The Meaning of Isolated Objects

by Billie Hinton

  When it got dark he got up to turn a lamp on. He read through every notebook, front to back. He learned everything there was to know about Lynnie. What she had thought and felt and dreamed. Her life had been simple but full. His comings and goings were as sharp as knives in the narrative. They had never got beyond being newlyweds. They’d never had the chance, with him coming and going so much.

  Since she’d died, he had imagined their marriage as something tightly knit and strong. He’d held it out as an ideal, never to be marred by attempting to repeat it with another woman. And yet what he’d had with Lynnie had not been all that much, truth be told. They’d shared a bond and a connection he couldn’t explain. But she had traveled a path separate from his. The paths paralleled, and they intersected many brief times. But the weave was not tight. It was loose and weak. If she hadn’t died it would have pulled apart to nothing.

  In the last notebook he learned the things she had known about him. His addiction to sex, which she named squarely on one line of her notebook. Her choice to forgive it. The things she wanted him to know. That his daughters needed him. That he had to take responsibility for both of them.

  She had been wise and he had been stupid. And still she’d given up one dream, the big one, to honor a dream she’d had as a girl. She’d given her adult life to teach him something about himself. And now she was gone. When he closed the last notebook he felt numb. He had loved her but he had never deserved her.

  But he had done what she wanted him to do, in the end.

  The thing that tore at him was Jess. Lynnie had been jealous near the end, upset that Jess had taken her dream and lived it out, college, psychology. What was missing in the notebook was that Jess ended up with Wendell. And now Scott himself.

  He felt like they had all betrayed Lynnie. But in betraying her they had done what she hoped. They had made things right between them.

  He didn’t know how to settle that part. He didn’t know if he had time left to settle it. Sometimes things just had to be left undone. On his way out he went to his computer. Paid a visit to Ebay and browsed until he found the precise thing he was looking for. A miniature cabinet with drawers for each day in December, counting down to Christmas. He clicked Buy It Now and sat back in his chair. He would fill the drawers with trinkets and notes for Wendell and Jess.

  If something happened to him before Christmas, his gift would do the giving for him, each little drawer offering something in his name.

  The night before Tristan left for Wales for the holidays, Wendell finally told him the details of the Bisti trip. She could only say it in the darkness of his bed in the middle of the night.

  She expected rejection and horror, that Tristan would recoil in disgust at what had passed between her father and her. She pulled away when she said it, found her own separate space in the bed and curled up there as she got to the end.

  “I wanted him, Tristan. There was part of me that wanted that piece of him, as though it might make up for everything else.”

  “It’s like what Jung said, Wendell, the idea of the opposites, containing and enduring. Untangling the unspeakable to allow for something new.”

  She allowed Tristan to touch her. She unfolded beneath his hands.

  “This is what you do for me, Tris.”

  “What?”

  “Let me be who I am.”

  She dreamed she went with Tristan to Wales, the two of them brandishing swords that rang out and glittered with light as they parried, equal in their match. He cut pieces of her out, and she did the same for him: dark pieces of themselves that laid on the earth and shriveled underfoot.

  She cut Kate away from his heart and he did the same with Tag. It took both Tristan’s hands when it came to her father, the piece of him that had to be removed. She staggered when the blade hit and wept, then turned to gold. Tristan’s sword was bent but not broken, and he let it fall with a clatter to the ground.

  She decided to take a trip alone to the North Carolina mountains in early January. To think some things through, was what she said to her father and Aunt Jessie and Tristan. But secretly Tag had come to her in his way and told her to go to the tree.

  Tristan took her to dinner the night before she left, Thai, and they ate without mention of her trip. His corded neck, the angle of his jaw as he chewed made her hesitate. Perhaps she should not go.

  She took a huge forkful of his Pad Thai and slid her plate over so he could share hers as well. They both reached forward at the same time, forks clashed with a metallic ring, the sound of swordplay.

  They had stopped fighting over men and women. He accepted her grief over Tag and she assumed he still saw Kate, that they shared intimate lunches between classes, closed the door to Tristan’s office and gave themselves to one another, urgent and then tender, in the warm dust-filled air of academia, afternoon sunlight swimming with passionate utterances whispered in Greek and Latin.

  Tristan had told Wendell it wasn’t true. “She isn’t like us,” he’d said. “She requires more loyalty than you or I.”

  Her father reviewed her route on the map she’d spread across Aunt Jessie’s kitchen table. Aunt Jessie was by the stove, tasting the white bean soup she had pampered in its big pot all day long.

  “Take the scenic route instead,” he suggested, and Wendell sighed. His route took her through the Virginia mountains, along Skyline Drive to the Parkway. She needed the brutality of the interstate, the traffic, the changing of lanes and ugliness of roadside gas stations to temper the emotion already building inside her chest.

  Where he would have her go would be a quiet drive, cold and white, sky segmented by bare black branches and evergreens cloaked in low cloud cover. She felt sure she would cry the entire way.

  She followed the directions to the tree, precise, in Tag’s handwriting.

