He studies the photograph. The woman in the picture is now forty-five, he knows, the same age as he is. Would he know this from the photograph? He cannot say for sure. Her hair is loose, wavy; he remembers it as a kind of pale bronze, particularly in the sunlight, with glints of fresh copper wire, though it seems from the black-and-white photograph that the highlights may have become muted over time. Her face is somewhat tilted, slightly turned, so that though she looks directly at the viewer, the sense is that her face is in profile. She is not smiling, but the gaze is steady—serious yet not sad. The suggestion from the eyes is that she is poised or waiting somehow, though he cannot imagine what precisely it is that she seems to be waiting for. She is wearing large gold earrings, simple circles, and what appears to be a black sweater or soft shirt with an open neckline, like that of a ballet dancer. The photograph stops just below her breasts. He remembers her mouth.
The mouth is generous; he has not forgotten that.
He reads the print again. She is a poet. She has a book.
He holds the newspaper up—looks across the desk at the picture. He remembers the high white forehead. He cannot escape the feeling that she is looking at him.
How many years has it been? The number staggers him. He remembers with absolute clarity the first time he ever saw her. He puts the paper down, again flat on the desk. He reads the smaller print about the book of poems. He notes the publisher’s name. He hears then a sound, the soft brush of fabric on wood, and he looks up to see that Harriet is in the doorway. She stands, arms crossed over her chest, resting against the jamb, observing him. Her face is not angry, but it is closed. She seems about to speak, to ask a question.
He might lift up the literary supplement and show Harriet the picture. He might say to his wife, You’ll never guess who this is. Instead he does something that surprises him, that makes a faint blush of heat rise from his neck to his face and lodge behind his ears. He leans forward over the desk, arms spread, elbows cocked. With his left forearm, he shields the picture of the woman in the newspaper.
That night, when I had already entered your thoughts, I drove my husband home from the college. I had found him in a bar around the corner from the party. He’d been drinking Guinness and Bass, a string of half-and-halfs. He was sitting alone, and he tried a smile when I approached.
I said, Stephen.
He collected his change from the counter and slid off the stool. He was a gentle, brooding man, though large and muscular. He had pale blond hair, nearly white, and the high, pink color of a man who spends his days in the sun. On the right side of his face near his jaw was the shiny seam of a scar.
He let me lead him to the car and let me drive him home. He did not speak on the way, and I did not know if his silence was composed of embarrassment or bitterness or worry.
A fine dust of black dirt almost always covered the house, despite the washings by the rain, and though the house had been painted white, it looked, from a distance, gray. The black dirt got in over the thresholds and through the cracks in the caulkings of the windows. I would find it in my drawers and on sheets that I had hung out to dry. The black dirt was nourishing and fertile, the richest soil in the state, but it seeped in everywhere, blew across the floor, coated sills and mantels. I sometimes scrubbed the woodwork until the paint wore through.
I went upstairs to see my daughter. I opened the door to Lily’s room, peeked in to see the tiny body in its bed.
Then there was my study, Stephen’s office, the bedroom that we shared. Stephen went into his office and shut the door.
When I had paid the baby-sitter and taken her home, I went back into the house and sat at the kitchen table. I had made an effort to give the room warmth, and there was a vase of mauve and brown hydrangeas on the pine table. I took off the jacket I had worn over my dress and laid it along the back of a chair. I took off my shoes, undid the pins from my hair. I sat down.
It was raining, a light drizzle that had come with the afternoon clouds, and on the windows the droplets lit up in the headlights of a car. Beyond the front yard, I could hear that particular sound of tires on a gravel road.
I thought then that I should go to Stephen. There are always, in any partnership, balances and debts and payments. But I know I hoped instead that he had fallen asleep on the couch in his office. He often slept there.
Perhaps, as I sat at the kitchen table, I replayed certain phrases from the party. Perhaps I thought about the morning, about a class I had to prepare for. Possibly I did actually wonder if anyone from my past would see the advertisement in the Sunday paper. Or did I merely peer into the vase, a polished ceramic surface that gave off a rose sheen like a mirror, and study the distorted image of my face?
When visitors came over the mountain and first saw the valley, the dirt was so astonishingly black and the landscape so unrelievedly flat that the visitors thought what they saw was tar. And sometimes they said that: A parking lot? A landing field?
I often wonder now: What would have happened if that first letter had not been sent on to me, if it had lain unattended in a folder or on a desk? Or if it had been lost?
I have your shirt still, but the scent is fading.
HE HAS BEEN back in his study now for twenty minutes, and he cannot find anything suitable. Outside, a cloud bank from the west has begun to cover the sun, letting through only a thin wash of light. His children are in the house somewhere: Hadley, he thinks, is upstairs, finishing her homework; he is not sure where Jack and Anna are. He can still taste the roast from Harriet’s mother’s, a leg of lamb that was, inevitably, too well done. No one in Harriet’s family can cook, he has long decided, and the table invariably looks stingy—even on Thanksgiving. He had forgotten that they were expected at his in-laws’ until Harriet had come to the door of his study to remind him. He was distracted at dinner, focused on a face.
