Here was our winter: our apartment had been broken into, jewelry taken, so we changed the locks. We bought special UV lamps to mitigate the low light and rearranged the furniture to trick ourselves into thinking we’d moved. Small electric heaters blazed at all times, but still we’d taken to wearing hats in the house and stopped combing our hair. We didn’t eat much, because we didn’t feel like eating. We’d been married seven years. The hovering spirits were not benevolent ones. Our mornings in that apartment bloomed a strange, acidic silence that held tightly at our throats, and some days we didn’t talk at all. We knew the winter was breaking us, keeping us in separate rooms. We were not who we wanted to be.
Was that the only thing pushing against us back then? It couldn’t have been, but my memory these days is not what I’d hoped it’d be. I do remember that we were confused as to where money was supposed to be coming from, dispirited by credit card debt that hung like a garlic wreath from our necks. I remember that loneliness was our night-creeper—that we were becoming wary of our own intentions and ability to follow through. I was at work on a book that I knew, via the secret door that led to the brain of my heart, would never come out. When I looked at the pages I’d written, it was like cowering before an object of pure entropy, the best lines echoes of better lines from other books. This knowledge was like a bad bird-song in my skull, unrelenting, listless—but I wasn’t ready to talk to my wife about it. I’d tried one morning and clammed up. What was I going to say, that I just couldn’t get it done? That I couldn’t imagine anything beyond what I hadn’t managed to make? I’d already lost two books; they’d slipped like sand through my fingers. I think she understood my quiet. She didn’t feel like herself either.
Meanwhile, all our old friends were having children. The announcements arrived daily, missives of joy. Most weekends the two of us spent at least part of one day driving around our snow-clogged city, sledding through intersections, chipping ice from the inside of the windshield, looking for clothes for these children we had not met and most likely would not meet, for more often than not these friends had made their homes in cities far away.
One Saturday morning, while grocery shopping, I came trudging around the aisle with some buy-one-get-one news and caught her cradling a sack of flour like a newborn. I watched. She was looking at yogurts, and swaying slightly, moving on the balls of her feet and rocking gently as she checked prices and made the mental calculations we had become accustomed to making.
My wife is a beautiful woman. These calculations broke my heart. We had played by the rules, and the rules had brought us here, where private despondency was the coin of the realm. What did we want? To dislodge. To redirect. To reclaim something we’d lost. We wanted something no one could take from us, something to fend off the darkness we knew to be approaching. At least: that’s what we thought. I said: I caught you cradling that sack of flour. She wasn’t shocked. She said: yes, you did.
At Christmas, my wife’s parents, who lived far away, and who, if they thought of me at all, thought unkindly, gave her money. We spent it immediately. We bought two plane tickets and a week at a B&B, with a small amount left over. We packed lightly. It was irresponsible. It was a jail-break. There was music in the air.
And our agreement was this: we’d have a baby, make a home, and be unhappy no more.
OUR FLIGHT TOOK us from the snow hills of Minnesota, cruised low over the continental power grid, and touched down in New York, the city where, years ago, we’d met. We waved through the small window at our younger, more certain selves. The flight to Heathrow was horrendous and bumpy, but still my wife managed to sleep. She rested her head on my shoulder. I tried not to think about my book. The ocean below us seemed a solid thing, an expanse you could draw on.
I took a pill, slept eventually. When I woke, the cabin was dark, and I had the disorienting sensation I was hurtling through someone else’s dream. My wife, awake now, watched a nature special with headphones on. The man next to me was snoring, and his labored breath smelled like ginkgo leaves. Out his window there was only a flat darkness and the sound of movement.
