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By the end of October, the winds began. And the cowl inside the Queen Ann's pipe sang as it rattled inside its iron cage.
And on November 1, it started raining.
We were entering our second full month on the farm. The smug euphoria of having found the perfect spot on earth was beginning to thin, and, like anything that has lived in the world beyond its infancy, the scuffs and fissures caused by simple wear and tear appeared. The cowl, for example. A lullaby in the gentle mood of mid-September, when we were still new and naked, and the life we had tumbled into was in its embryonic state, when the sun still struck the sand in early evening, and I listened to peanuts shucked from their protective shells drop into a ceramic bowl, choosing the beach to prepare our dinner, impractical as it was, because we had dreamt for six months and traveled for three so that I could. Because I liked the company of nothing more than cawing gulls and an ambitious moon.
But time had passed, and the cowl inside the Queen Ann's pipe was now an elegy of spinning metal. It was autumn; everything was dying.
*
I fell in love with Stewart in the summer. We began under the pretense of a three-day affair. He was a British ex-pat living in New York, who had recently ended a ten-year marriage to an American woman; I was a saddle tramp, whose path across the globe could be traced by a chain of razed relationships. New York was my Elba from a Texan. Stewart and I determined three days based on a novel by Kundera, the idea being we would walk away unmarked. What arrogance, what naiveté. We were on a fishing boat heading out from Montauk. The deck was spotted with the bloody carcasses of dead and dying bluefish. It was evening. The sun was low and warm, about to set. I closed my eyes, took in the heat, the salt, the lick of sea; I rested gently on the quietness between us.
Seven months later, we stood beside a canal in winter. In England, in a village called Stone; I'd been brought home to meet the friends and family. The ribbing Stewart got—having left the country for one American, returning years later with another. Stone was dusted with snow, the canal thickly iced, the buildings bleached by a winter sun. We were alone. So alone we could hear the ice crack as a slow boat pushed its way toward the lock. Again, the quiet. “This is what I want,” I told him. But on a coast. In a cottage. He claimed to want it too.
I can't remember if we looked at each other then or if we waited until nightfall, when the darkness would have made us brave.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
—Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis
When I was 19, my best friend, Gabriel, gave me this poem. He had written it on a scrap of paper before I went to Africa. I kept it in my wallet until my bag was stolen five years later in London's Victoria Station. No matter. I had committed the lines to memory. I always preferred the journey to the destination; arrivals made me restless. This was something Gabe understood, expressing awe and envy at my ability to fly away—his own wings severed by a handsome father who scoffed at the psychotic colored canvasses his son spun out like breathing that he never understood.
I've been in love with Gabe since we were 17.
*
After the canal in Stone, Stewart and I returned to New York City. We bought a map of Britain and pinned it to my bedroom wall. We took turns highlighting the names of places where we could live: Whitstable, famous for its oysters and painters' light; Dungeness, a desolate paradox of rare flora and fauna tucked beneath a nuclear power plant; Whitehaven, whose grit and dirt and stunted ambitions appealed to our melancholic halves; and Clovelly, built into a steep cliff above the ocean where my great-great grandfather, Charles Kingsley, once lived. There was no logic to these choices, no reason; we were merely led by instinct and whimsy and an attitude of joy.
*
The night before we left New York, we spent apart for the first time in months. When we met again in the morning, we took a gypsy cab to the airport. We held hands in silence, butterflies catapulting through our insides, while the brick and litter and sweat of early-summer Brooklyn passed outside our windows. North Conduit to JFK. Air India to England.
It was only once we reached the island that we realized the journey laid ahead of us. But isn't that always the way? One acme shrouds another. We spent a week at Stewart's parents' house, then bought a motorcycle we named Vasco (after the explorer) and set off one morning in late June. Though we still had no set route, we knew what we were looking for—a stone cottage on the coast—and since Britain was an island, presumably, all we'd have to do is drive until we arrived at where we began. We had time, we had money. And we had the desire to be in motion more than we had the desire to stay put. And so we traveled.
