The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  I imagine she heard him. I think she did. She just heard Sylvia louder and more clearly.

  * * *

  —

  WE CONTINUED TO SEE EACH other, Camilo and I.

  I remember it like walking down a narrow, long hallway. You don’t think to turn around. Your only thought is that something magical must be waiting at the end, to make up for the hallway being so long.

  And so spring became summer. There were moments that were good. Nothing quite approximated the rush of February light, the sound of our voices reflecting across a silent forest, our footsteps in snow. But there were moments in which I was reminded of having felt how I had felt. Liberated, was the word that stayed with me, long after it no longer applied. The wings just ready to rise, the feeling of lift-off.

  Camilo was in love. He hadn’t ever been in love before, he said, not really. And now he was, and the Camilo who was in love was not the Camilo who had helped measure the winter days with his heartbeat. The Camilo who was in love was prone to drastic mood swings. He would write me notes that ran the length of a twelve-by-eighteen sketchpad page, that read: I love love love love love love love love love you, I love you, I love love love…Half an hour later, he would be shut down, silent. I didn’t have enough time for him, he would say, if pressed. Why wasn’t I willing to make time for him in the same ways he would make time for me?

  He was semi-employed by that point, left with whole days of free time extending into open Brooklyn nights. My days started in the morning and on the nights I was lucky, spat me out at eleven—more often, midnight. Camilo first suspected that my love was being diverted away from him toward my ex, but over time he came to the conclusion that my work also diverted that love, and my friends, and then finally my writing. He decided maybe he wanted to be a writer too. Maybe we could be in the same rooms at the same times, and talk to the same people, maybe we could write together, maybe our work could be intertwined. For someone who had once preached a mantra of openness and fluid boundaries, he kept surprising me with what seemed like jealousy.

  I would take the long train into Brooklyn late at night as a token of compromise—It’s late, but here I am. And at first, that was good enough. He’d run me a hot bath in the aging porcelain tub on the top floor of his old house, ask me about my day, offer stories from his. But our conversations ground more and more into silence. Anything I talked about was something that excluded him, I was part of a world that was not his world, and it ate at him. He would grow quieter and quieter, more and more sullen, and finally the conversation would veer sharply into an interrogation of how much I loved him, how much did I care, what might I additionally do to show him that I meant it.

  More and more, when I looked at him, I saw a small boy with giant eyes, hair well past his shoulders now. It became autumn, and when we slept in the same bed I wanted to keep my clothes on. I didn’t want him to touch me. I said it was cold and his house was unheated. I said I was tired, we’d been up so late fighting, fighting. This was the greatest rejection of all and he felt it deeply, and didn’t hesitate to make that known. So finally I gave in—it was less exhausting than the fighting, and when it was over, I could go to sleep. Weeks passed like this. The leaves had barely changed color but I dreamed of winter, all the time, snow covering everything, tree-silent, world-far. Another month passed. I started to think of myself as someone without a body. I thought of myself as a pair of eyes.

  I thought broken trust could be willed whole. I began to learn what I hadn’t known: there is no such thing as broken trust, there is only trust and its absence. The absence of something can’t be repaired: the thing is simply gone. And if we choose to stay in its aftermath, we live in the hole it has made.

  * * *

  —

  THE NATURAL QUESTION IS: WHY didn’t I leave? The answers are all unflattering in the extreme. One answer is that I tried—I broke up with him a handful of times over the late summer, and into the long bleak fall—and that answer is the weakest, because I didn’t stick with it. Another answer is that I thought things would get better, they couldn’t get worse—and then another week would pass and every time I arrived at that freezing ancient house there was a fight. Midnight, one A.M., two A.M., it was three A.M. and the bathwater was cold and he was sitting in front of me crying: I love you, I love you, I love you. Maybe the worst answer is that he painted a picture of me and I started to believe it: I was selfish, I journeyed to places he couldn’t go, I was callous in my abandonment of him, just like his mother.

  And here is another answer, and to this day, now returned from that strange foreign soil, I don’t know what to make of it. I stayed because of Corah.

  * * *

  —

  ASSIA WAS REMARKABLY CLEAR-EYED ABOUT herself. That was the thing. She wasn’t blind. She’d moved onto a little island, she’d chosen the one that had no boats or planes or means of leaving, and she knew it was territory that would devour her. She continued to sleep in Sylvia’s bed, use her linens, eat with her utensils, and she wrote in her own diary: “A strong sensation of her repugnant live presence.” In letters to friends she called their flat “the ghost house,” and, as Hughes concentrated his energies into editing and compiling the Ariel manuscript, Assia wrote: “Sylvia [is] growing in him, enormous, magnificent. I shrinking daily, both nibble at me. They eat me.” Later, another diary entry: “[S]he had a million times the talent, 1,000 times the will, 100 times the greed and passion that I have.”

  Obsession is comparison, fueled by jealousy: Who is this person, what do they have that I lack? But it’s also compassion of a kind—or perhaps, more accurately, it’s empathy. One seeks to put oneself into another’s shoes. One seeks to feel what another has felt, to understand another down to her bones, to her DNA, down to the spinning heart of her atoms. Obsession is, ultimately, the compilation of narrative: it is uncovering a story, attempting to piece together what it would be like to be the person who lives inside. The line between biography and obsession, I think, is perilously thin. Sometimes there is none at all.