  Begin the loop – turn south down hyatt lane (the second gravel road that cuts south through the fields). As soon as the trees on your right end, you will see a pullout for parking on your left, by an opening in the fence. Park there and go back across the road (west) to where the trees end (you’ll have to go back up the road a few yards to where a little path cuts up into the woodline). On the edge of the forest, about 25 yards or so from the road, there is an oak with a single massive limb that extends way out into the meadow. That’s the spot. That’s where you can always find me.

  His energy pulsed as she traced her finger over each word. When she looked up before the final turn onto the gravel lane, the sky was brilliant blue and cold, marked with a huge white X. The rune of partnership. Of wishes fulfilled.

  She wanted to see Tag, felt him in her bones and muscle. She let the thought float up, like on the mountain, an intention.

  When she pulled to the side of the gravel road and got out, the wind whipped up around her. The sun had been out moments before, sky clear and cold, but suddenly it was cloudy and she felt the sharp sting of cold rain on her cheeks.

  Finally the mountain was raining down her intentions.

  She walked with the slip of paper protected inside her jacket, so the ink wouldn’t run, and traced the path Tag had laid out for her, into the woodline and then to the massive oak. She misjudged the distances at first, but when she stopped thinking in terms of yards and simply opened her eyes, the limb was there.

  She stood beneath it and let the empty branches shelter her as they would from the cold rain. She looked up at the limb overhead and glimpsed something white. She couldn’t quite reach it but using a stick managed to knock it to the ground. It was a small ziplock bag holding a note.

  And it was from Tag.

  More directions, to a cabin.

  I’m there right now. Waiting for you.

  She had no way of knowing when he’d written the note or left it. He had put no date. But she folded it back into the bag, put the directions to the tree in with it, and walked back to her car.

  Before she left the gravel lane the sun had come back, and as she drove out, a rainbow appeared on he
r left, so close she felt she could reach out and touch it.

  She carried her duffel up the steps to the cabin door, past the neat stack of split wood, inside to where someone had laid and lit a fire, the smell of wood smoke and warm air like an embrace as she entered.

  She had never been afraid about being alone, or about meeting a man. The possibility that Tag was there, or not, the isolation of the cabin, all melded into a sort of terror in the pit of her stomach.

  She waited.

  The crunch of tires, the muffled slam of a car door, the steady thud of feet on steps. She was reading on the bed, but dashed to the bathroom window to sneak a glimpse. Whoever it was had already passed by. She ran to the sofa and then stopped, expecting someone to come through the doorway.

  But no one did. Instead, someone knocked softly, one, two, three.

  When she opened the door, he embraced her immediately, held her safe while she breathed him in. Even if this was all there was, it was enough.

  She had always wanted more and made do with less, but never dared admit that. With Tag it was the way of things, her heart on the table, no secrets or pretenses.

  He led her to the sofa, where they sat and looked and he breathed for her while she soaked his spirit in.

  For months she had wanted to demand things of him, ask questions, gain clarity, destroy ambivalence. But with him inches away, there was nothing that needed saying.

  She realized before he spoke that it was the last time she would see him. He didn’t say it, nothing foreshadowed it. She just knew, deep in her bones and cells, that he wouldn’t let himself choose her. That he would blame it on the world, on circumstance, on the government, but he was lying to himself. It was in him, the need to do without. And maybe it was in her as well, the need to be beholden.

  The second night, while she was lying in his arms, he shifted into some other incarnation of human, borne somehow from the same air and light and energy as her. They fed one another -- shined and glowed and tingled with life and love and knowledge. It seemed like forever and then it seemed like only one instant had passed since he’d walked in.

  She cried in the muted light of dawn while his pale blue eyes stared into hers. “I do love you, Wendell,” he said. “Don’t ever not know that.”

  Arms and legs and skin came gently undone as he rose to dress in the oblong square of sunlight that passed through the bedroom window. The way he tugged at the waistband of his pants, the backs of his elbows, the elegant way he turned to her. One brief but potent gaze.

  Later that morning they stood on the front porch of the little cabin in the woods. He held her and then he kissed her. When he pulled away he was lit from behind by the morning sun. His warmth belied the morning’s winter chill.

  “I found it,” he said, and then he left. Quietly, ghostlike, not even a rustle of fabric accompanied him.

  He turned one time and tapped his wristwatch with a finger. She watched as his truck wheeled around in the loose gravel drive. She watched until the truck went up the hill and disappeared.

  She stood there until the telephone in the cabin rang. She tried to ignore it, but it kept ringing, on and on.

  When she answered it she felt a moment of dread. It was apparent in the silence before Aunt Jessie said the words.

  “He died this morning, sweetie. It was quick, he didn’t suffer.”

  After they hung up, she wondered if her father had done it on purpose, to save them all the pain of a prolonged departure. It might also be true that Aunt Jessie had helped him.

  She turned to the counter to make the last pot of coffee. There was a black notebook on the table. A Moleskine that at first she thought was hers. The elastic band had been left unbound, the pages were swollen and curled when it fell open in her hands.

