by Luanne Rice
Martha is smart. I suspect her wisdom has come from shaking out of many of our usual life commitments. She is committed to the dogs, true, but she spends almost no time on what most people in modern life do to occupy themselves. No trips to the mall, or the grocery store—except about four times a year—and no sitting at stoplights or driving mindless errands in a car. All of that energy we use for everyday routines is channeled elsewhere in her life. It feels almost as though she has a reservoir other people don’t possess—that she is not as scattered and drawn as most Americans. Anyway, I’d like you to meet her someday. As one gets older, it feels harder and rarer to be impressed by another human being, but she impresses me.
She said one thing you might find illuminating regarding Paul’s adventures up here. She said she has come to believe every person alive is part snake, and she contends people have to shed their skin as surely as a snake does in order to grow. She said you can never tell when a person needs to molt. Some do it early on, some late. Some do it a couple times during a life, but she says everyone will do it at least once. She said Paul’s heading up to the north country to work was his first transformation. She said he would have come back changed in unexpected ways, stronger maybe, weaker maybe, but different. She said we cannot blame ourselves for what happened, because Paul needed to grow, plain and simple, and that you cannot prevent a person from cracking the casing that has held them. They have to go through it, that’s all, and she claims she changed when she moved up here. Who knows why? She had a good job, a comfortable life, and then she chucked it to run dogs and lead expeditions. She doesn’t make nearly the money she once did, but her days belong to her, and she believes, but doesn’t know for certain, that she is finished molting.
All this discussion of change, Hadley, makes me wonder what we are doing. You and me. It feels entirely natural to be in contact with you, but I don’t want to skip over the distance between us. I love you, Hadley, and always will, but I understand we have changed, too. I don’t want either of us to rush, or to discount the days that have passed between us. I am open to you, but I am not entirely the same husband I was before Paul’s death. You are not the same wife. In the excitement of receiving your letters, I don’t want to cheapen the profound changes we have both undergone. We are not schoolkids with crushes. You are my wife. If I have jumped too quickly to assumptions, or hurried too fast along a track, I apologize. I don’t know if Martha is correct about peoples’ need to molt, but something has changed with us. I recognize that. I know you do, too. It makes no sense to name it, though. Not yet. I trust these letters.
Sam
Hadley—
This is the third day. I skipped a day because I was too exhausted to write. I am bone tired, but otherwise in good spirits. This morning we saw our first moose, an enormous creature with a rack as wide as a Volkswagen. It trotted through our camp and Martha hurried to shush the dogs. I guess the moose are in rut and any noise or irritation can turn them surly. Moose are a bigger problem than bears when you are running dogs, she said, although polar bears on some expeditions are a true menace. She said a basic grizzly will follow a camp sometimes, and even look for opportunities to steal food, but for the most part they are wary of humans and stand clear. Polar bears, on the other hand, hunt everything. They live on such a thin margin that they cannot afford to pass up an opportunity of any kind. Martha has a friend who came north to photograph the landscape and ptarmigan for National Geographic. A German guy. He was transported way up on Baffin Island and he went to bed in his tent with a shotgun beside him. He had posted a laser trip wire around his tent so that anything passing closer would trigger an alarm, but the bear stepped over it like a cat burglar, and the German fellow woke up to feel himself being slowly dragged out of his tent by the foot of his sleeping bag. No sound. That’s what the German found most remarkable. The entire episode had taken place without as much as a broken stick. Fortunately the German reached back and was able to grab his shotgun—by the hair on his chinny chin chin the way Martha described it—and then swung the barrel around and put it against the bear’s forehead. He said even as he did it the bear did not pounce or do anything aggressive or ferocious. It reminded him, he said, of a well-trained dog sliding a piece of bacon off the kitchen table. The bear didn’t want to do it, he knew he shouldn’t do it, but that bacon was too hard to resist.
Bear stories. Not as good as shark stories, but they have their moments. The German pulled the trigger and the blast peeled the bear back in two sections and dropped it dead.
Okay, I need to say something. It’s about Daniel and what I saw that night and what it did to me. I don’t know why, but I am haunted by the evening more than anything else I can call to mind. You and Daniel. Daniel and you. And his hands.
First, I want to acknowledge every last thing you said. Yes, I was distant. Yes, I had deliberately taken assignments that forced me away from the house. And, yes, Paul’s death—how in the world can we even calculate that into the equation? I took you for granted. I did. I know that. In the devastated state I knew myself to be in, you felt—please try to understand this—like a chore. You were one more thing to do, one more thing to factor in when I had no desire to think of anyone but myself. Selfish, I know, but human, I would argue. We have talked about Paul a thousand times, but how can we ever fully comprehend what his death meant? How can we ever swallow that last full spoonful of utter loss? Hell, I am halfway across Alaska on a dogsled, still chasing something about Paul that we know can’t be captured. So perhaps we just have to accept Paul’s death as a prime mover, something that pushes us in directions we can’t always explain. I couldn’t be with you. Not for daily chats, not for a cocktail, not for a should-we-clean-up-the-garden-and-spread-compost-on-it kind of married discussion. To have engaged in that kind of conversation would have killed me or driven me mad right then. So, true, I had no psychological room to rent.