The airline—I am not worried about telling you which one it was; it was United—lost all the bags we’d checked. Before we’d left, our cheerful neighbor had stopped by to wish us well, and had announced that if it were he traveling internationally, he would learn from his last trip, which was to Granada, Spain, to visit the Alhambra—not a single one of his bags had made it home. So, on account of all the thieves in the world, he’d said dramatically, he would under no circumstances check a bag. Midwesterners love nothing more than to give advice. As I stood at the United counter, trying to pry information from the clerk about when we could expect our luggage, I decided I would write him a postcard. And that postcard would say: you were right! The exclamation point would appeal to him.
There are thieves everywhere. They gave us forty-five pounds to buy clothes and no information about when we could expect our bags. I said: you have wrecked our holiday, and you will be hearing from me. The clerk shrugged. He knew there was nothing I could do. Ruined, I thought, though we’d packed nothing anyone would want. On our way to the coast in our rented and empty car, my wife kept repeating what I’d said and cracking up. You will be hearing from me, she said in a basso profundo voice. Maybe you don’t know who I am now, but you will, and you will be hearing from me.
THE PLACE WE WERE STAYING was called the Captain’s House. It was off a skinny little winding street, only two or three blocks from the center of town, which was itself only two or three blocks away from the shore. This was a beach town, but it was January, and everything was for the most part boarded up. We missed the correct turn two or three times, went round the empty town square, and finally found a parking spot directly in front of an ancient-looking Anglican church. There was no sign outside the church that told us we couldn’t park there, and no one to ask. I had sweat right through my shirt while driving. I had filled the car with a panicked smell. We said, fine, this is it. It was already very late at night.
I’m not going to describe this house for you yet, because what happened later on is so strange. I’d like you to picture, instead, simply whatever your version of a small English house might look like, a tourist trap B&B near a beach, in a town that depends on the sea for oysters and visitors like us, washed ashore, unclean and unkempt, uncertain, to some degree, about what the future might hold, yet moving toward it, in the hope that the second part of their lives together would soon be granted recognizable shape. That’s probably good enough. The man who owned the house, who my wife had corresponded with over the internet, was called M. He answered the door, looked up and down the street, and said: What, no bags? You are the most optimistic Americans I have ever met.
FROM OUR ROOM ON THE SECOND FLOOR, my wife used an international card to call her parents to thank them. I had the sense they weren’t happy we’d used the money to book a week at the Captain’s House, but what did we care? They were miles away, minor characters. We figured they would be pleased when presented with a grandchild.
That night, after M.—who looked, as my wife pointed out, like an ancient, pecking bird—explained the long history of the house, we stayed up until dawn. We were relieved, I think, and a little delirious from travel, thrilled with the idea of spending money we couldn’t afford. The low-ceilinged room was small and drafty but bore no resemblance to our apartment in the Midwest, and what I remember now about that first night was that it felt as though entire swaths of our past life disappeared as if they’d never existed at all. Where was our luggage? We had parted with it; it was not here. And as the night wore on, we became enchanted with the idea that all you had to do, change yourself was to change your context. No letters would find us. It all seemed so easy. My wife stripped off her clothes, and I mine. The bed was narrow, the quilt knitted and thick, a sleep shroud we kicked down to our ankles then recovered as the night settled lightly around us.
From the small window in our room, we could
see the ocean. Near the shore, a solitary nightwalker scuffed his boots in the sand, and, farther out, we saw the lights of a barge bearing out to sea. The hours passed. We sank into them. We talked like we hadn’t spoken in months—as though our life up to this point had been a series of private chapters we’d been unable to assemble. With some sadness, I told her about my book drifting away. She listened, and then said she wanted to tell me something she’d never told anyone before.