  Tag’s handwriting was precise, the occasional swirl of an extravagant hand curtailed by the smallness of the page. His words concise but elegant, the descriptions of his days back to the previous year. She stood in the kitchen and read from beginning to end almost without breathing. She was so hungry for what he saw and thought and lived.

  She learned some things: that he loved strawberries and sunsets, that he had a brother, that he went months without sex and made someone up, a fantastical woman who came to him nights and moved his heart. That he mourned the loss of her when he decided to let her go.

  He wrote of landscape and love. He wrote of a dream: that one day he would find what he was looking for.

  She remembered what Aunt Jessie had said when she told her about Tag, the notes he’d written, his body when they were riding the motorcycle across the mesas. Aunt Jessie had tilted her head slightly. Her hair fell forward and she brushed it back. “He writes beautifully, doesn’t he? Demand more, Wendell. Don’t let a man you love get by with pretty words. Demand that he act just that same way.”

  But Wendell did not have him, and could make no demands. She didn’t know what to make of Aunt Jessie’s wisdom, which she knew had come from living her life watching a sister grieve a man who was never there, and then a daughter who did the same. Aunt Jessie made the demand and it had worked for her, but the circumstances were different. Her man was dead, and he had made amends. He found something real before he died.

  She tried to think of Tag as a gift, something she had been given that wasn’t a permanent thing, but meant to be used up, and remembered. She knew she would have dreams of him, that he would come to her in that one way they both knew.

  While she had him in her arms he was hers that way, and in the dream times he was hers another way. Neither one was better or worse than the other. Both ways had meaning. Both ways counted.

  After the trip, she went straight to Tristan’s. He was waiting in the living room, pacing with a beer in one hand.

  In the shadowy afternoon light of his room, she climbed beneath the quilt on his bed and beckoned for him to come too. Inside her warm den, there was darkness and the smell of her breath and his. Citrus and mint and dark beer.

  His lips slid sideways across hers. Her thick leggings, cotton turtleneck, and woolen socks were barriers against his skin, but he pulled her in close and held her until she twisted out of the clothing beneath the blankets, deep inside their warm cave, and tugged at his until they, too, slid into the mass of fabric at their feet.

  She was soft and everywhere, under him, on top of him, beside him; their limbs tangled and came undone again. All over him and then gone, the feeling even when he was in her and his weight held her down, that she would turn to air and melt up through him, and off someplace, like smoke.

  There was wet against his chest, the warm damp of her tears. “I’m sorry, Tris. This is all I have to give right now.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “But I won’t stop asking for the rest.”

  She had a dream that she was walking toward an isolated stone that rose tall from the earth. In the dream Tristan translated.

  Isolated derives from the French isolé, the Italian isolato, from the Latin insula, which means island. Isolation means being alone. Being separated from someone. It also means, in alchemy, the separation of a chemical substance in its pure state.

  You’re in your purest form, he said.

  Her.

  In the dream she stood, rooted deep and sure as a myriad of men turned and spun around her. She changed with each man’s circle: wild woman, hellcat, wanderer, woman with tears, woman with smiles, the little girl Wendell.

  Her angle of vision got wider. She saw then that she was but one of many, one in a huge circle of stones that extended further than her eye could see. She panicked and then relaxed. There was nothing she could do, in the dream. Nothing but enjoy the dance. Take solace in being, for that moment, the center of someone’s gaze.

  In the dream she asked Tristan what it meant.

  “It’s nothing all that mysterious,” he said. “If you allow it to happen, it will. What has been base and elemental can turn to gold.”

  Sometimes when she was lonely she took o
ut Tag’s Moleskine and read.

  I love autumn best. Fall is the Beginning. Fall is the New Year. Rebirth, fresh hope, the smooth tobacco-hazel of a fallen oak leaf. Windy bare-bones trees topping a ridgeline and switching at the moon. I used to think, when I was younger, that I took this view out of sheer contrariness, loving autumn more than spring. But now I know that I love autumn best simply because it is in me to love her best. And it is autumn’s way to take me in her arms and hold me the way spring never could.

  Tag left her words, lines and lines of words, the curve and swirl of blue fountain pen on creamy white pages.

  Before he died Scott had a dream about his daughters. They cried in Jessie’s arms while he boarded a plane, en route to someplace dangerous and far away. On his mind already was what he’d do in between the danger, the spice of some anonymous woman that would temper the loneliness and the fear.

  And then he looked back, across the tarmac, and saw what was real and true. His daughters, there were two of them. The gleam of red hair and black, their teary eyes shiny in the sun. And Jess, a young and lovely woman who took care of them both.

  The danger was not in other countries. It was inside his own closed heart. He got off the plane and walked back to them, took them into his arms. He grabbed hold of Jessie’s hand and drove them home, the treasures in his life. He saw it all. He missed nothing.

  Wendell dreamed of Tag, his silvery blue eyes, the curve of muscle and bone. He was laid out flat, partially excavated, someone she uncovered slowly with brushes and the tips of her fingers.

  He shone like a jewel and waited patiently as she worked. His thoughts and hers twisted and combined into one single thought. They became part of one another in some odd way she could not describe outside the dream. There were moments when she thought she was uncovering her self.