Far-Flung

by Peter Cameron

  Eventually she got up. Virgil got up, too, as if he had been waiting all along. But he hadn’t been. He didn’t know what was going on. He was, after all, just a dog. It took very little to make him happy. If you petted him and said good dog good dog he was happy. You could make Virgil happy if you wanted to. He followed her inside. There were lights on that Ruth hadn’t remembered turning on. She turned them off and stood in the guest room. The unmade bed was something that should be taken outside and burned. And the table: In moonlight, at least, it gleamed.

  PART II

  Someone who excites you

  Should be told so, and loved, if you can, but no one

  Should be able to shake you so much that you wish to

  Give up.

  —Kenneth Koch, “Some General Instructions”

  SLOWLY

  LATER, THIS IS HOW WE heard it: It was the sixth day of their honeymoon and their last day in Ireland. They decided to drive to the coast, to a beach they had passed the day before, and picnic. At the breakfast table, Jane made a list of what they needed for their meal, and after breakfast Ethan drove the rental car to the closest town and shopped. Jane went for a walk on the bridle path, saw no horses, saw deer, came back to their room, packed their bags, and went down to the terrace and waited. When Ethan had not returned in an hour and a half she mentioned this to the hotel owner, Mr. Fitzgibbon. He told her the stores didn’t open till ten; her husband would return by eleven. At noon Mr. Fitzgibbon called the police in Dingle; they told him yes, an American had been in an accident. Driving on the wrong side of the road. Hit by a truck. Deader than—well, dead.

  I had been the best man at their wedding. I am—was—Ethan’s brother. I had introduced him to Jane Hobard, who had been my friend in college. I stood beside Ethan and watched Jane walk down the aisle. I gave him the ring; I gave it to him, and he gave it to Jane. I watched him slip it down her finger. I woke them at four o’clock the following morning and drove them down the deserted highways to the airport. I helped them unload their bags and then I left them. I kissed Jane good-bye, but I didn’t kiss Ethan. Did I shake his hand? Did I touch his shoulder? I don’t remember. Probably not.

  Jane did not come to the memorial service. She quit her job and moved to her parents’ house on an island in a lake in Canada. I sent her a letter and waited, but got no answer. The summer passed. The week before Labor Day, her brother, Teddy, called me at work in Washington.

  “Tom?” he said. “I have a mission that involves you.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I have been instructed to bring you to Château Hobard this weekend. I am driving up Friday evening and I am not supposed to arrive without you. What are you doing this weekend?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “It’s Labor Day, you know,” said Teddy.

  “I know.”

  “And you don’t have plans?”

  “No. Well, I was going to Maryland, to my parents’. But … Is this Jane’s idea?”

  “Yes,” said Teddy.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “I haven’t been up in a while. She doesn’t talk on the phone. Can you come? If you can get to New York Friday afternoon, I’ll drive you the rest of the way.”

  That night I told Charles about Teddy’s mission. “I take it,” Charles said, “that I wasn’t invited.”

  “Teddy didn’t mention you.”

  “Château Hobard,” Charles said. “Do they really call it that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “As a joke.”

  “Well, you should go,” said Charles. “You’ve been summoned.” Charles didn’t like Jane. I had made the mistake of telling him that if I weren’t gay I might have liked to marry Jane myself.

  “What will you do?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “But don’t feel that you’re abandoning me.”

  “You could go out to my parents’,” I said.

  “You mean spend the weekend with Chester and Ileen? At Chateau Kildare?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You are so wonderfully and pathetically naïve,” Charles said.

  Château Hobard was reached via a ferry from a small town called Big Bay. Teddy and I arrived there about three o’clock Saturday morning. We had breakfast in a diner and sat in the car, waiting for the first ferry. “Last summer I did this with Ethan,” Teddy said. “It was Labor Day, too.”

  “I remember,” I said. “It was when they got engaged.”

  “It’s a shame,” said Teddy.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I taught him how to wind-surf that weekend. He was terrible.”

