Arcadia (35 page)

One week, Bit tells Grete. Give me one week. Then come get me.

Grete holds her sharp elbows and nods. She watches him go into his room.

All is still here, the walls full of comforting dimness. The bed is like two cupped hands, welcoming him in.

There is a landscape inside his head. Delicate hills, threading rivers of blood.

Unpeopled, this place would be nothing. Bit’s people come at will. Abe, striding along, his toolbelt jingling. Grete, a fleet flash in the woods. Verda gathering from the shadows at the edge of the trees, the white dog her dapple. Titus, who reaches for Bit and swings him into the sky. Hannah, her hand stretching toward something, young, golden, round.

Everything he needs is here.

If he cannot be infinite—his love meeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadow—this is the nature of landscapes. The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night.

Every limit, a wise woman once wrote, is a beginning as well as an ending.

Grete climbs behind him, holding him with her thin length. But she is made of flight and burrow, Helle and Hannah both, and leaves him to run when twilight falls.

Luisa comes in and, weeping, kisses him goodbye.

Jincy comes in, bringing the twins. They sleep against him, and Jincy sleeps in the chair, her face lined in the moonlight, mouth open, black as a cave.

Dylan comes in; Cole comes in; Bit’s department chair comes in.

Ellis comes in, the hardcover book splayed in her hands like a bird poised for flight. She stays and stays. She whispers in his ear.

The night comes in, Grete comes in, Astrid comes in.

Glory comes in with muffins, saying something over him in her guttural language, a prayer, perhaps.

In the window, the moon comes in.

On her e-reader, Grete holds Yoko, who was at last allowed to go home to Japan; the girl plays her violin but so poorly Grete snorts and turns her off.

Astrid comes in with avocados and mushroom soup.

Ellis comes in, puts his head on her lap, brushes his temples with her cool hands, murmurs.

Grete comes in; Grete comes in; Grete comes in. With a new song and a sunwarmed tomato, with applesauce and ice water, with a scrimshaw, brittle and yellow, Hannah’s face endlessly carved in the bone. Grete, like water, like the world, will always let herself in.

The first thing is the tea. The stun of rosehip lets the ghosts enter, the cookies flavored with anise, the sighing cushion of the white dog, the close smoky cottage of his own story.

Next, the stars brief in a window between the maple branches. From under a rocking chair, a mouse. It prays into its pink hands, watching Bit, it smoothes its fat haunches like a housewife in a new dress. Bit laughs and the noise scares them both, and the mouse skitters off. Bit is lonely when it is gone.

Soon the page of a book can stay cohesive in the eyes; one sentence can lead to the next. He can crack a paragraph and eat it. Now a story. Now a novel, one full life enclosed in covers.

They are in the room when he wakes again.

It’s been a week, Dad, Grete says, her voice tight with urgency.

Time to get up, says Ellis from the chair. She is rumpled; Otto sleeps under her feet.

Astrid, in the doorway, her own column of light.

Dad, says Grete. Please.

It is an effort like digging himself out from a mound of dirt. But he sits.

It is a cool morning. The spring has ended, Bit sees. Grete leaves her e-reader out for him to use, and he finds that the disease has tiptoed backward. Quarantine is over: three quarters of a million dead, only thirty thousand in the United States. Most deaths have been contained in a few areas, the city mostly. The president praises technology, the ability to track the disease and make decisions; he comes onto the e-reader, blue thumbprints under his eyes, and says, Without technology, the pandemic would have been a disaster of proportions never before seen on this planet. We must be grateful. Bit is.

Grete is rosy with health and tan from the sun. Home, she says, a flash of yearning in her face. He sees how the brownstone they bought ten years ago is to Grete what Arcadia is to him. Soon, they will leave the furniture where it sits in the Green house, the clothes neat in their closets. They will seal the windows against drafts and close the curtains. They will secure doors that have locks as afterthoughts: Titus’s, Midge’s, Scott and Lisa’s, the Green house, quieted of its solar clicks. They will load the car. Ellis is coming for a week to help them resettle. There is little of Helle’s in the brownstone: a chair, the same kitchen table, the same bed. He imagines thin brown Ellis filling those places, and is surprised to feel no pain.

He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.

The night before they go, he stays awake, watching the subtle seep and draw of the moon. In the dark, he scans Abe and Hannah’s bookshelves until he finds what he’s been looking for. The book is smaller than he remembered, the edges flaking like pastry dough under his fingers. But the color plates surprise him: they are so startling, so excessively beautiful. He hadn’t remembered such beauty.

For hours in the sleeping house, he reads the old stories until they blend together. Then he puts down the book. When he turns out the light, the moon seizes its brightness again in the window. The stories themselves aren’t what moves him now. They are sturdy wooden boxes, their worth less in what they are than in what they can be made to hold. What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire, the milk churned, the chickens sleeping, the babies lulled by rocking, the listeners’ own bones allowed to rest, at last, in their chairs. The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set off fear: a nail dropped in the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods, the newest baby in the tired womb. His heart, in the night-struck house of his parents, responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.