Our life was beautiful in the shine of summer. We were down to a tent, a road map, and three panniers for our sleeping bags and clothes. We developed our own sign language, as verbal communication was rendered near-impossible by helmets, wind, high speeds, and the isolation of our individual thoughts: “thumbs up,” “right thigh pat,” “left thigh tap” and impulsive squeezes of romantic jubilation. We slept in farmers' fields and highway rest-stops. We got high and made love. We watched lightning illuminate swaths of giant sunflowers, and dreamt of fixing up a folly.
We bought a blank book at W.H. Smiths and took turns recording our exploits.
…We think it's Wednesday. We know it's July and can only guess at the date, it may be the 17th…. Vasco has done over 5000 miles in three weeks and we only took a spill once…. It's hard work on a motorbike. Much harder for the driver than the pillion. The hardest thing for me is staying awake when we have to take the motorway…. Dungeness is no longer in the running. Great fish-and-chips but way too barren…. The Isle of Sheppey scared us—it has a prison and is a playground for London crooks…. But maybe Rye, with its twee shops, is worse….
It was only occasionally—when we were tired, or wet, or disappointed yet again that another hopeful detour to a village by the sea proved so opposite to what we had imagined—that the trip grew unromantic. Only when a flat tire forced us to spend a day at a mechanics; when the sun and monotony of the motorway turned my helmet into a sun-baked isolation chamber and I had played my fourth solo round of the alphabet game, backwards, forwards, and in whatever incarnation I could devise; when my old companions, fear and insecurity, attached themselves like extra pillions, affecting the precarious balance of our motorcycle journey, did I feel myself pushing against the skin of our relationship, testing to see how much weight it would really hold.
We had a lead on a place in Wales. A friend of a friend of a friend knew a Welshman. He had a farm on the Gower Peninsula, 30 miles west of Swansea. There was a stable on the property, recently converted. We called for directions and got an invitation for dinner. Chicken with lemon—we liked lemon, right?
My knowledge of world geography can be mapped by boys and men I sometimes thought I loved. There was Thom in France. Marcus, Greece and Turkey. Geoff was London. Javier in Cuba. A camel-herder in Morocco was named Hasan. The boy in Ireland people just called Bones. Canada was a bass guitarist. Emotional tourism, Gabe would say, looking at the corner-mounted snapshots arranged inside the pages of a scrapbook.
I couldn't stand the scrutiny of anything longer than a couple months. My temper, my moods, my bouts of sadness—they could all be held at bay with the distraction of travel or the early days of an affair. I could hide behind a smokescreen of good cheer and light heart, but when those defenses were stripped away and it was just me, in all my stark fat nakedness, it was as though a large graft of skin had been torn away, exposing all that red and oozing in-ness underneath. A season was all I ever lasted.
And yet, I'd always had a thing for Icarus, his attempt to journey to the center of the sun, his fateful desire to know her core.
*
“What's the matter?” I asked, as we sat inside a caff, a near-empty pot of tea and egg-yolked plates between us.
Stewart shook his head and smiled. “Nothing,” he said, then got up to pay the bill.
But I knew—he was growing tired of the seeking.
“Shall we?” he said, coming back. He was already putting on his helmet and walking toward the door.
I downed my tea and grabbed a slice of toast. Vasco's engine was revved by the time I got outside.
*
We stopped in Glastonbury to hike the famous tor on the way to Wales. A hard summer rain had left the air stiff and laden, and a hash-coated hike to a spiritual vista occasionally accompanied by people dressed in Renaissance garb was made all the more bizarre by the heat and humidity. Halfway up the mount, we slipped into a grove of trees and made love. Then Stewart leaned me against a tree so he could take a picture. I had dried leaves in my hair and dead grass. In the photo, I look uncomfortable, self-conscious, stoned—not at all like how I thought I felt at the time.
Afterward, I sent Stewart on ahead. I watched him get smaller as he climbed toward the peak, the sun's haze eventually swallowing him whole.
*
Leaping into the Void. Gabe loved showing me this image of Yves Klein. I had always believed his fascination for Klein came from one artist's respect for another—to trademark blue. I never gave much thought to the image itself. Never read anything into the photo of a man about to jump out of a window.