  “He wasn’t an athlete,” I said. “I got all the athletic genes.”

  “That’s funny,” said Teddy. After a while he fell asleep; at least he slumped forward and drooled. I liked Teddy. I reclined his seat and pushed him back into it; he woke for a second and smiled at me, wiped the spittle from his face, and fell back asleep. I got out of the car and walked through the deserted town, looking in the shop windows at the mannequins and lawn mowers and books. In the half-darkness they all looked vaguely alike. Everything seemed just on the verge of being alive, poised on the edge of gesticulation. I thought about running away, finding the bus or train or taxi station and disappearing north into the wilderness. But I went nowhere. As it got light I could see the island across the lake, and as the sun rose it struck the fronts of houses there. Windows gleamed as if they had lanterns hung in them. As if the houses were on fire.

  “Jane has gone to pick berries,” Mrs. Hobard said. “She claims she will bake a pie.”

  “Oh,” I said. And then, “What kind of berries?” I couldn’t think of what else to say. Mrs. Hobard was showing me my room. The house was old and made of stone; my room was in a kind of tower.

  “Gooseberries,” said Mrs. Hobard. “There is a thicket of them up past the barn. Did you notice the barn?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s straight down the driveway and across the field. If you follow the path behind it—the dirt path, not the gravel one—you’ll find the berries. And, I hope, Jane. Why don’t you go help her?”

  “O.K.,” I said.

  “There’s an extra blanket in here,” said Mrs. Hobard, opening an armoire. “It gets cold at night.” She laid the blanket across the foot of the bed.

  “How is Jane?” I asked.

  Mrs. Hobard smoothed the blanket. “I don’t know,” she said. “She doesn’t talk about it. I think it’s good she wants to see you.” She looked up at me. “Go find her,” she said. “Tell her to come home for lunch.”

  I followed the dirt path up through the woods to a small meadow. It was the highest point on the island. I could see the lake on all sides, filled now with boats and event, although it was quiet up on the bluff. The gooseberry bushes ringed the field. They were low and scrubby and full of tent caterpillars, not berries. I walked across the meadow and found Jane lying asleep in the hot tall grass. I stood and watched her. She was lying on her back, her arms crossed over her breasts, her face turned to one side. I knelt down and looked in her pail. There were some berries in it, but mostly it was full of other things: twigs and stones and flowers. A toad leapt up against the curved cool metal, falling back into the debris. I set him free.

  “Jane,” I said, and my voice sounded awful, the way I’ve heard it when it has been recorded and played back. I moved my hand above her face so it blocked the sun, shadowed her eyes.

  They opened. She smiled at me for a moment and then sat up. “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I was sleeping,” she said. “What time is it?”

  “About noon.” I looked up at the sun, as if I could tell time by it. It did seem to be at the top of the sky. “Your mother says to come home for lunch.”

  “You came,” she said.

  “Yes. With Teddy.”

  “You’ve never been here,” she said. “What do you think?”

  �
�It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “You saw the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “I got your letter,” she said. “Thanks.”

  I shrugged. I sat down. She picked up her bucket.

  “I let the frog go,” I said.

  “It was a toad.”

  “I let him go,” I repeated. “He went thataway.”

  “I think I’m still a little asleep,” said Jane. She looked up at the sky. “I sleep all the time now,” she said. “I was taking these tranquilizers, but I’m not anymore. But I still sleep.”

  “Sleeping’s cool,” I said.

  “I was hysterical for a while,” said Jane. “You missed it. Now I’m not hysterical anymore. I just sleep.”

  “Should we pick more berries?” I asked.

  She looked in the bucket. “The toad probably peed on all of these,” she said. She emptied the bucket onto the place where she had been sleeping: the warm, matted grass. “Let’s go have some lunch,” she said.

  “O.K.,” I said. I started walking toward the path.

  “Wait,” said Jane. “Come here. We have to hug. I want to hug you.”

