The Letters (7 page)

The season is brutal here. It’s the only place in Maine—maybe in the world—where they lobster only during the harshest months, from January to June, letting the lobsters fatten up all summer. Right now, with Thanksgiving coming on, everyone is getting eager to get back to work. They talk a lot about ice and weather. It’s strangely comforting to me, being among people whose daily lives incorporate the elements that killed Paul. It’s as if they’re fighting them for him. Or something like that…

I found out that the man Annabelle loved was an artist by summer, lobsterman by winter. He died in a blizzard, when his boat got caught out beyond the entrance to the harbor. Annabelle was standing on the dock, calling for him—she thought he could follow the sound of her voice back to shore. It’s such a touching image, and helps me understand her so much. I’ve been doing sketches for a painting of that storm—her on the wharf, him out at sea.

John Morgan told me the story. It turns out the reason he’s here on Monhegan is that he grew up spending summers on the island and he’s going through a big change in his career. He’d worked out in Seattle for a long time, doing large-scale sculptures—they’d remind you of Calder, bright works of iron, the kind you see in city parks or company courtyards. The kind you don’t like. He and his wife broke up—I have no idea why, we haven’t spoken about anything personal. But anyway, when he found out I was staying in this house, he told me about Annabelle.

I’ve asked Turner about her, too. This is the amazing thing: Annabelle’s lover was Turner’s brother Ralph. He was in the boat with him when he died—he said the snow was so thick and white, heavier than the fog we get here. They’d grown up sailing these waters, and their instincts were so strong they could find their way home through any storm—until that one. He said they heard Annabelle calling over the wind, her voice guiding them in. But then they shipped a big wave, and it washed Ralph overboard. Turner tried to grab him—their hands clasped, and Turner pulled as hard as he could, but his brother just slipped away. They never found his body.

I keep seeing it all—Turner watching his brother drown, Annabelle waiting, calling, them being so close to home, almost within sight. But Ralph died. She saved Turner, but not her love. Is that the way life is, Sam?

I think of Paul saving Boing—of that entire litter, he was the only one who survived. He jumped into Paul’s arms, and never really jumped out. And then, when Boing was old, Paul went to Alaska. The cat lived, but our boy died.

And I ruined everything. That’s how I feel…I’m sorry, Sam. Those words sound so dry and old. But I mean them. I’m sorry. I talk to Annabelle and Cat about it. Cat, my little feral island stray. When you have a son who comes up with names like Boing, you just don’t even try. Simple is best for me. Me and Holly Golightly. But, oh. Everything is making my heart ache. I look at Cat and think of Boing running away. So much unhappiness in our house…

Be safe up there, wherever you are. What are you doing for Thanksgiving? Hold tight to that photo, and promise me something? Will you kiss it for me? When you get to where Paul crashed? Kiss the picture—his face and your face. I don’t want this letter to end. It’s keeping me with you right now. I wish I were there.

Hadley

AURORA BOREALIS

You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like

tingling nerves.

—
Robert Frost
from “On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations”

Dear Hadley—

Dogs, and wind and motion and meat and snow and trees and cold and cold and cold and dogs and darkness and tents and wet and clothes that are stiff and motion, everything in motion, and the sound of two runners in the snow and snow hooks and ganglines and more motion and sleep with your hip digging at stone and restlessness and water tasting of snow and ice and numbness.

Here are things you would want to know:

Brass does not freeze as easily as other metals, so the hooks and clips are made of brass.

Dogs can run forever. Their gait is one of the most efficient on earth.

Dogs need meat. Not suburban kibbles. They eat and they burn.

“On-by” is a command to keep going, to ignore the thing distracting you. On-by. I shout it a hundred times a day. On-by. There is a lesson somehow in on-by, but I’m not sure what it is.

You never let go of the sled. Never. If you do, the dogs will pull it away and run off. And you will be stuck in the tundra with nothing but a team of dogs to track. You do not want to be tracking dogs on foot through the bush.

