hands were three frozen acorns. In his mind, it was not yet Christmas Day.

  It’s still a mystery why he didn’t call out. Perhaps he was afraid of being punished; children possess the most powerful fear of disappointing their parents.

  After they took Jonathan’s body away, my father went into the shed. He closed the door and then chopped off his right hand with an axe.

  The police came and took him to hospital.

  For almost three decades, I’ve kept acorns in my pockets. I check for them constantly.

  Sometimes I roll them in my palms and hear laughter, then the sound of a breaking branch, something soft punching the snow from a great height.

  Birdsong.

  VII

  THE GIRLS IN THE gift shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel were kind enough to help me pack the stones into the hatbox with pink tissue paper. They asked if I was French. They said it wasn’t so much my accent as the way I was dressed. They were excited to be involved in something eccentric.

  The younger of the two wore blue eye shadow. She asked me what “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi” means. The older woman giggled and said she just wants me to say it. The girl with blue eye shadow slapped her friend’s arm.

  I asked for more tissue paper, and the younger girl asked why I wanted to wrap stones anyway. I told her it was just something I did.

  Before I closed the hatbox, the young shop assistant reached in. I waited with the lid in my hands.

  “Stones are really quite beautiful, aren’t they?” she said. Her retainer glinted in the shop light.

  I walked past the hair salon and then up the stairs. As I passed the Polo Lounge, a woman appeared from around a corner and walked straight into me. The force of her motion was enough to knock me down. I dropped the hatbox, and the stones rolled out with a loud clacking sound. The woman was carrying what I thought were small rocks, and they fell from her hands and scattered across the hard, glossy floor.

  She glared at me. And then suddenly an arm of sunlight reached through a high window and opened its hand upon her face. I saw her eyes as clearly as if we had been pressed against one another in a very small space.

  A bellboy rushed over and started to pick up her stones.

  “Acorns!” he exclaimed.

  The woman looked at him in horror.

  “Please, I’ll do it,” she said. The bellboy was confused and continued to pick up the acorns, just more carefully.

  “No, I’ll do it, please,” the woman said again. The bellboy looked at me for a few moments and then hurried off.

  For some reason I didn’t get up immediately. Instead, I watched her collect her acorns. She had beautiful shoes. And then the sunlight fell away and I noticed drops were falling from her eyes. I finally stood up and proceeded to collect the five stones I’d so carefully packed into the hatbox with the girls downstairs in the shop.

  “Sorry,” the woman said genuinely.

  She had an accent I had never heard. Her hair was very soft, but I kept looking at her shoes.

  For a few moments we stood opposite one another. It was awkward. Neither of us walked away. To anyone watching, it must have looked as though we were talking—but we weren’t saying anything.

  The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said again. I said I was sorry too. I wasn’t sorry, but I felt like I should have been.

  There were freckles on her cheeks and forehead. Her eyes were very green.

  When she walked off, I sat on a bench by the counter and held on to my box. I sat there for some time and even considered leaving my box behind so that I might follow her, grab her arm, and force her to go somewhere with me and sit down. I wanted only to look at her green eyes and to hear the lilting song of her voice, as though her words were the notes I had been searching for, the vital sounds that I had never played.

  The most important notes in music are the ones that wait until sound has entered the ear before revealing their true nature. They are the spaces between the sounds that blow through the heart, knocking things over.

  I eventually went back to my room.

  Later. My telephone flashing. A message from Sandy, my agent, some detail about my San Francisco concert and the music director’s belief that my grandfather’s chair is too damaged to sit on. I wanted to call her and tell her about this woman but felt for some reason it would upset her. Her daughter’s birthday is coming up. Sandy asked if I would buy her a bicycle. Her daughter requested that I give her a bicycle and teach her how to ride it. I think when I am older I will be someone she turns to when her mother is depressed. I think Sandy is depressed a lot. More than once I’ve found her sitting at her desk in the dark.

  I remember when my parents bought me a bike. In Europe of the 1970s, there was less production of things and so many of my toys and clothes were secondhand. In my village there was a weekend before Christmas when people sold bicycles. They leaned them against the wall of the church. From each handlebar hung a tag with the price in francs and the name of the person selling it. So if a child had outgrown a bicycle, on Christmas Eve it would begin a new life. Twenty or so bicycles circulated the village, changing owners every few years.

  Sometimes, previous owners, unable to contain themselves, would call out to their old bicycles as they passed at the mercy of new owners.

  “Isn’t she a beauty—but watch for the front brake!” or “Be careful going over curbs like that—you’ll buckle the wheels!”

  It’s amazing the details from childhood that can surface in a day. That’s the best present I ever received. I remember watching parents walk the line of bicycles leaned up against the church, feeling for the money in their pockets, and the children who sat excitedly at home—forbidden to follow, even at
a distance.

  My bicycle was golden brown with a dynamo light—a small wheel spun by the back wheel that’s connected to a small cylinder that uses the motion to power the front and rear lights.

  I called Sandy and told her about my first bicycle.

  “You get worse every day,” she said. “But you’re still my favorite client.”

  We straightened out the details for the afternoon concert in San Francisco. No chair, no concert, I told her. Then I tried to call my brother. His assistant picked up his cell phone and told me that he had gone shooting.

  “Shooting?” I said.

  “But he isn’t shooting,” the assistant said, “he’s just in the forest with English.”

  I laughed. “English” was what my brother called his current girlfriend’s father because he wore corduroy pants with small pheasants embroidered into the material.

  “So English,” my brother mocked.

  “He’s always glad when you call,” his assistant said, and then she hung up without saying good-bye.

  I never know when to hang up the phone, and try to say one final good-bye even though I can hear the other person has gone.

  Then I ran a bath and let the heat settle. Before I slipped into the still water, I thought of the woman who walked into me downstairs. And suddenly I felt an extraordinary sense of hope for everything that was to come, a continuation of what I had begun feeling in Quebec City. It was something I had not experienced since I was a boy. Something I hadn’t felt since the days of sitting in fields.

  VIII

  WHO IS THIS MAN, who like an apparition haunts my every thought? I thought about him last night in my small, steamy apartment. I took out my photographs of Jonathan and spread them on the kitchen table. Then I went to sleep and dreamed that the man from the hotel was sitting on the edge of my bed. Then I was watching the scene from above, and in the place of my body was stone. A person made of rock in the shape of me.