  I stepped through the grass and hugged her. I knew she was crying by the way she shook, and then I heard it. I held her and looked out at the water. Then I looked down at the berries and petals strewn in the grass. I closed my eyes.

  “Sometimes I can’t stop,” Jane said, as we walked down the path through the trees. “The first time I went to Big Bay—the only time, actually—I got completely hysterical. It was rather wonderful. I went over to see Born Free—you know, about the lions. They show a movie at the high school every Saturday night. Very rinky-dink. Anyway, it was a big deal: my first trip to the mainland. Back to life, I guess. I went with my parents. We had dinner at the hotel, and I was fine. I was quite ordinary. I had dessert and everything. And then we went to the movie, which was in the gym—all these folding chairs and a movie screen under the basketball hoop. You would have loved it. About two minutes into it, the man-eating lion kills the native woman washing her clothes. You don’t even know the woman, you’ve developed no sympathy for her. I mean, she’s not a character. She’s just this woman. Well, I completely lost it. I started crying, and I couldn’t stop. All the way back home on the ferry, I cried, and when we got home they wanted to take me back over to the doctor, and somehow that stopped me. The idea of distance. Of traveling. I realized I just wanted to go to bed. You get to a point where you don’t want to cry anymore, at least not cry and travel, and then it’s easy to stop. That’s when I started taking the tranquilizers.”

  “But you’ve stopped?”

  “Yes. I don’t need them anymore. I’m fine.”

  I looked at her. We had emerged from the woods into the pasture behind the barn. “You’re fine?” I asked.

  “I mean I’m better,” she said. “How are you?”

  There was a tree in the field and some cows lying underneath it. They seemed to be watching us. “I’m better, too,” I said.

  We stood for a moment, watching the cows. Jane mooed. It sounded authentic to me, but the cows took no notice.

  That night, after dinner, we sat on the terrace and watched the sun set. Barrels of salmon-colored geraniums separated the flagstones from the lawn, which sloped down the hill to the lake, where it ended abruptly, as if it were a scene in a child’s coloring book: lawn, water; green, blue. At the same moment in the evening’s descent, when the light from the sun was falling most beautifully through the clouds, groundhogs appeared from the earth and sat, Buddha-like, on the lawn. They seemed to be waiting to sing: something ancient, in unison.

  We were all there: the parents Hobard, Teddy, Jane’s younger sister Eleanor, her boyfriend Scott, Jane, and I. No one said anything. We watched the sun and the groundhogs as if they were fascinating and specially rehearsed.

  “There’s an albino one,” Eleanor finally said. “Scott and I saw it the other night. He looks like a baby polar bear.”

  “I’ve never heard of an albino groundhog,” said Mrs. Hobard.

  “There are albino everything,” said Eleanor.

  “I bet it was a rabbit,” said Mrs. Hobard.

  “It wasn’t a rabbit,” said Eleanor. “What would a rabbit be doing in a groundhog burrow?”

  “Vacationing?” suggested Mrs. Hobard.

  The sun and the groundhogs departed simultaneously. Mr. Hobard lit kerosene torches, and we watched bats swoop from one side of the lawn to the other. Crickets chirped. We played a game called adverbs, which was a little like charades. People had to act out a scene in the manner of an adverb while someone tried to guess what the adverb was. Mr. Hobard was dismissed to be the guesser. We decided on “surreptitiously.” Mr. Hobard returned, and directed Mrs. Hobard to sell Eleanor a hat in the manner of the word. Mr. Hobard guessed “incompetently” and “lackadaisically.” New participants and a new scenario were needed. While Scott tried to surreptitiously teach Teddy German, I looked across the firelit terrace at Jane, who was sitting on a wrought iron bench, looking down at the lake. Her cheeks and eyes were wet. I knew why she was crying, or at least I thought I did: It should have been Ethan sitting here, across the patio, or, better yet, beside her on the bench; it should have been Ethan she had canoed with that afternoon; it should have been Ethan—my brother Ethan—who woke her in the field surrounded by gooseberry bushes. That is why I thought she was crying; that is why I cried.