I loved the early days of falling in love. Not in love the way best friends are, not even best girlfriends when they're seven, eight, or nine, and wish so desperately that they were sisters that they smear picked scabs against each other and will the blood to mix. But in love with the understanding for the first time of what it is to be so deeply affected by another person that a part of them is inside you; in love with those first stumbling steps, those cautious tendrils of trust that are extended, before the dance is practiced and predictable.
That was Gabriel to me. I would have happily stopped seeking then, so at home I was in the cup of his hand, had he only said the word. But he never did. Flutter flutter went my wings, trying desperately to flirt with my bright beauty. And off he'd send me, release me into the world time and time again, with poems and fond wishes, paintings, music, and one time, food.
Before I left for Britain, I met Gabe for lunch in Grand Central Station. After two years dividing his time between his parents' house and a hospital, he was braving a solo move to Washington, DC. He'd packed his goldfish, Red and Blue, in a Tupperware inside his suitcase, and after lunch we took turns lugging the heavy baggage down 42nd Street to Port Authority. I waited with him until the dispatcher announced the bus. We talked about beginnings, and the future. He had so many questions. We sat on the floor and rested our heads on each other. To any passerby, it would have looked like we were making the trip together, but Gabe was already on his own runaway course to God knows where—understanding, I guess, enlightenment, or just some sense of peace.
*
When I finally reached the top of the tor, I found Stewart smoking a cigarette, staring out across the land. I sat beside him. Verdant green, craggy gray and sheep-white tufts lay below us. This was the England tourists dream of, far removed from the greasy caffs smelling of smoke and ash and bacon fat, and the washed-out wasted down-on-their-lucks who do nothing but complain. The class system didn't exist up here, nor racism; no loutish lads, no cheap-end girls. From this vantage, no one cared what color wellies you wear, how you pronounce a word, or where you went to college. I liked this view of Britain. Its promise. Stewart lifted his arm and pointed west. “I think Stonehenge's over there. It's where my father's from.” I had met Stewart's father but didn't know this. I appreciated the closer glimpse. We stood up and circled the compass of the hill. North. South. East. West. We contemplated the different versions of our lives that could lay in each direction, paused to read a plaque drilled into a slab of rock, took a self-timed photo and began the long walk down together. We stopped once at Merthyr Mawr, made love (twice), then continued to the island's edge.
Swansea's most famous children are Dylan Thomas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. It was once a summer mecca for Victorians, and proudly touted the world's first single-gauge railroad. But the track is now defunct and weeded over, and the strip of tumbling guesthouses that lines the shore road looks like pancake make-upped ladies having fags outside an old folks' home. By the time we reached the city center, a gray rain had begun, and with it, an evening chill. We stopped once for petrol and to double-check directions then, with trepidation, carried on.
By this point, Stewart and I both knew that if this lead proved disappointing, we would have to try a different island. Inside my helmet, I catalogued other towns that we had seen that seemed like possibilities. Port William, in the north, where we had taped a note to a shop window asking for accommodation. Our friend Helena's house in Suffolk, with its salt marshes and fields of samphire fit for exploration. There was also the Yorkshire Dales, different than the life we had imagined, but with its own inherent beauty.... But none of them were what we dreamt of when we circled names on the map in my bedroom in New York.
So immersed in these thoughts, I didn't even realize we had left behind the last of the Georgian terrace flats until we were sheathed in the scent of wild garlic. I looked up. Knobby ancient trees birthed from moss and ivy linked branches above the road. Tumbling farms with unmanned stalls of flowers, cheese, potatoes, and bundles of vegetables clodded with dirt popped up at every bend. Sheep moved lazily in fields or clustered in front of us, fleeing dumbly forward, frantic. And then there were the horses. Hundreds of them. Wild. Pot-bellied. Sleek. Swaybacked. Those that deigned to look at us as unconcernedly returned to their grazing once we passed. The others didn't bother looking up.
By the time we reached the crest of the peninsula—also its narrowest point—the rain had stopped, and was replaced with a gold-green haze of twilight that gave life to the channel and estuary splayed out on either side.
