by Anita Shreve
Congratulations.
Charles
September 23
Dear Charles,
I was delighted to get your note. Can it really have been thirty-one years ago? I have an image of the boy you were then—and somewhere I have photographs of you, even one, I think, of the two of us. Weren’t you called Cal, or did I dream that?
I live on a farm with my husband and my daughter, Lily, who is three. Two days a week, I teach poetry at Stryker University, not far from my home. Thank you for your comments about the poems. The landscape I write about is familiar to me. As are the migrant workers.
You know what I do and what I look like. I am more than a little curious about what you do and what you look like.
Siân
September 26
Dear Siân,
Somewhere my children still have a gold identity card hanging from a chain, with “Cal” written on the front and “Siân” written by you on the back.
I am married, with three beautiful children—fourteen, twelve, and five.
I am surprised your daughter is so young. I suppose I just assumed you had married earlier and that your child would be nearly grown.
I plotted the bike ride between my house and yours several times, but a 200-mile bike ride across three states is pretty difficult for a fourteen-year-old boy. Did your father ever tell you that I called about a year after we had each graduated from college?
Concerning what I do, I sell both insurance and real estate. I’m doing brilliantly at neither at the moment.
To know what I look like, you’ll have to meet me for a drink.
Thank you for not making me write to you through your publisher. That would be tiresome.
Charles
October 15
Dear Siân,
I am just a little concerned that you have not responded to my last letter. I hope this correspondence has not put you off in some way.
I remember I saw you as soon as I arrived at The Ridge. I can picture this vividly. You were standing in the courtyard, in a cotton dress with short sleeves, and it came down below your knees. It must have been just after we had arrived. I remember, too, the first time we spoke to each other.
We were painfully shy with one another. I do remember that. I remember walking down to the lake in an agony as to whether or not I would have the courage to hold your hand. I believe I also gave you a gold bracelet that said “The Ridge” on it. I remember the badminton game. And, of course, I have never forgotten the bonfire. Do you remember that?
I find it extraordinary that I should have the same feeling looking at your picture in the advertisement that I had thirty-one years ago looking at a beautiful young girl in a courtyard.
Charles
October 20
Dear Charles,
No, I have not been put off by this correspondence, though I am unclear as to just where it is going. But perhaps I am being too linear. It doesn’t have to go anywhere, I suppose; it might just circle and loop around in our memories.
I am fascinated by your memories. I would love sometime to compare them—yours and mine. Did you perceive that week as I did, I wonder? I do see myself with you. I am wearing a white sleeveless blouse and plaid pedal pushers, and my hair is pulled back in a ponytail. You are beside me, quite a bit taller, and you have a crew cut. I must have this image from a photograph. I will go through my trunk and find all of the photographs one day soon.
I do remember the bracelet and the badminton game and the night of the bonfire. I also remember having an epiphany of sorts, down by the outdoor chapel at the water’s edge, that the essence of religion was love, pure and simple. I am not religious now, by the way. I haven’t been inside a church, except for a wedding or a funeral, in twenty years.
I would, of course, meet you for a drink, but I think you will be disappointed. I am not quite as interesting or as mysterious as my photograph makes me out to be.
Siân
October 23
Dear Siân,
I received your letter yesterday. I saw the review of your new book in last Sunday’s literary supplement. I was thrilled when I saw it, and I thought it was quite good, all in all. I know it must be hard to have your work hanging out there for anyone to take aim at. I confess I seldom read poetry—at least contemporary poetry: I am more likely to read philosophy or history—so I was a little lost and befuddled in the paragraph of comparisons to other poets, but I felt the reviewer was absolutely right when he referred to you as a transcendentalist.
I can remember being with you at the outdoor chapel by the water. If the essence of religion is love, and you love someone as I’m sure you do, then I guess you’re religious. Those are words from a former seminarian. After college I entered the seminary and was there for two years. Mostly I wanted to avoid the draft, but I probably received my best education there. I haven’t been to church in twenty years either.
There is a line in a book I read recently about the curiosity of lives unfolding. I guess that is what we are doing. I know you are interesting. The part of you that I believe is mysterious we could hold on to by not meeting, but I wouldn’t be satisfied with just holding on to a mystery.
Just tell me where and when. Whatever is easiest for you. I’m looking forward to meeting you. Again.