WHEN SHE WAS YOUNG, she began, she cycled through a series of largely irrational but deep fears in a way that had baffled her parents. One day she was deathly afraid of the peach-colored curtains in the dining room and would not leave the couch until her father took them down. Another day, perhaps, she couldn’t hear the sound of her sister practicing scales on the piano without imagining that someone was watching her through the kitchen’s screen door. When she was a little older, she had trouble with what she, and the therapist her parents made her see, called “leaving dreams.” She would wake up, only to find that a thin strand of her dream life had emerged from sleep with her: a lingering image, an emotional state rendered in sensory detail. An animal she’d dreamed of wanting would lurk in the shadow near her closet, then, as she squinted in the darkness, scurry under her bed. Certain objects became radiant and pulsed: called to her. Then she would wake once again, this time with her mother at her bedside, pressing a hand to her forehead, reassuring her that all was well—See? her mother would say. I’ve turned on the light, there is nothing wrong. They gave her a set of small, woven worry dolls to put under her pillow. But there are layers between dream life and waking life, she said, and these dolls, which were supposed to absorb her anxiety and bear it away, never did. What did you do? I asked her. I stopped talking for almost a year, she said. I was never entirely certain I was the best judge of what was happening—I became used to things feeling both familiar and strange simultaneously—and I just decided to stop bringing other people into it. When I asked her what had finally shifted, she was quiet for a moment, and I saw her withdraw into herself almost completely. Near the end of the year when she had stopped talking, she finally began, she’d become fixated on a single repeating episode, something in her imagination that reached out to her and crossed into the realm of nightmare, and that was this: that every night, as she got into bed, she became convinced that as soon as she was asleep, someone dressed entirely in black would climb the gutter to her bedroom window, slide it open, creep silently across her bedroom carpet, and stand at the foot of her bed without saying a word. This man, she said, did not mean well, and his power was great. With one breath, he could inhale all the good she’d known and replace it with emptiness. He knew something essential about her that she didn’t understand herself; he knew where to find it, and he’d come to spirit it away. Never mind that her house didn’t have climbable gutters (she’d checked); never mind that her window was locked. In the middle of the night things are different, and in the middle of the night, the house had gutters, and the man was standing over her, had come to take part of her away, and he was giving her a choice: gaze upon me and know that I’m real, or keep your eyes shut and be left alone. For this reason, she always slept facing the wall, so that when the man came in, and stood near the foot of her bed, he would never know for sure if her eyes were open or shut. If she was asleep, or merely pretending. At some point, out of nervous exhaustion, she really would fall asleep, and wake with the morning. She never told her parents about the visiting man, and one night, almost a year later, she’d chanced it, and opened her eyes. He wasn’t there. She’d vanquished him.
I DON’T KNOW WHY I’ve never told you this, she said finally. Or why I’ve told you just now.
She reached over and held my hand. It felt, to me, like she was very far away. I’m glad you did, I said.
Don’t be surprised, she said. I’ve never told anyone. No one noticed I hadn’t spoken. At least, that’s how I remember it. Don’t be upset. No one knew. But now you do.
I’m not, I said. I’m not upset.
When I asked her where she thought he’d come from, she shook her head. I don’t think, she said, I could describe it for you if I tried. She went quiet. Away, she finally said. It doesn’t have an ending.
I cherish stories like this. I go looking for them, and lying there, I felt as if a door had opened and I’d slipped into a new room on the heels of someone else. I wished to know more, but I could tell she’d had enough, was exhausted and done with talking. Every story has a limit, a line that cannot be crossed, and that’s where we were—and anyway, I figured, we had nothing but time now that we were here. I could ask her tomorrow, or the next day, as questions occurred to me. She squeezed my hand and brought it to her breast; she wished to come back; I didn’t push. I could hear cars on the street now, dull engines revving to life—morning was at the door. We’d come here to think about the people we wanted to be, to look forward, and so that’s the direction we faced. Would our son be more like me or her? Would our daughter grow up to be a good person? We stopped thinking about money. It wasn’t something that occurred to us then, on that first night. How much of it we would need.
I hope he has your face, she said.
I didn’t want that, not for anyone, but I didn’t tell her that right then. You’ll be hearing from me, I told her later. I was in the bathroom, trying to figure out the flush mechanism. She was sprawled out on our bed.
Say it again, she said. So I did.