We climbed a short hill and then dropped down, following the cascading topography to our destination. The Kings Head pub was on our right, and a church and PJ's Surf Shop to the left. We followed the winding road to a mini-roundabout, up a narrow lane, past a metal sheep gate, along a dirt track, took one final hairpin turn, then down below, in a cleft of beach, with black cliffs towering above, was our house. In stone and wood.
The earlier rain had slicked the track and a sharp angle just below a bulge hid a patch of stones. Stewart braked by accident. The front tire skidded and sent us to the ground. We got up, checked for broken bones (none), hoisted up Vasco, and walked the rest of the way to our cottage on the coast.
*
“What do you think?”
“He must have loved his horse.”
“No, I mean, do you want to stay here?”
It was the next day and Stewart and I were standing beside a large fresh mound of upturned dirt. A photograph inside a plastic sheet was nailed to a stick at one end of the knoll and a newly-planted sapling was at the other end. The photograph was of a horse: Winston.
“Jess?”
I was stalling. And Stewart knew it.
“It's exactly what we wanted,” he said. I heard the small plea in his voice—as well as the effort to disguise it. I paused on the realization that I knew him this well by now.
“I know,” I began—
He cut me off. “We'll walk around today. Have a curry at the pub. We don't have to decide right now.”
*
I once saw a sculpture of Icarus' wings. It was in the middle of the sea off the island of Ikaria. This would have been with Marcus. Island after island we went, blaming our unhappiness on our location. He believed another ferry ride was all we'd need to capture bliss. I already knew that we were dead, but the travel was a nice distraction. In the myth, Icarus is punished for his curiosity. The sculpted metal wings erupting from the water are a warning. But I see Icarus as a hero—wanting the enormous Truth. His descent is not a failure in my mind, but merely a conclusion. Having gleaned the answers held in the belly of the sun, he could drown at peace.
Another memory: the summer Stewart and I met. We were made complicit by our attempts to control the undertow between us; accomplices in our lie of freedom. Stewart spent the season calling himself a ghost and I was waiting for my metamorphosis. We believed we were unaccountable for anything that might transpire because it wasn't really us engaging when we met, merely our spectral versions twisting naked in the summer heat. One night we made love in the boiler room of his apartment building. It was Independence Day and it'd been raining. Earlier, we'd gone to someone's rooftop to watch the fireworks and I lost my shoes. So when we got back to Stewart's, I was barefoot and my white dress was soaked with rain. I took it off and hung it on a pipe when we reached the boiler room so the black soot wouldn't smear its way into the fabric, and I saw it, as we lay naked in the basement: swinging, swaying overhead us, a silent ghostly witness to our wish this time that it would matter.
*
I said yes to the cottage. We moved in September 4.
Sept 10. ‘This is where we live.'…A mantra oft-repeated, as all good mantras are, to remind ourselves, if it's even necessary, that what we have is special…There is plenty to do. Jess bites off great chunks of it: cleaning kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms and lounge, making a home; training me in maintaining one; creating work; feeding dogs; living the dream….[SG]
Sept 18. Is this the life we've fallen into? For whatever reason, through whatever means, is this our actual life settling around us? Here, on this beach, under the sun, with sounds of water and children, I am not 200 yards from my front door. Only a few families from the nearby caravan parks are out….And the tide is falling, so by tonight, I'll be able to run. The slap of bare feet on wet sand, as loud as the sound last night of peanuts dropping into a ceramic bowl…. [JK]
I thought I was finally where I was supposed to be. I even wrote Gabe and told him this. Told him he should come to the farm and stay with us awhile. He could paint. I could write. Stewart had his photography. I dared to think in future tense, making visits to the stone church around the bay and imagining a lace mantilla. Roles were established, routines and rhythms set. And even as the season started turning, we managed to extend the summer inside our iron stove.
Three to four days a week, I strapped on my canvas rucksack, hollered for the Welshman's dog Rhiannon, and we walked across the rabbit's field to the empty beach. While Rhiannon sniffed at dead sea grass and burrowing crabs, I learned to spot and select the prime combustibles—bits of lumber or pallet boards that could easily be splintered for kindling, and the sturdier hulks of branches: stout, slow-burning—and load them in my rucksack.
