Nine Island (19 page)

Low plants that are pale green and cream and look like sea grass: that's where she landed. Between a fan palm and a ponytail tree. She seems to have aimed for them. Walking around all those days in her bikini, large wet footprints on the path, deciding what to do.

Ice cubes, she was dropping.

And P is not here. He is in Canada. But was on his way home when he got the call. It seems that she planned it this way.

• • •

Virgil told me all this as I walked back and forth and back and forth on the dock.

Maybe it felt like swimming?

If you retire from love, N once told me, then you retire from
life
.

N is the one who said this.

I
T'S ALMOST eleven. The police cars are still parked on the ramp, but their blue lights no longer spin. The police themselves wait upstairs in the apartment for P, wait until one of the planes that fly in is his.

I wait, too.

The planes appear, one star swelling after another, and it's a strange emergence each time a new star grows out of that dark. But they do, they keep emerging from that darkness, growing brighter until finally swerving west. P is on one of these, maybe the one turning now, maybe up there now looking down at the blackness of sea, lights frilling the shore. And if he is on that one, he sees the bright strip of beach, the high red lights showing pilots the topography of roofs. He can see our islands spangled upon black.

One star has just made the turn and transformed from pure light to jet. I will sit here and wait until his plane has flown over and landed ten miles west, until he's picked up the bag of clothes recently folded for him by N, stepped into a cab, and sped over the causeway, back to this island where his wife is not. At last a cab will pull up the ramp slowly, in consideration for the man inside.

This might be him, this cab now. I think it's him. The driver's stepped out, walked around to the trunk, pulled out a bag, set it down.

In the fountain by the entryway, water jets, tumbles, and falls—its sound.

When it is P, everything will begin. He will come inside, ride the elevator up to his floor, and walk the long hall to his doorway. The police will take him out to the balcony and show him where N stood, where she pulled a chair to the rail. They will stand on each side of P as he takes this in with his eyes. But his eyes will find, in the potted palm on the balcony, a single toothpicked olive, and he won't be able to help it, he'll see her sipping a last martini before dumping the olive she never liked, before she does what she does at 6:17, and he won't be able to help it: he'll laugh. The police will escort him in to the kitchen table, where she placed her letter, and maybe then or maybe later he will read it: the words are words he knows. Yet she will tell him a few new things. How she'd been ready to do this three months before but decided to wait a bit: she wanted to leave things in order. He'll see how carefully she planned, how she deliberated her method. One that's unusual for a woman but likely to succeed. She'll tell him things he knows but needs to see again, and others he does not need to see again, does not wish ever to see again, wishes he could scrub from the earth. She'll even tell him a few things she'd had in mind these past months, matters she'd hoped to set in motion, in leaving him alone. She did not want him to be alone. Or me.

The cab door opened. P stepped out. The door shut, and the cab pulled away, curved down the ramp, around the oval park, was gone. But P still stood on the curb. For a moment, as long as he didn't move, he might stand outside time. The only thing moving were the cords and sprays of water as the fountain jetted up in the light, weakened, tumbled, splashed a chlorine bloom.

Far to the right in the sky, a light appeared. From Brazil, maybe, or Peru.

P bent for his bag. As he rose he lifted his face and seemed suddenly to see our huge building. He stood staring up at the height.

I was in the lobby by then, with Virgil. We both looked away; we had to.

Just the sound of the rising, falling, splashing water. Everything else was still.

Then P was stepping onto the curb, and we were stepping out, the revolving door turning, Virgil reaching to touch his arm, starting to say something, and what could he say, and I was behind, the same—

But there came a sudden sharp whistle from across the way, from Costa Brava. We all stopped and looked.

The origami woman stood on her balcony on the seventeenth floor, holding a nest of colored paper. It looked like a fabulous cape, a dancer's skirts. She went to the balustrade and called down a word to someone waiting. It took her a moment to gather herself, and then, in a sweep, she flung the paper over the balustrade rail. It fell like smoke, billowing and slow, a chain of colors, a rope of sky and coral and lime, colors that spooled, cascaded.

We watched as it swung and slowly stilled in the night. Then she waved to her friend below, and he waved smiling back up to her, camera in his hand.

Virgil took P's arm, I took his bag, and we walked through the revolving door.

O
VID, STILL here?

I like to think I see your eyes. I like to think I hear you. I do feel your sentences swimming inside, your figures pacing their wilds of woods, and air, and letters, and time.

The idea that your words could ever be dead, past not always present.

Try telling that to the sand, the sea.

Brief passages from writers and lyricists other than Ovid appear,
sometimes paraphrased, in these pages: Yeats's “Sailing to Byzan
tium,” channeled through William Gass's “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”; the opening lines of Dante's
Inferno
(my translation); Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; the Clash's
“Should I Stay or Should I Go?”; Kate Bush's “Wuthering Heights”;
Chrissie Hynde's “Talk of the Town” and “Up the Neck”; Marianne
Faithfull's “Why'd Ya Do It?”; James Brown's “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine”; David Bowie's “Ashes to Ashes”; John Mayer's “Your Body Is a Wonderland”; and David Markson's
Wittgenstein's Mistress.

For their care in helping me bring this to printed page, my great thanks to Lauren Groff, David Shields, Karen McBryde, Andrea Barrett, Emily Forland, and Pat Strachan, with her wonderful team at Catapult.

Jane Alison is the author of a memoir,
The Sisters Antipodes
, and three novels—
The Love-Artist
,
The Marriage of the Sea
, and
Natives and Exotics
—and is also the translator of Ovid's stories of sexual transformation,
Change Me
. She is professor and director of creative writing at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.
www.janealison.com

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