THAT FIRST MORNING WE SLEPT LATE, and when we did wake, we watched the sun cut through our small window and move down the wall. Our clothes—we’d washed and wrung them in the sink, set them to dry—hung from their hangers over the bathroom door like empty sacks.
I realized that at some point in the night I’d come to an understanding about my book. The lines had been there, but I couldn’t arrange them. I had approached my work with a shameful passivity and waited so long for meaning to accrue that it simply snatched itself away. I’d been selfish but not selfish enough; as such, I’d deserved the crumbling I’d witnessed, for I’d offered no protection and stood by, watching, as the book drifted from my reach. I thought of the radiance my wife had talked about in her dreams. My pages had none of that, and I knew, as surely as if I’d been told by God himself, that no one would read them. I felt obliterated, and, for a second, free of this earth. I thought perhaps I would never again leave this bed nor this room. But soon my heaviness returned; we grew hungry for lunch and I put these thoughts away.
It turned out that M. had come to own the Captain’s House via what he called a great misfortune. We didn’t press. He’d laid on the dining room table three settings, and we joined him for soup and homemade bread. This, he informed us, would be our only meal together, but it was a courtesy he enjoyed. He was tall, and stooped, and as he passed the bread around the table he looked only at my wife. We talked in a small way about nothing for a while, but I could sense my wife becoming uncomfortable. I know you, he finally said to her. I think we’ve met.
This, she said, is our first time in England.
No, he said. Can’t be. I remember.
My wife looked at me, and then back at M. She flushed. By the water, he said. Near the bookstall. When we met, M. continued, you were carrying a baby.
My wife shook her head.
I’d swear by it, M. said. You let me hold her.
She was tiny, he continued, and dressed for the cold.
You were watching the evening boats come and go. You were waiting for someone. I held her out of the wind. She fit inside my jacket. And you, he said, were so sad.
No, my wife said, and though she managed a smile, I could see she was shocked. No, she said again. She looked pained in a way I’d never seen before. I wanted to step in, to redirect, but I was surprised too and could think of nothing to say. My hands stayed on the table. Presently, M. composed himself, and looked at me with red-rimmed and watering eyes. I was struck still. I had a sense that the house itself was listening closel
y, hearing something I couldn’t—a hidden melody, a warning. Then suddenly he reached across the table and put his hand on top of mine. At this touch I felt a cold pulse run up my arm like an electrical transfer, and I pulled my hand away, perhaps too violently. He gave a small cry; then, composing himself, he picked up his fork to illustrate what was happening to his memory, and apologized profusely. He had, he told us, been thinking of someone else. Of course he had been. You must be the husband, he said. I mumbled yes, and after that, his mood went dark, and he became less talkative.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the meal, except that whenever I looked across the table at my wife, she looked at her lap.
Finally, after we had politely eaten our fill and it became clear that our now silent lunch could go on no longer, he raised his glass. To happiness, he said. To health. May it flow, he said, now looking directly at my wife, from this house to your heart.
Thank you, she said. Thank you very much.
And he smiled in a way I will never forget, as though he knew something we did not. I saw sharp, yellowed incisors, the flick of a dry tongue. Then his lips closed, and the feeling was gone.
AFTER WE LEFT THE HOUSE, we wandered the village, and made our way to the shore. And as we walked along the beach, a low fear began to blossom and hum in my chest. After a while, my wife asked if I needed to sit down. I did. She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead. I asked her if she’d been upset at lunch. She told me she’d been startled, but she was fine now, it had been a mistake, he was old. I knew she wasn’t telling the truth. We’ve come all this way, she said. We’ve come all this way. I asked her if she wanted to leave, but she pretended not to hear. She took her hand away from my head. You have a slight fever, she said. She took my hand, placed it in her lap, and began to cry softly. An old lady passed us, and said there, there. Don’t look at us, please, I said.
Farthest South & Other Stories Page 7