When we returned to the cottage, Rhiannon would settle on a cushion, head on paws, eyebrows lifted, looking from Stewart to the stove and back again. He'd take the ax down off the wall, grab his brown plaid jacket from a nail beside the door, and go outside. Moments later, the sound of chopping would ensue: a deep low rhythmic thwack. Thwack…thwack…thwack… thwack... and then… thunk as a trimmed log was tossed aside and a new log put beneath the blade. Thwack…thwack…thwack…thwack…. I'd take up the scuttle, jam my feet into a pair of wellies, go to the large bin outside the house and add the scrape of coal to Stewart's thwack as the scuttle dug deep into the black rocks and emerged again, heavy with potential heat.
Once brought inside, the wood was divided according to size and function. The twigs and splinters were laid down first, slightly larger branches teepee-d over them, and finally the largest logs were built up on the apex. The kindling would be lit, the wood would light, and after an hour, when the largest chunks were marbled orange, the coal would be added. A delicate balance between oxygen and heat had to be maintained. Nature had her orders.
When summer finally slipped away and autumn settled in, leaves colored, dried, dropped, laying bare the skeletons of wood. The grass on the dunes thinned, exposing the sand. Animals burrowed.
And then our stuff arrived.
To show our commitment to the dream, we had had our few remaining possessions shipped from New York to Britain. We found a Guyanese shipper in Crown Heights who worked part-time as a preacher, and ensured our goods on a sea of parables.
In all that stuff was the unraveling of my delusions. As each piece was unpacked, it served as an undeniable reminder of what I'd chosen to suppress: We had each been here before. Inscriptions inside books, grocery lists in an unfamiliar handwriting, recycled calendars that bore the evidence of dates and plans from years ago, which, with just a quick mistaken glance, could trick you into thinking the plans were present-day. ‘9:30. Michael's party. Meet at the entrance to the park.' In my more mature moments, I would say okay, who we are is a direct consequence of who we've loved before. But the fact remained: we had each taken previous gambles on the unreliable premise of love—and those respective gambles failed.
*
Oct 12. Something has been mysteriously torn asunder! Our stuff arrived last week on a dark, wet afternoon. Now we are adjusting to the intrusion of our things. There seems so much of it, but then, of course, it is your life…And so it seems like yet another new beginning…. [SG]
Oct 13. Yes, we are beginning again! All the things that, no matter how late you talk into the night when you're first getting to know someone, aren't discovered until you live with them, shop together, keep house, care for an animal. So yes, last week we began again. Today we began again and tomorrow we'll begin again. But then again, beginnings are so much more hopeful than endings.…[JK]
Oct 14. Yes, new beginnings are conceptually more hopeful—but then they do not exist without endings. That is why the Death card is one of the most hopeful in the Tarot. [SG]
I had nothing to say to that and so the conversation ended.
*
I was up in the loft, working on the novel I'd promised myself to write.
Stewart called to me from the kitchen, “What did you do with the knives?”
It was a about a nomad in post-Civil War Spain. It wasn't coming as easily as I had hoped. “I put them away.”
“Where?”
“In the jar with the other utensils.” I had set it in the Pyrenees but didn't know enough about them to justify the choice.
“What if I wanted to use one?”
“Then you can look in the jar and take one out.” Still, I had the characters.
“But I had them on the counter.” It was going to be a love story.
“That's why I put them away. We don't have that much counter space as it is.”
“We have plenty of counter space.”
“We have plenty of counters, but we hardly have any counter space, because someone keeps leaving his stuff all over the place.”
“My stuff isn't all over the place.”
“That's because I cleaned it up.”
“So now I can't find something when I need it.”
“How hard is it to look in a freaking utensil jar and pull out a knife?”
“I wouldn't have to if you'd left them where I put them.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Stewart, I'm sick of cleaning after you. I'm not your mother.”
“Fuck you.”
I said nothing. It stung too much, but I whispered asshole, asshole, asshole over and over under my breath. My throat swelled and I bit my lip. I could hear him banging around in the kitchen and finally shaking out the utensil jar. I listened to metal slide against metal, no doubt a segregation taking place.
