The Keep (30 page)

Somewhere along the way I notice a hotel called the Keep. The picture shows a castle with towers. I click on its website and a little slide show starts up: a castle with gold sunlight on it, then a long square tower, then an ancient-looking map showing a maze of underground tunnels. Then a big round swimming pool.

I push my chair away from my desk and put my head between my knees. I’m afraid I’ve gotten high without realizing it. I go back through my day to make sure I haven’t smoked a pipe.

When I sit back up, the slide show is still playing: castle, tower, map, pool. It’s Howard’s castle—Ray’s castle. The same place. And then I start to laugh. It’s a weak laugh, full of relief. Because all the time I was reading Ray’s story, week after week, I never believed that the castle existed.

Map, pool, castle, tower.

I found him. Or he found me.

I didn’t think a hotel could be so expensive—to pay for two nights plus airfare, I have to cash in part of my 401K. I make the arrangements without ever believing I’ll actually go. I have vacation days left at work, and my mother makes good on her promise to take the girls. When the plans are all in place and I’m supposed to leave in a week, the truth of it hits me. The whole thing seems wild, self-indulgent, not allowed. I can still get back my deposit on the hotel, although the plane ticket is nonrefundable. When I call my mother, she won’t even listen. “You’re going,” she says. “That’s it. Now go.” I get the feeling traveling overseas to foreign countries is the sort of life she used to imagine for me.

When I drop off the girls at my mother’s house, Gabby hugs and kisses me and Megan leaves the car without a word. Then, as I’m driving away, she runs back out of the house. I stop, but already Megan’s slowing down, and it takes her a while to get to the car. “Did you forget something?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer. There’s a tiny gold locket around her neck, but who gave it to her is anyone’s guess. It’s high summer now, cicadas chattering in the trees. Finally Megan says, “You’re coming back, right?”

“Megan!” I say, and she starts to cry. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her cry. She’s like me in that way: dry.

I lift up my arms and kiss her through the window.

I take a commuter plane to New York and catch an overnight flight to Paris. A feeling of unreality sets in at the John F. Kennedy Airport. It’s been years since I got on an airplane. I had to buy a suitcase; all we had were the old canvas bags we used to pile everything into when Seth was touring with the band.

I have a window seat. When we take off, the city lights look like embers. I have a feeling of shock; if I’d only realized that all this was going on—planes taking off and landing, cities looking like embers—I would never have fallen so deep inside my life.

The hotel sent me a packet of stuff I haven’t had time to open in the rush of getting out. Or maybe I’m saving it. The envelope is really a flat shallow box made of creamy paper. When I break the seal I smell vanilla, spice. Inside the box are a few square cards printed with brown ink on that same creamy paper. The first one says:

Anticipation: You are almost here. Which means you’re on the verge of an experience that will send you home a slightly different person than the one you are right now.

I laugh out loud, but I’m intrigued. What the hell do they mean?

Another card:

The Keep is an electronics- and telecommunications-free environment. Close your eyes, breathe deeply: you can do it. We have a secure vault, where all your gadgetry may be stored when you arrive. This ritual of renunciation is important. If you feel the urge to thwart it, pay attention. You may not be ready.

And another:

Apart from the live medieval music at dinnertime in the Great Hall, we provide no formal entertainment at the Keep. That’s your job. We trust you. Now trust yourself.

I find myself turning to the guy next to me, who’s already cocooned inside his blue airline blanket with a sleep mask over his eyes. There has to be someone to share this joke with me! I scan the airplane, row after row, and wait for a set of eyes to look back at me with knowing, with understanding. Because I’m not alone. I know that. I’ve felt it ever since I saw the Keep on my computer screen.

We land at 5:30 a.m. in a smoky sunrise. I haven’t slept. My view of Paris is mostly baggage handlers pulling suitcases off our plane and babbling in their wonderful language.

