Love Begins in Winter

by Simon Van Booy

  Her uncle tended the fire dispassionately, and then sat down again. They were watching a black-and-white television and not talking. With their eyes safely fixed upon the screen, Walter wiped the window with his sleeve, but the mist was on the inside.

  His body went limp as he let his eyes explore the length of her body. Her legs were so long, they stretched out almost the length of the table. Her young sister was nowhere to be seen—perhaps in her bedroom playing with dolls, Walter mused. Walter imagined her talking to them, smoothing out their clothes with her small fingers and setting them down at a table of plastic plates and plastic food which she held to their lips encouragingly.

  Then a gentle but powerful feeling took Walter, and the boy immediately understood the obsession of the portrait artists he’d read about in his uncle’s books; the troubadour poets and their sad buckled horses; the despairing souls who rowed silently at dusk in a heavy sea; the wanderers, the lost, those dying blooms who’d fallen away.

  Walter’s young mind reeled at the power of his first feeling of love. He would have walked to America if she had promised to meet him there.

  From where had these feelings come? Walter thought. For he had not swallowed anything created by her body; neither had there been any physical contact, not even the brushing of sleeves in a crowded market. So these feelings for her—like fires lit in various parts of his body—must always have been within him, waiting to be lit.

  And then Walter thought of something else. Could it be that first love was the only true love? And that after those first fires had been doused or burned out, men and women chose whom they would love based on worldly needs, and then reenacted the rituals and feelings of that first pure experience—nursed the flames that once burned of their own accord. . ..

  Walter declared in his thoughts that his virginity was spiritual and that he had already lost it to someone he was yet to meet. The physical act, should it ever occur, would be nothing more than blind and fumbling reassurance that man’s mortality could be celebrated with the division of spirit through flesh.

  Walter wondered what else he was capable of—what other emotions, talents, even crimes might suddenly erupt under certain conditions.

  He remembered all those mornings as a child out in the field beside his caravan, watching storms move across the fields below. Eyes glued to the sky until a fork of lightning hit the earth; wind ripping trees from soggy riverbanks; an early morning blizzard like pillows ripped open. Walter suddenly felt that such things were part of his very being. And that for his entire life, the countryside he’d grown up in was a form of self-portrait.

  And with his mind churning experience to understanding like milk into butter, Walter thought of Adam and Eve, the inevitable fall—their mouths stuffed with apple; their lips dripping with the sweet juice of it; the knowledge that life was the fleeting beauty of opposites, that human existence was the result of conflict, of physical and spiritual forces trapped within a dying vessel.

  Every change in his behavior started making sense to him.

  The days after seeing her, Walter took long rides on the roads he imagined she might be out walking. He dreamed of stopping to offer her a lift.

  Walter would ride for miles and miles, as far as he could on a full tank—through the wind and pelting rain which lashed his face. Then he’d find a petrol station in the twilight and fill his tank while being watched suspiciously by the cashier from the bright kiosk that sold crisps, chocolate, Pot Noodle, magazines (dirty ones on the top shelf), birthday cards, cigarettes, maps, and black pudding.

  The greatest hazard to riding a small motorcycle through the countryside of Ireland was the wildlife—sheep in particular, who when they spotted Walter rattling along would hurl themselves into the road.

  The evening matured into night. Walter shivered. It had stopped raining, but his clothes were wet through. Standing at the window, he began to feel cold.

  When she laughed at something on the television, Walter laughed too. There was a moment when she turned and peered through the glass, failing to notice the face of a boy upon the pane like an unfinished painting.

  What he’d read in books was not right—man did not love with his heart but with his whole body. Every piece of him was involved somehow—he could feel her in his legs, in his fingers, the imagined weight of her shoulders upon his, her head upon his bare white chest. Walter knew he would die for her. And he thought of all the old songs he’d heard, the ancient ones from the days of horses, candles, and hunks of meats spitting on open fires. The songs composed for men at sea, the sweet high voices of girls imploring the Lord to bring home their loves. Walter imagined himself one of these men, called from the frosty woods to her cottage by singing, his horse nodding through the marsh, hands blistered from wet reins, breath in the cold like white fire.

  Walter knelt and coughed into the patch of wet grass at his feet. Then he sat down knowing that on the other side of the wall was his eternal love. He could sense the weight of her body in the chair. He wanted to touch himself in the way Father McCarthy had forbidden all young boys to do in assembly—and he would have but for the sense that in some way it would have defiled his pure love for her.

  His fingers dug into the soil as he imagined the vibration of her voice touch his body. He stiffened. His mouth hung open. And then he sprang back at the shock of seeing a figure standing a few yards from him.

  “Mary, Mother of Jesus!”

  “What are you doing out here?” a small, trembling voice said. It was a little girl. The younger sister, wearing an overcoat and orange Wellington boots that were too big for her. A plastic hairless doll hung down from one of her hands.

  “Don’t you have a television at home?” she said.

  “What? A television?”

  “Is that your motorcycle by the tree?”

  “My what?”

  She turned and pointed.