Charles
October 28
Dear Charles,
I would like to meet with you sometime, although I confess I am a bit uneasy. My larger difficulty, however, is that I feel uncomfortable in the position of having to arrange a meeting. I don’t know quite what else to say at this point, except that I will think about it. I don’t mean to put you off, but I am a little daunted by the hows and wheres.
I’m sorry you had to see the review in the literary supplement. It is probably a classic example of a “mixed” review, but it stung nevertheless.
I smiled at the image of your plotting the bike ride from your house to mine. My father still lives in the same house in which I grew up in Springfield, but I really left western Massachusetts when I went to college. I attended a Catholic college for women in New Hampshire and barely escaped entering religious orders myself by joining the Peace Corps. My mother died while I was in college. In the Peace Corps, I taught elementary school in Senegal. When I returned to this country, I went to graduate school for a time, and I met my husband there. Then we settled on his farm.
What is it like where you live, and what are the names of your children?
I am sorry my handwriting is so poor. I could type these letters if you’d rather—your handwriting is remarkably beautiful.
I am intrigued by how you happen to have a postbox.
Siân
November 1
Dear Siân,
I had already ordered from my local bookstore your two previous books, and several days ago your first book of poetry, about Africa, arrived. I think the poems are beautiful—that goes without saying. There are threads and currents that run through your poetry, but each poem is somehow a surprise. I’d also like to say, and I hope this is not disturbing to you, that I think there is a kind of sadness associated with your poetry. This is easier to see in the later poems—a kind of awful loneliness, I think. Or do I only imagine that?
I’d like to see you smile. You seem fairly serious, and I’m sorry about the “sting” of the review.
I knew that your mother had died. Your father told me when I spoke to him on the telephone.
Our lives seem to have been running on parallel tracks. I mean by that only the coincidences of having small children, of both having entered or nearly entered religious orders, and of both having lapsed. Perhaps when we meet, we will discover other similarities.
I live in a middle-to-working-class coastal fishing village, in a large white house badly in need of repair. Unfortunately I’m fairly lazy, so it will probably stay in need of repair.
I went to Holy Cross, then to seminary in Chicago. After that I drove a city bus. I was driving the city
bus when my sister’s husband was killed in a car accident, and I had to come home to help her take over her husband’s business. Then she remarried and went off to Los Angeles, and I got stuck with the business. The rest, as they say, is history.
The town I live in is about a half hour from Providence, where I was living when we met as children.
My children are Hadley, fourteen; Jack, twelve; and Anna, five. I think each is beautiful and unique.
When I first wrote you, I thought we could have a casual meeting. Now every letter I write you, I feel I risk scaring you away. Putting the burden of the “where and when” of our meeting on you was really just the concern of someone who knows what it’s like to have a three-year-old child. I can set up the time and place and arrange for a chaperone.
I’d rather write you in longhand, and thanks for the compliment about my handwriting, but I had to get this out in a hurry. The only reason I have a P.O. box is that I run my business out of it, and I can get the mail earlier.
It takes time to read between the lines.
I notice that you don’t say much about your husband.
Charles
November 5
Dear Charles,
I am leaving for Cambridge, England, on Thursday and will be away teaching a poetry seminar for two weeks. I wanted to say, before I left, that I like the letters you write to me, that I like the things you choose to say.
Yes, I am often too serious, and no, you are not wrong if you sometimes see sadness in my work. These are characteristics I don’t seem to be able to do much about.
Thank you, but I won’t need a chaperone.
I notice that you say little about your wife.
Siân
November 7
Dear Siân,
Touché.
Going to England is one hell of a good excuse for not being able to meet with me. For whom are you teaching? Do you do this sort of thing often?
I am disappointed. If I knew what flight you were taking, I’d drive to the airport and see you off, though that would be incredibly frustrating.
Please send me a postcard from England. I probably won’t get it before you’re home, but do it anyway.
I miss you already.