Another plane to Prague, then a train. We pull out through a poor section of the city, children waving to us as we pass. Finally I go to sleep.

I wake up in a different world. Mountains, trees. Little cottages with wood beams on the outside. Where am I? Where are my girls? I freeze in my seat, feeling I’ve done something horribly wrong, abandoned them, risked their lives. It takes some minutes to calm myself down. And then I have an odd thought: that none of this is real, that I’m still back home with my girls. Everything is exactly the same as always, but in some other dimension a part of me has broken off and is having this dream.

Later, the conductor taps me on the shoulder. I’ve nodded off again. The train groans and sighs pulling into the station. When I get off, I’m surprised by how cold the air is. A thin blond guy named Jasper is there to meet me, and he takes my suitcase. We come out of the train station into a valley surrounded by narrow pointed hills. The castle looks down from the one directly ahead of us, gold-brown and majestic in the sun, and maybe it’s exactly the way I imagined or maybe it erased whatever was in my mind before I saw it. But looking up at it, I think:
yes!

We take a gondola from the valley. As we glide over thick cables, I look down and see that a lot of the trees are already bare. When I look back up we’re swooping toward the mountain as if we’re about to smash right into it. I shut my eyes.

Jasper says, “Is scary, yes?”

“It is,” I say.

A big iron gate, two towers. A side door leading inside. All of it so familiar it’s like I’m coming back for the second time. Did Ray do such a perfect job of describing it? I’m not really sure. I loved what he wrote because he wrote it, because he’d touched the pages, because it gave us a way to have a conversation. I tried not to ask if it was any good.

The lobby is fancy, hushed, its craggy stone walls exaggerated by tiny bright lights pointing up from the floor. The couple checking in ahead of me is wealthy; even their skin looks expensive. The woman glances at me for a second, and I’m relieved when she looks away.

I put my electronics in a silver box, which I lock and keep the key. In my case, it was only a hair dryer.

Jasper walks me up a curved staircase to my room. He tells me about this castle: how the keep was built first, in the twelfth century. Then the rest of the castle in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, it was converted into a family estate.

A fluttering in my chest. It feels like soap bubbles. I can’t concentrate.

My room might as well have been Danny’s room: high ceiling, a bed with a velvet curtain, fireplace with a burning log in it, little pointed windows. Outside I see the keep, square and narrow, rising above the trees.

I lie down and feel the mattress give under me. I open up a second envelope box they gave me downstairs and find more of those creamy vanilla cards.

Forget about getting dressed. We’ve provided loose, comfortable clothing that looks the same rain or shine, day or night, no matter who wears it, so you can look at other things.

Our premises are absolutely secure. You may go wherever you wish, day or night. If you need light (especially important in the tunnels) just ask. Our staff is plentiful and, we hope, unobtrusive.

Be mindful of the fact that other guests may be using a space at the same time you are. Remember—you’re here to talk to yourself, not each other. There is no need for greetings or even eye contact. You have the rest of your life for that.

I fall asleep. When I wake up the fire’s gone out, leaving the room cold, and my clothes feel sweaty and foul.

I take a long hot shower. I comb out my hair and let it hang. I put on the outfit they’ve left for me, which is like a sweatsuit except it’s made out of cashmere, which means it’s unbelievably soft. There’s a pair of puffy rubber-soled boots. I notice my chest fluttering again. The soap bubbles. I picture them overflowing the tight little pot of my heart.

There has to be a word for the feeling that comes from seeing a place you’ve imagined and having it fulfill your expectations. But I don’t know it. I follow a hall lined with electric candles to a curved stairwell that winds down to a set of glass doors opening onto the garden. White shell paths gleam out through the dense green. There are small signs pointing the way to various places, but I don’t really need them. The keep is straight ahead of me.

Around the bottom of the keep, the bushes and trees have been cleared away. A woman sits cross-legged on bright green grass and a man stands near her, shielding his eyes from the sun. Neither one looks at me, and for a second I feel insulted, invisible. Then the feeling passes. They’re dressed exactly like me.

