We stayed on the floor for hours, breathing, bundled in the pitch dark listening to the storm.
128.
I have written you across time.
I have written you across my life.
I have gone to town.
I have taken care of the garden.
I have called Seymour, who is getting married.
I have called Hank, who is hanging on.
I have left messages for my sister, who still refuses to respond.
Perhaps one day, Claire.
I cannot fully explain it, but somehow I understand you. It is perhaps healthier to turn entirely away. Begin again from nothing. If I were capable of it, I think I’d like to do the same.
No matter how you live, there are casualties.
I have tried. I have tried to rid this house of its detritus. But there are objects I cannot burn. I don’t know why that is. The books remain on their shelves. There are still matchbooks, feathers, champagne corks, photographs.
Despite my efforts, there is all the usual crap.
I want to burn the whole thing down. But I don’t get very far.
The devices are easy.
My own clothes are easy.
I have fantasies of dying like my mother did. Leaving so few objects behind. It thrills me, this prospect. Give everything away.
Leave nothing behind but a pistol and a paper box of ash.
A legacy of bone.
I see the box, square and white on this table, and I feel calm. My own ashes here as a centerpiece. I feel chills of pleasure to think of it. Such clean simplicity.
And yet I cannot even take the books from the shelves. I can barely rid the house of anything that holds her mark.
The other night I sat outside with matches we’d kept from some lodge in Leavenworth. I burned them all at once on the deck, and only felt regret.
And now when I see the black mark on the wood, I think of them, and then of our room there, and then of Tess on a mountain path in the snow.
I dream of Tess in all the ways a person dreams: nightmare and vision, fantasy, hallucination and reverie.
It is no good.
You see how I am stuck?
Even if I have tried so hard to do so, even as I keep the .45 in front of me. I cannot rid myself of hope. And perhaps that’s what nostalgia is. Perhaps that’s what it is to be sentimental. An inability to abandon hope.
Look at my father. He died with a heart on fire, so full of faith in all of us, and our pure and fertile futures. He died believing we would all be happy, Tess and I and Claire. Seymour and Hank. Perhaps, even, my mother.
When I burn the feathers and the matches. When I burn the books, and all her fragrant clothes, the photographs and all her notes, that is when you might truly worry.
129.
I want you to know how it ends. Or how it ended for a while.
Just like that.
Suddenly.
Out of thin air.
The way my life has changed over and over again.
I go along and then there is horror.
I go along and then there is wonder.
It was late afternoon. Cool. A soft wind blowing through the apple trees. Hundreds and hundreds of high white clouds racing through the sky. Sunlight flashing across the house. I’d collected green beans from the garden and was sitting outside with a basket of them snapping off their ends. There was a cardinal flitting around, returning again and again to the same branch. I was talking to him. He was singing to me, cocking his head in that sweet cardinal way—human and questioning like an old man, half deaf. When he took off for the woods I looked up and there was Tess.
Is Tess.
Is Tess.
Is Tess.
As sudden as my mother’s temper, as sudden as my mother’s death, there was Tess at the edge of the clearing just as I had dreamed her. Well, no pistol, no saber, no stallion, but otherwise, just as I had dreamed her.
She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Over it, her ragged army surplus jacket. The sleeves rolled up. Her hair cropped short again.
There was a dog at her side.
I was still, basket between my bare feet.
She was coming toward me, talking to the dog. The animal stopped first, raised its head and barked. Then Tess looked up. Both of them with a similar expression—heads canted at the same angle, gaze on the same line, mouths slightly open. Both were tense, muscles coiled, ready to spring.
And you know what I saw? Watching Tess Wolff in her boots and army jacket? The strangest thing: I saw my mother sitting on our front step in Capitol Hill in a red summer dress, the fabric drawn loosely between her knees, a blue bowl of cherries to her right, and she was pushing the pits out, dropping the flesh onto a white plate to her left, while Claire and I played in the spray of our Rain Bird.
I had been injected with the image, the needle slipped straight into my brain.
And it was not Tess who made me think of my mother.
It was me.
Or it was me through Tess’s eyes.
I might have been wearing the same dress, dropping green beans into my lap, smiling at my knight errant returned from battle.
She stopped.
She was only a few yards away now.
Her skin was deep brown. Her hair gone greyer.
