The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  “What do you mean?”

  “He had a darkness.” The wolf touched his chest. “Here. He liked to laugh, but his heart was dark. It would have happened sooner or later.”

  I heard myself ask, “And you?”

  “And me what?”

  “Don’t you have it too?”

  I thought he wouldn’t answer at first. The night slid past, shadowy fields replaced by Tokyo lights, closer, closer. And then the wolf said, quietly, “Don’t you?”

  We pulled into Shinjuku, got off the train with Yuki-chan. I kept feeling like there was something else I wanted to tell the wolf, but I couldn’t think what it was, so I followed him and the red suitcase through the thick crowds. I hadn’t realized how thin he was until now, walking in front of me with all of his rib bones under the taut fabric of his shirt. I wondered if he lived alone. If anyone cared if he ate. If Yuki-chan had cared. I imagined the two of them, eating raw octopus and mackerel in a dodgy side-street izakaya. I wondered if either of them had other friends.

  “You know how to get home from here?” Oukami Yasuhara asked.

  I looked around. We were standing at the southwest exit of Shinjuku Station, and a light rain was falling. Street musicians were playing, an assortment of Japanese teenagers with guitars and torn jeans.

  “What about Yuki-chan?”

  The wolf tilted his head a little, the way I was starting to realize meant that he was surprised by something. “I’ll take care of him now,” he said.

  We hesitated, and then the wolf nodded to me. “Thank you for today.”

  His tone was formal, and I thought how we’d look to the people walking past—a Japanese man and a foreign girl, saying good night. People might assume we worked together at the same company, perhaps. But we had sat for hours by the ocean with a body between us.

  “Kochira koso,” I echoed, a formal thanks, and my voice was as distant as his.

  We nodded to each other again. He turned to go. Tokyo would swallow him back up. The earth would swallow Yuki-chan—or fire, or water, whatever one did with bodies that no one wanted discovered. And I thought: I’ll never see him again. Tomorrow it will be as if this never happened. By next week, even Kryzstof won’t talk about it. It will be my dream, me alone, tucked away in my little cell in a city of cells, all of us dreaming in silence. And I imagined the wolf, tucked away in his little cell, dreaming black and silver dreams, but somewhere in them, the glitter of the Yokohama harbor at night, the flash of a bright red suitcase.

  And so I called out to him, without intending to. “Oukami Yasuhara!”

  He stopped and turned back, and I could see the surprise clearly in the lines of his body.

  “If you die,” I said, “let me know. I’ll take you somewhere fantastic. Okay? It’ll be the best date of your life.”

  A moment in which his face was blank, utterly blank, and then he smiled. It was radiant, it transformed him completely. It was as if a new person had walked into his skin and was smiling out at me from that smooth cold face. And I smiled back at him, something in me glowing out at something in him, two sleepwalkers shining flashlights down at each other from opposite windows.

  “Tanoshimi ni,” the wolf said. I’ll look forward to it.

  Safe journey, I thought to Yuki-chan. And Yuki-chan gave me an Okay with his thumb and forefinger together, bumping along in his red suitcase, unfurling like a flower, reaching his roots up toward the sky.

  Later it will seem remarkable to me how innocuous they were: both of those first meetings. Snow had fallen in the kind of thick gathered layers that only a New England winter can roll out, snow like muddy wool, snow like two-day-old cake frosting. I was reeling from an eight-hour bus ride turned eleven by the weather, hauling a backpack and battered guitar case into the main outbuilding of the artist colony. I remember the thrill of anticipation—this was a place where the relentless onslaught of our lives yielded a little, where peace seeped in and changed us over the days and weeks of working alone. I was ready to be changed. I was primed for transformation and heavy with exhaustion, and then Camilo was there.