  I got up and moved down the lawn, out of the hot flickering light, into the shadowed, bumpy groundhog turf. Behind me, the adverb was declared too difficult and the game abandoned. “You must be exhausted, Thomas,” Mrs. Hobard called out to me, “and you, too, Teddy, driving all last night. I think we’re all tired.”

  “I’m not,” said Eleanor. “I’m going to swim. Do you want to swim, Scott?”

  “No,” said Scott, “Swimming in the dark water gives me the creeps.”

  “It’s beautiful at night,” said Eleanor. “Will you come, Jane?”

  Jane stood up. “I’ll come watch you,” she said. “You shouldn’t swim alone.”

  “Let’s take the canoe out,” said Eleanor. “We’ll look in the swamp for fox fire.” The two of them set off down the lawn.

  “Be careful,” called Mrs. Hobard.

  We watched their shapes disappear toward the lake, into the trees, and then heard the canoe being launched, the slow splash of paddles, their voices. Then it was quiet.

  I said good night and went up to my room in the tower. I couldn’t find the light switch so I undressed in the dark. I opened the windows and leaned out into the night. The torches had been extinguished. I could hear the click of billiard balls from downstairs and, in the far distance, Eleanor’s laugh. A splash.

  In bed I thought about Ethan, just missing him. I realized I did not want to be there anymore, in that tower room of Château Hobard. It was not that I thought it was haunted. It was that I wished it were.

  “My turn to wake you up,” Jane said. She was standing beside my bed, grinning down at me. It was still dark. “I’ve been watching you sleep,” she said. “You sleep the untroubled sleep of angels.”

  “How long have you been watching?” I asked.

  “Not long. What were you dreaming about?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I was dreaming.”

  “Of course you were. I could tell. Were you dreaming of Charles?”

  “No,” I said.

  Jane sat down on the window seat beside the bed and kicked off her shoes. “How is Charles? I forgot to tell you how pleased I was to meet him. It was nice of you to bring him to the wedding.”

  “He said to say hello,” I lied.

  “He’s awfully good-looking,” said Jane, “and he can dance. Did you know that? Do you ever dance together?”

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s sad,” said Jane. “You should.” She opened the window.

  “Eleanor’s still out in the canoe. She got Scott to go wi
th her. They went over to the hotel for a drink.”

  “What have you been doing?” I asked.

  “Waiting. I won’t be able to sleep until they get back.” She looked out at the lake. “I think I saw the northern lights before. I was walking around the lake. I mean around the island. Come here. Come watch the sky.”

  “I can see from here,” I said.

  “But not properly,” she said.

  “It’s too cold. I haven’t got anything on.”

  “You’re such a prude.” She stood up and sat down beside me on the bed. “Move over,” she said. “I’m coming in.”

  “There isn’t much room,” I said.

  She got in bed beside me. For a while we said nothing. “Don’t fall asleep,” she said.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “So are you in love with this Charles?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Of course you do,” she said.

  “He’s going to Africa,” I said.

  “To be an ambassador?”

  “Economic attaché, at an embassy.”

  “Are you going with him?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think he wants me to come. I don’t think the State Department does, either.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Maybe we should go to Africa, the two of us. We’ll move to Africa and start a coffee plantation. At the foot of the Ngong Hills.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “Good,” she said, “So it’s all settled.”

  “Perfect,” I repeated, sleepily.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” Jane said.

  “I won’t.”

  We heard Eleanor’s laugh out on the lake. Jane sat up. “They’re coming home,” she said. “In the wake of the moon. It looks lovely.” She watched Eleanor and Scott paddle toward the shore. “I think they want to get married,” she said.

  “So why don’t they?” I asked.

  “Because of me. They’re waiting on my account. For me to get over this.”

  “That’s very sweet,” I said.

  “I know,” said Jane. “Everyone’s sweet. I hate it.”