Bit moves through the house, turning out the lights that Grete thoughtlessly left burning. And like that he lets the darkness in to take its place, where it belongs.

The early June woods simmer. When Bit and Grete lace up their boots, Ellis starts to put hers on, too, but something in Bit’s face makes her sit back down on the porch steps with a book instead. Take Otto, she says. He’ll dream of this walk when he’s a city dog. Bit stays to look at the way the sun off the page shines on her face. I’ll be here when you get back, she laughs into her book. Don’t worry. In gratitude, he doubles back to kiss her on the soft part in her hair. By midmorning the birds grow heavy and watch the world with their beaks cracked, panting from the coolest clefts of the branches. Under such cheery light it is impossible to see the forest as he had so long ago when he was a lost child, grasping and bitter and ready to gobble him, the twigs turned fingernails, the roots sinuously rising from the ground to pull him in.

Grete tells him long, fantastical tales of the kids at the school. She had finished the year with a kind of shuddery relief: now she turns others grotesque to strip them of their terror. The girls are blades in female form; the boys lurch through the halls as rustic as bears. The teachers are gobbling amoebas, greedy for what they can’t understand. Otto races back, his underbelly caked with mud, and squeezes his body between their legs, and races off again.

They come to the place Bit has avoided all these years and climb a storm-felled oak to find the path. Here is the island of trees between two snakes that once were knee-deep streams. Here is the house. The old walls are still standing. The roof has fallen in: a tree grows from the heart of Verda’s cottage as if it were a vast stone planter. One window is breathtakingly intact. The cherries by the doorstep have spawned an orchard, and last year’s pits gravel the ground. When Bit pushes open the door, it swings easily, true in its frame. Inside, the house is forest. The floor is dirt and skittering leaves; the beams have returned to mossy logs. They sit and unpack their lunch, the dog panting at their feet, and he tells his daughter of Verda.

Hm, is all she says.

He watches her, amazed. I’m not lying, he says.

I didn’t say you were, she says. Just, how fantastic it seems. I mean, she was precisely the opposite of everything you were. A witch, magical. Old, self-sufficient, with a pet. You were tiny, overwhelmed with community, longing for a woman to take you in. It’s interesting. She shrugs.

You think Verda was an imaginary friend, Bit says, laughing with dismay.

This place looks like it’s been abandoned for centuries, Dad. But whatever. It doesn’t matter. You found what you needed when you needed it, she says, and squeezes his knee.

She has more of a shell than he ever will. Already, she watches life from a good distance. This is a gift he has given her.

Peace, he knows, can be shattered in a million variations: great visions of the end, a rain of ash, a disease on the wind, a blast in the distance, the sun dying like a kerosene lamp clicked off. And in smaller ways: an overheard remark, his daughter’s sour mood, his own body faltering. There’s no use in anticipating the mode. He will wait for the hushed spaces in life, for Ellis’s snore in the dark, for Grete’s stealth kiss, for the warm light inside the gallery, his images on the wall broken beyond beauty into blisters and fragments, returning in the eye to beauty again. The voices of women at night on the street, laughing; he has always loved the voices of women. Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.

He sits. He lets the afternoon sink in. The sweetness of the soil rises to him. A squirrel scolds from high in a tree. The city is still far away, full of good people going home. In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.

My gratitude goes to everyone who gave me shelter during the long development of
Arcadia
: to all at Hyperion, especially Barbara Jones, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, Claire McKean, and Ellen Archer; to Jason Arthur at William Heinemann and Stephanie Sweeney at Windmill in the UK; and to Mathilde Bach and Carine Chichereau at Editions Plon in France. To my dashing agent, Bill Clegg, for his honesty, patience, and kindness, and to his assistant, Shaun Dolan. To Erika Rix, who gave me her hours. To those who provided physical space for writing: the Groffs, the Kallmans, the Drummonds, the Peddies, the Herndons, the McKune-Parrishes, and Hannah Judy Gretz and Ragdale for the lovely fellowship. To the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MFA program in creative writing at Queens University–Charlotte. To my readers: Sarah Groff, Steph Bedford, Kevin A. González, Jaime Muehl, Ashley Warlick, James Willett, and Lucy Schaeffer. To my family, friends, and the authors of the many beloved books that made this novel richer: you are too numerous to list, but I thank you.

Above all, I am grateful for my household of boys: Clay, my bedrock, and my two sons. This book is for Beck, who taught me how great-hearted little boys can be.