I saw her sailing some subtropical river.
Against her tan face, those green eyes appeared exaggerated, lit from within, the lines at their corners deeper, more beautiful.
Tess stopped, but the dog kept coming, tail down, head down, all curious submission. I reached and once he found me friendly, he began to wag what was left of his tail and nuzzle my leg. He flopped at my side and rolled over.
It was an Australian shepherd, barrel-chested, black and white and grey with one of those milky-blue eyes.
“What’s his name?”
“Zeus.”
She smiled at me.
The dog looked at her, his head hanging upside down off the step.
She was still too far away to touch, standing in her boyish way, hip kicked to the right.
I said, “Is this as close as you’re coming?”
She came near enough so that I could see the down on her arms. And then enough to touch. She pressed her hands against my thighs. She pulled herself forward by her nails until her balance was gone and she knocked me back and I had the full weight of her body.
“Joe,” she said, “Joe.”
It is not possible to translate into language what it was to feel her against me.
It is not possible to describe what it did to my skin, to my eyes, to my blood.
I can only tell you what I have always known, and what I knew again with such pure certainty: I would give anything for the full heat of her body.
There was nothing I would not do to have her.
No. Have is the wrong word.
There is nothing I would not do to be in contact with her. I would do anything to see her move, to listen to her speak. I would do anything to be near her.
Whatever she asks. Whatever she wants. No matter what.
There is nothing I would not do. Do you understand me? There is nothing.
I have given up.
We went to bed and I did not want anything else.
I did not want to know where she had been.
I did not want to know how long she would stay.
I wanted nothing else.
I have given in. I have given up.
We went to bed and I did not want anything more.
I have abandoned all of it: logic, control, and system.
In those first days I held onto her with such fierce and desperate strength.
We pressed so hard against each other. We were trying to make some seal, some p
erpetual lock. We were trying to make some absolute and final joining.
For nearly two years she was gone.
Now Tess is here. When I wake she is next to me.
130.
Every morning I run through the cool forest. Sometimes with wild brightness, sometimes dragging behind me the tar and the bird.
And when I return home Tess is there on the deck in the sun with her books.
In the evenings we cross our clearing and walk together along the elk trails while Zeus charges ahead.
131.
Last week we drove all the way out to the coast and spent a thunderstorm getting drunk in the back of the Wagoneer while Zeus cowered and farted between us.
After the rain passed, we had the beach to ourselves. All three of us were delirious with joy, chasing seagulls, running in circles.
The wind came up in the late afternoon and we all lay on our bellies watching the sunset. Tess the sniper, we her spotters.
132.
Perhaps I will ask where she has been.
Maybe I will ask what she has done.
On the other hand, one must surrender entirely.
133.
Last night on the couch, Tess tucked her feet beneath my legs. Zeus was asleep between us. Our owl was calling from the woods.
I wanted nothing but for nothing to change. I wanted nothing to change and for nothing to change to be my reward for faith, for insistence, for staying alive, for fighting so hard against the dark, for surrendering, for seeking out that other thing, which is neither tar nor bird, which is neither beast nor object, which is beauty, which is love.
I wished for nothing to change, but if wishes were horses, Joey Boy, beggars would ride, and the night went on and on toward morning, and now as I sit here writing one last time, I see Tess at the edge of the clearing, her back to the house, Zeus panting at her side.
She is out there looking into the forest at something I cannot see.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the following people for their generosity, intelligence and faith:
Caroline Ast, Natalie Bakopoulos, Joe Blair, Ryan Bloom, Laura Bonner, Jon Brockett, Diane du Périer, Patricia Escalona, Jenny Gersten, Francesca Giacco, Pilar Guzman, Leslie and Jon Maksik, Paula and William Merwin, Greg Messina, Michael Reynolds, Grant Rosenberg, Barbara Seville, Stefan Schaefer, Colombe Schneck, Eric Simonoff, Rachael Small, Daniel Smith, Tara Spencer-Frith, Françoise Triffaux and Christian Westermann.
I would also like to thank The Corporation of Yaddo for twice providing me shelter, peace and friendship.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexander Maksik is the author of the bestselling novel You Deserve Nothing (Europa, 2011) and A Marker to Measure Drift (Knopf, 2013), which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2013 as well as finalist for both the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.
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