He has the paper folded to the ad and has arranged it so that it looks casually tossed upon his desk. He has found a box of Audubon bird cards, is not sure that they will do. Harriet, he knows, may have stationery, but he certainly cannot ask her. In any event, it’s unlikely to be appropriate for the occasion; he has an idea that her writing paper will be the color of cotton candy and will have scrollwork down the sides. He sifts through the papers in his top left-hand drawer. There’s a Hopper print, but it’s of a middle-aged couple in front of a house, and they don’t look particularly happy. Does he have nothing plain and simple? He pulls out a thin sheet of blue airmail stationery, looks at his watch. Five past four. What’s open?
He puts on the hooded sweatshirt, checks his back pocket to make sure he has his wallet. He slides his keys from the kitchen counter, snaps the screen door shut. Harriet is raking along the ell, already removing the first leaves of the season. She has her back to him. He watches as she bends and pulls. She has on jeans, an aqua sweater. The tines of the rake scrape along the dirt, obscure the sound of his leaving. She doesn’t turn around. He hesitates, observing her.
He loves her more than he used to, he does know that. He does not like to think about the early years of their marriage, when he would sometimes wake in the night, his heart racing, stricken with the knowledge that he and she had both made a terrible mistake. That fear, foundering and bobbing in the early mornings like a stick tossed upon a chop, would make him irritable, and they often fought. He remembers the fights—shrill words he thought could never be taken back. But then Harriet had become pregnant with Hadley, and their life together—the pregnancies, the babies, the house, the building of his business—had become a project that made them quieter, easier together, and he no longer allowed himself to ponder the question of whether or not he had made a mistake. How could he regret the decisions he had made that led to Hadley and to Jack and to Anna? It was to him almost a physical impossibility, like juggling, which he has attempted several times to impress his children but has never mastered.
He watches her stoop to remove a rock. Her jeans are tight along the backs of her thighs. S
ince Anna she has not lost the extra ten pounds she has wanted to lose, despite her vigorous and sometimes comical early morning walks with the hand weights. He has tried to tell her that she looks fine as she is, which is true but does not explain why they seldom make love anymore. He does not understand it himself exactly, except that it is harder now to get through the day without the small irritations that lead to resignation.
He knows, too, that it is not Harriet who often demurs in the bedroom at night, but rather himself. Always, his wife asked for and accepted their sexual life as a given—even in those early years, when there was little love between them. For that he might be grateful, though he often feels that while she is essentially present in the bed, perhaps even in the entire marriage itself, he somehow is not.
The fan rake catches on a rock, bends the tine. He thinks of calling to her, taking the rake, straightening the tine for her, but he stops himself, watches instead as she ignores the rake’s bent finger and drags the tool even more aggressively across the ground.
They are not alike, he and Harriet, a fact that he knows was a source of his tension in the early years of their marriage. A tension that has become a mild discomfort whenever he has to be alone with her. They do not talk much together, and he knows that despite the children and the house, they have little in common. It is not just the obvious dissimilarities—that he is an Irish Catholic and she a Yankee Congregationalist, despite the fact they virtually never attend church (nor do the children); or that he grew up in working-class Providence while she spent her childhood in the suburbs; or even that he cannot quite escape the old thought patterns of sin and redemption, while she seems never to have imagined a life in terms of transgressions and payments. No, it is instead, he thinks, the smaller truths, the almost inconsequential ones, that carry with them the greater weight: That she has plans for any given day and seldom deviates from them, is almost never late, and at the end of the day can add up the experiences, the completed tasks, and find among them some satisfaction, while he squanders time, resists the effort necessary to complete a task, thinks of his drives to the beach as the highlights of his day. Or the small truth that she has never once, in their entire marriage, played a piece of music for herself, never put a cassette into the tape recorder, never put a record on the turntable, and that when she drives she prefers silence to the radio. Or the small fact (although perhaps, he thinks, this ought to be a larger fact) that she believes wholeheartedly in the ritual of the family dinner at six, even though his stomach almost always seizes up at that hour and doesn’t begin to relax until later in the evening. Many nights he stands at the kitchen counter at nine o’clock and eats alone a dish that he has made and if she walks through the kitchen then she almost always asks him what he’s doing there.
Sometimes this information—the small truths and the larger ones—puzzles him: how one can be with a woman for so many years, ostensibly have shared so many intimacies (how many times have they made love, he wonders—two thousand? three thousand?), and yet still feel fundamentally unknown in her presence.
She did not hear him leave the house, but she will hear the car starting, so he calls to her.
“Harriet.”
She turns to face him. Her hair is fixed in place, and she has on her makeup.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“Out,” he says. “An errand.”
“What errand?” She frowns slightly, a reflexive gesture more than a comment. Her hand is poised on the top of the rake.
His mind flails and leaps. What errand on a Sunday afternoon?
“Tires,” he says.
“Tires?”
“I’m worried about the tread. Thought I’d get them checked out. Before the weather turns.”
