by Barbara Vine
She disliked telephones and loved letters, notes, anything written. She sent faxes to Lynette’s husband at the State Office Building on the Goncharof’s machine and she took me into the room where the machine was to show me how it was done.
‘Wouldn’t it be fine,’ she said, ‘if everyone had one?’ She often used ‘fine’ like that, where someone else would have said ‘nice’ or ‘good’. ‘Wouldn’t it be fine? Then telephones could disappear.’
‘But people don’t like writing letters,’ I objected.
‘They had to when they couldn’t pick up the phone.’
I said I couldn’t see a world without phones.
‘But faxes are cheaper,’ she said, ‘and that always counts for a lot. Do you think people specially want to hear someone else’s voice? Silence seems so much better, silence and contemplation. The spoken word departs – well, it’s out there somewhere in the spheres, but it’s inaccessible unless you record it. Can you imagine taping your own conversation and listening to it over and over? I can’t.’
‘But you can read and re-read a letter?’ I said, and then, impulsively, ‘Shall I write to you? And would you write to me?’
‘I expect so. Of course I would. Shall we start a correspondence? That would be fine. I love letters. I’ve kept all the letters I’ve ever had and I do hope other people keep mine.’
I’ll keep yours, I said, but to myself, not out loud.
This conversation took place before the arrival of Ivo’s first letter. When it was handed to me and she saw me look at the handwriting of the address she didn’t ask me anything about it. I couldn’t have said it was from someone at home because she’d seen the United States stamp if not the postmark. But she didn’t ask.
We had dinner at the Alaskan Hotel that evening. I said to her, ‘Why do you always wear black?’
She delighted me with her answer, the correct, the only, answer. ‘I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.’ And then she laughed to show me it wasn’t true, that it might have been true for Chekhov’s Masha but not for her.
I wasn’t entirely convinced. The laugh had seemed forced. Of course I didn’t suppose she was actually in mourning for anything, that she wore black for that reason, because she wore white just as much, but mostly just those two colours, black and white. I thought, I’m in love with a woman who always wears black and white and wants to abolish the telephone, and this made me laugh out loud.
She asked me why I laughed and when I prevaricated, said, ‘I can’t afford clothes, Tim, or not many. That’s why I stick to black and white, it’s easier. Did you think I was rich?’
‘I’m glad you’re not,’ I said.
‘I’m not sure I am. Glad, I mean.’
Her departure was casting its shadow before it, though I didn’t know that then. I only knew that her being poorish, like me, brought her closer to me and made her more accessible. We were inseparable, except when she had to be with Lynette, and I was getting the impression by the next day that she was with Lynette more from duty than anything else. It was becoming a chore. She would rather have been with me. Back from Calhoun Avenue, where Lynette lived, she was always with me, yet we hadn’t even kissed each other.
Alone, I strolled along the waterfront or drank Coors in the Red Dog Saloon, and wondered how I was going to cross that bridge, how was I going to get to make love to her. Was it to be through speech or a touch? I nearly groaned aloud when I thought that perhaps I’d left it too long, there had been too much friendship for it ever to be bridged. Because, of course, by then I’d forgotten about my love transcending sexual desire. I wanted her. I had to have her.
The weather had held but that morning huge clouds had appeared, like snowy outgrowths of the mountains. They covered the sun and sank on to the land in masses of vapour that hid the other side of the strait and hung in white curtains over the ranks of pine trees. It was going to rain. I’d been allowed to meet Isabel from Lynette’s the day before and I went up there again just before one, carrying the umbrella I’d bought in a shop in Senate Building Mall. The house was up beyond the Governor’s mansion, what we’d call a bungalow, made of what we’d call weatherboard, with a garden full of spring flowers, waiting hopefully for the rain.
For some reason, I was sure it would embarrass Isabel if I rang the bell, so I waited at the gate, putting up the umbrella when the first drops of rain came. She was surprised to see me but not annoyed. The black shiny waterproof she wore reminded me that she knew Juneau, the vagaries of its climate weren’t a mystery to her. But her hair was uncovered, so the umbrella wasn’t entirely useless. This time when I took her hand and put it under my arm, she didn’t take it away but held on, giving my elbow a squeeze.
Emboldened, I said something about the way the Victorians held arms. ‘I’ve always thought it odd. They were so prudish, they even made a fuss about certain kinds of dancing, but a woman would always hold a man’s arm even if she hardly knew him.’
Isabel gave me a sidelong glance. ‘Is that a hint at my forwardness?’
‘Of course not!’ I was rather horrified, but the hand remained and gave a second squeeze.
‘I know what you mean,’ she said. “Lean on me”, someone says in Jane Austen to a woman he scarcely knows, and there’s no question but that she will, that she takes it for granted.’
I said something then that I immediately regretted, that I felt it was folly to say. ‘And men too,’ I said, ‘men taking each other’s arms, you read about it everywhere.’
She gave me another upward tilted look, half-smiling, half-inquiring. I thought, she mustn’t know. Whatever I have to do, she mustn’t know. The act I was to perform I didn’t think of then, I never thought of it in advance at all, I didn’t premeditate it. That small thing can at least be said in my favour. But I thought of other ways of concealing what Ivo and I had been to each other, lying, prevarication and cover-ups.