I’ll add this. I took a certain delight in not being available to you. There, I’ve said it. I felt you blamed me for Paul’s death. Intellectually we both understood it was an accident, a horrible twist, but I felt in your bones you believed I had pushed Paul to take on an adventure like this. Though you never said it, I perceived a haze of blame, a motherly accusation that the older male had been unfair to the young male, your son. I understand that if I pinned you down this second, or if I said it to you face to face, you would deny it. And maybe part of you will deny it even reading it here. But I believed it to be true, felt it in my heart, and used my absence as a way to get back at you for such a terrible accusation.
Now you know. I don’t know if a thing like this can be shaven and cleaned and made to live between us. I don’t know. But now you understand why I did not stay near you, why I accepted assignments to get me out of the house. Not noble, but perhaps forgivably male. I’ll let you decide.
Now Daniel.
I hate the bastard. Is that too blunt and unexamined? I hate his guts, everything he stands for, the pretense to art, his little “jewel-box windows,” as you call it, his appeal to the women of the town, his lurking, especially his lurking, on the computer, waiting to talk to you, his wife in the other room. I hate him for that. And I hated you for falling for it. You were too smart to fall for it, too smart to give in even in a small way to that jerk. I understand, I do, that you also went nearly insane after Paul’s death. I know that I had made myself unavailable to you. But Daniel? Good grief. He was such a cliché. I would have had more respect for your misstep if it had been with a local construction guy, or a cop, or almost anything. Sorry. I am not blaming you a second time, but if these letters mean anything, we might as well be honest.
So, yes, when I saw what you had written in your email to him, when I knew you had gone to town to see him, I felt a deep, horrible train running through my stomach. Call it an excruciating nightmare when you know you shouldn’t look, you shouldn’t turn to see what has slithered up the stairs, but you have to turn anyway and put your eyes on the horror
that came at least partially from your own imagination.
I parked across the street. I watched you. Here’s a thing I never told you. Part of me, a sliver of me, accepted the pain of seeing you in another man’s arms. Does that sound perverse? I’ll tell you why I felt that way. I saw you, Hadley. It felt like a slap across my face, like the world sending me a message, and when he slid his hand off your waist and put it on your hip, ready to move down—the greedy bastard—I saw you as the girl I had fallen in love with, the woman I had loved for years, and you were no longer part of me, no longer a married woman, but Hadley Emmet, the beautiful woman on a bicycle I had fallen for the instant I saw her. You were free again. You lived apart from me, and all the pain of Paul’s death, all the pain we had caused each other—suddenly it disappeared for a flicker and I saw you. Just you. And you turned a little, and your hair swung out, and your shoulder tucked in, and I knew that gesture, knew it so deep in my tissue that I could hardly breathe. It was not a married woman making that gesture, not a wife, giving herself to Daniel. It was you, the core of you, and I hated you for it, and I forgave you for it even as I despised what I saw.
Then we had our big scene, didn’t we? The loud voices, the angry words. Another cliché. It is so clear now that Daniel was merely a symptom of the trouble between us, not a true threat, but my male ego had been punctured. It had. I saw, too, that for a moment at least, you wanted him. I’ve always loved your hunger, and to see it turned for an instant on another man nearly derailed me once and for all. So we fought. Made a scene. Then, of course, I had carte blanche to take any assignment I liked. I puffed up with righteous indignation, though I would have put it some other way to myself. Time apart. Breathing space. All those lousy terms we use to protect ourselves. Daniel was fuel. That’s all.
If he’s back with his wife, hooray for him. Too bad for her. I am not going to promise I will ever put Daniel out of my thoughts. He will stay there, a little grit of sand. Sorry, but he will. But I can live with the discomfort as long as I know he is out of your life.
I’ve gone on too long. Enough for now. I feel wrung out and tired as I have seldom been tired. Martha said we might run into a snowmobile crew or two somewhere in the next day, so if we do, I’ll ask them to carry this to the lodge and mail it. I am thinking of you right now, Hadley. The real you, the heart of you. Daniel never touched her, not my Hadley.
Sam
Hadley—
Okay, to lighten up. A conversation you would enjoy, entirely off subject. Picture it late at night, dogs snoring, cold wind blowing, Martha flat on her back, me flat on my back, the hiss of the stove now and then. Cold in the tent, maybe 40, but warm in the sleeping bag. Kind of like a junior high sleep-out, only warped up by a factor of eighty. Martha’s voice is a little scratchy, like a kid talking through an oscillating fan.
Me: So were you ever married?
M: Once, but it didn’t take.
Me: How long?
M: Six months. He proposed to me at a Celtics game and they posted my response on the scoreboard. I thought it was incredibly romantic, but looking back it feels slightly insane. Why do Americans think public proposals are so charming?
Me: Did they put your picture on the scoreboard?