  He’d just come in from the outside, where a car stalled with his boxes of darkroom chemicals. I remember taking him in and not taking him in—spiky black hair, slight frame, bare inches taller than me, his obvious nervousness, a women’s coat that made him look like Little Red Riding Hood. (“I don’t buy clothes,” he would say later, a statement of purpose. “I only wear things that have been given to me.”) He glanced anxiously at me, and I smiled, and turned away again; I wanted the keys to my studio, I wanted to be alone. Months later, almost half a year, Camilo would say: “That was when I fell in love with you.” He would say: “You were so confident. You shook my hand. You looked me straight in the eyes and you said ‘Hello.’ ” This must have happened, but I don’t remember it because in that first encounter, he didn’t matter to me at all.

  I met Corah two weeks later, also at the main hall. I was determined to do laundry, so I didn’t notice her until my second trip up from the basement, and then there she was: an older woman, long tightly curled black hair, perched stiffly on one of the leather couches. A book in hand, I think, a glass of whiskey, some prop that declared: I belong here, the prop that every new arrival needed in order to feel like they could sit on the leather couches. I remember her plunging neckline, a strand of elegant pearls, heels, and I remember thinking: heels, winter, New England? She said hello, I made a joke about laundry and continued on. Nothing about her struck me too deeply, except maybe her sad eyes, trained on you in an unyielding direct stare, even as she discussed the snow—when did it start snowing, when will it stop, the snow is so bad this year. Later everyone would say this about her: “She had such sad eyes.” Later than that, she would describe herself as having sad eyes. Much later I would realize that her exquisite command of her own details threw them all into question—what was manufactured? What existed on its own? What could be trusted?

  When I think about each of those meetings, I envy myself in them. Neither meant anything to me, and so I continued unscathed.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS READING SYLVIA PLATH’S diaries that winter, Ted Hughes’s letters, and both their poems. I was finding their bodies of work as intertwined as their lives had been, a conversation that continued even after Plath’s death. I had recently ended a long relationship with an artist whose work I loved as fiercely as I loved her. Although I tried not to read either of us into that legend, I found myself raw, strangely moved by the convergence of the two poets’ work. Hughes’s later poems from Birthday Letters intentionally riffed on earlier ones of Plath’s; some of Plath’s earlier poems were written on the backs of Hughes’s drafts. I couldn’t have explained what I was looking for in all those papers. Retelling their relationship lends itself to reductive cinematics: the young poet lovers, the mad broil of art, Plath’s jealousy, Hughes’s great and wandering eye, an older woman seductress, a betrayal, a rush of rage and fevered genius producing Ariel, finally Plath’s suicide. It’s ripe for the picking, easily distilled, too easy. What attracted me most that winter weren’t the reductions but rather the complexities—how headlong everybody was, how hungry and shipwrecked on each other, how impossible to tell right from wrong.

  Assia Wevill was the figure at the heart of it, the mysterious and powerful Other Woman—and yet there was so little written about her, in comparison to the volumes and volumes on Plath and Hughes. Assia was a mystery, gathered in snatches of detail, a passing mention here, a blurred photograph there. I discovered that she was a Berlin-born Jew who’d fled Nazi Germany for Palestine, lived in England and Canada, married three times, had passionate affairs about which she spoke candidly and multiple abortions about which she also spoke candidly. In 1961, she and her husband, the much younger poet David Wevill, sublet a London flat from Plath and Hughes, who’d relocated to a farm in Devon they c
alled Court Green. The Wevills were invited to visit Court Green; on the eighteenth of May they did visit; over the course of a night and a morning, Hughes and Assia fell into the sort of passionate affair that Assia excelled in.

  I was haunted by the poetic irony of this, the Greek tragedy–like invitation of destruction into one’s midst. It was so easy to imagine how a different story could have unfolded: if only a different tenant, if only no dinner invitation. I found myself imagining the innocence of that first farm meal: the long wood table, both couples laughing, faces flushed from wine, candlelight, beef stew, dark gingerbread. So tempting, to try and conjure the seeds of all that destruction planted right there, in a glance that held too long, shadow on cheekbone, light on a wrist. How can we know what will come of the strangers we bring close? And who can resist a story in which the price of unknowing is so high?