Introduction

The background for Lauren Groff’s sweeping second novel is Arcadia, a utopian commune in upstate New York. Formed in the 1960s by a small enclave sleeping in old buses and lean-tos far from the political turbulence of the era, it evolves and expands over time until its ideals and integrity are challenged by great swells in population, emergent personal desires and agendas, and, eventually, a new generation of Free People.

At the center of all this is Bit, whom we follow from his birth as the Littlest Bit of a Hippie, barely three pounds resting in the local market’s produce scale, through his adolescence in Arcadia, to well into his adulthood, when he struggles with the disappearance of his wife, the complex and slow death of his mother, and his responsibilities as the single father of a teenage daughter, Grete. He also must wrestle with the issue of whether to make a more modern life in the city—teaching photography, making art, and maintaining for his daughter the contemporary life she desires—or to return to the simple, protected land and lifestyle of his youth in the face of a pandemic.

Arcadia
introduces us to all kinds of odd and interesting people and provides an emotional exploration of the ever-human challenges of family, personal identity, social organization, and our relationship to the natural world. In its beautiful and quiet way, it stirs us to ask weighty questions about the best way to live, about our relationships with others, about the arc of life. It also constantly reminds us of our potential as human beings for strength, wonder, and grace.

Discussion Questions

1. Thinking of Arcadia at its best moments, which of its values and tenets seem healthy and important for an individual? For a social group?

2. What are the potential threats—from within the organization and without—to such a communal social structure? How might these be guarded against or managed?

3. What’s healthy or not for children being raised in an environment such as Arcadia? Consider the different ways Bit and Helle think about their upbringing.

4. As a young man, Bit quotes George Eliot’s statement “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is . . . we are part of the divine power against evil.” Where can you find examples of this being put into action in the novel? What might this mean for your own life?

5. Why is private property not allowed in Arcadia? What effect do you think this has on the identities of those living or raised there? How much of your identity comes from things you’ve purchased? What elements of your identity are independent of what you own?

6. Midway through the story, there is a confrontation between Handy, Arcadia’s founder, and Abe, one of its leaders. How are these two men different? In what ways are they successful or failed leaders? To what extent does someone’s personal or private life affect his or her ability to lead?

7. Consider the long span of Hannah’s life. What have been her strengths and weaknesses as a member of Arcadia? As a wife? Does her admission to Abe that he always gets what he wants, for example, suggest strength or dependency?

8. What has Hannah been like as a mother to Bit? What healthy and positive effects has she had on his growth and development? What qualities does he possess as a man or a father that we can attribute to Hannah? Late in the novel, Bit confronts his mother about the profound difficulties her depression caused him as a boy. What were the long-term effects of this on the kind of person Bit becomes?

9. Consider the various uses of pharmaceuticals and other drugs in the novel: the Trippies’ permanent damage due to LSD; marijuana as recreation or economic crop; the medication that Hannah is on most of her adult life to adjust the “brain chemistry” that causes her depression. How do we determine which are healthy and which are not? What do you make of Abe’s statement that growing marijuana to raise money is “not legal” but not necessarily wrong either?

10. One of Bit’s responses to his mother’s deep depression is to decide he needs a Quest. How does that idea serve him? Real or imagined, how might a Quest be psychologically important or effective as a response to emotional difficulty?

11. Verda plays a significant role in Bit’s life, first as the seeming focus of his Quest, as the old, magical witch in the woods who might give the “curse or antidote” to help his mother. Soon, though, she becomes someone Bit visits and needs in a more realistic way. What does she offer him that is so valuable? In what ways is she different from many of the women in the novel?

12. Consider the complex character that is Helle: her precocious behavior when young; the confrontation with Handy, her father; her disturbing sexual encounter in the woods; her vague, apologetic explanation to Bit, “I thought you knew who I was”; and her return and relationship much later with Bit, the birth of Grete, and her eventual disappearance. What do you understand about her nature and behavior?

13. On the final page of the novel, we’re told that Bit “has always loved the voices of women.” Consider the various women who gather to help when Hannah falls ill: Astrid; Luisa, the nurse; Dr. Ellis Keefe. What valuable qualities does each of these women possess? In what ways are they different?

14. What effect does Groff’s decision to include the SARI pandemic have on the story?

15. Bit challenges his students to take what he calls a “digital fast,” going without any electronic communication technology (cell phone, computers, GPS, etc.) for as long as possible. Try it. Go for twelve hours. Keep track and write down the various responses and realizations you have. Afterward, assess the benefits and dangers and what you think a healthy relationship with such technologies might be.

16. At one point, Bit recalls how, as a boy, he made lists of beautiful things, a “litany” he would whisper to his mother to try to stir her out of depressive sleep. As an adult, in the midst of his troubles with his mother and wife, he does so again, this time for himself. Read his, and then try to make your own. Be specific to your personal experience. Then consider how such a gesture affects you and what role it might play in our everyday lives.