Charles
November 10
Dear Charles,
My plane is leaving in a few hours, but I had to send these pictures off to you before I left. For some reason I cannot explain, I was seized this afternoon with a desire to go through my trunks and find the photographs I thought were there. I am sending you these two—the one of us together in the courtyard and the shot of the lake taken from the outdoor chapel. I’m sure that the one of us was taken on the last day, just before we had to leave. How extraordinary what the memory got right and what it didn’t. You look much as I had remembered you (do you still have somewhere that wonderful old Brownie that is in your hand?). But I look very different. I didn’t remember the Bermuda shorts or that my hair was quite that light ever. Nor that you and I were the same height. Your arm is around me, but just barely, and I’m unable at all to meet the gaze of the camera. I seem to be studying my feet.
Aren’t the photographs concrete proof that somewhere in time we did actually meet and know each other? What did we know? I wonder. And what did our voices sound like?
This archaeological dig has consumed nearly all my afternoon, and I’m not even packed yet. I must run, but I wanted you to have this. One day I will find the bracelet. I’m sure I must have it. I never throw anything away.
I promise a postcard.
Siân
November 15
Dear Siân,
I drove to the beach today to look out toward Portugal, but there was a haze on the water, and the view was obscured.
Actually, I often go to the beach and look out toward Portugal. This activity consumes more of my time than it ought to.
This letter is hard to write, knowing you are far away and won’t even read it for at least a week. I wonder what it is like for you in England, what you are doing. I imagine you with a long scarf wrapped around your neck, walking along a path toward a beautiful stone building where your students are waiting for you.
I was moved by your archaeological dig and by the two photographs. It was the last day of camp, and we had asked someone to take the picture of us together. I remember that my parents had arrived already, before yours, and that they were standing off at some distance, watching us, barely masking their impatience. I also remember that I cried all the way home in the car and that when I told my mother I had given you a gold bracelet with the words “The Ridge” on it, she said to me: “So where’s my bracelet?”
What happened to me thirty-one years ago was love at first sight. I don’t understand the phenomenon entirely, and I’m more than a little embarrassed at having to resort to the cliches of old 45s, but I can remember vividly that gut-wrenching feeling. I am less clear about what happened to me when I saw your picture in the newspaper two months ago. Last night I was reading Paul Ricoeur, and a line of his stopped me: “the fulfillment of an antecedent meaning which remained in suspense.” He meant the irrational irruption of Jesus Christ in the context of the New Testament, but I tend to take bits where I find them and apply them to my own life. The difficulty for me is that I can’t completely absorb what happened thirty-one years ago or on September 15, because I don’t have enough access to the antecedent.
All this means is that I want to meet the woman who has grown from the girl I remember.
Time has taken on a new dimension. I feel the chaos of time, but I’m trying to comprehend it in relationship to loss. I spent all of August with Stephen Hawking, thinking about “quarks” and black holes, but he didn’t mention how waiting for a letter or recrossing a warp of thirty-one years to a young girl’s face can make time fold in upon itself. My daughter is now the same age as we were then, a “fact” of physics or of nature that baffles me.
Perhaps I am looking only for an open connection.
Today has more warmth than you would imagine for the fifteenth of November. The ocean was a dusty blue when I drove to the beach earlier, with the haze on the horizon. There was a stillness this afternoon, both visual and sensual, that was soporific—or at least that’s the excuse I am using to explain why I dozed for twenty minutes in my car with the sun warming the front seat through the windshield. At the beach, across a long wooden bridge from the mainland, you can hear the bells from the church tower in the center of town, and I like listening to them, interspersed with the calling of the gulls. Even the gulls were half asleep today, though—enjoying this short Indian-summer respite from a string of cold gray days. I nearly missed my lunch appointment.
You mention my wife, and I mention your husband, and we receive in reply only further questions or silences. I might one day be able to speak to you or write you about my marriage, but I am more engaged now (and have been for some time) with the sound of bells from a church tower or the mysterious physics of time. What to reveal and what to conceal is perplexing to me.
For the same reason that I cannot focus on my marriage, my business is shot to hell. I used to be better at compartmentalizing. I’m supposed to sell insurance and real estate, but the entire town is under siege, and every dime is frozen. I could write you more about this, but I’d like to keep the shit out of this correspondence. I’d like to transcend the shit, is what I’d like to do. Actually, I do not always hate my job. I used to like to talk to people about what was important to them.
Where does the pain in your poetry come from?
I imagine going to a market in Cambridge and buying ingredients for a meal that I would make for you. I love to cook. Am I going too far?