  * * *

  —

  IN THE TWO WEEKS BEFORE Corah arrived, Camilo tracked me with the patience and single-mindedness of a bloodhound. When I got to the Hall, he was there smiling. When I left, he was actually going back to his studio too, why didn’t we walk together. When I headed into town, he needed some supplies, he might as well come. When the resident artists gathered in someone’s studio for a night of drinking, wherever I was sitting or leaning was where he also happened to be.

  I didn’t fully realize it at first. He was just there, someone I didn’t mind talking to, despite an unwavering directness that was not always kind. When he asked what I was working on and I told him the subject of a human interest piece I had been paid to write, he said in his flat objective way, “Why are you writing that? It’s unoriginal.” I found myself stammering a little, trying to explain that it wasn’t my idea, I was getting paid to execute it. But—“That’s silly. Why are you writing something you don’t want to write?” Surrounded as I had been in New York by a scramble of other young artists desperate to make rent, this seemed like an entirely naïve—but also new and suddenly fascinating—perspective. Why were we doing things we didn’t want to do? Money must be too simplistic an answer, if Camilo hadn’t even considered it.

  In another conversation, he said that he was undocumented. “I came to the U.S. when I was thirteen. I don’t have papers.” At first I thought I misheard him, or had misunderstood. When he saw the blank look on my face he said, “I’m illegal.”

  “Oh,” I said, uncertainly.

  He shrugged. “I’m getting my green card through my wife. We married in the fall.”

  “Congratulations!”

  “It’s just for the green card. She’s a friend. But thank you.”

  “She’s a good friend,” I said, awkwardly, “to do that for you.”

  Camilo sort of smiled then. “She has projects,” he said. “I’m one of them.”

  The first time we slept together was something of a surprise. It had never occurred to me to find him attractive—I’d been dating women for the most part, and besides he looked nothing like the men to whom I was drawn. He looked more like a child, with his large sober eyes, unruly hair, the bright primary colors of his scavenged clothes. And so when he invited himself back to my studio and then, sitting close on my narrow twin bed, asked, “May I kiss you?” I felt both a shock, and then also a recognition. Oh this is what this is. This is what’s happening. And it was February, and the woods and the snow dampened all sound, changed all color and texture, everything that happened here could so easily never exist at all, so I said, “Okay,” and then he kissed me.

  * * *

  —

  SOMEHOW IT WAS ASSIA ON whom I fastened. She kept diaries too, I discovered, but they’d mostly been destroyed. Some of her watercolors remained—ink drawings, featuring exotic birds and strange plants. She had a steady hand and an eye for beautiful things, and both showed themselves in her affair with Ted Hughes. Hers was a quick wit, and a sharp one. Men found her irresistible, women as well. She knew how to make a mark, how to be the only one in a room that anyone would remember long after. And she was someone without family (nearby), without home (-land), whose self-description as an orphan and a refugee made her both infinitely sympathetic and utterly exotic. But more than any of that, she was desperately hungry. She couldn’t stand to be alone and so she lined up her husbands carefully, making sure to have the next in place before she left the first. If all eyes in the room weren’t on her, she couldn’t be sure that she existed.

  * * *

  —

  CORAH’S ARRIVAL KICKED WHAT HAD been a sleepy working colony into high gear. She showed up with a handle of whiskey that she placed by the leather couches—“for late nights,” she said—and tea drinkers converted themselves immediately. At dinners in which the rest of us were in jeans and fleeces, she wore bodice-plunging silk dresses, heavy mascara, once a contraption that looked like a corset. She came from wealth, and she made that clear in a way that was equal parts ostentation and defiance. Corah didn’t find women terribly interesting, I discovered, but in rooms with men, she blossomed. She became vivacious, aggressive, she said provocative things and then leaned back and sized everybody up. Her first night after dinner, she announced, “Well, my husband and I divorced recently. I guess I’m here to find a new husband.” She laughed, inviting the rest of us to laugh, adding: “We didn’t have enough sex, you see. Sex matters much more to me, and so I was always unsatisfied.” She made light eye contact as she dropped the words, her liquid gaze flitting from the composer to the sculptor to the novelist to Camilo, who was sitting next to me, clutching a slightly incongruous hip flask. (“It was given to me.”) On the path from the composer to Camilo, her eyes stopped on mine for a sheer second by accident, and we looked at each other, and then she moved on.