Rhiannon, who had spent the afternoon on the rattan couch near the stove, was whining to be let out. I heard Stewart open the door for her; she whined again—perhaps the only dog with fields and beach and farmland open to her who needs someone to take her for a walk. I pictured her standing at the open doorway, looking back at Stewart.
“Dammit, Rhiannon, not now.”
But she just whined some more. One last shove of metal and then the door shut with a slam. I watched from the upstairs window as they scythed a path through the napping geese. I was alone in the house again, grateful for the solitude. I sat there in the quiet, waiting for that cool hard succor of escape to come, the comfort that usually came from the knowledge that I didn't have to stay, that I could, if I wanted, just pick up and walk out the door. I could be gone by the time they got back from their walk. But like a slippery eel that keeps wriggling between wet fingers, I couldn't quite grasp the feeling enough to give me comfort. This time, it was different.
I went down to the kitchen and found the offending knives. I laid them on the counter the way Stewart had previously had them, and put the rest of the utensils back in the jar. The cutting board was still out and a jar of Marmite, but I resisted the urge to put these away. I did wipe off the counter though—I couldn't help it—and went back upstairs to work on the novel in the comfort of our bed.
I woke to the smell of burning wood and hot tea. Stewart was sitting on the side of the bed with my mug. He'd started a fire and the smell of autumn hung on his clothes like perfume.
“I'm sorry,” he said.
“Me too.”
“I'm an asshole.”
“You're not an asshole.”
“I'll pick up after myself more.”
“And I'll be more relaxed when you don't.”
And like that, we devised a system of vows. It was as close as we would come to marriage without ever actually being wed.
*
As the weather continued turning and our dreamed-of life grew heavy with the reality of ‘everyday', I felt myself retreating. Washing clothes, keeping house, trying to write, working at a relationship. I didn't like to feel so earthbound…and exposed. With nowhere to retreat to, I escaped in sleep. In the morning, I'd sleep in, complain of headaches, get up for a cup of coffee then hide myself in sleep again, re-emerging late in the afternoon, guilty, gross.
“You're like a different person,” Stewart would say. And I'd assure him this was me as well.
“You used to be so carefree, light, you're heavy now.”
“Everybody sees that side of me. I'm showing you another.”
I hated that he seemed so disappointed.
*
Oct 20. Rhiannon killed a rabbit in front of me today. As Jess took another nap, I walked out to the beach with Rhiannon and a spliff. Two rabbits darted into the hedgerow just in front of us. And then, before I knew it, Rhiannon was in pursuit of another. As my sight caught up to the rabbit, I could see how swift Rhiannon's movements were. And she was deft in cornering the animal, despite appearing to stumble in a hole at one point. The rabbit disappeared from view, and then a moment later, emerged in Rhiannon's mouth, with only a brief shudder left of its life. I immediately felt her pride in the weight of flesh in her jaws and thought it amusing that she'd taken matters into her own hands as far as dinner went. I assumed she had needed to feel alive, through death.
Rhiannon then walked over to Winston's grave, lay the rabbit down and began to push dirt over it with her nose. She was neither effective at digging nor at covering the body. As she struggled with it, the task developed an almost frantic, obsessional quality. I had been standing, watching. Now I called to her. After about the eighth time, she acknowledged me.
I walked up to her, bent down, and started to cover the rabbit. She walked off and watched from a distance. When I finished, I called her over; she looked at it, sniffed the leg, and we walked home. There was nothing to think of the rabbit's life. Its end had been sudden and brief, a swift hand of fate…. [SG]
I looked up from the blank book. Stewart's entry had been the first since our conversation about beginnings. Rhiannon was asleep, exhausted, no doubt, from all that chasing. Stewart was nowhere around.
I cut strawberries into slices. Laid them in the shape of a heart on a wooden cutting board and left it on the table for him to see. When he came in, he brushed by me, didn't even glance at my offering. It was as if I'd disappeared. When we lay in bed that night, I lay my hand on his belly. He flinched, then turned his back. I went downstairs and destroyed the heart, threw the strawberries in the trash and scoured the board to rid it of the red that had soaked into the grain. It was time for me to leave again.