Walking up the outdoor stairs, I have another impulse to use that unknown word. The rubbery soles of my boots grip the stone like suckers, and I rise up over the trees.

The door to the keep is heavy. My heart pounds as I push it open. There’s a second door, just like I expected, and beyond that is the room where Danny met the baroness: gold, shiny, heavy draperies next to tiny windows, a purple-orange sunset pouring in from outside. The lack of a word to describe the matching up of this place with my expectations is starting to hurt. So I pick one. I pick Danny’s word,
alto,
and I give it my own definition.
Alto:
when things are exactly the way you imagine they’ll be.

There’s a fireplace with a burning log, a brocaded couch, a shiny wood table in the shape of an oval. Alto, alto, alto. I go to the windows and look out, my back to the door. My hands shake on the windowsill. I don’t tell myself what I’m waiting for, but of course I know.

I stand there and wait. The anticipation is so intense I feel I can’t sustain it. That it will break me.
Now
and
now
and
now.

Now!

I hear a sound and turn. The room is empty but the air quivers against my arms. Like a ghost has come in.

“Ray,” I whisper.

No sound. The logs shift in the fireplace.

“Ray.”

I go to the door and open it, then the second door. I look down the outdoor stairs and over the trees at the horizon. “Ray,” I call, but the wind has come up and it blows my voice to pieces.

“Ray! Ray! Ray!” Suddenly I’m hollering, because he has to be here. He must be; otherwise I’ve spent all that money and left my girls and come all this way for nothing.

I call his name until my voice gets weak. I go back inside the keep and lie down on the brocade couch. I’m overwhelmed by the purest sadness I can remember in my life—not like Corey, where the sadness was mixed up with guilt, responsibility—this is just loss. Pure loss. I know Ray is gone, and I’ll never see him again.

I start to cry. I lie there, sobbing into the cushions. A couple of times I hear the door open, but I don’t look up. I know it’s not Ray. It’s other people in cashmere sweatsuits who leave as soon as they see me.

Eventually I stop. I lie there while darkness fills up the room. The only light is from the fireplace. And then I hear a bell. It ripples in through the windows, a clear beautiful sound. It rings five times, each one like a silver wave rolling onto a dark beach.

After the bell stops ringing I hear movement, as though the keep has suddenly come to life. I even feel it: a rustling behind the walls, doors pushing open, the whispery sound of feet as people move down from the top of the keep through all those internal stairwells and begin passing outside through the doors on the floor where I am.

Dinnertime.

I lie there, empty from crying, and listen to the movements of people walking. And even though I don’t want to eat or listen to live medieval music, I find myself getting up off my couch and leaving the room. I join the stream of people in beige cashmere sweats and move with them back down the outdoor staircase.

At the base of the keep, the group follows a white shell path toward the castle. I go a different way. The air is sharply cold on my hands and face, but the cashmere keeps the rest of me warm. The sunset is an orange tear at the bottom of a solid gray sky.

Hotel employees are lighting candles along the paths, each one inside a glass globe.
Alto.
I know where I’m going as if I remember it.

The wall of cypress. An opening lit by a lantern. I squeeze through, and the beauty of the pool rocks through me like the bell did—it’s huge and round, lit from under the surface. The water is pale green. The white marble around it turns the whole area bright, as though it’s earlier in the day. A few people sit along the edge of the pool in thick beige bathrobes. Some are in the water. I’ve stopped looking at faces, so I don’t know how old they are, if they’re male or female. Off to one side is a cloth tent.

The air hurts my fingers, and I pull my hands inside the sleeves of my sweater. Cold skims steam off the top of the pool, and it whirls and dissolves like dozens of mini-twisters. It’s getting darker by the second, but that globe of light around the pool lasts and lasts, like a bubble you know will break, can’t believe hasn’t already broken, but there it is, intact.