M: Yes. And the strange thing is, we got married because our pictures had been put up there. Doesn’t that beat all? We both knew we weren’t well matched, but we had done this incredibly public thing, broadcast to the entire Celtics audience around New England, and both our families saw it. He had called my mother and father and they had started up the whole phone chain. So when I said yes, and they flashed our picture on the video board, it was like we had signed a contract to marry or die.
Me: And you knew it wasn’t right?
M: We both knew it as we were doing it! (One of the few times I have heard Martha raise her voice. It made me laugh and the dogs raised their heads and looked around.) That’s what made it nutty. It was as if we had to walk to our execution while knowing we could stop it at any time if we simply dug our heels in. But we had been recorded at the Celtics game!
Me: You still a Celtics fan?
M: Hate them. (getting sleepy)
Me: That’s too bad.
M: What they should do, they should make couples who divorce after these big public proposals—they should have to come back to the Celtics game and admit they got divorced. You know, hold up the divorce decree so the Celtics fans can see that. That would be better drama.
There, a little taste of Martha. Even the noble, dog-driving, north woods woman has endured her humiliating moments. Love levels us all. It is nearly incomprehensible to imagine Martha at a Celtics game with a big grin on the Megatron (or whatever they call the scoreboard) and her attentive beau beside her. But there she was.
We heard snowmobiles late last night, and Martha says we may strike a trail later this morning. I will pass these letters along and hope they find their way to you. I am thinking of Paul right now. He was a fine boy, sweetheart. If we never did anything else but create such a fine human being—better than us both, I think—then our lives would still be well spent. I miss him so.
Sam
Dear Sam,
On-by. You’re right—there’s something to be learned in that. It expresses a sort of letting go, detachment. I’m not there yet. But I like the phrase…
Thanksgiving was hard. I missed you and Paul so much. I remember how when he was little, he’d come home from school on Wednesday—they always had a half day. And I’d be baking the pies, and doing the things my mother always did for holidays—polishing the silver, making cranberry sauce, fixing creamed onions, only those things always seemed to come so naturally to her, and I was always worried I couldn’t measure up, and he would help me. He was so sweet, Sam. When he was in first grade, I’d pull a chair over to the sink for him to stand on, and he’d just do whatever I gave him…He always liked helping and he loved polishing the silver, seeing the tarnish coming right off before his eyes. Instant gratification.
This year I didn’t even want to notice the day. The weather has been so cold, with snow falling almost every night. I’ve been feeling like a hibernating bear—pulling the covers up over my head and waiting till the spring thaw. The nights get dark so early, it’s easy to hide. The island is pretty deserted right now, except for the lobster fishermen getting ready for their season and a few stragglers like me. Cat keeps me company, but she still won’t let me pet her.
Turner actually came and knocked on my door, told me the church was having a turkey dinner for the AAs. It was the last thing I felt like doing, but I made myself. And in a funny way, I’m glad I did. There was a meeting first, and the topic—perfect for Thanksgiving—was “gratitude.”
It’s been hard for me to feel grateful for much. No matter how clear the sky, or how bright the morning, or how warm the fire, none of it has mattered much in light of losing Paul. And—I’m glad this is a letter so you can’t interrupt me—losing you. I never thought that would happen.
Your letters have stirred me up, especially the—well, the hard parts. The part about Daniel, to be exact. Sam, I knew you felt it—it was obvious, the way you couldn’t stand to look at me, meet my eyes. Would things between us have turned out differently if we’d faced this before you moved out? Maybe it’s only possible to do it in letters. Reading your words, I hear your voice, and I’m almost glad I don’t have to look into your face. It’s terrible to realize what I did to you, to us. What I broke. I appreciate your taking part of the blame, not that blame is the point.
What is the point? Understanding, maybe. On-by.
From the very beginning, I knew we belonged together. I’d never known how lonely I was until I fell in love with you. I’d lie beside you and feel you were part of me but somehow not, too, somehow so exotic and unknowable, and I’d feel I could look into your eyes forever, just touching you and caressing your face, your beard, and the way it felt to my hand, and the way my heart would feel as if it was beating out
side my rib cage, and we’d just gaze at each other and you’d never look away first. I loved you for that…
I felt such passion for you. I couldn’t sleep when you were away from me, and I couldn’t sleep when you were right there. I felt this huge worry—I could never put it into words, but it felt as if my being couldn’t support such emotion. My body, my spirit, I was afraid I couldn’t handle the intensity. I had never felt so close to anyone, but I wanted even more than what we had—honestly, I think I wanted to be right inside your skin with you.
Because that’s the only way I could hold you for sure. When you went away on assignment, and I mean even early on, before Paul died, I used to imagine you meeting gorgeous, amazing, athletic younger women—and as much as you assured me both that you did and that they didn’t matter to you, it took me years to get comfortable with that reality. I finally began to trust you—even more, trust us, you and me…I wasn’t so much like a howling dog anymore, but one who had circled and circled and finally come to rest.