*
By the second week of November, the wet gray of the sea was barely distinguishable from the wet gray of the sky. And the land, once firm and green, became submerged—sometimes just a couple inches so that, though puddled, one could feel the solidity underneath; other times, entire ponds were made from fields—complete with wading birds and ice floes on the edges.
We sat quietly over cups of tea. “Stewart,” I began….
He already knew what I was going to say.
“Will you come back?” he asked.
“Of course,” I answered. “I just need the space to write.” But we both knew that wasn't necessarily true.
He got up and went outside to smoke a cigarette. I could see him through the window, out there in all that rain, the outside light shining down on him, fixing him in a shadowy aura. He never talked about his marriage. I wondered when it started to dissolve. Did he fight for her at all?
*
With its existence as a norm, talk of the rain soon changed to a discussion of its details: how much rain had fallen, at what density, what speed, the weight of the drops. Whose field was now a pond, how many sheep had drowned, how many dams had broken and which Council member was responsible for the state of the weathered nation. By the third week of November, the gods had turned the world on its head so that the sky was now the earth and the former lakes and rivers were inverted into air. And on November 20, Gabe died by jumping out a window.
It was my sister-in-law who called to tell me. Trained as a social worker, she knew the best way to make me hear her was to tell me straight. No preamble, no dressing up words, no emotional wallowing. Even then I didn't understand. She gave me details: his apartment in DC, the fifth floor window, six o'clock at night. It was a steady tide of information. She knew his sisters' names, the medication he'd been on, the name of the street where he had lived.
After hanging up the telephone, I sat down. I rocked in the stillness, waiting for time to slow and space to expand enough for me to take this in. Perhaps there was no better place for me to be than Wales for this to happen. Stewart had once talked about portals for the spirit-world and if any place was going to provide a doorway, it was Wales—with its weather; its cairns; its ancient trees; and stretches of beach where logs and boats and animals mired in the quickly shifting tides had drowned, their sun-bleached ribs now host to trash and shells and the hard white shit of gulls. It was the sort of place one could imagine ghosts riding the dumb backs of sheep across manured fields, racing each other to the nearest pub to wax about the good ol' days when a pint of bitter was thick and warm and cheap.
There is always an exchange in nature. Energy is never created nor destroyed. Life is transferred from one object to another. Water evaporates to become rain and evaporate again. The physical world can only accommodate a finite amount. Ascent. Descent. An exchange is always made.
*
Stewart and I went to the pub that night. Usually a group of village men were there. Loquacious fixtures, they passed their judgments on the world from worn positions on the paisley benches. The weather must have sent them under cover. The weather or the mood. The youngest of the bartenders was there, and a diehard surfer. I had seen him a couple times before and will admit to having noticed how his dark hair fell gently in his eyes.
“This is the rainiest November on record,” Stewart said.
“Really?”
He nodded.
Once we had exhausted the topic of the weather, there was nothing left to say. The recent weeks of distance lay between us, like a coat or a pile of books someone had left out on the table. Stewart tried to move one: “How are you?”
Numb, was the answer. Numb and scared and angry and alone. Guilty, confused, sad, lost, shocked, awed, in denial, in love, tired, cold, wet, drunk, scared, empty, lonely, sad, numb, confused. I shrugged, “You know.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes. Without looking at me, “I can't talk to you anymore. You've disappeared.”
“My best friend just died. I don't really feel like talking about the weather.”
“You've been like this for weeks.”
Oh God, don't do this. Not now. I can't handle this right now.
Then… “I'm sorry about Gabe,” he said. “I know how much you loved him.”
*
We walked home that night in the rain. Usually, flocks of sleeping sheep were in the field above the house, and when we first got to the farm, we made a game of running through them. There were no sheep out tonight. Too much rain can kill them. It saturates their fur, and they never can get dry again.
As I fell asleep that night, I heard the cowl squeal fiercely in its cage. The wind was picking up and the rain, doing what seemed impossible, was falling harder. Later, I woke with a start. Gabe's ghost was sitting on my bed. He didn't say anything, just looked down at his big hands. He wouldn't look me in the eye.