The first of these was due. We ran up the steps of the Goncharof out of the rain. Collecting our keys at reception, I saw what was waiting for me in the pigeonhole, not one letter but two. The clerk handed them to me before I could stop him. But what do I mean, stop him? How could I have stopped him? They were for me, they were mine, and as I saw from the handwriting on the envelope, as of course I knew without seeing, both from Ivo.
Isabel said, ‘Two more. You are lucky. I wish someone would write me letters.’
She hadn’t asked but the question hung there, unspoken. I’d have said they were from my mother except that she had already seen the stamps. I was obliged to say something but I said nothing, I stuffed the letters into my jacket pocket – or, rather, the pocket of Ivo’s jacket, which she’d remarked on and admired – and we walked into the dining room for lunch.
Later on, while she was in her room writing letters, appropriately enough, I looked at mine. Strongly tempted to put them into the pocket of my suitcase unopened, I reflected that whatever happened meanwhile I was going to see Ivo in a week’s time, there would be no avoiding that, I had to know what he’d written to me about.
What can I say about them now that won’t increase my shame? They were love letters. They are love letters. I don’t want to quote from them, I don’t want that added pain. Or perhaps it wouldn’t be pain so much as remorse, for I read what Ivo had to say with impatience and with only half my mind on the content. The other half was on Isabel upstairs and wondering if it was her husband she was writing to.
It took me two minutes to read what had probably taken Ivo two hours to write. When I’d finished I put the letters into the suitcase pocket with the first one and tried to think what I was going to say if she was with me when I got the next one. She very likely would be. The only way she certainly wouldn’t be was if she found out I was getting love letters from a man who had been my lover. I’d have to think of something to tell her, I’d have to tell more lies, invent a friend, use my creative imagination …
Then I had an idea that was very unwelcome. Suppose she
spent so much time with me and had all her meals with me and drinks with me and explored the place with me because she’d seen that I was gay and felt safe, as some women are said to do, going about with a gay man. It’s an awful expression and I didn’t like using it about Isabel, but suppose she was a fag hag? I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, trying to see if there was anything – well, epicene about me. I didn’t care about clothes, I just wore whatever was to hand and was clean. That business of dressing up for Ivo with the bare chest and the gold chain had been strictly a one-off. My hair was shorter than most men’s without being anywhere near shaved, I hadn’t got a pierced ear, God forbid. I never used men’s scent, I’d never possessed any. To me I looked just like any other man of twenty-four, any heterosexual man, that is, and if I could tell I was good-looking, I swear I was pleased about it then because I fancied my looks gave me more chance of attracting Isabel.
I turned away from the mirror in disgust. It was then that I remembered the way Ivo had told me he loved me, in a pub, just like that, out of the blue. I knew I couldn’t do the same. I wasn’t going to be able to look up from dinner in the Summit restaurant and say, ‘I love you.’
I’ve read somewhere, probably in one of those newspaper articles on teenage sex, that young people today take sex very casually, they’re never obsessed about it, they don’t even think about it very much. If they want to do it they do it, always, of course, cautioned by the fear of AIDS. But there’s no soul-searching and no sense of right and wrong, no hesitation and nothing shameful. It’s not daring or a gesture any more, there is nothing rebellious about it. Things have changed utterly from when the generation before them were young in the sixties and seventies.
I can only say it hasn’t been like that for me. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it the most important, and the most fraught, thing in my life at that time.
There was a desk in the room. Isabel was probably sitting at her version of it upstairs now. I sat down at the desk, took a sheet of paper from the blotter in the drawer and started to write a love letter, the first one I’d ever written in my life.
It took me three hours. I told her – but it doesn’t matter what I told her. I suppose the first love letter one man writes is much the same as the first love letter another writes, in content at least. As for delivering it, I thought of doing that immediately but lost my nerve. We were due to meet at six. I could imagine waiting downstairs in the bar for her, all among the aspidistras and the yellow pillars, waiting and waiting and her not coming, realizing she wasn’t going to come because she’d read the letter and was bitterly offended or completely disillusioned. I’d give her the letter when we parted for the night, but if we didn’t part for the night maybe I’d never give it to her, I wouldn’t have to.
Amazing, wasn’t it, the whole thing? I’d wondered how I was going to pass those two weeks. I was so bored I’d even tried to get myself on a flight home and here I was now, wishing it was twice as long, a year long, wanting it never to end.
The end was something I didn’t want to think about but I had to when we met and she started talking about Lynette Case. Lynette was very ill. The remission she’d had was over and it looked as if she’d have to go back into hospital in Anchorage. Perhaps as soon as the beginning of the following week, if it could be arranged. That would surely mean there would be nothing to keep Isabel in Juneau. My face must have shown my feelings but if it did she said nothing. We talked about the cinema. There was a film on we both wanted to see and we thought of going on the Saturday afternoon. Then Isabel asked me if I’d been up the Mendenhall Glacier.