“Oh.” She looks puzzled.
Charles flings open the door of the car, puts the key in the ignition. Although he does not look at her again, he knows his wife is studying him as he backs the Cadillac out of the drive.
Costa’s Card & Gift is just past the pharmacy. He flips his blinker on to pull into a space in front of the store, then abruptly turns it off. Jesus Christ, he can’t go in there. Janet Costa, Antone’s wife, is a class mother with Harriet, and Janet owns and manages the store. He can hear the dialogue: Saw Charles on Sunday in the store. Charles? He was buying stationery. Stationery? What kind of stationery?
He will have to drive to the mall. The bookstore there sells note cards and writing paper. He checks his watch again. It’s a twenty-minute ride. The mall should still be open.
The route to the mall takes him along 59, a county highway so densely packed with fast-food restaurants and discount stores that it looks more like Florida than the coast of New England. Yet even here the recession has claimed its victims: an appliance center is boarded up; the windows of a ski shop are empty, the fake snow still cascading across the glass. He thinks briefly of Joe Medeiros, pushes the thought from his mind.
The bookstore is small and appealing—surprisingly so for a shop located in a mall. There is, when he enters, an abundance of wood and Essex green, a wicker rocking chair by a pot of coffee, books with glossy jackets arranged on tables and shelves. Along one wall, he sees several stands of note cards. He heads in that direction.
He turns the wire stands slowly, looks at the rows of cards. A young woman in a black sweater asks him if he needs help.
“I need paper,” he says, looking at the woman. “Writing paper. Simple. Heavy.”
The woman bends to retrieve a box in a cabinet beneath a counter.
“I don’t have paper,” she says, “but I have these.”
He takes the box from her and opens it. Inside are stiff heavy cards, about the size of wedding invitations. Below them are envelopes that match. The color is ivory.
“They’re our best,” she says.
“This will do,” he says, “and I need a good pen, if you sell them. A fountain pen.”
This last request has occurred to Charles only as he has uttered it. He will have to write the note in the car. He cannot write it at home.
They walk together to the register. Charles hands the woman a credit card, wonders fleetingly if he’s already over the limit—a staggering amount of money in itself. “Wait a minute,” he says. “I have a book on order here. And I need another book too, although I don’t know if you have it.”
He tells the saleswoman the names of the books. He adds that the second is a book of poetry. She checks in the computer, says that his order came in and that they have five of the volumes of poetry—the shipment arrived last week.
“I’ll get it for you,” she says.
When she hands the small book to him, Charles studies the jacket, turns the book over. The photograph he saw in the advertisement is on the back. He reads the short biography that accompanies the picture: “This is Siân Richards’ third collection of poetry. She lives in eastern Pennsylvania with her husband and daughter.”
This last sentence seems impossible to him—as if he had been told that the earth had four moons. Or that the tides had stopped.
The bridge is desolate, empty at five-twenty on a Sunday. He parks on the blacktop at its end. The cloud cover is thick now, a grayish-brown batting, darker behind him in the west. Soon there will be splashes on the windshield. The temperature has changed too; it’s dropped ten, fifteen degrees since noon, he thinks. Beside him is the book of poems, the box of stationery, the pen. He picks up the book, rests it against the steering wheel, turns each page slowly. He reaches down in front of the passenger seat, fumbles for a beer in the cooler. Still cold; the label is wet.
He reads each of the poems, then closes the book. He makes a desk with it on his lap, resting one edge on the steering wheel. He unscrews the pen, slips in a cartridge, makes a few practice scrawls on the paper bag from the bookstore. The rain begins, tentatively at first, a slow, uneven rain of fat drops. He likes the sound of the rain on the roof of his car, the isolation of the beach. He takes a card from the box, lays it o
n the book. He puts the pen to the card.
He cannot think how to begin. He takes a long swallow of beer, then hears a phrase, a single phrase of a song. Jesus Christ. He turns the book over to look again at the picture. The phrase comes to him again, blown off across the sand. He plays it in his mind, and then again, even as he played the 45 over and over as a boy.
Fragments rush in upon him now. A young girl’s face. A high white forehead. A blue dress just below the knees. A stone courtyard.
Images and ideas scud along the crust of sand in front of him, pockmarked now with the beginning of the rain.
The song may be on a jukebox somewhere, he thinks. He cannot remember all the words, just the tune, bits of phrases. He looks down at the thick white card on the book.
He thinks: I cannot do this. I have a wife and three children, and I may lose the house soon.
Then he thinks: How can I not do this?
“Dear Siân,” he writes.
Two
September 15
Dear Siân,
When I saw your picture in this morning’s newspaper I had the same feeling as I had the first time I saw you, in the courtyard of The Ridge thirty-one years ago. I bought your new book of poetry today. I have read all the poems once, and will need to spend more time with them, but I was struck initially by the way the bleak emotional and physical landscape you describe takes on a unique beauty. Beauty out of deprivation. And how this theme holds true as well in the several poems about the migrant workers. I hope you have not had to experience what you write about.