Where or When (6 page)

I knew that your mother had died. Your father told me when I spoke to him on the telephone.

Our lives seem to have been running on parallel tracks. I mean by that only the coincidences of having small children, of both having entered or nearly entered religious orders, and of both having lapsed. Perhaps when we meet, we will discover other similarities.

I live in a middle-to-working-class coastal fishing village, in a large white house badly in need of repair. Unfortunately I'm fairly lazy, so it will probably stay in need of repair.

I went to Holy Cross, then to seminary in Chicago. After that I drove a city bus. I was driving the city bus when my sister's husband was killed in a car accident, and I had to come home to help her take over her husband's business. Then she remarried and went off to Los Angeles, and I got stuck with the business. The rest, as they say, is history.

The town I live in is about a half hour from Providence, where I was living when we met as children.

My children are Hadley, fourteen; Jack, twelve; and Anna, five. I think each is beautiful and unique.

When I first wrote you, I thought we could have a casual meeting. Now every letter I write you, I feel I risk scaring you away. Putting the burden of the “where and when” of our meeting on you was really just the concern of someone who knows what it's like to have a three-year-old child. I can set up the time and place and arrange for a chaperone.

I'd rather write you in longhand, and thanks for the compliment about my handwriting, but I had to get this out in a hurry. The only reason I have a P.O. box is that I run my business out of it, and I can get the mail earlier.

It takes time to read between the lines.

I notice that you don't say much about your husband.

 

Charles

 

November 5

 

Dear Charles,

I am leaving for Cambridge, England, on Thursday and will be away teaching a poetry seminar for two weeks. I wanted to say, before I left, that I like the letters you write to me, that I like the things you choose to say.

Yes, I am often too serious, and no, you are not wrong if you sometimes see sadness in my work. These are characteristics I don't seem to be able to do much about.

Thank you, but I won't need a chaperone.

I notice that you say little about your wife.

 

Siân

 

November 7

 

Dear Siân,

Touché.

Going to England is one hell of a good excuse for not being able to meet with me. For whom are you teaching? Do you do this sort of thing often?

I am disappointed. If I knew what flight you were taking, I'd drive to the airport and see you off, though that would be incredibly frustrating.

Please send me a postcard from England. I probably won't get it before you're home, but do it anyway.

I miss you already.

 

Charles

 

November 10

 

Dear Charles,

My plane is leaving in a few hours, but I had to send these pictures off to you before I left. For some reason I cannot explain, I was seized this afternoon with a desire to go through my trunks and find the photographs I thought were there. I am sending you these two—the one of us together in the courtyard and the shot of the lake taken from the outdoor chapel. I'm sure that the one of us was taken on the last day, just before we had to leave. How extraordinary what the memory got right and what it didn't. You look much as I had remembered you (do you still have somewhere that wonderful old Brownie that is in your hand?). But I look very different. I didn't remember the Bermuda shorts or that my hair was quite that light ever. Nor that you and I were the same height. Your arm is around me, but just barely, and I'm unable at all to meet the gaze of the camera. I seem to be studying my feet.

Aren't the photographs concrete proof that somewhere in time we did actually meet and know each other? What did we know? I wonder. And what did our voices sound like?

This archaeological dig has consumed nearly all my afternoon, and I'm not even packed yet. I must run, but I wanted you to have this. One day I will find the bracelet. I'm sure I must have it. I never throw anything away.

I promise a postcard.

 

Siân

 

November 15

 

Dear Siân,

I drove to the beach today to look out toward Portugal, but there was a haze on the water, and the view was obscured.

Actually, I often go to the beach and look out toward Portugal. This activity consumes more of my time than it ought to.

This letter is hard to write, knowing you are far away and won't even read it for at least a week. I wonder what it is like for you in England, what you are doing. I imagine you with a long scarf wrapped around your neck, walking along a path toward a beautiful stone building where your students are waiting for you.

I was moved by your archaeological dig and by the two photographs. It was the last day of camp, and we had asked someone to take the picture of us together. I remember that my parents had arrived already, before yours, and that they were standing off at some distance, watching us, barely masking their impatience. I also remember that I cried all the way home in the car and that when I told my mother I had given you a gold bracelet with the words “The Ridge” on it, she said to me: “So where's
my
bracelet?”