  Corah was there to work, and she took it seriously: there is no work greater than either finding the next love of your life, or getting the taste and feel and smell of the old one off of you. I still thought my own work was much simpler: the article, which I hadn’t touched since arriving—and maybe also Assia, about whom I now knew a startling amount of unhelpful detail, and none of what I actually wanted to know. I hadn’t realized or couldn’t admit that my work was similar to Corah’s, even if I masked it better.

  * * *

  —

  CAMILO AND I HAD BECOME inseparable by then, as time blurred into what felt like one long day, punctuated by nights. We worked together, sharing the long table in his studio as he played South American folk music and I put new logs on the fire. We ate our lunches together out of the picnic baskets in which they were delivered: thermoses of hot soup, large still-warm cookies. We walked together, long loops through the woods, snow sometimes sinking us thigh-deep. We slept together, yes, but more than that, we woke together.

  He told me secrets late at night—about his mother, who had abandoned him as a child while she went to America, and how her sporadic returns bewildered him: “I followed her through every room of the house, and she still left me again. I wouldn’t eat, they had to call her in America and say: Camilo will not eat.” He told me about how lost he felt as an artist: “This is the first time since I left art school that I’ve made work. I don’t know if I’m even actually an artist.” He told me about his legal wife: “Her mother said, ‘Do not marry him, he will steal all your money’—and that was why she married me, I think.” But mostly he talked about his own mother: “Now she lives in Florida, I spent three hours on the phone with her electric company, they overcharged her but she wouldn’t argue with them, she makes me take care of her even from here.” Camilo spoke of his mother with anger, bewilderment, confusion, longing, occasional tenderness. He wrote letters to her that he never sent, but sometimes he would read them to me, in the dark studio with the fire leaping.

  In service of keeping my focus on my work, I’d had a series of conversations with Camilo that began with, “I’m not looking for a relationship, you understand,” and had invariably ended with u
s naked, woodsmoke and blankets and decadent mid-afternoon sunlight, all of that bright, blinding incandescent snow, so bright you couldn’t see properly, maybe, exactly what it was you were doing.

  Camilo was as receptive to these conversations as he was to everything else. “I understand,” he always said in his dispassionate tone, and I took this as a great, overarching, broad-ranging understanding, the kind of understanding that took in my recent breakup, subsequent unease, conflicting desire to be happy, and how all of these contradictions could propel us together, result in an unending night-after-night that had begun to feel like intimacy. “I understand,” he would say, and eventually I incorporated that into my understanding as well. Calling my best friend, I said, “It feels complicated, but Camilo understands.”

  “What does he understand?” my friend asked, and before I could consider my answer, maybe study it a little longer, I’d already replied: “Oh, everything.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST AND ONLY NIGHT that Assia and her husband stayed at Court Green, she had a dream about a giant pike with golden eyes. Within each golden pike-eye was curled a human fetus. It was a fascinating, exotic dream—she expected no less from herself—and she told it with flair at the breakfast table the next morning. I imagine the scene: Sunday, a cool English spring, a hot mug of coffee thick with milk, Assia with her hair artfully loose, just awoken. She clasps her fingers around that mug, her voice is husky and warm, just low enough that you have to lean in. She sees herself reflected in Sylvia’s wide eyes, while Sylvia listens “astonished and envious” as Hughes later described her in a poem.

  Later, Hughes would write the infamous epitaph to the scene: “That moment the dreamer in me / Fell in love with her, and I knew it.” The day would build to Assia and Ted alone and laughing in the kitchen, Sylvia rising stonily from where she sat with Assia’s husband, asking the Wevills to leave, ending the visit abruptly. But the dream would linger—not the fish itself, but the spell of it, I think, the sensation of being caught in someone else’s vision told to you at your breakfast table, transforming your breakfast table, transforming your breakfast, transforming you.