  * * *

  —

  A FRIEND HAD BEEN AT a different residency with Corah, and over coffee, her name came up. They’d slept together, my friend said—he’d liked her a great deal, but had eventually discovered himself to be part of a long list that Corah was working down. Those on it were replaced quickly enough—a young composer, then a writer. Months later, another friend: they’d been at an artist colony as well, Corah had been drinking heavily, she’d made advances to a novelist who rejected her in reluctant loyalty to his fiancée at home, Corah had wept. This startled me. Had she actually wept? Was a half-stranger’s rejection enough to actually wound her?

  I thought of her. I didn’t want to, but I did. More through the grapevine: She’s like a tornado, everything she touches ends in destruction. This from someone who watched her sleep with two friends at different times, then wait, breath held, for the moment in which they told each other. She became a myth of sexual weaponry. She became more interesting than Camilo, who was constantly sullen now, who clung at my sleeves, who grew younger every day, who was waiting in a closet, who needed me to come let him out. She was an unapologetic missile, a god of destruction. “Pathological”—this from a writer—“just pathological, she’s not at home anywhere unless there’s absolute chaos.”

  By the winter I was reading another of her memoirs, but I hid it from Camilo. I couldn’t explain my obsession. If it was jealousy alone, it would have been something I could name and then admit to, but it was something I didn’t have words for. The book was as lurid and tell-all as one might have imagined: everybody was sleeping with everybody and screaming at everybody and doing drugs with everybody and never forgiving anybody and then rushing off somewhere with someone new, and then it started all over again. Nobody was sitting on the third floor of a Brooklyn brownstone, sadly folding socks and waiting for someone to come home. Nobody
was leaving resentful voicemails about how perhaps somebody was too busy to step out of work and call them back. Nobody was comparing everybody to their absent, much-hated, much-needed mother; instead, somebody was a Molotov cocktail, doing coke with married men and eager to detonate. It was her unstoppable plummet that held my attention. It was her inexorable vitality, in stark contrast now to Camilo’s sullen stillness.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN WE FIRST STARTED DATING, Camilo had mentioned Corah often, as if completely unaware that it would hurt me. She’d given him a book of photographs, and he leafed through it, impressed by her knowledge of art. I hadn’t known that she had children until he mentioned it—she was taking her eldest to look at colleges. “She’s such a good mother,” he said wistfully, and the thought struck me that he wasn’t much older than her own son. Another time he mentioned how she’d pursued him—“from the beginning,” he said, with the awe and pride of someone wholly unused to being pursued. Once she’d come over to his studio with a bottle of wine in hand, and had given him advice about his mother while they drank. This was while I was still there, he said, but “nothing happened.” Later, it came out that he’d invited her to take a bath with him—“I thought I told you that already. Anyway, we didn’t do it.” Every revelation shifted the uneven ground on which we were standing. Every revelation changed our story of the snow and the wings and the glorious space, and made it smaller, stickier, increasingly absurd.

  Eventually he spoke of her less and less, but her presence remained. Most obviously, in a low-grade paranoia that ran like a fever through our every interaction. Every time he hesitated before speaking, I put the next sentence in his mouth: I have something to tell you. In the beginning, I flinched from this sentence. By the winter, I willed it. What else could he give me of Corah? What had she said, what had she meant, what had she revealed to him in an unguarded moment?

  But now he didn’t want to talk about her anymore. He was suspicious of my persistent interest. I wanted to know if he thought she was happy. I wanted to know if he thought she did things just to write about them, or if she wrote about the things she did in order to understand and then escape them. What was story and what was Corah? What does escape look like, if you don’t know the way out?

  “Let’s not talk about her,” Camilo said. “That doesn’t matter now.”

  “Why do you want to talk about her?” Camilo asked. “You don’t like her.”

  “I don’t even think of her anymore,” Camilo said. “I think only of you. Why aren’t you thinking of me?”

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS EARLY DECEMBER, BY NOW. Almost a year had passed since meeting Camilo and it was the coldest winter on record—something called a “polar vortex” swept in like a knife, straight from the Arctic, and rendered us raw and miserable. I seemed to be sick all the time. I was always cold, never hungry, most often nauseous. I’d lost fifteen pounds, although I couldn’t have told you where they went. Skinny enough at the best of times, now I watched water bounce off my rib bones when I showered. Camilo told me I wasn’t taking care of myself, I was careless with him and careless with myself, why couldn’t I be less careless.

  And again through the grapevine: the divorce hadn’t been a reasonable mutual decision, Corah’s husband had simply decided he couldn’t take any more, and had left. She wanted him back, he was unyielding. She fled from artist colony to artist colony. Her children were resentful, old enough to understand betrayal, the unspoken kind most of all. Everything at home had spoiled, but as long as she stayed in the woods, whichever woods they were, the dream remained good. I knew how that felt. I’d left the woods, and look what had happened to my good dream.