What happened to me thirty-one years ago was love at first sight. I don't understand the phenomenon entirely, and I'm more than a little embarrassed at having to resort to the cliches of old 45s, but I can remember vividly that gut-wrenching feeling. I am less clear about what happened to me when I saw your picture in the newspaper two months ago. Last night I was reading Paul Ricoeur, and a line of his stopped me: “the fulfillment of an antecedent meaning which remained in suspense.” He meant the irrational irruption of Jesus Christ in the context of the New Testament, but I tend to take bits where I find them and apply them to my own life. The difficulty for me is that I can't completely absorb what happened thirty-one years ago or on September 15, because I don't have enough access to the antecedent.

All this means is that I want to meet the woman who has grown from the girl I remember.

Time has taken on a new dimension. I feel the chaos of time, but I'm trying to comprehend it in relationship to loss. I spent all of August with Stephen Hawking, thinking about “quarks” and black holes, but he didn't mention how waiting for a letter or recrossing a warp of thirty-one years to a young girl's face can make time fold in upon itself. My daughter is now the same age as we were then, a “fact” of physics or of nature that baffles me.

Perhaps I am looking only for an open connection.

Today has more warmth than you would imagine for the fifteenth of November. The ocean was a dusty blue when I drove to the beach earlier, with the haze on the horizon. There was a stillness this afternoon, both visual and sensual, that was soporific—or at least that's the excuse I am using to explain why I dozed for twenty minutes in my car with the sun warming the front seat through the windshield. At the beach, across a long wooden bridge from the mainland, you can hear the bells from the church tower in the center of town, and I like listening to them, interspersed with the calling of the gulls. Even the gulls were half asleep today, though—enjoying this short Indian-summer respite from a string of cold gray days. I nearly missed my lunch appointment.

You mention my wife, and I mention your husband, and we receive in reply only further questions or silences. I might one day be able to speak to you or write you about my marriage, but I am more engaged now (and have been for some time) with the sound of bells from a church tower or the mysterious physics of time. What to reveal and what to conceal is perplexing to me.

For the same reason that I cannot focus on my marriage, my business is shot to hell. I used to be better at compartmentalizing. I'm supposed to sell insurance and real estate, but the entire town is under siege, and every dime is frozen. I could write you more about this, but I'd like to keep the shit out of this correspondence. I'd like to transcend the shit, is what I'd like to do. Actually, I do not always hate my job. I used to like to talk to people about what was important to them.

Where does the pain in your poetry come from?

I imagine going to a market in Cambridge and buying ingredients for a meal that I would make for you. I love to cook. Am I going too far?

Yesterday I called The Ridge to see if it was still there. You will probably not be surprised to learn that it has been turned into an inn. I asked the woman who answered the phone if she had a brochure with a photograph so that I could see what it looked like now. She said the only exterior shot was the building itself with the fountain. Did I remember the fountain? I said yes, but that my most vivid memory was of the girl I met there thirty-one years ago. She said: “Did you marry her?” I said: “No, but I should have.”

Now I
know
I am going too far.

Sometimes I think we are both too serious. If you want me to stop, just tell me. I know this can end in an instant.

I know we have to meet. I think you know that as well.

I could tell you so much more, but I really just want to hold your hand.

As I sit here trying to compose a letter that will mean something to you, I can't take my eyes off your picture. You said in a letter that you are not interesting and not mysterious, but you didn't say that you are not beautiful.

 

Charles

 

November 16, London

 

Dear Charles,

Today I took a walk in Regent's Park. I'd love to see it in the summer when the roses are in bloom. I'm in London for talks with my British publisher. They've put me up at a wonderful hotel on the Strand. Downstairs in the pub, they serve forty different kinds of malt whiskey. Last night I tried three and was nearly paralyzed. Today is my birthday.

Cheers,

 

Siân

 

November 28

 

Dear Charles,

I want this to stop. I'm sorry.

It has been a very long time since anyone wanted to, or wanted only to, hold my hand.

I do not know you, but I sometimes think I have felt who you are in your letters.

 

Siân