  “Oh, my motorcycle—yes, it’s mine.”

  “Can you take us for a ride?” she asked.

  “Us?” Walter said, suddenly hopeful. “Us?”

  The girl held up her doll.

  “Ay,” Walter said. “I’ll take you and your dolly for a ride.”

  The girl’s eyes widened with excitement. She said something in her doll’s ear.

  “But you have to tell me something first,” Walter said quietly.

  “Okay.”

  “Does your sister have a boyfriend in Canada?”

  The girl looked back at his motorcycle.

  “Are those eggs for us?”

  “They might be—but first you have to tell me if your sister has a boyfriend.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “Some awful, boring fellow who tried to impress your sister but who just ended up being a nuisance without even realizing she was beyond him in every way imaginable. Did you notice anyone like that at all?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, unsure as to whether it was the right answer. Then in a voice loud enough to be heard from inside, she said, “Are you in love with my sister—is that why you’ve brought us a basket of eggs?”

  Walter felt the tingling of embarrassment.

  “It’s more complicated than that, you know—you’re too young to understand.”

  “Are you going to marry her?”

  “Is that a serious question?” Walter said.

  The girl nodded.

  “Do you think she’d like me?”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “I think she would.”

  “Well, that’s a brilliant start,” Walter said with pure joy. “I’m Walter, by the way.”

  “I’m Jane,” the girl said, with the embarrassment of all children when talking to someone older.

  Walter didn’t care that he was speaking to a girl of eight or nine. Through the cold autumn night, he could hear the bells of the church casting their notes upon the village like seeds. He could see Father McCarthy’s serious face as they approached the altar. The Canadian orphan in white like t
he queen of swans, her eyes like tiny glaciers that held him, the church, the congregation, the whispering smoke of incense; old women’s heads in colored hats, bowing like yesterday’s flowers. He would wear his motorcycle jacket and Uncle Ivan’s Olympic medal.

  “What should I do, Jane?”

  “It’s a bit cold out here,” Jane said.

  “Well, go on in,” Walter said. “You’ll catch your death.”

  Then he regretted saying it as he remembered what had happened to her parents only several months ago.

  “I’m sorry about your ma and dad.”

  Jane set down her doll.

  “Don’t worry, Jane—they’re up in heaven, and when you’ve had a long life and your own babies you can see them again, so don’t worry now, they’re not really dead, they’re just not here.”

  Jane went back into the house with her doll.

  Walter listened for the sound of the latch and considered for a moment that she might tell the uncle, and then he’d be discovered and would have to explain what he was doing.

  He imagined her uncle coming out in black boots. His kind face quickly turning to scorn. Jane pointing at the hot, wet ball of boy in the thicket beneath the window. Then his beloved—ashamed and disgusted, surveying him from afar; a shawl over her shoulders like closed black wings.

  What would he say? By the next Sunday, the entire village would think him a Peeping Tom.

  But you can’t explain love, Walter thought to himself, and with the breathless ambition of youth, he believed, in his young heart, that those five words would be enough to shield him.

  “You can’t explain love,” he said out loud. “That’s how it gets ruined.”

  Without daring to look in again, Walter decided he had to go—but that he would allow himself to return. He would leave the eggs at the door with one of his gloves—then he’d have to return to pick it up. He’d started to rise when he heard the latch of the front door.

  His heart rolled like a stone ball into his stomach.

  “It’s just me,” Jane whispered. She handed Walter a lukewarm mug of tea.

  “Jesus of Nazareth,” Walter said, gulping back the tea in gulps. “You’re a little star, Jane—but you bloody well gave me fright.”

  Inside the house, Uncle Popsy searched in vain for the tea he thought he’d set on the hall table only moments ago.

  When the mug was empty, Jane pointed past the cottage and into the night.

  “We have to go down to the sea now,” she said, and Walter noticed that in one of her small hands were two red buckets, the kind children used to build sand castles.

  “The sea? Why, Jane?” Walter asked.

  “Because,” she said, “I’m not allowed to go by myself.”

  “But you don’t know me.”

  “Yes I do,” she said emphatically.

  Walter sighed. “You want to go there now?”

  Jane nodded.

  “In the dark?” Walter said.

  Jane nodded. “It has to be now,” she said, and pointed up at the moon.

  “What about your uncle?”

  “He’s watching TV with my sister,” Jane said. “Can we go on your motorcycle?”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Jane stood and looked at him. She lifted her doll up to Walter’s face, so they were at eye level.

  “Please,” the doll said without moving its mouth. “Don’t be boring.”

  “Jesus, Jane—it’s too feckin’ loud.”

  Jane looked at her feet. Her bottom lip protruded slightly from the rest of her mouth.

  “All right,” Walter said. “But if we go, we go on foot.”

  Jane clapped her hands and said something to her doll.

  “C’mon then,” Walter said. “Are you sure you’re warm enough?”

  But Jane was already five paces ahead, her small body buckling with the flood of desire and the breathlessness of grief.

  The journey would not be an easy one, for the path down to the sea was treacherous; they would have to hold hands for part of the way, stepping with more courage than faith.