  Camilo was sad, and the snow was gray, nothing was or could ever again be new, I weighed as much as a twelve-year-old boy, and it was almost the new year.

  * * *

  —

  ASSIA WROTE IN HER DIARY that Hughes was having nightmares all the time, dreams of Sylvia—ones in which her hair grew shock-white, or in which he shot the cat they’d once owned together, but it wouldn’t die. Assia’s waking dream was Sylvia. In her diary again: “I’m immersed now…forever in the burning shadows of their mysterious seven years.” And then: “What insanity, what methodically crazy compulsion drove me…to this nightmare maze…and Sylvia, my predecessor, between our heads at night.”

  * * *

  —

  THE ONE CONSTANTLY SURPRISING FACT that I keep learning is that things come to an end. They carry themselves as far as they can, but eventually momentum runs out.

  As the polar vortex sharpened days to a point, I read the few books I could find that contained excerpts of Assia’s diaries, Koren and Negev’s biography being the best. By September 1963, she was living alone in London, in Sylvia’s old flat, and Hughes was living with his family at Court Green. Although she joined him there for a period of time, his parents couldn’t forgive her for the death of Sylvia. In 1965 she had a daughter, Shura, whom she identified as Hughes’s but whom Hughes would not claim. By 1967, she had returned alone to Plath’s flat in London, and she and Hughes were exchanging long, fraught, argumentative, passionate letters. She wanted them to move in together, marry, find a house that would fit all three but leave no room for ghosts. Meanwhile, Hughes was split between his elderly parents, Sylvia’s estate, his depression, and multiple other women carefully spread out between Devon and London. Assia didn’t permit herself to think of these women, but she knew and the knowing fed her fears and insecurities. Phone calls devolved into shouting matches. By the time the harsh winter had descended, the kind that Plath struggled through seven years earlier, Assia was exhausted, depressed, and entirely alone, save for Shura and the ever-presence of Sylvia. And so Assia continued trying to reconstruct her, trying to resurrect the meat, the bone, perhaps so that Assia could understand the parameters of this invisible and implacable barrier. In her diary, at various points she wondered if Sylvia’s elbows were sharp, if her hands were large-knuckled—what shape did brilliance assume? She might have kicked herself for not noticing, that weekend so many years before. She might have wished to go back in time, although even I can’t guess for what: to do it differently, or just see it all more clearly?

  * * *

  —

  IN DECEMBER, CAMILO CAME TO my apartment. I was sicker now; walking up subway stairs took twice the usual amount of time, and I had to rest partway. I just wanted to sleep, and then sleep, and then go back to sleep. I made dates and then missed them, agreed to meet Camilo for breakfast, and then canceled. Even his anger and hurt couldn’t penetrate my thick weariness. We’d broken up, come together, broken up, come back together. And then he came to my apartment late that night. He’d come to take care of me, he said, to put all the madness and fighting aside for a moment and just be there for me. And as I made us both tea, handed him a mug, he said, “I have to tell you something.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE SPRING OF 1969, Assia accompanied Hughes to Manchester, for a television reading that he’d agreed to do. They went to dinner afterward at the Elm Hotel, and Hughes, probably exhausted and definitely drunk, was goaded into admitting that he could see no chance of a life that they could share. That evening Assia quoted him in her diary: “It’s Sylvia—it’s because of her” and finished with her own addendum: “I can’t answer that. No more than if it were a court sentence.” Assia returned to London feeling as if, for better or worse, after so much time, she had her answer.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEW GIRL SOUNDS FINE. Sweet, optimistic, also Colombian. She participates in a book club with him. She smudges sage around the room to keep out bad spirits. She understands his situation with his mother, Camilo told me, and her understanding is healing. She came over just the day before and cleaned his room for him, sorted all of his clothes. She says kind things to him in hi
s mother tongue, that his mother never said. She’s married, but it’s recently become an open marriage. And he just felt that it was very important to be honest because he loved me, he had hopes for our reunion, after all his relationship with her was an entirely separate thing. Then he asked if he could borrow five hundred dollars, for his rent.

  I asked him to leave my apartment.

  And in hers, Assia dismissed her nanny, held her sleeping daughter, turned up the gas, and went to sleep. “Life was very exciting at the beginning,” she wrote, “but this living death was too much to pay for it….Please don’t think that I’m insane, or that I have done this in a moment of insanity. It was simple accountancy.”

  There is no more waiting. There is nothing left to turn over, assemble, uncover. There is no more story.

  * * *

  —

  I SAW CAMILO ONE MORE time after that. Early summer. I felt like I’d come out of something much longer than just a winter. I’d gone to San Francisco for work, lived in a high sunny studio with a courtyard in the back. Nobody else in that space but me; no ghosts, just sunlight. I’d gained a little weight by then, laughed more easily, slept better. I returned to New York and fell, unexpectedly but entirely, in love with someone whose gentleness, generosity, and consistency were in every way antithetical to the madness in which I’d been living. Someone who moved in easy strides through the world, whose quick wit went hand in hand with an unshakable loyalty. It wasn’t that anyone had built a bridge to my island, rather that I’d dived into the shallows and started swimming.