Nothing about dogsledding is what you think it is. It is grunt work, mostly. It is hard and it is pushing and shoving like unjamming a car out of a snowbank. Then, when you are too exhausted to continue, it becomes easy and beautiful and you feel in harmony with every breath the dogs take. Part of you wants it to go on forever. It is all
next.
It is some sort of perfidious human desire to never be where we are, but to be next, to be the next minute forward, to escape the present. I can’t adequately explain it. When you stand on the runners, you are not in one place, but in the future and the present simultaneously, and the dogs are slender backs pulling you through snow and the horizon is everything. Strange, I know. It must be what it is for you to paint. You flow into the brushes or into the picture and suddenly everything is about light and color and texture. When you look up, you are surprised to be standing in the same place. Something like that.

Hold on. I have chores.

Hadley, these letters are like an old-fashioned LP and we are both standing above it, holding the stylus, trying to drop it into the start of the song. Do you remember how impossible that could sometimes be? And you occasionally put it down at the chorus, and sometimes into the opening guitar solo, or at the goofy refrain? You and I are spinning like that, within the grooves, and Paul is in there, and our house, and Boing, and the apple trees and autumn weeds and tall grass, and we are both also outside and above the plastic grooves, the stylus arm in our fingers, the needle prepared to pick up small bits and pieces of our lives. And we want to play this song, or that melody, to remember it together, but the needle has a mind of its own, doesn’t it? Sometimes I see you vividly, and I experience incredible joy and contentment, and other times—yes, you with Daniel, that moment I witnessed—the needle skips and fumbles and I want to gouge out the tracks, mar the damn thing so it can never play again.

Okay, let me slow down. You must think I am a madman, and I am a little. I suspect now that part of my coming here was the hope that I could pare things down and see them once and for all—to see you every bit as much as to see Paul. I had some notions about the cold, the endless landscape, and about the simplicity of dogs, but of course nothing is simple. The dogs are pure and wonderful, but they are not simple. And running a sled across this wide, beautiful country is not what I believed it would be. I will tell you about the trip, because I know you would want to know, but first let me do a little psychological housekeeping.

First thing: I have your letters here. They arrived just before I left, almost as if fate had a hand in our affairs. I have them in my shirt pocket to keep them safe and dry. (No, not to keep them close to my heart, even I am not that corny.) I’ve had a strange experience reading them. In some way I don’t quite understand, this fragile exchange between us seems like reality, while this trip, these dogs, the marvelous Martha, seem illusory. People always write about dreams, or about a sense of déjà vu, but I am knee-deep in it here. I want to say that I am feeling a connection to Paul, to his final moments, but that hasn’t come yet. Maybe it will. I am not sure. But this other feeling, this dream feeling, is more than strange. Somehow I feel as though I have waited a lifetime for this trip, that I had been destined to be here for a thousand years before, and that the dogs know I am hardly on the sled behind them. Of course I know this is a vision quest sort of thing—yes, I am that transparent—but it’s also too easy, too pat to call it that. How can I make you understand when I hardly understand myself? I have tremendous calm right now because I know, for once in my life, that I am precisely, unerringly, uncannily, where I should be. Can you imagine what that feels like?

And here’s another thing: I have dreamed of taking you every way that we have ever thought of, or dreamed of—roughly, no prisoners, with kisses that don’t end, with these fierce, deep movements between us, with belts sliding off so hard they make small whip sounds, bras lifted, zippers, one leg in the pants, against walls, on tables…and other times, we are on a large bed, our bed, and you are entirely open to me, and it is afternoon, and the sun is working slowly away, and I am inside you, and the light is perfect, and we are so deep inside each other that nothing matters, and both of us—this is my dream, remember, my interior life right now—both of us wonder why it isn’t always like this, why we don’t always stay like this when it is possible, when this sumptuous Eden is here for us, and we cast ourselves out instead of staying in this warm bed together.