If I’d said yes I would have had to have told her I’d gone with someone. She knew me well enough by then to be aware I wasn’t sufficiently keen on nature to go on to a glacier by helicopter on my own. But if I said no she’d want to take me up there herself, which I would have liked, I’d have liked anything with her, but it was too much to hope that the people at the helicopter pad wouldn’t remember seeing me before. They knew Ivo and would remember I’d been with him. That obsequious girl would probably ask how Dr Steadman was.
I knew it was my imagination but she seemed to watch me as I hesitated. Guilt makes for strange fancies. But when I said, a bit sharply for me, that I didn’t much like the idea, not in the rain anyway, you wouldn’t be able to see anything through the mists, she made no attempt to persuade me.
She was wearing her white silk blouse again and the black skirt, the clothes she had had on the first time I’d seen her. I was suddenly filled with a longing to know everything about her, all the personal things she kept hidden from me just as I, to be fair, kept mine hidden from her; if she loved her husband, how long she’d been married, if she lived with her husband, where she’d been that first evening after her arrival, why she came all this distance to see a sick friend. I was afraid to ask any of it. I don’t usually ask questions because I’m not usually much interested. But I thought, if I’d made love to her, if we were lovers, then I could ask.
So we went out to dinner. We went in a taxi for the first time because the rain was coming down in sheets. I didn’t look up from my plate in the Summit restaurant and say, ‘I love you’, of course I didn’t. We talked about the gold rush and she said that quite by chance she and some man – she said ‘we’ but I knew it must be a man – had stopped the night in a little town in northern California. They’d gone into a bar for a drink and found themselves in the oldest tavern in the West. Sawdust on the floor and animal heads all over the walls, everything seemingly unchanged since 1848 when it first opened. They’d asked for a beer and a glass of white wine and the beer had come in a bottle, had been slid down the bar. Asking for a glass would be outrageous. ‘He’ had drunk it out of the bottle like the other patrons. I laughed and wondered if ‘he’ was her husband.
‘ “My companion”,’ I said, ‘as the restaurant journalists say.’
I wouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t had quite a lot of champagne. She put up her eyebrows, but she didn’t smile or say anything. She could quickly distance me with a look. My love letter to her was in my pocket, ‘burning a hole in it’, as Clarissa used to say about money. We went on talking, we talked about travel and then about me and my future. She reminded me, apropos of what I don’t recall, that she was seven years older than me. Arm-in-arm, we walked by a circuitous route back to the hotel, and she told me she went to a dance class at home in Seattle. One day she’d come to N., she said, and see the ballet. Please, I said, please come.
We were out later than usual and the moon was up. It was romantic down there on the waterfront, like the setting for a film when the first kiss is about to happen. We stood there, talking about the stars, trying to decide which constellation was which. I wanted her so much and I was scared to touch her. I’d even withdrawn my arm from hers because the pressure of her hand on my arm was too much for me. I was almost gasping. A line from Eliza’s song in My Fair Lady kept going through my head, the one that goes, ‘Don’t talk at all: show me.’ I realized I didn’t dare show her.
And when the time came to part for the night I didn’t dare give her the letter either. I knew I wouldn’t sleep if I did. I’d got up my nerve to take her all the way to her room door instead of parting from her in the lift. The letter was burning away against my right side, I fancied I could actually feel the heat from it. The stupid thing was that she gave me the opportunity, to give her the letter or, better still, show her. She kissed me.
It was a quick, friendly kiss on the cheek. She said, ‘Dear Tim, good-night.’
‘Good-night,’ I said.
I may even have sounded cold. I fled to the lift and hit the button repeatedly with my fist, as if that sort of treatment would make it come sooner.
There was no morning kiss. She planned to spend all day with Lynette. On the Monday we had arranged to take the six-hour cruise to the twin glaciers at Tracy Arm, because my week-long trip didn’t take that in and Isabel said it was something I shouldn’t mis
s. It was raining, of course. We met in the hotel lobby, Isabel in jeans and T-shirt and carrying the all-enveloping black waterproof, and once again she didn’t kiss me. By this time I was paralysed by the idea of actually touching her, and I marvelled at the nerve and self-control I’d had the previous week when I was putting her arm in mine.
I suppose they were beautiful, those glaciers. The great sheets of rain and ground-level clouds hid everything but the grey water and the dazzling white water-sculpted ice. Ivo must have seen them many times, and I thought of him and his enthusiasm as we gazed from the little ship that went in among the ice floes. I thought of him but not for long because Isabel was telling me about glaciers and the way they were formed and making it a lot more interesting than Ivo had that day we went to the Mendenhall.
It wasn’t until we’d got off the ship at the dock in Juneau and were walking up Main Street, not touching, a couple of feet separating us, that I remembered another letter from Ivo was sure to be waiting for me. Isabel liked to see Lynette every day and had said she meant to do so before dinner. I thought I could see a way of avoiding her being with me when I received the next letter so I suggested her going straight up to Calhoun Avenue and said I’d walk up there with her.
‘I couldn’t take a stranger in with me,’ she said.
We had been through that before. I hadn’t the least wish to meet Lynette Case or her husband but, absurdly perhaps, that word ‘stranger’ hurt.