  Jane

  SHE SAT ON A red towel, looking out to sea. People laden with bags and beach chairs passing slowly across the surface of her Wayfarers. It would soon be time to go home.

  The sand beneath her towel had molded to the shape of her body. She glanced down at her legs. They were not as she would have liked them to be, but for her age, she felt she was still attractive. In the deli below her apartment, the Spanish men sometimes flirted with her if they weren’t too busy. At the office, she realized that the young girls—the assistants and the interns—probably looked at her as being old. She didn’t feel old. Although her feet ached sometimes. Her enthusiasm for life had turned to appreciation for life. And she could feel life getting quieter. Her life getting quieter, like the end of a party where only a few people remain at long messy tables, staring at their glasses, at the absent chairs, and at each other.

  It was the end of summer and families were migrating back to New York from East Hampton. The lines in the cafés were shorter, and it was no longer difficult to park on Main Street.

  In the distance, Jane’s teenage daughters sat at the water’s edge discussing boys and the secret things known only to siblings.

  Jane had been close to her own sister.

  They looked very much alike.

  And while Jane’s accent became unmistakably Irish, her sister had never lost her Canadian twang. They both had blond hair and would take turns twisting braids for one another in the garden on summer days, as their uncle Popsy picked lettuce and whistled.

  Jane’s daughters were close too.

  They were both at the Waldorf School and always ate lunch together. Jane could sense how the world was opening up to her children. The telephone in the kitchen rang all the time now, and their doorman had got to know several boys quite well. Jane approved only of the ones who were nervous when they met her.

  Her daughters’ lives were very bright; everything felt for the first time.

  The roots of her own life had found deep soil—holding her in place. Jane felt the strength and poise to give her children a safe and stable shelter. A place to rest when they sat at the kitchen table and said things that made them cry.

  Her children meant everything to her.

  The shelter of a mother’s love was something that Jane thought of very often, for her own parents had lost their lives in a car accident when she was very little. Then her older sister died of cancer in London two years ago. Jane’s husband experienced a breakdown at the funeral and was taken to a hospital in Kings Cross. He had been very fond of her sister.

  In Jane’s opinion, her sister had never been able to get over the death of their parents, as though a part of her had died too on that long-ago morning when charred debris lay scattered across the freeway outside Toronto.

  The first car to come along saw several small fires: Something completely wrong. No trace of people. It was an image Jane conjured daily. Age is a plow that unearths the true nature of things. But only after the moment has passed and we are powerless to change anything, are we granted wisdom. As though we are living backward.

  Jane knew her daughters must learn this for themselves, and so there was only one piece of advice Jane wanted to pass on to her girls.

  She watched them at the water’s edge.

  Laughter.

  Seagulls swooping down in their endless pursuit of scraps.

  The billowing sail of a faraway boat holding the last of the day like a nugget of gold.

  One day, Jane thought, this moment will be a long time ago.

  For Jane knew that wisdom means knowing when to give everything, knowing exactly the right time to give everything and admit you’ve done it and not look back. Loving is the path to eternal life, Jane thought, not worship, as she was taught in Ireland.

  And she sensed that everyone she had ever touched—whet
her deeply over years or for only a brief moment in a crowded elevator—might somehow be the whole story of her life.

  Jane wiped her eyes and noticed a small child standing at the edge of her blanket with a red bucket.

  The girl had lovely eyes. Her belly lunged forward. Her red bucket was full of water. Jane reached out to the girl, but she turned and ran away.

  Above her, the sky held on to a few clouds. They hung far out at sea—watching the lives of people who’d gathered at the edge of land.

  The red bucket reminded Jane of Walter, calling to her as she reached the edge of the field long ago in Ireland. And then his large, rough hand, which although she didn’t know it then, was a young hand.

  The beach was dark, and the sand had been packed hard by the outgoing tide. Rain lingered; like something said but not forgotten.

  Walter ran to the water’s edge, and Jane remembered a moment of panic when he disappeared from her sight—but then he was upon her again. He had found shells and he unloaded them into her small arms.

  She told him about her mother and father, and he listened and kissed her once on the forehead, telling her that they would never truly leave her behind—that people, like little fish, are sometimes caught in the cups of rocks as the tide sweeps in and out.

  Jane wondered what he meant; whether it was she or her parents who were trapped.

  “And should you ever feel too lonely, Jane,” Walter said as they carried the moon home in buckets, “listen for the roar of the sea—for in it are all those who’ve been and all those who are to come.”

  Jane remembered his words during the long nights in the cottage where she would spend the next fifteen years.

  Some nights, she believed that if she listened hard enough, she might hear the voice of her mother and father calling to her from wherever they were.

  Some mornings, the moment before she opened her eyes, she had forgotten they were gone; then like all those left behind in the world, Jane would have to begin again. For, despite the accumulation of experience, one must always be ready to begin again, until it’s someone else’s turn to begin without us, and we are completely free from the pain of love, from the pain of attachment—the price we pay to be involved.