Before
The first book I wrote about her was true. This one isn’t, and you should know that going in.
It was true the way a maintenance log is true. Dates. The text of the note. The minutes of a hearing about a fence, which I obtained by written request, and which she typed. A photograph of the gate latch. A list of everything she had ever cooked for me, in order, with the dates I could reconstruct and question marks where I couldn’t. I thought that if I put the whole thing down accurately enough, she would have to see it the way I did. I had it printed. I left a copy inside her gate, on the step, on a dry morning, and I went to work on the island and I did not come back by the lane until dark, so that whatever happened to it could happen without me watching.
It was gone the next morning. Nothing came back. Not a note, not a look across the fence, not a change in which light was on. Once I’d have written that gone meant read. Gone means gone.
I imagined her putting it down. In the version I settled on she finishes the last page, which is the list, and sets it on the counter face down, and looks at the window for a while, and says — not to me; there’s no me in the room — Keep writing. Try again. The way you’d say it to a student who’d done the assignment and missed the point. She didn’t want to be documented. She wanted to be moved, and I had sent her a dossier.
So I tried again.
Her favorite author is Murakami. Her favorite film is The Notebook. She told me both early, in the months when people tell each other things. So: a story where a man thinks the town is talking to him and can’t tell whether it’s the town or him. A story where a woman is written back to a man by his persistence. And one who knows he’s writing it, to keep me honest. If it’s good enough somebody will make a movie of it and she’ll see it with her daughter at the Luxury Cinemas on a Thursday and not know until the credits.
That was the plan, when I started. I’ve left it in so you can watch it stop working.
I’ve gone out to the island and come back every working day since before I knew her, and the only thing it has taught me is that you can do that more than once.
This is more than once.
1. The Note
It was under the door when I came in from the afternoon boat. She’d have put it there in the dark, because the lane is short and she’d have wanted the dark. February, the ninth. A folded sheet of her school paper, the kind with the blue margin. Three lines. Here they are once, exactly. I quoted them forty times in the first book and it didn’t help.
Wes — I can’t keep doing this. I’m sorry. Please don’t come to the house. — C.
That’s all of it. The dash before her initial was her habit; she signed emails to the school that way. I stood in the kitchen with my boots still on and read it, and then I read it again to make sure there wasn’t a fourth line on the back, and then I did what I’d do on the island if a pipe went — I stood very still and listened for where the water was coming from.
Her kitchen light was on. I could see it from mine; I’ve been able to see it from mine for four years, and since the night she first left it on for me as a signal that meant come over if you’re up, it’s gone on meaning that, in my head, long past when it stopped meaning anything in hers. The light was on and the shade was down and the dog was not in the yard.
Our two houses sit at the dead end of a short lane off Hatch Street in Mystic, Connecticut — the Stonington side of the river, the side without the postcard, a few blocks up from the water in a part of town where the houses are shingled and small and were built for people who worked at the shipyards and not for people who came to look at them. Hers is a gray shingled thing with a porch, mine a smaller white one that was somebody’s carriage house once, and both of them are in the flood zone. Between them runs a cedar fence that is technically on her lot and that I have maintained for four years, because the first owner of my house made an arrangement with the first owner of hers, and arrangements in a town like this outlive the people who make them. The fence is six feet. There’s a gate in it, at the back, with a latch I replaced in year one and a key I was given in year two. Under the fence, near the gate, is a gap the dog made and I have never repaired, because repairing it would have been a statement and we were both, for a long time, careful not to make statements.
The dog is Newt. He’s a miniature golden retriever, which I didn’t know was a thing until I met him, and he is named Nutella, after her favorite food, which she admitted to me on the second night I knew her with the specific shame of a Frenchwoman confessing to a jar. Newt comes under the fence when he wants to. He came under it the first week I lived there and sat on my foot while I was staining the boards and that was how I met her — a woman in a school cardigan coming through the gate saying pardon, pardon, he thinks everyone is his, and me saying it’s all right, he’s got good taste in feet.
I’d written that line down, after. I write things down.
I didn’t go to the house. The note said don’t, and I didn’t, that night. I took my boots off and sat at the table and let the kitchen get dark around me and watched her light until it went off at ten-forty, which was her time, and then I went to bed and lay there and did the thing I’d been doing for a month already without naming it, which was going back over the last evening we’d spent in her kitchen and listening to it for where the water was coming from.
The Sunday before. Soup — she made a leek thing on Sundays. The daughter upstairs, music through the floor. Newt under the table. We were talking about nothing, about the ferry schedule changing in May, and then we weren’t, and she said something in French, quietly, looking at the soup and not at me.
I’d been learning. I’d had the app on my phone for exactly as long as I’d known her, and I was at the level where I could order food and apologize and understand about one sentence in five of what she said to her daughter. She knew I was learning. She’d been kind about it.
What she said was: Je veux juste être en sécurité.
I caught sécurité and I thought she meant the gate. The latch had been sticking. I said I’d look at it, and she looked up at me then, and I have thought about that look more than I have thought about anything in my life, and she said, in English, “Okay,” and we ate the soup.
I’m not going to translate it for you. I couldn’t, then — or I could have, by midnight. It’s six words, and the app on my phone would have done it in four seconds, and I had the phone in my hand most of that night. I didn’t. I told myself she’d said it in French on purpose, and that running it through a phone would be reading her mail. That was true. The other true thing is that I was afraid of what it said. So I kept it the way I kept the key, and you can sit with it the way I did.