*
When I woke up the next morning, the power was out and the storm had grown to near-hurricane proportions. The wind and rain pounded against the stone of the converted stable. I looked at Stewart sleeping. When we were first together, I'd spend hours tracing the camber of his form, letting my hands memorize the knit of bones and map of bumps and moles. It was a new land, his body, and I could never understand how this tangible, touchable, feelable thing contained all that Stewart seemed to be. Surely the bones would break apart, the skin stretch, the muscles pop like buttons. I touched him now. Warm. Familiar. Something known, or at least not so uncharted.
I pulled on my jeans, a sweater, boots, and went outside. I wanted to feel the fullness of nature's force.
The wind immediately fought me, blocking out all sound except the crash of waves, which it seemed to amplify. I braced myself, heading for the water, and found the wind a wall against which I could lean. To advance, I had to find the spaces in between the wind, where there was less resistance.
I reached the first gate, the one behind Winston's grave, and battled to press it open. My hair and clothes were already soaked and my boots slid wildly in the mud. The warm house beckoned: coffee, breakfast, sleep. But the water and the roiling waves called louder, and so I climbed the gate instead. The wind helped steady me.
I went through the open fields where the rabbits usually darted—there were none there now, tucked smartly underground. In fact, there were no animals at all. I made it through the coiled bedspring that served as the second gate. The water thundered louder, its tango with the wind a heady escalation. I was almost at the dunes.
The wind drove sand into my skin, ears, nose and mouth. The storm was getting stronger by the second. I closed my eyes, and felt around the ground for something I could use for protection—a log, a rock. I picked up a piece of driftwood and held it against my shoulder to shield my face, then picked my way, eyes squinting, feet seeking, up, then down the dunes.
On the other side of them lay the water. I could already smell the charged salinity, like a girl about to bleed, the essence of its self intensified. I imagined floating free above it, joining with the elements, being spun to disparate corners of the world.
Beneath the dunes, the needle-pricks of sand came even faster and more relentlessly. I opened my eyes for just a second—I wanted to see the foaming sea—and was blinded by the sharp glass slivers of the beach. I jammed shut my eyes, and pressed the board against my face to better shield me, and wondered how long the storm could last at this ferocity. And how long I could stand in the maelstrom of this in-between?
Behind my closed eyes, I saw the sand being whipped, giant billowing whisks of flurrying beige, darkened by the rain, and myself being lifted with it, my hair streaming, my jacket billowing, my layers molting as I climbed further away from earth. A bird picks me up within his talons. And the sound is no longer the wind and surf, but his wings beating as we rise. And then it is no longer a bird, but Gabe, taking me on his flight. But the air isn't getting warmer, the sound of water isn't ebbing—it's getting louder and more consuming. In the midst of this, I hear what sounds like Stewart's voice trying to guide me toward him, but the words just break apart and scatter, offering no mooring whatsoever. I open my eyes for just a moment, and the water rushes at me. The same lightness that has led me all my life is now betraying me, and I know if I don't live deliberately in this moment, if I don't make a real decision now, I'll drown out here. In return for Gabe, I'll have to give myself.
I call back to the voice I thought I heard. I call out Stewart's name.
*
And then I felt his hand. He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me back against him. He opened his coat and wrapped half of it around me. My feet dragged and stumbled as he pulled me, my world still dark behind closed eyes. I felt him lead us across the beach, then up the dunes and down again. We walked a little further on and then the wind subsided. The threat of stinging sand erased, I opened my eyes. He had led us to a copse of trees protected from the elements. I rested on him a while longer, and felt my slow surrender.
When the storm had finally exhausted itself, we walked to the cliffs above the bay. The wind and rains had torn away the greenery, leaving a world exposed. Other people from the village had found their way to the clifftop, too, and were taking turns bracing themselves against a flagpole near the edge. Everyone was laughing, brazen, bold. Stewart had his turn as well. And then I took my own. The storm had finished what the fall began. The sand and sea lay below us, stripped and seen. I suddenly remembered another photo Gabe had loved: it was a giant picture of the sky. And then I laughed at how predictable it had been that he should end his life by flying. I marveled at nature, at her patterns, her routines.
I spread my arms open to the elements. An exchange is always made.